Former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney announced on April 11 that he is “formally exploring a presidential bid”. Image Credit: conservativesforamerica.comMitt Romney Blasts Administration's Response To Economic Peril
In an opinion editorial featured in the little known and non-internet posting New Hampshire Union Leader, Mitt Romney does not believe that President Barack Obama and his administration is not serious about the economic health of the country.
The OP-ED entitled "Obama is not serious about America's financial health", which Romney later posted to his Facebook page, Mitt describes what he believes an executive response to the recent Standard & Poor's signaling of a change of the United States bond rating downward should be.
This excerpted and edited from Mitt Romney's Facebook posting -
Obama is Not Serious About America's Financial Health
by Mitt Romney on Monday, April 25, 2011 at 5:29am - Originally published in the New Hampshire Union Leader
America received a giant wake-up call when Standard & Poor’s, the bond rating agency, announced that it was changing the outlook on its highly prized AAA rating for U.S. Treasuries to “negative” from “stable.” This is the first ratings warning for the United States since S&P began evaluating our creditworthiness in 1941.
S&P’s action is a significant marker of our country’s deteriorating economic position.
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Obama’s top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, downplayed the event, saying, “I don’t make too much about it.” The President himself went on a weeklong campaign swing highlighted by six fundraisers and sharp partisan attacks against Republicans for their attempts at deficit reduction and entitlement reform.
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Consider that during the Bush years, the U.S. government’s deficit — the gap between what Washington taxes and spends within a year — hovered between 2 percent and 4 percent of GDP. Already that was a problematic level.
But in the first year of the Obama administration, the shortfall in our annual spending exploded to 10 percent of GDP — a shocking number — and has risen even higher, to 11 percent of GDP in 2011.
No less dramatic has been the explosion in our level of debt, the total amount Washington has borrowed to pay for its out-of-control spending. In 2008, our debt was 40 percent of GDP. That was bad enough. But, according to S&P, even under the most optimistic scenario our government’s indebtedness will double to nearly 80 percent of GDP by 2013. Other estimates project that our nation’s debt will equal the entirety of our nation’s economy — 100 percent of GDP — by 2020.
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The main job of any executive — whether a CEO, a governor or a President — should be to avert these dangers, or work to repair them.
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We are not on a sustainable course. The consequences may come in slow-motion, with reduced growth, chronic high unemployment and a lower standard of living. Or they may come suddenly, in the kind of cascading crises that we just witnessed when the housing-price bubble burst. The only way to avert it is to take action that is rooted in the need to reduce spending.
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The overall picture may be dark, but we should not lose sight of what we are capable of as a country. Our economy is astonishingly flexible. It is highly diversified. We have low inflation.
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Even more significant are the clear signs that the American people have had enough of a federal government that is increasing in size and dominance. We are a great republic in which change is possible. The Obama administration may not be serious about addressing the problems that have caused the S&P downgrade, but in less than two years the voters will tell us whether they will issue a decisive downgrade of their own.
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There may not be enough resolve in the rest of our Government houses (the House of Congress and the Senate) to stem the tide of damage this and the previous Executive Administrations have placed on our country.
Borrowing 4 billion dollars a day (that is $12.00 a day for each and every citizen living here in the United States ... or $4,356.00 each year) to hold on to the status quo will only kill what little freedoms we enjoy here in the once grand United States.
