It’ll take cuts

During the presidential campaign, President Obama successfully convinced many that Gov. Mitt Romney was an uncaring plutocrat and that Republicans cared only for saving taxes for the “rich.”

Now facing the “fiscal cliff,” Obama’s full attention is still on having the “rich” pay their “fair share.” This is a precise analogy to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: In the face of impending and certain disaster, occupy yourself with something meaningless. As everyone should know, the “rich” do not have enough money to fix the problem.

Whatever bad happens as a result of this impasse, the Republicans will be blamed. As the president himself has said, it is entitlements that drive the debt – the debt that is unsustainable.

So why hasn’t someone suggested specific spending reductions? Remember when Romney was asked to be specific during the presidential debates and he said, for example, he would cut funding to NPR and the next day the president was joking that we now know that the problem is “Big Bird.”

Announcing specific spending proposals publically is a political trap, but the speaker and the president could work something out in private, couldn’t they? When do the adults show up?

Virgil Early

Smithfield