Name that president! Which president did what during their first 100 days? See if you can answer all of the questions below:
1.) This president signed an executive order granting amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers the day after his inauguration.
2.) Which president’s speechwriter said the following “The first 100 days in any presidential term is a very heady time. You think you have the magic touch. You’ve just been elected to the most powerful position in the world…And boy, oh boy, that’s a dangerous time and that’s a dangerous attitude.”
3.) Which president met with the Soviet leader at the time and agreed on a 10-year program to curb offensive nuclear weapons?
4.) During his first 100 days, this president became the first Republican president to attend a Democratic congressional retreat?
5.) Name the president who passed the Civil Rights Act in his first 100 days.
6.) This president set the standard for acting swiftly and boldly throughout the first 100 days of an administration.
7.) He was the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.
8.) Which president was more popular coming into office than any president since the beginning of polling?
9.) This president secretly bombed Cambodia within his first 100 days, which the American public didn’t learn about for months.
My first few jobs after college were government jobs. In those departments, a new employee was a superstar if they’d mastered the telephones and building security system in 100 days. Needless to say, our country’s top government employee, President Obama, is scrutinized much more for the product of his first 100 days on the job.
In his first 100 days, Obama has organized, planned or implemented aggressive initiatives at healing America’s international reputation, our generations-old feud with Cuba, our broken health care system, environmental concerns and, last but certainly not least, the economy, including a number of major stabs at curing several critical housing market ailments.
It would be foolhardy to try, here or elsewhere, at this juncture to determine whether the real estate market stabilization and stimulus projects the Administration has enacted in the last 100 days will or won’t work – time will tell, and though they have been very smart and strategic (IMHO – reference my prior professions of Probama-ism), there is much about the rest of the economy, namely unemployment, that will impact the ultimate success of these programs. So for now, let’s just recap Obama’s first 100 days from the perspective of his efforts at fixing the broken housing market:
Stimulus package – within weeks after taking office, the Obama stimulus plan was approved by Congress and signed, increasing the FHA loan limits up to $729,750 in high cost areas and boosting the first-time homebuyer tax credit from $7,500 to $8,000, changing it from a loan to a refundable credit, and extending it to apply to homes purchased on or before December 1, 2009.
MakingHomeAffordable.gov mods and refis – in a separate foreclosure mitigation plan, the Administration devoted already-allocated funds to pay lenders and homeowners incentives to modify still-current home mortgages and to refi loans on homes with little or no equity. The goal? To make continued, responsible homeownership more affordable for 7 to 9 million homeowners in an effort to prevent more foreclosures.
Home Affordability and Stability, the rest – the same Act that spawned MakingHomeAffordable.gov had a lot of less sexy but important behind-the-scenes real estate market boosts, like money for Fannie and Freddie to maximize mortgage money availability to would-be homebuyers.
In the works. . . – the Administration has also put plans in action to revamp the stunningly unsuccessful HOPE for Homeowners plan to try to make it, uh, work (this should happen), and has lending reform and bankruptcy cramdown proposals on the floor now (these two don’t look as likely to make it through Congress).
Say what you want about the president, there’s one thing he ain’t – a slacker! Again, only time will tell how successful these strategies will be in the context of the unemployment, auto industry distress and environmental challenges our nation currently faces. But there are small rays of hope – California resales of existing single family homes were up 68% in March, year over year, and consumer confidence (a prerequisite to market recovery) is much higher than you’d expect just based on the economic indicators. Who knows – maybe there is something to that whole ‘Hope’ thing?!
** Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. is a real estate broker and attorney, and the Founder & Chief Visionary of REThinkRealEstate.com, where you can Ask Tara your most pressing real estate question. Tara, a nationally syndicated real estate columnist, has authored two books for women homebuyers, and is the host and author of the Drama-Free Real Estate resources on FrontDoor.com.
With the President's leadership and Congress' cooperation, the U.S. Department of Education successfully designated approximately $100 billion in stimulus funds to save education jobs and drive reform in our classrooms. The Department acknowledged the importance of investing these funds quickly and made the first $44 billion available to states within the first 100 days of the Administration. The Secretary also worked to communicate the message on how to apply for and receive stimulus funds in visits to 14 cities and 12 states and meetings with more than 300 constituency groups from across the country. In the months to come, the Department will work to hold states and school districts accountable for how they spend the first half of the stimulus funds, make the use of taxpayer dollars transparent to the American public, and reward those who use money innovatively. In the first 100 days, the Department also worked with the President to propose a budget for 2010 which will significantly improve higher education possibilities for today’s college students, increasing Pell Grant funding alone by $117 billion over the next ten years and eliminating bank subsidies on student loans, a step that would allow Congress to finance 95 percent of the higher Pell grants. However, the bulk of the work on the 2010 budget still has to be done in the coming days and weeks as the Administration works with Congress to make these proposals law.
Obama’s Healthcare Trojan Horse
By Governor Michael O. Leavitt and Jeffrey H. Anderson
President Obama supports the idea of a “public option” for health insurance. The language of competition and choice cleverly conceals the objective. But the President’s “public option” is a gateway leading to 118 million Americans losing the option of private choice. It is a strategy for government-run health care. It is a Trojan horse.
The story of the Trojan horse is familiar. After years of fruitlessly trying to enter the city of Troy, the Greeks boarded their ships and pretended to sail away. They left behind a huge wooden horse, which the Trojans claimed as a symbol of their victory and dragged into their mighty fortress. But the horse was full of Greek soldiers, who waited until midnight and then opened the gates for their invading army.
Advocates for government-run health care are similarly pretending to sail away from “Medicare for all” or “universal coverage,” leaving before us the notion of a “public option.” Simply stated, if people don’t have private health insurance or don’t like the plan they have, they could select a government-run plan similar to Medicare. The “public option” is presented as a means to promote competition and choice but would prove fatal to both.
With a “public option” in place, employers would bolt. How many employers would continue to provide health insurance if the government were willing to take their place? Under a widespread “public option” with Medicare-like reimbursement rates, the Lewin Group estimates that 118 million Americans would lose their private health insurance. If you add them to the 80 million Americans already insured by Medicare or Medicaid, no private insurance system would be able to survive, and the United States would have a government-run system like Medicare.
Why would this be bad? Advocates of government-run health care suffer under the illusion that Medicare operates more efficiently than the private sector. It’s true that Medicare issues checks more efficiently than anyone else. It should, as it issues a billion a year. But the efficiency of a health-care system isn’t measured by the volume of checks it issues, but the value it generates. Medicare’s uncoordinated, quality-indifferent, more-more-more structure is moving it rapidly toward bankruptcy, and taking our nation with it.
Medicare’s and Medicaid’s skyrocketing price-tags are generally kept hidden from view. So even a simple cost-to-cost comparison is illuminating: Since 1970, the cost of these flagship government-run health-care programs has risen more than two-and-a-half times as much as the cost of all other health care in the United States, the vast majority of which is run by the private sector. Since 1970, Medicare’s per-beneficiary cost — even without counting the prescription drug benefit — has risen 50% more than our overall per-capita national health expenditures aside from Medicare and Medicaid, rising 8% more in this decade alone.
The picture gets worse going forward. Medicare’s budget is projected to double within ten years, topping $1 trillion annually. The number of workers per beneficiary will soon drop from almost four to just over two and a half. The Medicare hospital trust fund, which funds the largest part of Medicare, is projected to become insolvent by 2016 — three years earlier than last year’s projection. Yet the Obama administration wants to add new federal health-care spending at a projected — not actual — ten-year cost of $1,300,000,000,000.00? This is like treating chronic obesity with a perpetual regimen of double calories.
Every American should have access to health insurance that he or she can afford. Government must take strong action to make that possible. However there is a better way to go about it than having government control every aspect of it. The government needs to promote value — to empower consumers to pursue the highest-quality care at the lowest-possible prices. Strong government action is needed to organize an efficient market where consumers can choose insurance plans and medical practitioners who offer the best value. What is not needed is to replace the private market with a government-run system in which only the truly rich have a choice.
President Obama’s “public option” is designed to become most Americans’ only option. Our only hope is to keep this Trojan horse safely outside our gates.
Michael O. Leavitt served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2005-09. Jeffrey H. Anderson taught as professor of Political Science at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Today marks President Obama's 100th day in office. This day is often used to reflect on and measure a president's accomplishments and performance thus far.
Test your knowledge: What is the origin and historical significance of the phrase "100 Days"?
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