Barack Obama's Five Resolutions For The New Year

Barack Obama's Inauguration will be held in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2009. The forty-fourth President of the United States will soon have to address five major problems in United States foreign and domestic policy. Resolutions of these five problems would define success for his Presidency.

However, a failure to resolve these five issues will lead to failure and result in a dramatic decline in the Democrats' Congressional majority in the 2010 elections. Here are the top five challenges that the new United States President must try to resolve in the New Year.

1. The Current Economic Recession: Most economists now think that the current recession is already one year old. Unemployment is projected to exceed 9% next year. Housing and retail sales are currently in a monthly free fall. Indeed, by every economic measurement, 2009 looks to be a very bad year for the U.S. economy.

So, what can the new President do? The truth is not very much. Cutting taxes would provide some immediate help, but ultimately economic recessions need to run their course. The truth is that pork barrel stimulus spending will not create any jobs next year. It will only provide a slush fund at taxpayer expense for political special interest groups, which will increase, for many years to come, the already bloated federal budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.

2. Bail Out Nation: Where do all these corporate bailouts end? First, the financial services firms looted the United States Treasury. Then, the car companies flew in on their corporate jets to get in on the bailout action. Certainly, the retailers will soon be in the government hand-out line.

There is not enough future taxpayer dollars to bail out every industry feeling pain from this recession in the private sector. Enabling bad corporate business models with taxpayer dollars from the government needs to become a bankrupt practice. Early in 2009, Barack Obama needs to declare that America acting in the capacity of a Bail Out Nation has come to an end.

3. Middle East: War is already under way in the Middle East and it will get worse during 2009. The latest Middle East peace process is dead. Israel has started bombing Hamas in the Gaza Strip and an escalation of the conflict with an Israeli ground invasion appears to be imminent.

In addition, the problem of Iran's undeterred march to develop a nuclear capability has not been slowed by three different sets of United Nations sanctions. Overall, the Middle East will be an escalating international foreign policy crisis in need of resolution in the new year.

4. Increase Transparency On TARP: The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least 1 billion dollars each in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what’s the plan for the rest? None of the banks provided specific answers.

It should be resolved by the new administration that the second part of the 300 billion dollars in TARP money should not be authorized by the United States Congress next year until the first 300 billion dollars of taxpayer money has been completely accounted for.

5. Afghanistan : The events of September 11, 2001 led to the War in Afghanistan and the temporary defeat of the Taliban. Unfortunately, the Taliban have staged a dramatic comeback and more United States troops are going to be needed to counter this insurgency in Afghanistan. It is a war that has not had any resolution for the last seven years. A solution to the long-term problem in Afghanistan needs to be another Barack Obama resolution for the New Year.

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