Feb. 28, 2013: Our readers write

President’s leadership lacks

The president has been in the media about every day recently making statements of how bad things are going to be because of the coming sequestration. When one looks into it, he was the one who proposed sequestration, even though he said he didn’t before the election. Now he would like to prevent his own proposed legislation from automatically taking effect March 1. How embarrassing for him.

As a result, the president is making bad statements such as firefighters, teachers, police officers, etc., would lose their jobs. Remember, most are paid by state and local governments. The expectation was that voters would rise up against the automatic federal spending cuts. Just 36 percent of voters want the president and Congress to stop them. That appears to be done to alarm voters to get them to support replacing the legislation with a combination of tax hikes and specific spending cuts. Voters haven’t come around to that, either. Thirty-nine percent are for it, 42 percent oppose it and are for the automatic spending cuts instead. How embarrassing for him.

Because President Barack Obama has not shown leadership ability and has stayed in campaign mode, the wheels are coming off many other areas of his administration. A few are:

• The recent increase in the payroll tax may seem small, but is causing reduction in spending that is affecting earnings big time on Wall Street.
• Gasoline is about double the price when he took office, and everything that is delivered is af-fected by increases in petroleum costs.
• Unemployment numbers are not coming down. The last quarter the GDP was negative — one more negative quarter of GDP and we’re back into a recession.

How embarrassing for him.

The president has indicated we have al-Qaida, etc., on the run. The terrorist raid at Benghazi and the defenders of Mali being outgunned using arms that came from Libyan rebels are em-barrassments. What are our ongoing commitments to NATO? The list goes on and on and on.

Bill Beckerdite
Elizabethtown