...The aim of this document is to assess the Obama administration’s performance on the economy, social policy, and foreign policy. To discuss the key factors that explains performance (so far) in each category. And to express my prognosis for future improvement in each category. The aim of this document is to assess the Obama administration’s performance on the economy, social policy, and foreign policy. To discuss the key factors that explains performance (so far) in each category. And to express my prognosis for future improvement in each category. The slowdown in US economy and high unemployment rate has driven the US presidential elections in 2012 by making these issues to be prime concerns for voters. Stimulating the economy and job creation became the obvious concerns for president Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney to stand out in the elections by creating strong outline policies for competing with each other. Intending to create new jobs through public investment in education and infrastructure, Obama proposed a $447 billion bill for job creation. He tried to attract the middle class by cutting the payroll taxes. But at the same time raised the taxes on the top two percent of earners, by extending the Bush-era cuts for the rest of the population—this plan was passed by senate in July 2012. Meanwhile, Romney and many other Republicans have advocated extending the Bush tax cuts for all Americans as a way to stimulate the economy and facilitate job creation. The Romney economic...
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...Evaluation of President Obama's First Year and a Half as POTUS" Introduction Barrack Obama became the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20th, 2009. He is the first African American to take office and with his presidency he promised to make changes to America that would liberate the American people from crisis into a bright new beginning. In his Inauguration speech, he claimed to mend the financial crisis by stimulating jobs and laying a “new foundation for growth” (Naughton, “Inauguration speech”). He promised to rebuild the Nation’s foundations such as roads, bridges, electric grids, and digital lines, to revive the prosperity and importance of science, to increase the care and lower the cost of health care, to mend the threat of global warming, to enact peace with Afghanistan, to withdraw from Iraq, and to transform the educational system to meet the conditions of a new era (Naughton, “Inauguration speech”). Throughout his first year as president Obama has enacted many policies and regulations such as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and Health Care Bill. However, has Obama stayed true to his original promises stated throughout his campaigns, in his Inauguration speech, as well as his first State of Union speech. Has Obamba’s first year been a success or a failure? This essay will explore the history of Obama’s ascend to presidency, his success and failures, and an overall evaluation of Obama’s first year in office. ...
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...Critics of Obama have complained that his foreign policy lacks a strategic and coherent vision. But one has to bear in mind that discussions on military intervention are complicated by the intersection of political, security and economic interests. After the past decade of warfare, Americans are weary of foreign engagement, especially military intervention. While the use of military force is sometimes necessary to prevent or mitigate a conflict, the past decade of warfare has demonstrated that military interventions often come with great costs and unintended consequences. Given the high costs of the Bush-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, doubts about the benefits of military intervention rose in the American public. Furthermore, domestic fiscal...
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...Obama Timeline: The most powerful person in the world -Barack Hussein Obama, was born on August 4, 1961 in Hawaii -His parents divorced when he was 2 yrs old and after that in 1967 he moved to Jakarta, Indonesia to live with his mother -1971: when he returned to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and attended Punahou school, a private preparatory school. He was one of few black students in school and his classmate regarded him as “the black kid from Indonesia” -1975: while in high school, Obama joined the basketball team and became a leader in class. (I think he started leading people very young) However, during his teenage years, he described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage lead him to use alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. (At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his high-school drug use as a great moral failure) -1979: Obama attended Occidental College and here he made his 1st public speech, calling for Occidental’s disinvestment from South Africa due to its policy of apartheid (mid-1981). - He graduated Bachelor of Arts with the major in political science in Columbia University in 1983. -He worked as director of the Developing Communities Project (a church-based community organization). He helped set up training program, a college preparatory tutoring program. -Entering Harvard Law School in 1988 and becoming an editor and also a first black president of the Harvard Law review. ...
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...M E M O R A N D U M TO: Gail B. Wright, DBA, CPA FROM: Sara Torocco and Rexhina Elezi RE: Federal Budget Proposals DATE: October 2, 2012 This memorandum analyzes the federal budget proposals currently being debated. Detailed information related to the components of budgets is also provided. Focusing mostly on the issue of Medicare, this memo identifies how Medicare will change in future years. The following compares and contrasts the overall budgets and Medicare budgets for each of the federal proposals, and also presents an argument against Congressman Ryan’s proposed Medicare budget. U.S “On-Budget” Surplus and Deficit Historical Data Presented below is the United States surplus and deficit data according to the historical tables provided by the Office of Management and Budget. * The United States on-budget has ran a deficit for the majority of the years between 1990 and 2011. * The years 1999 and 2000 both ran a surplus on-budget. * See chart no. 1, page 6. Federal Government “Off-Budget” Financing * Federally owned and operated entities that are off-budget do not affect the federal budget. The revenues and expenditures of these organizations are not included in the calculation of the federal deficit or surplus. * When the off-budget entities have a surplus, the Federal Government can borrow the money. The surplus in the Social Security Trust Funds is a large source of borrowing for the Federal Government (Penner, 2007)...
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... Barack Obama Barack Obama Biography U.S. Representative, U.S. President, Lawyer (1961–) Early Life Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where her father worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham's father, Stanley, enlisted in the service and marched across Europe in Patton's army. Dunham's mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program and, after several moves, landed in Hawaii. Barack Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa, eventually earning a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams of college in Hawaii. While studying at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham, and they married on February 2, 1961. Barack was born six months later. Obama did not have a relationship with his father as a child. When his son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University, pursuing a Ph.D. Barack's parents officially separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964, when their son was 2. In 1965, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya. In 1965...
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...BARACK OBAMA'S SOUTH CAROLINA SPEECH Introduction In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech from a particular pragmatic perspective. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to Bakhtin 1981, 1986) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama's achievements), Obama uses the technique of 'personification' (The Economist, Dec 13th, 2007). When he voices an idea, he does not just expose it as if it came from himself, but gets another person (fictitious or, plausibly, real) to voice it. Since in an electoral speech, he cannot reasonably get people on stage to voice his ideas, he personifies ideas by narrating what people told him. His stories are his way of personifying his ideas. The discourse strategy he uses serves to reverse the direction of influence from the people in control to the people controlled (see van Dijk 2003). Duranti (2006b) writes that The language of politics has been presented and studied in terms of its ability to persuade an audience (of peers, subjects, and superiors) to go along with the speaker's view of the world and his or her proposal (Perrot 2000). In much of this literature, the successful political...
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...22 No Longer Inevitable? The Transatlantic Relationship from Bush to Obama Michael Cox Until recently, the relationship between the United States and Europe constituted one of the most intimate in modern times. Indeed, as we ‘over here’ love reminding our American friends ‘over there’, the United States was in the beginning a mere by-product of Europe – initially created by a rising European power in the form of Great Britain, then born out of a long war between Britain and France, and finally transformed into a world power in large part because of large-scale European migration between 1814 and 1914. Europe’s long twentieth century crisis, however, had a massive impact on the balance within this relationship, and by 1945 not only had Europe lost its place at the head of the international table but had become highly dependent on the United States itself. Still, in uncertain times, the US continued to need as many friends as it could muster, and whether one prefers to view the nature of the postwar relationship in the more liberal sense of being a ‘community’, or in more realist terms as being one in which an American hegemon dictated terms to weak dependencies, matters less than in recognising how important the relationship was to become to both countries during the Cold War. Thus, Europe needed the US to survive in a bipolar world: the United States, however, required Europe in order to protect that world from the threat posed by its many anti-western enemies...
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...The New World Order: Not Built in a Day Luke Nosko 2011-04-02 David Tabachnick Word Count: 3028 The end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the beginning of an unprecedented geopolitical scenario in modern times, namely the existence of a lone superpower nation which easily dominated the other countries of the world in terms of military strength and international economic and political influence. With this never-before-seen position of power in the modern, globalized world came the heightened importance of American foreign policy decisions, and the world waited to see how the US would react to being thrust abruptly into this role of the unipole of world power. The first test of US foreign policy as the sole superpower would actually come before the official dissolution of the USSR (though it had been in steep economic decline for some time), when Saddam Hussein lead the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. US President George H. W. Bush would place this conflict into perspective for the countries now looking to the US for leadership in his address to a joint session of Congress and the nation on September 11, 1990, and it was then that he most famously claimed that the US would strive to establish and protect the concept of a New World Order (NWO): “We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these...
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...Analysis of Funding Levels for the U.S. Government And Department of Education Week 4: Case Analysis: U.S. Budget Public Administration 581: Governmental Budgeting and Finance Introduction In 2009, Barack Obama took office as the 44th President of the United States. In February that same year, President Obama signed a stimulus bill into law that included tax cuts and a safety net of spending and appropriations for projects in our nation. When President Obama took office, he was faced with experts stating that this is the “worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression” (CNN U.S. 2009). Several documents that incorporate 2009 funding levels for the U.S. Government and the Department of Education, will attempt to identify trends for the years 2009 to 2011 in regards to outlays and receipts along with the GDP relationship. The following articles will be analyzed; The Budget Message of the President, Restoring Responsibility, Rescuing the Economy and Reviving Job Creation and Laying A New Foundation For Economic Growth. When analyzing this articles, we will look at what progress has the country made during this past year, what issues are we facing as we move forward, what is the economic situation and what significant issues and initiatives are discussed in these articles. One other piece of document that will be analyzed is the Department of Education. When we look at the Department of Education, we need to know what departments mission...
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...Abstract The US has the largest defense market in the world, and in 2012 the US defense budget stood at US$645.7 billion. Expenditure is primarily driven by the modernization of existing weapon systems as well as the acquisition of advanced defense equipment capable of enhancing interoperability among the armed forces. Due to its high levels of military spending, a large number of opportunities are available to companies keen to supply the nation with defense equipment; however, pressure to reduce the debt burden after the US financial crisis has shown a negative impact on the government budget and caused cuts in defense budget as well. A side effect of the uncertainty and budget cuts in the U.S. is strong industry interest in international sales. Defense companies that have never worked abroad are now eyeing the international market as a way to diversify their sales and balance out volatility in the U.S. market. The Foreign U.S. Defense Industry: International Arms Sales Begin your paper with the introduction. The active voice, rather than passive voice, should be used in your writing. This template is formatted according to APA Style guidelines, with one inch top, bottom, left, and right margins; Times New Roman font in 12 point; double-spaced; aligned flush left; and paragraphs indented 5-7 spaces. The page number appears one inch from the right edge on the first line of each page, excluding the Figures page. U.S. Defense Industry Flees the Country Defense budgets peaked...
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...GAME CHANGE OBAMA AND THE CLINTONS, MCCAIN AND PALIN, AND THE RACE OF A LIFETIME JOHN HEILEMANN AND MARK HALPERIN FOR DIANA AND KAREN Contents Cover Title Page Prologue Part I Chapter One – Her Time Chapter Two – The Alternative Chapter Three – The Ground Beneath Her Feet Chapter Four – Getting to Yes Chapter Five – The Inevitables Chapter Six – Barack in a Box Chapter Seven – “They Looooove Me!” Chapter Eight – The Turning Point Chapter Nine – The Fun Part Chapter Ten – Two For the Price of One Chapter Eleven – Fear and Loathing in the Lizard’s Thicket Chapter Twelve – Pulling Away and Falling Apart Chapter Thirteen – Obama Agonistes Chapter Fourteen – The Bitter End Game Part II Chapter Fifteen – The Maverick and His Meltdown Chapter Sixteen – Running Unopposed Chapter Seventeen – Slipping Nooses, Slaying Demons Part III Chapter Eighteen – Paris and Berlin Chapter Nineteen – The Mile-High Club Chapter Twenty – Sarahcuda Chapter Twenty-One – September Surprise Chapter Twenty-Two – Seconds in Command Chapter Twenty-Three – The Finish Line Epilogue – Together at Last Index Author’s Notes About the Authors Copyright About the Publisher Prologue BARACK OBAMA JERKED BOLT upright in bed at three o’clock in the morning. Darkness enveloped his low-rent room at the Des Moines Hampton Inn; the airport across the street was quiet in the hours before dawn. It was very late December 2007, a few days ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Obama had been sprinting flat out...
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...Constructivists do not rely of institutions such as the UN but instead ask fundamental questions such as, “Are we not afraid that Britain has a nuclear weapon because they speak English and N.Korea has there own language?” Why are you not afraid of Britain but afraid of Iraq having nuclear weapons? It is simply because ideas give meaning to material worlds; whether or not a state Is powerful or considered a threat is not due to the number of weapons or troops they have alone. The constructist paradigm focuses n the power of langaue, speech acts, framing and dialogue, power of culture, symbols, identity, norms, and ideas in shaping decision making. To help the alien better grasp the cncept of this puzzling behavior, I would boldy point out that the shared understadnings and the history between the states play a big role. For example, the importance of speech acts and words tie with Geroge W.Bush’s intrudctuion of the term “The axis of Evil” and Obama’s introduction of “Redlines”. In the end it comes down to who is defined as an enemy or a friend. The history of relations with that state and their identity can be looked at as the missing piece of the...
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...***AFF*** ***1AC*** Inherency – 1AC Contention one: Inherency The new FAA bill cut funding for the AIP, which will cripple our airport infrastructure – rapid investment is critical PRINCIPATO ‘12 - president, Airports Council International-North America; M.A. in International Relations from University of Chicago; International Trade and Transportation specialist, Hunton & Williams (Greg, “Why we should invest today in 'Airports Inc.'”. March. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/labor/218525-faa-why-we-should-invest-today-in-airports-inc) With the latest Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) forecast predicting a doubling of passengers and cargo by 2030, the current funding system is not up to the job of ensuring airports will have the infrastructure they need to handle such dramatic increases in traffic. This will have far-reaching consequences. Commercial airports are powerful economic engines, generating 10.5 million jobs and $1.2 trillion for the U.S. economy, according to a new Airports Council International-North America study. Across the country, workers and businesses count on local airports to attract investment and move people and goods around the world. Since 2001, the total number of jobs associated with airports has increased by more than 50 percent. Despite unprecedented growth and clear evidence of the economic benefits of infrastructure investments, airports expect to have $80 billion in unmet needs through 2015 because of the flawed system...
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...Condoleezza Rice was the 66th and first black female Secretary of State appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005. Her accomplishments created a national spotlight. She became a faculty member at Stanford University while in her twenties and continued to excel through academics as well as on a national scale. Dr. Rice reached her success by her own accord. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights era with a strong family influence. Both of her parents were teachers and emphasized the importance of education. She is an accomplished pianist and speaks several languages to include French and Russian. Prior to the appointment to Secretary of State, Dr. Rice became the Nation Security Advisor during President George W. Bush first term in the presidency (Rice 2008). Dr. Rice studied political science at Stanford University and served as Provost. Dr. Rice’s expertise is concentrated on areas of Soviet Union and European countries. During the 1980’s Dr. Rice closely worked with Security of State George P. Shultz under President Ronald Regan. She was part of a forum, which held frequent meetings on foreign affairs. Dr. Rice served as a Soviet expert on the United States National Security Council, (Rice 2011). Serving on the council came during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Dr. Rice served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. She helped develop Secretary of State James Baker’s policies in favor...
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