Pawlenty in Iowa: Obama swung and missed on spending cuts

ANKENY, Iowa — Appearing at a book signing at a Christian bookstore Sunday, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty criticized President Obama for not significantly addressing spending cuts during his State of the Union address last week.

“He stepped to the plate, he swung the bat and he whiffed badly,” Pawlenty said.

During Obama’s speech, he called for a freeze on discretionary spending, other than national security, and mentioned “painful cuts” would be required in order to regain budget discipline.

Pawlenty complained the president did not get into specifics and lay out ideas like the governor discussed Sunday.

“You’ve got to look the American people in the eye, tell them the truth, tell them how we got into this mess, and show them a way out that’s positive and reasonable,” Pawlenty said. “The president, unfortunately, had a golden opportunity to do that the other night with the State of the Union and he didn’t even significantly address the government spending crisis in the country.”

He added: “It makes me very upset and it’s one of the things that motivates me about 2012.”

The Minnesota Republican made the trip to Iowa as he mulls the idea of his own bid for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Pawlenty told reporters he would make a decision in March or early April.

The main component of tackling government spending, Pawlenty said, is restructuring and reforming entitlement spending, which he called out of control and “mathematically doomed to fail.”

One idea Pawlenty mentioned would be raising the retirement age for young workers entering the workforce. He also advocated changing the cost of living adjustment, or COLA, so that wealthier persons would receive less of an increase than lower income individuals.

Social Security will be solvent until at least 2037, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts. After the surplus is drained of Social Security, it will still be able to make payments, but only 78 percent of benefits.

The president did not offer a specific prescription to fix Social Security, but called for a bipartisan plan to address it.

Cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid generally do not poll well among Americans, but Pawlenty said they would be inevitable, while taking a swipe at President George W. Bush.

“The country’s made great progress in this regard,” Pawlenty said. “If you look at 2004, President Bush said he had political capital and he was going to use it, and he tried to tee up entitlement reform — he couldn’t even get it off the ground, he couldn’t even get a vote in one committee of a Congress controlled by his own party.”

Yet, while Pawlenty addressed the national debt, he said the country is not under-taxed.

“The premise behind the call for tax increases is we have to raise taxes so we can keep the way they are or get back to the way they were–we can’t do that, it’s reckless it’s irresponsible,” Pawlenty said.

Pawlenty said he was open to tax reform, telling reporters “there’s a lot of talk about earmarking on the spending side, but keep in mind there’s a lot of earmarking in the tax code that goes on.”

Obama also called for a simplified tax code during his State of the Union address and threatened to veto any legislation with earmarks for pet projects.