Word: bille
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...birthday, Dec. 16, in Chicago, at which Obama showed up with a vanilla cake. Orszag, Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Orszag's deputy Robert Nabors agreed that there was no avoiding a deficit this year of about $1.5 trillion, including the bank bailout and the stimulus bill. They were prepared to swim even deeper into the red next year, expanding Obama's initiatives on renewable energy and high-speed rail lines and raising the deficit to 10% of gross domestic product, the highest figure since World War II. But assuming the economy has begun to turn around...
...Iraq, cutting fat and raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans--and, later, by entitlement reform. All during the campaign, Obama talked about going through the budget "line by line," zeroing out programs that don't work or have outlived their usefulness. Even as he signed the stimulus bill, he had already pivoted to the next message. "We will need to do everything in the short term to get our economy moving again," he said, "while at the same time recognizing that we have inherited a trillion-dollar deficit, and we need to begin restoring fiscal discipline and taming our exploding...
...thinking went. But, by the time the bill cleared the Senate with the minimum 60 votes last Friday night, at least some members of the Obama camp were wondering where all the bipartisanship had gone. Not a single House Republican had voted for the bill. It barely cleared the Senate, where only two weeks before some in the administration thought it might garner 80 votes...
...then there was the timing. It was being proposed at a time when a humiliated GOP base was being asked to sit and watch a “transformative” Democratic president walk on water. How many details of a $900 billion spending bill would it take to provoke a furious negative response from the Republican base...
...this, then, an equivocal triumph for Obama? I don’t think so. In the final calculation, what passed on Friday night was a somewhat reduced version of what Obama first submitted to the House. The bill that Obama will sign reflects his own policy priorities, not any significant effort to placate Republicans. Things were cut, but nothing significant was added to get it past the Senate filibuster. You can argue with Obama’s priorities, but you can’t argue that his effort at bipartisanship reshaped the final product...