OBAMA “TALKS TURKEY”, BUT AS USUAL, THE CONSERVATIVES DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT

…This is not the “Turkey” that the GOP did not want to hear about from President Obama.

Obama properly describes an “American deficit” that is more important in the long term, than the nation’s fiscal budget.

It just drives me crazy when a high level person in government makes a truthful statement, that may or may not, be what some people want to hear.  But then the opposition turns around and attacks this truth-teller with a barrage of total untruths.

It’s especially aggravating when those untruths come from the likes of conservative talk show hosts, known for their misstatements, and questionable political cable networks such as Fox News.

Last week, President Obama spoke to a crowd at The ARC arts schoolhouse about what he referred to as the “real deficit in our nation”.  And this deficit had nothing to do with the national budget.

The president said, "A relentlessly growing ‘deficit of opportunity’ is a bigger threat to our future than our nation’s ‘rapidly shrinking fiscal deficit’." The President went on to explain that the lack of upward economic mobility in our country has led to the wealthy continuing to increase their wealth, while the American working poor are finding it harder than ever to get out of their level of poverty.

What really upset the conservatives about these comments and what really made them so uncomfortable was when the president said, “This is an American problem, not one that people face in other first-world nations.”

President Obama made it very clear that, "It is harder today for a poor child born in America to improve his or her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies, [that meaning] countries like Canada or Germany or France."

The conservatives of course went totally bat-shxx crazy when the president said this issue started back just before Ronald Reagan became president and that the problem was, “The perpetuation of [the conservative’s] trickle-down economics, which started in the late 1970s and has today created an ever-widening wealth gap in our nation.”

In other words, this approach that the GOP continues to promote, saying that all you need to do is lower the corporate taxes and the jobs will appear.  This has been proven to be pure bunkum!  And time has shown that this approach has and will never work.

After making this statement, the president said he will called on Congress to pass legislation that could reverse this economic inequality, like: providing universal preschool; a minimum wage hike; and the Paycheck Fairness Act. (This is the act that is an effort to address male–female income disparity in the United States.) But I question how far this is going to go when considering speaker Boehner’s do-nothing congressional House.

President Obama’s comments brought back images of the way it was with the New Deal, just after World War II.  This was what was what later became known as the “American Dream”.  This was also, as the president said, “When a child's economic future was not be determined by the ZIP code they were born into, but by the strength of their work ethic and scope of their dreams."

Once upon a time, these principles were not just ideals in our nation,  There were policies that gave everyone an equal chance at success. My father, myself and this president are good examples of that era.

Today, the system is totally rigged, and it's harder than ever for those born at the lower end of the income ladder to climb their way to the top. President Obama cut right to the core of some of the biggest issues in our nation. 

Unfortunately, we need more than words to fix this broken system. It's time for our elected so-called leaders to get to work at restoring the original “American Dream”.

But unfortunately, I'm afraid I can't ask anyone to hold their breath, waiting for it to happen.

Copyright G.Ater  2013