Now that the first 100 days of the Obama Administration have come and gone, the hard work of governing and leading truly begins. A state of irrational exuberance will continue among many administration supporters.
Conversely, the rest of America will be looking for results that are not anchored in reality show hoopla but answers that will address their real world issues. The rubber tires of the Obama Administration vehicle must now the meet concrete road of complex problems.
With great expectations ...
we can look ahead to the Obama Administration’s management of the critical matters facing our nation. In this diary, only three of a possible 8-10 critical issues facing the nation will be emphasized, and we’ll begin with the the economy.
The first and foremost question demanding attention continues to be the economy, and it must be handled forthwith.
As the latest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) report illustrates, the nation is still in the throes of a mini - depression, uh deep recession. On Wednesday, 2009 April 29, the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s (BEA) advance report on first quarter 2009 GDP told a story of a 6.1 percent decline in real GDP (i.e., inflation adjusted GDP). Additionally, the BEA revised the fourth quarter 2009 real GDP decrease to 6.3 percent – the BEA advance estimate for 4Q 2009 was originally a decline of 3.8 percent.
Excerpt from latest GDP report by the BEA:
The slightly smaller decrease in real GDP in the first quarter than in the fourth reflected an upturn in PCE for durable and nondurable goods and a larger decrease in imports that were mostly offset by larger decreases in private inventory investment and in nonresidential structures and a downturn in federal government spending.
Motor vehicle output subtracted 1.36 percentage points from the first-quarter change in real GDP after subtracting 2.01 percentage points from the fourth-quarter change. Final sales of computers added 0.05 percentage point to the first-quarter change in real GDP after subtracting 0.02 percentage point from the fourth-quarter change.
Within the scope of the economy’s problems, the banks are still at the forefront of issues with which the Obama Administration is dealing – not withstanding the present housing industry debacle and Chrysler’s pending bankruptcy. Perhaps the Obama Administration is beginning to re-think its approach to dealing with the banks. The New York Times article, "Time for Bank Creditors to Share the Pain?" (note: National Print Edition’s title for this article was "Haircuts and Their Discontents"), as shown in the accompanying passages from the article, offers new insight into the Obama Administration’s management of the nation’s banking catastrophe.
The big debate about President Obama’s financial rescue plan has centered on whether he’s been right to avoid nationalizing the country’s biggest banks. But there is another, more pressing question about the plan that has received considerably less attention.
And
Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and other officials are reluctant to force losses, often called haircuts, on banks. They worry that haircuts could create a cascade, in which some of the creditors that take losses become insolvent, while creditors of healthier banks begin wondering whether they will be subject to future haircuts. In the ensuing panic, financial markets could freeze up, as they did last fall.
But relying on the government alone to shore up the banks brings risks, too. In the long term, it could leave taxpayers with an enormous bill. In the short term, it could destroy the already thin political support for the rescue plan.
Recently — and, I’d [David Leonhardt] argue, fortunately — the Obama administration seems to have become more open to the idea of encouraging loan forgiveness in certain situations. Beyond those situations, officials hope that no others are needed.
The second critical issue facing the Obama Administration must be the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The new, higher levels of violence in Iraq, deadlier attacks on the Kurds by Turkey, and increased military operations in Afghanistan/Pakistan highlight the questions of war that must be answered. The following excerpt from the New York Times article, "Poppies a Target in Fight Against Taliban":
American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.
The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.
The third acute issue that must be managed by the Obama Administration is affordable health care for all Americans. The Associated Press story (courtesy of NPR), "Obama Health Care Fix Put At $634B Over 10 Years" points out the difficulty of reforming health care.
A passage from the AP article is enclosed below.
Obama has called on Congress to send him a health care reform bill this year, but even before the budget arrives on Capitol Hill, senior members of both parties say they are concerned about the cost.
Almost no one believes that Americans are getting good value for their health care dollars. Some experts say 30 percent or more of what the nation spends may be going for tests and treatments of little or no lasting benefit.
But bringing the uninsured into such a costly system won't be easy. Experts say the cost could easily exceed $1 trillion over 10 years, a figure that the Obama administration does not dispute.
Against that backdrop, "it's very hard for me to understand why the answer is to put more money into the system," Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota, said at a hearing Wednesday.
Although reviving the economy, concluding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and providing health care for all Americans are three significant issues facing the Obama Administration, by no means are they the only ones. The nation still has global warming, energy independence and improvements in public education, just to name another three major issues that demand the attention of the Obama Administration.
Think Obama’s five pillars foundation speech given at Georgetown University.