With initiatives to create jobs and reduce the unemployment rate popping up all over the country, Former President Bill Clinton hosted his own conference. After greeting the guests, he emphasized the fact that our country lacks the long term budgeting and planning needed to reach its full potential on the global stage (McCormick). .
"We've gotten ourselves in a position where we're spending too much money on today and yesterday, and not money enough on tomorrow," he said during a discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative's two-day long conference in Chicago. "We're borrowing too much, so that once the economy picks up, we're creating tomorrow's problem" (McCormick). .
"We also know that we have the power to turn things around and that every job matters," Clinton said. "There are facts in the American economy that give me hope and things in my own experience that give me hope" (San Francisco Chronicle). .
Clinton proposed more evenly balancing the U.S. gross domestic product, which is derived from federal spending and taxes. His plan would span an entire decade, but it would allow Americans to have a better sense of "what we think would be a competitive level of revenues and a competitive level of expenditures" (McCormick).
"We can't afford to spend 25 percent of GDP on government expenditures," he said. "I don't think we can afford to tax at only 15 percent of GDP, either, which is about where we are" (McCormick). .
President Barack Obama and congressional Republican leaders are currently in a standoff over the best way to reduce the national deficit, which will allow the nation's borrowing limit to increase. The limit currently has a ceiling of $14.3 trillion. The August 2nd deadline will be upon us quickly. This date was provided by the Treasury Department, which said that at that time the U.S. will no longer be able to pay its debt obligations. Obama is still pulling for Republicans to set aside their difference of opinion regarding tax increases as part of the deficit-reduction plan.
