There’s a “fiscal cliff,” you guys, and somehow that cliff is looming.
The “fiscal cliff” is an important financial decision that lawmakers have to work together on in order to stop America from heading into financial ruin. What’s the big deal?
“Without some kind of agreement on the expiring tax breaks and expected spending cuts, the Congressional Budget Office has predicted the United States would plunge back into a recession at the start of 2013,” said an article on Politico’s website. “But if the situation looks dire — with a fiscal cliff at its worst totaling $665 billion, or more than 4 percent of the economy — the pullback can start immediately.”
What Obama seems to realize is that it’s going to take some push from the American people in order to get anything done.
Uh, but the flipside of that is the realization that American people can be extremely hard to motivate to do anything. Most people will only do something if it’s very easy to access and takes very little effort.
We’re pretty sure Obama understands that about us.
On Wednesday, he released a new kind of grassroots campaign: a Twitter hashtag.
“Middle-class families, folks who are working hard to get into the middle class, they’re watching what we do right now. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, when the American people speak loudly enough, lo and behold, Congress listens,” the president told a crowd of middle-class Americans at the White House on Wednesday, according to ABC News.
A $2,000 tax increase is part of what will happen to the American middle class if an agreement is not reached.
“It’s $2,200 out of people’s pockets. That means less money for buying groceries, less money for filling prescriptions, less money for buying diapers,” Obama said in an ABC News report. “It means a tougher choice between paying the rent and paying tuition. And middle-class families just can’t afford that right now.”
So he, or his brilliant team, came up with a Twitter hashtag for folks to use in order to encourage their lawmakers on Twitter to do something and reach an agreement: “#My2K.” Remember Y2K, when we all thought computers would freak out and shut down the world in the year 2000?
They’re equating that potential meltdown to the financial mess we all will face if an agreement is not made by the end of the year.
The president wants to stress the importance of reaching out to your lawmakers, and it’s not a bad thing to remind us about.
We might forget sometimes that really important people in our legislature are literally an email or phone call away. Heck, you can even write on their Facebook walls. It seems much easier to tell people how you feel before they make a decision that could affect your livelihood.
