Change Doesn't Come Cheap (1993)

President Clinton promised the voters last year that if he was elected he would reverse the Republican policies of the past 12 years. Last night, he finally explained the full cost of living up to that promise – a volatile political mix of new taxes and spending cuts on which he is gambling his presidency.

Clinton laid out his economic program in a long and diffuse State of the Union Address. He once said he would "focus like a laser beam on the economy," but he used his first speech to a joint session of Congress -- which ran an hour in length – to outline a domestic agenda that could fill up his first term and more.

But at the heart of the speech, at times lost in his barrage of rhetoric, was a call to enact a potentially painful program to assure the economic future of the country. "Unless we have the courage to start building our future and stop borrowing from it, we are condemning ourselves to years of stagnation, interrupted only by recession, to slow growth in jobs, no growth in incomes, and more debt and disappointment," he said.

This was not the Clinton of the campaign trail, a candidate who regularly urged people to have "the courage to change," but who asked little of them other than their votes. The plan unveiled yesterday clashed in significant ways with the rhetoric that brought Clinton to Washington, as the new president bluntly acknowledged that the brighter future he described comes with a stiff and immediate price tag.

The $493 billion package of new taxes and spending cuts was as dramatic and comprehensive as he had promised, slicing through every federal agency and household in the country –

I’ve posted multiple times the similarities of the Clinton, and the Obama Administrations.

Both were backed by the same sources I believe, and both were Hell Bent to socialize America, but the Clinton’s spent more time, and energy filling their own pockets, creating favor for their personal future that they lost the faith of their backers as I see it, thus Obama, not Hillary.

Obama is a good little soldier doing precisely what the backers demand. I’d say Obama would jump off a cliff if that is what his backers were to tell him to do.

It’s the same ol’, same ol’, but with a “Yes Man” marionette at the end of the strings IMO.

Dan Balz, February 18, 1993 | President Clinton promised the voters last year that if he was elected he would reverse the Republican policies of the past 12 years. Last night, he finally explained the full cost of living up to that promise -- a volatile political mix of new taxes and spending cuts on which he is gambling his presidency. Clinton laid out his economic program in a long and diffuse State of the Union Address... This was not the Clinton of the campaign trail, a candidate who regularly urged people to have "the courage to change," but who asked little of them other than their votes. The plan unveiled yesterday clashed in significant ways with the rhetoric that brought Clinton to Washington, as the new president bluntly acknowledged that the brighter future he described comes with a stiff and immediate price tag. The $493 billion package of new taxes and spending cuts was as dramatic and comprehensive as he had promised, slicing through every federal agency and household in the country...

...almost as much BS in this eulogy of Clinton's speech as there was and is in Clinton himself. Thanks smokingfrog.

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