Budget and Debt

[Ritty77]

Top Ten Obama Budget Failures
By Michael Tanner
February 16, 2011

So many to choose from . . .

Looking for a good joke? Did you hear the one about how President Obama is making painful spending cuts in order to reduce the budget deficit?

There is so much to dislike in this budget that it’s hard to narrow it down to the worst ideas. But here are my top ten:

1. Red ink as far as the eye can see. At no point over the next ten years does the president propose that the government actually balance its budget. In fact, the budget deficit never drops below $600 billion. By 2020, the deficits are over $700 billion again and rising.

2. Greek-style debt. Overall, the president’s budget adds roughly $13 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. By 2020, our gross debt reaches $26 trillion.

3. More spending. Unprecedented budget deficits, unsustainable debt — and what does the president propose? Spending $53 billion over ten years on high-speed rail. Nothing better symbolizes the triumph of narrow special interests over the national interest. In total, the president’s budget includes $8.7 trillion in new spending over the next ten years on everything from education to “green jobs.”

4. Locking in past spending increases. After increasing domestic discretionary spending by 21.4 percent over his first two years in office, the president now proposes to freeze spending, thereby locking his previous increases in place. It is important to remember that Obama’s increases came on top of huge increases during the Bush administration. Thus, for example, under Obama’s budget federal spending on education will have increased by more than 100 percent since 2001. The Department of Energy’s budget is up 134 percent. Even the Department of Agriculture will spend 112 percent more than it did before George W. Bush became president.

5. Bigger government. Under the president’s proposed budget, the size of government would actually increase from the current 23.8 percent of GDP — the second-highest ratio of government spending to GDP since Word War II — to 24.8 percent.

6. Higher taxes. The president’s budget imposes $1.6 trillion in new taxes on families and businesses over the next decade. This includes more than $900 billion in higher income taxes and $435 billion in unspecified transportation taxes.

7. No entitlement reform. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office reported that Social Security had begun running permanent budget deficits. Medicare is facing future budget shortfalls larger than the entire budgets of most countries. In fact, if the unfunded liabilities of entitlement programs were to be included in our national-debt figures, our total future indebtedness could top $127.5 trillion. The president’s response to this looming crisis was to do . . . nothing.

8. Faux Defense Cuts. The president’s budget includes $78 billion in defense cuts recommended by Secretary Gates over the next five years. If implemented, those cuts would amount to barely 2 percent of Pentagon spending over that period. But, as with much of the administration’s budgeting, the cuts turn out to be the usual Washington game of calling a reduction in projected increases a “cut.” In reality, the military’s base budget (excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) will increase from $549 billion to $553 billion. Some conservatives may be pleased that Pentagon spending will be at the highest level in history, but it is impossible to make any serious effort at deficit reduction without addressing defense.

9. Phony assumptions. “Rosy scenario” is back. The president’s budget numbers are based on the assumption that the economy will grow, in real terms, 3.6 percent in 2012 and 4.4 percent in 2013. That’s much faster than CBO or private economists forecast, and nearly a quarter point faster than the economy has grown coming out of the last five recessions. The president also projects a dramatic decline in unemployment, with the jobless rate dropping to 6.3 percent in 2014 and then falling to just 5.3 percent in 2017 and beyond. Maybe, but not likely, especially given the impact of the administration’s proposed tax increases and the looming implementation of Obamacare. And speaking of Obamacare, the administration continues to insist that the new health-care law will reduce the deficit by nearly $200 billion, when an accurate accounting suggests that it will actually increase the deficit by as much as $823 billion.

10. More money for Obamacare. The budget includes $465 million next year to implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency charged with implementing most of the law’s major provisions, such as Medicare changes, Medicaid expansion, insurance reforms, and the exchanges, will hire an additional 650 bureaucrats. Moreover, CMS director Donald Berwick told reporters that additional Obamacare funding is scattered throughout the budget.

Are you laughing yet?

www.nationalreview.com/articles/259843/top-ten-obama-budget-failures-michael-tanner

[Ritty77]

[philunderwood]

From Neo Neocon:


Has Tim Geithner…
…suddenly stepped into the Jim Carrey role in the movie “Liar, Liar?” You know, the one where Carrey plays Fletcher Reede, a lawyer whose son makes a wish that his dad will be unable to lie for a day, and it comes true?

Because otherwise there’s no way I can account for this startling exchange:

[Ritty77]

Yes. Beck, Levin, and Rush were all over that one. We will never get anywhere without being truthful about the numbers. Timmy did good.

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?cat=47


Trumka: Raise gas taxes to create jobs

February 26th, 2011 | Author: Bruce McQuain

If ever there was an example of the complete cluelessness much of the left commonly displays when it comes to economic matters, the AFL-CIO’s (and Obama advisor) Richard Trumka provides it:


What’s the best way to get Americans back to work?

Raise taxes, according to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Specifically, he wants to raise the federal gas tax as a means to fund infrastructure spending. "We need a dedicated source of revenue to create infrastructure in this country," he tells Aaron Task in the accompanying clip.

"We need to create jobs. The best way to do that is through infrastructure development." Simply maintaining the existing infrastructure in this country will cost $2.2 trillion over five years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. That doesn’t include Obama’s objective of high-speed rails and green energy projects.

So, to sum up, raise one of the most regressive taxes there is (it hits the poor the hardest at the gas pump because they end up having to pay a larger portion of their disposable income for gasoline) and declare this will help "create jobs".

What it will actually do, if that were to occur, is create more union jobs. And if the poor have to cut back on food or shelter, well, you know, a few eggs have to be cracked to make an omelet. The key to economic recovery, per Trumka, is government created jobs with money taken from taxpayers who just might have a much different priority for it. It calls for another “new revenue stream”. And he has no qualms at all laying claim to your dollars to fund his nonsense.

Trumka didn’t say specifically how much he would raise the gas tax, but mentioned he’s shown the President a $256 billion plan to improve infrastructure. If every billion spent on infrastructure creates 35,000 jobs, as he claims, this package would create close to 9 million jobs over the next five years.

The idea would also improve America’s fiscal and competitive future, says Trumka. "There’s also a downstream effect, you put people back to work, they pay taxes, they don’t use services, they’re contributing, other jobs are created along the way as well," he explains.

Fantasy. A) it is, as usual, the left’s answer to everything – tax and spend. Someone tell Mr. Trumka that it is precisely that mindset that the majority of Americans have rejected. B) it assumes something not in evidence. We just spent over $800 billion on “infrastructure” – look around you, did you see the unemployment rate dip significantly or go up? C) after the stimulus was spent there has apparently been no down-stream effect for jobs, service use is up and tax revenue is down.

If Trumka’s solution had any credibility, unemployment would be down below 8% (that was the promise, remember – spend the money on infrastructure and see jobs created) and we’d be riding the recovery train. We have a million little signs up everywhere in America right now touting infrastructure projects – and the unemployment rate?

In fact, what Trumka is doing is asking for more to be spent on a plan that has already failed miserably and expecting different results. Isn’t that the definition of “insanity”?

That’s precisely what this plan is – insane. Government has wasted trillions on nonsense like this. The solution to this isn’t government creating jobs. It is private industry doing so. That requires low taxes and a stable business atmosphere where government hasn’t declared war on business and corporations. That requires less government, not more – something the Richard Trumkas and Barack Obamas of the world can’t quite seem to get through their heads. In their world, government is always the answer. Unfortunately, we’re living in their world right now.

Happy with it?

Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?

~McQ

[twinder]

Speaking of gasoline, Holy Crap! Prices went up thirty cents per gallon in Montgomery at all three places yesterday. Shenanigans!

[Ritty77]

GAO report expected to show hundreds of duplicate programs
By Vicki Needham
02/28/11 09:00 PM ET

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found hundreds of possibly duplicate programs throughout the federal government's agencies, according to a report scheduled for release on Tuesday.

The GAO, an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress and investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars, identified programs across the agencies including Defense and Energy departments, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday night.

Congress and the White House have targeted many duplicate programs for elimination, including several that are included in the House Republicans' two-week continuing resolution, also in President Obama's fiscal 2012 budget, that cuts $4 billion in spending through March 18.

The Journal reported these duplications from the GAO study:

1. Food safety: 15 agencies that implement several federal laws.

2. Defense: Duplication in the purchasing of tactical wheeled vehicles, procurement and medical costs.

3. Economic development: 80 programs spread across several agencies that share goals.

4. Surface transportation: More than 100 programs run by five divisions within the Transportation Department.

5. Energy: Cutting ethanol production programs could save $5.7 billion each year.

6. Government information technology: 24 federal agencies handle IT.

7. Health: The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments are still working separately to update electronic health records.

8. Homelessness: There are more than 20 federal programs dealing with the issue.

9. Teachers: 82 programs and several agencies deal with teacher quality.

10. Job training: 44 employment and training programs.

thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/146641-gao-report-expected-to-show-hundreds-of-duplicate-programs

[Ritty77]

So homelessness has over twenty agencies, yet there numbers are said to be increasing: www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/How_Many.html

So education has 82 programs or agencies looking to "deal with teacher quality," yet test scores lag and graduation rates (especially for minorities) are at all time lows: www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/10/34swanson.h29.html

More government, more government employees, more government spending means less freedom, higher taxes, and a lower standard of living.

[philunderwood]

But to hear the left tell it, cutting government will mean little old ladies will freeze and starve, we’ll all lose our SS and Medicare, Criminals will run wild, houses will burn to the ground, etc. etc.

We could make huge cuts in the size and cost of government and we’d probably not even notice it.

[philunderwood]

Copying this one simply wouldn’t do it justice:

www.qando.net/?tag=mary-meeker

[Ritty77]

A very good read from Mark Steyn.

Cowboy Subsidies
In Harry Reid’s world, the cowboy embodies dependency without end.

How mean-spirited are House Republicans? So mean-spirited that they would end federally funded cowboy poetry! Last Tuesday, Harry Reid, the majority leader, took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain’t big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner).

“The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 . . . eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Senator Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy-poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”

“Tens of thousands” would “not exist”? There can’t be that many cowboy poets, can there? Oh, c’mon, don’t be naïve. Where there are taxpayer-funded cowboy poets, there must surely be cowboy-poetry festival administrators, and a Bureau of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Licensing, and cowboy-poetry festival administration grant-writers, and a Department of Cowboy Poetry Festival Administration Grant Application Processing, and Professors of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Educational Workshop Management at dozens of American colleges credentialing thousands of cowboy-poetry festival workshop coordinating majors every year.

It all adds up. In western railroad halts where the Last Chance Saloon shuttered in 1893, dusty one-horse towns are now glittering one-grant towns, where elderly hoochie-koochie dancers are being retrained to lead rewarding lives as inspectors from the Agency of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Handicapped-Access Compliance. Used to be a man could ride the range for days on end under lonesome skies with nuthin’ on the horizon ’cept a withered mesquite and a clump of sagebrush, but now all you see are clouds of dust and all you hear’s the mighty roar of thundering hooves as every gnarled ol’ wrangler in the territory races for the last hitching post outside creative-writing class.

Well, it’s easy to mock, and in the hours after Senator Reid’s effusions many of us on the Internet did. I liked Mary Katherine Ham’s channeling of Ted Kennedy: “John Boehner’s America is a land in which cowboys would be forced into back-alley poetry recitations.” Funny — although, being an example of private-sector non-government-funded wordsmithing, it obviously doesn’t “create jobs.”

But what’s more difficult to figure out is why everyone doesn’t mock — and why Senator Reid (and presumably senior flunkies in the bloated emir-sized retinues that now attend our “citizen-legislators”) thought this would be a persuasive line of argument. This year, the NEA will be giving $50,000 toward the exhibition “Ranchlines: Verses And Visions Of The Rural West” in Elko.

What’s the big deal? It’s 50 grand, a couple of saddlebags in small bills. Not a large sum. But then when you’re Harry Reid staggering around in your trillion-gallon hat, it’s all small potatoes, isn’t it?

He and too many other Americans seem to be living their version of the old line: If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. America owes the world $14 trillion, so the world has a problem.

And, if it’s the world’s problem, why bother our pretty little heads about it? I’m struck by the number of times I’ve been blithely assured by insiders in D.C. and elsewhere that “it’s not in China’s interest” to yank the rug out from under America: We don’t need to do anything drastic, because they won’t do anything drastic. I’m not so sure I could claim with any degree of confidence to know what China considered to be in its interest. But we have the planet’s most lavishly funded intelligence agency, so they’re bound to be on top of it, aren’t they?

In the new budget, there’s a request from the CIA for an emergency appropriation of $513.7 million. Great! A mere half-billion. That’s enough for 10,000 cowboy-poetry festivals. So what’s it for? Toppling Kim Jong-Il? Taking out the Iranian nuclear program?

Er, no. It’s an emergency payment to stop the CIA pension fund from going bankrupt next year with unfunded liabilities of $6.4 billion. The CIA failed to foresee the collapse of the Iron Curtain until it happened. It failed to spot that Pakistan was going nuclear until it happened. But, when the world’s most bounteously endowed intelligence agency fails to spot that its own pension fund is going bankrupt until it happens, I wouldn’t bet the future on anyone in the United States government having much of a clue about what is or isn’t “in China’s interest.”

That leaves America to calculate what’s in America’s interest. And Harry Reid seems to have figured that it’s in America’s interest (or, at any rate, his) to spend like there’s no tomorrow even as the clock chimes quarter-to-midnight. And, when the Complacent Caballero tells you that we cannot contemplate doing anything as “mean-spirited” as a $50,000 cut in a poetry festival, he’s telling you it’s over.

What else do we fund apart from cowboy poetry? Well, American taxpayers fund the vast bulk of the rapidly expanding Chinese military merely through interest payments on the debt. This is the point in the cowboy movie when the guy squints through the window of the shack and says, “It’s quiet out there. Too quiet.”

What do you need to write cowboy poetry? Words like “tumbleweed” and “chaps.” Also, trochees, spondees, and dactyls. Pencil and paper. Total cost: 79 cents. Maybe you and a half-dozen other cowboy poets like to book the back room at the local bar once a month for an evening of cowboy poetry and a few beers. Total cost: couple hundred bucks. Maybe folks get word and you figure you should get a bigger room and invite the public and charge a three-dollar admission. Why does any of this require national subsidies managed by a distant bureaucracy thousands of miles away?

Well, because these days, what doesn’t? Once upon a time, the cowboy embodied the rugged individualism of the frontier. In Harry Reid’s world, he embodies dependency without end. To “preserve” the “tradition,” it is necessary to invert everything the tradition represents: From true grit to federally funded grit. Thus America, bouncing along in the Dead Wood Stage of history.

Whipcrack-away, whipcrack-away, whipcrack-away!

www.nationalreview.com/articles/261992/brokeback-mountain-debt-mark-steyn

[Ritty77]

Here's a link to some nice charts by the US Budget Committee chaired by Paul Ryan:

budget.house.gov/UploadedFiles/marchlisteningsessions.pdf

It's a .pdf. Lot's of scary figures laid out in big, single page graphics.

We need to get the debt under control now, and the Dems are playing pure politics.

Barak likes to speak to and court the young people yet piles mountains of debt on them and purposely weakens the nation they will inherit.

[Ritty77]

Rep. Paul Ryan Explains GOP 2012 Budget Proposal



budget.house.gov/

[Ritty77]

I'm not an economist. Nor am I a farmer, but I know bullshit when I see it.

In Search of a Straight Answer, Rep. Ribble Asks: Does President's Budget Add to the Debt or Not?

[philunderwood]

It makes sense if you live in the land of unicorns and moon ponies.

[twinder]

Just what the Hell is a "moon pony?"

Love the phrase though.

[philunderwood]

Moon ponies live alongside of unicorns in never never land where some reside.

[Ritty77]

Budget deal reached to avert government shutdown.

Short term Continuing Resolution(CR) used to bridge the gap until new budget is compiled and voted on this coming week.

CR includes an agreement that Harry Reid will allow, in the near future, Senate votes on two bills passed by the House. One is defunding Planned Parenthood and the other is defunding Obamacare.

Long term budget through September 2011 includes $38.5 billion in real spending cuts ("real" meaning that they are off of 2010 numbers, not some projected spending wish list).

To review, the Left had unstoppable majorities of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, yet failed to pass a budget for 2011--a budget that surely would have increased spending.

Instead, seven CR's later (the last of four these including GOP spending cuts), and now an agreement on a GOP-written budget that actually cuts spending. Plus, Dems will have to go on record in support of PP and Obamacare.

I'm not sure of the reason for the Dems apparent abdication of this process to the GOP, but it places the GOP agenda at the forefront with Paul Ryan's trillions-slashing 2012 budget looming overhead. There is also a debt ceiling issue to be addressed soon and the GOP has already stated that it WILL include spending reduction guarantees.

Is fiscal sanity within reach?

[Ritty77]

I clipped and posted this 4 minute audio. I can't figure out how to embed it, so you'll need to click play at the file sharing site.

Amazing how low they will go. My favorite is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: "This Republican path to poverty passes like a tornado through America's nursing homes."

Runner-up: "This is the, the, the functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians."

I could never be stupid enough or a big enough liar to be a Liberal.

Mark Levin montage of Liberal lies.wma

[Ritty77]

I missed our wonderful President's speech today. I'm sure he laid out a reality-based, common sense, detailed approach to getting our government on a path to a smaller, fiscally responsible, less intrusive entity.

Can anyone confirm this?