Well, it appears that our efforts are paying off.  Responding to our charge that the GOP was violating the pledge against bundled megabills, Boehner announced that he will split the proposal into three separate bills; the highway bill (HR 7), pension reform (HR 3813), and expanded oil and gas drilling (HR 3408).  This from Roll Call:

In a joint statement with Rules Chairman David Dreier (Calif.), the Ohio Republican sought to cast the decision as part of his pledge for a more open environment in the House.

“Republicans pledged to pass bills in a more transparent manner and reverse the era of quickly moving massive bills across the floor without proper examination. Accordingly, the energy/infrastructure jobs plan will be considered on the floor in the same manner in which it was written and voted upon in committee — in separate pieces,” Boehner and Dreier said.

Such a process will allow “each major component of the plan to be debated and amended more openly, rather than as a single ‘comprehensive’ bill with limited debate and limited opportunity for amendment,” they added.

This is great news.  But here’s the catch (via CQ subscription):

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Editor’s note: Earlier this year, I promised to harness our collective outrage against the GOP establishment by searching out candidates to support – men and women who will uphold our first principles.  Unfortunately, we have been too busy dealing with capitulation after capitulation on the major legislative battles.  That is about to change.  Over the next few months, I will be seeking out conservative candidates for The Madison Project (my other daytime job) and bringing them to the Red State community.  Your suggestions are much appreciated. Together we can get this done.

As conservatives, we have been frustrated by the fact that there is such a dearth of intellectual firepower among our elected Republicans.  Very few Republicans have the ability to articulate conservatism from a position of strength.  Unfortunately, this shows in their voting record.  Someone who fails to articulate conservatism as a candidate is bound to vote along with GOP leadership as an elected member of Congress.  This is why we need more candidates like Clark Durant in the Senate.

Clark Durant has been articulating conservatism long before he decided to run for public office.  During the 1970s, Durant worked at Hillsdale College and helped start Imprimis, one of the best conservative publications.  In the ‘90s, he helped found a network of charter schools that have had a positive impact on education in inner city Detroit.  While many Republicans struggle with the issues of education, Durant will be able to clearly articulate the superiority of private enterprise over government control in the education system.

Durant is a comprehensive conservative who possesses the requisite knowledge of history, policy, and the Constitution to properly articulate conservative principles in this Democrat-leaning state.  His campaign has already excited Tea Partiers in Michigan.  He has raised $1.3 million in just four months against a better-known opponent.

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We all agree that a temporary payroll tax cut without permanently restructuring Social Security, along with its funding source, is a ludicrous idea.  Sadly, Democrats would rather play politics by introducing this inane stimulus measure, in an attempt to get Republicans to vote against a tax cut.

For far too long, the extension of the payroll tax cut was coupled with more entitlement spending, in the form of 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and extension of Medicare ‘doc fix.’  We have long advocated that Republicans should decouple the tax cut from the spending in order to preclude a situation where conservatives, who oppose more entitlement spending, would be forced to vote against a tax cut.  Today, House Republicans announced that they will decouple the two issues and pass a clean payroll tax cut extension until the end of the year.  They are leaving out the entitlement spending extensions and daring Senate Democrats to oppose their clean tax cut – one that they have “championed” for the past few months.

Going forward, Republicans must stand strong against pressure to slip the entitlement spending into the payroll tax cut deal.  Once they are free from the burden of shooting the hostage (the tax cut), they should negotiate hard for the rest of the package.  They should be guided by the following principles:

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Last week, John Boehner’s spokesman, Brendan Buck, falsely asserted that the highway bill is “completely paid for –without raising the gas tax,” and will not engender further bailouts.  The reality is that this bill will impel an immediate $40 billion bailout from the general fund, while relying on phantom offsets to pay for it over 10 years.  Moreover, these offsets will never pass and will never come to fruition, while the deficit-producing bailout will occur immediately.

Here are the inviolable facts.  This 5-year (2012-2016) surface transportation reauthorization bill, H.R. 7, will commit $262.8 billion in spending through 2016, even though the revenue from the user-pay taxes (gas tax and other highway related taxes and fees) will only reach $193.2 billion over the same period.  Even working with CBO’s numbers, which don’t account for FY 2012, there will still be a $55.2 billion deficit over 4 years ($210.3 billion in contract authority vs. $155.1 billion in revenue).

Boehner can propagate his protestations from now until tomorrow, but the fact is that, under this bill, contract authority for transportation will outpace its funding source by roughly $55 billion from FY2013 through FY 2016.  That is their solemn commitment to the Democrats; that spending will definitely be authorized at those levels.  Any “offsets” discussed henceforth are notional, phantom, temporary, and/or stridently opposed by Democrats.

Back in November, Boehner announced that he would agree to spend roughly $52.5 billion per year on transportation, instead of $38 billion (projected annual revenues from gas tax) as originally proposed by the House.  But fear not, he promised to offset the deficits with royalties from new drilling in ANWR, the Outer Continental Shelf, and from shale fracking in the western states.  We all agree that these are laudable proposals that should get passed as standalone measures.  But the idea of using non-existent royalties to pay off an immediate 5-year deficit was always inane.

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On Monday, Obama is slated to release his annual budget proposal for FY 2013, along with a 10-year budget (2012-2021) outlook.  One would think that after talking incessantly about cutting spending, Obama would spend less money next year than this year.  Yet, in Obama’s world, a spending cut means spending less than you were slated to spend, even though it is still higher in nominal terms.  The Wall Street Journal has already obtained the outline of his budget:

President Barack Obama’s budget request to Congress on Monday will forecast a deficit of $1.33 trillion in fiscal year 2012 and will include hundreds of billions of dollars of proposed infrastructure spending, according to draft documents viewed by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

The projected deficit is higher than the $1.296 trillion deficit in 2011 and also slightly higher than a roughly $1.15 trillion projection released by the Congressional Budget Office last week.

Hence, even though revenues are projected to go up by $220 billion this year, the deficit will still tick up another $37 billion.  Using CBO’s baseline, that would mean spending will rise $257 billion this year under Obama.  And that’s during an election year.  You can imagine what he would pull out of the hat if he wins a second term.

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Aside from defeating Obama, the most important goal of the 2012 elections is to win back the Senate.  Or is it?

On days like today we should begin to wonder if there really would be much of a difference when there are 51 senators with an R next to their name as opposed to just 47.  In another terrible day on the Hill, Senate Republicans caved on two issues; judicial nominations and the stimulus highway bill.

When Obama announced his illegal appointments to executive positions last month, Republicans shook their fists heavenward and pledged to vigorously challenge those nominations.  Well, instead of engaging in vapid rhetorical promises, Senator Mike Lee took action.  He pledged to block all of Obama’s judicial nominations until he agrees to rescind his illegal appointees and resubmit them for confirmation before the full Senate.

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Throughout the week, Republicans have expressed their shock and dismay that we would have the unbridled temerity to oppose a highway bill.  They want to know why we are suddenly opposed to such basic things as transportation bills, even ones that will leave us with a $70 billion budget shortfall.  They are impugning our motives, charging us with opposing everything that emanates from leadership.

Well, once upon a time, it wasn’t just conservative outsiders who supported the notion that we peg transportation spending to the level of gas tax revenue.  In fact, just last July, members of the T and I Committee, led by Chairman John Mica, introduced a bill that would do just that.  They drafted a plan for a 6-year reauthorization bill that would cost $230 billion, roughly commensurate to the gas tax revenue over that same period.  At the time, we heaped accolades upon that bill.  On July 18, I wrote the following in these pages:

“As a new spirit of fiscal discipline slowly seeps into Washington, John Mica, Chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has drafted the framework for a new highway bill that will cap the funding for highway and transportation projects to the amount of revenue supplied by the gas tax and other highway user fees.”

In fact, it wasn’t just conservative outsiders who stressed the importance of maintaining the integrity of the highway trust fund as a pay-as-you-go system.  The draft proposal from the T and I Committee made that the selling point of their legislation.  It appears that the document has been removed from the committee’s website (the link in the aforementioned quote is defunct), but I still have the pdf from the time I wrote the article.  It reads like this:

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We’ve directed a lot of attention to the deficiencies of the House version of the highway bill (here and here).  We must also work to defeat the Senate version, which is even worse.  The 2-year $109 billion Senate bill (S.1813) offers no reform to mass transit and continues to mandate that states use 10% of their funding for wasteful “enhancement projects.”  As bad as the House bill is for conservatives, the Senate bill is absolutely indefensible.  Yet, amazingly, it was reported out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee with unanimous support from Republican members last year.  Last night, it was approved by the Finance Committee.

The Senate bill will spawn even larger deficits in the long-run.  Even for the two-year authorization period of the bill, there will be a $35 billion deficit between trust fund outlays and gas tax revenue.  Both the House and Senate versions rely on drawing down all existing funds in the trust fund to cover some of the gap ( to the extent that those funds really exist outside of an accounting gimmick).  However, there will still be a $13 billion shortfall over the next two years (and much more in the long-term).  The House bill relies on new royalties from oil exploration (that will never be approved by Democrats), but the Senate bill relies on phantom savings (from revenues that are already used to offset other expenditures) plus…you guessed it; tax increases.

After the EPW committee approved the underlying provisions of the bill, the Senate Finance Committee voted last night to approve $7 billion in sundry tax increases to fund this terrible bill.  One of those provisions includes a tax hike on inherited “stretched” IRAs and 401(k)s.

Here are the details from the horse’s mouth (Baucus Chairman’s Mark).

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The annual federal budget is a whopping $3.6 trillion, but that figure fails to capture the true burden of government on taxpayers.

There are a number of GSEs (government sponsored enterprises) that are considered off budget.  Politicians use off-budget entities like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Postal Service to obfuscate the true cost of government.  Additionally, the government runs a number of credit programs, in which taxpayers are on the hook for loan guarantees.  These guarantees include loans for college students and for energy programs, such as the one that purveyed failed green energy programs like Solyndra.

Under current law, Congress only factors in the cost of the loan itself when formulating the annual budget.  Perforce, if the money is paid back with interest, there is no cost to the government.  However, as we have learned so painfully, the loans are, all too often, never paid back.  Taxpayers have been called on to bailout a modicum of failed loan guarantees.  In the private sector, they use “fair value” accounting in calculating the costs of credit programs.  Fair value accounts for the costs of the market risk the lender incurs by issuing a loan, in addition to the actual borrowing costs.

Yesterday, the House passed H.R. 3581 – The Budget and Accounting Transparency Act (Scott Garrett).  This legislation brings Freddie and Fannie back on budget so taxpayers can see the true cost of these officious and destructive enterprises.  In addition, the bill will subject all loan guarantees to the “fair value” accounting method that is used in the private sector.

Astoundingly, almost every Democrat voted no on this commonsense bill.  Remember that this bill doesn’t mandate any changes to these programs or enterprises; it is not an ideologically charged bill.  This legislation merely forces Congress to reflect the true cost of government in the annual budget, not unlike what every family does with their household budget.  Sadly, even this moderate reform was too bold for Democrats.

We will be forced to clash with members of the House leadership over the next few weeks, but we should commend them when they bring legislation from conservatives, such as this budget reform bill, to the floor.  As for the Senate, we need to get them to agree to pass any budget, much less use prudent accounting methods.

Cross-posted from The Madison Project

While most of us have been caught up in the brouhaha of electoral politics, liberal activists have been working indefatigably to pack the courts – the unelected branch of government – with radical statists.  We might have turned over a number of congressional seats in 2010, but Obama has successfully turned over many conservative seats in our federal court system.  Since taking office, Obama has appointed 125 people to federal judgeships, including 25 to appellate courts, and 2 to the Supreme Court.

After three years, Obama’s mark on the federal courts is beginning to become quite potent.  The Fourth Circuit appellate court used to be filled with a majority of strict constructionist judges.  Now, following Obama’s appointment of five new radicals, the court has totally shifted.  This once conservative court ruled in favor of the administration in upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare last year.  Obama’s indelible stain on the judicial system will reverberate for years to come.

While Republicans have successfully blocked some of Obama’s most extreme nominees, they have voted to confirm the vast majority of them.  Many Republicans have insisted for years that anyone who is “qualified” to serve as a judge deserves to be confirmed, irrespective of their judicial philosophy or ideology.  This school of thought suggests that as long as the nominee has the requisite resume and is clean of ethical violations, he/she should sail through the nomination process.  That is the grim consequence of elections, they contend.

Last week, in an interview with an Egyptian television station, Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed why ideology matters and why perverted judicial philosophy should indeed be a disqualifying factor for a judgeship.  She told the audience –one that lives under tyranny – that the U.S. Constitution should not serve as a role model for a modern draft:

“I would not look to the US constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, had an independent judiciary… It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done. Much more recent than the US constitution – Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It dates from 1982. You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights. Yes, why not take advantage of what there is elsewhere in the world?”

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Last week, several House committees favorably reported the $260 billion 5-year House GOP highway bill to the full body.  This 846-page behemoth is now headed to a floor vote sometime next week.  Simply put, conservatives oppose the House leadership’s highway bill (H.R. 7) because it continues the failed top-down federal approach to transportation spending, while precluding devolution to the states for at least another five years.  Moreover, it eschews the pay-as-you-go funding mechanism of the Highway Trust Fund (eerily similar to the Social Security Trust Fund!) by permanently authorizing a higher level of spending than the fund’s corresponding revenue source; the federal gas tax.

Nevertheless, let’s disregard the policy concerns for a moment and focus on the political argument.  Just as they did with the budget battles of 2011, GOP leadership is selling this bill as the best alternative, a virtuous improvement of past policies.  And undoubtedly, on paper, the version that will be presented to conservative House members (as opposed to the final version after they cave) contains many good provisions:

• It eliminates the mandate requiring states spend 10% of their transportation funds on transportation enhancements and bike lanes.
• No earmarks. Dozens of old and/or redundant programs are eliminated.
• While it continues to fund Mass Transit to the tune of $8.4 billion annually, this legislation bars gas tax revenue from being diverted in order to support public transportation. [Although, in fine print, the legislation will still fund public transportation projects with a one-time $40 billion appropriation transfer from an unknown source (general fund?) into a renamed account called the “Alternative Transportation Account.”]
• The deficit between the trust fund outlays and the gas tax revenue (anywhere from $30-60 billion over 5 years) will be offset, in part, with royalties from opening lands in Alaska, parts of the continental US, and offshore to oil and gas exploration.
• Yet again, there is a provision slipped into the bill that grants a permit to TransCanada Corp. for construction of the Keystone pipeline.

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After billions in stimulus funding failed to transform impotent green energy sources into profitable endeavors, even Obama has taken a break from promoting Wind and Solar.  He is even talking more about oil and gas exploration, although his sincerity is in serious doubt.  Unfortunately, some Republicans have not relinquished their affinity for using public funds to prop up their local wind industry.

Yesterday, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback sent a letter to the 20 members of the payroll tax cut conference committee imploring them to extend the Production Tax Cut (PTC) for Big Wind, set to expire at the end of the year.  They warned that “wind development will grind to [a] halt due to the uncertainty of a PTC extension.”

The PTC is among 51 ‘tax extenders’ that have either expired last December or are slated to expire this December.  It grants a 2.2 cent/per kilowatt-hour refundable credit for wind, solar, or geothermal.  Believe it or not, that is a large sum of money.  According to the Heritage Foundation, if the oil industry received a commensurate subsidy, they would get a $30 check for every barrel produced.  The PTC is tantamount to an Earned Income Tax Credit for corporations.

As such, the governors are probably correct to assume that Big Wind will grind to a halt without the credit.  And that’s how it should be in our free-market economy.  Why is this any different than Obama’s attempt to pick winners and losers?  Actually, in this instance, we would be picking losers as winners.  While ending the tax credit will probably bring down Big Wind, it’s not like the subsidy actually helped Wind become prosperous.  In 2010, wind accounted for 0.9% of our energy supply, geothermal 0.2%, and solar 0.1%.  Many states offered their own tax credits to the wind industry, and lost money.  In Texas, the property tax break alone cost the state $1.6 million per job created.

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Here we go again.  Republicans talk incessantly about the need to cut the deficit, yet they are once again proposing a policy that will actually augment the deficit.

On March 31, authorization for transportation spending, along with its accompanying revenue source – the federal gasoline tax – is set to expire.  Republicans in the House and a bipartisan group in the Senate have introduced dueling proposals to fund long-term transportation projects, in lieu of the short-term bills that have been enacted since 2007.  Unfortunately, the Republican House bill is not much better than the Senate bill.

One need not be a staunch conservative to appreciate how inane it is to collect gasoline taxes from all 50 states into one pool, only to be doled out randomly for every state’s personal transportation project.  Ever since the Interstate Highway System was completed almost 20 years ago, there has been no rational purpose for the current top-down federal control over transportation.  Successive congresses have diverted as much as 38% of the gas tax revenue to mass transit projects and wasteful endeavors for specific states.  The net result is that some states are donors (contribute more), while other states are recipients (receive more in funding than they contribute).

We need to abolish the federal gas tax, and devolve all responsibility and taxes for transportation projects to the states.  The two bills percolating through Congress will double down on failed policies, add to the debt, perpetuate inefficiencies in highway construction, continue to encumber traffic, and preclude any devolution of responsibility to the states.

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Yesterday, Mitt Romney caused a stir when he made the following remarks about the poor during an interview with CNN:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Following this comment, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien prodded Romney to clarify his remarks.

“We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor…. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus…. The middle income Americans, they’re the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them.”

The media, Democrats, and many Republicans are painting him as out-of-touch, while expressing their concern that he is apathetic to the plight of the poor.  However, they are missing the point.  The real outrage is not that he doesn’t want to do more for the poor; it’s that he thinks they are taken care of with the welfare state.  Worse, he believes that the welfare state is, more or less, functioning properly.  Fear not, ‘any minor glitches would be repaired by Mr. Fix It.

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When purchasing a product or service, we all like to see the itemized list of charges – one that separates the cost of the purchase from the share going to Uncle Sam through the form of taxes and fees.  Needless to say, government bureaucrats don’t like that.  They desire that we remain blissfully ignorant of government’s burden on our everyday lives.  This is one reason why they concocted the withholdings scheme for income tax collection.  Now, they are expanding their tentacles into commercial taxes so they can obfuscate the magnitude of taxes and fees on airfare purchases.

Without much fanfare, the Department of Transportation (DOT) enacted a rule which requires airlines to ensconce all government taxes and fees in a single total advertised price with the fare.  For example, if you purchase a $350 plane ticket with $50 of taxes and fees, the DOT is demanding that the airline advertise the price as $400.  Airline passengers pay over a dozen taxes and fees on any given airplane ticket, but the government doesn’t want us to know that.  The rule was finalized last April, but only took effect last week.

The timing of this rule is very fortuitous.  This week, Congress will finalize negotiations for a long-term FAA funding bill.  This bill authorizes the collection of all taxes – including taxes on aviation fuel, domestic and international ticket taxes, and cargo –directed to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which provides the bulk of FAA funding.  As usual, Democrats want to spend more money on wasteful projects, and are all too hungry to increase aviation taxes.  What better way to leverage tax increases than by forcing airlines to hide their cost and to shoulder the blame for the perceived higher price tag at the top!

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It’s another week in the Senate, and there’s another battle over earmarks.  Senators Toomey and McCaskill are proposing an amendment to the STOCK Act (“insider trading bill”S. 2038) to permanently ban earmarks in the Senate.  Not surprisingly, there is pushback from Harry Reid…and a number of Republicans as well.

As always, there are those who argue that earmarks are just inconsequential “drop in the bucket” expenditures; that we must focus on more impactful issues.  This from Senator Cornyn:

He continued, “I wish we would focus on what the American people are most concerned about rather than some of these other issues that have their importance but are tangential to the main issues we ought to be focused on.”

“I think we ought to [instead] be looking at other ways to … address people’s concerns about jobs and the debt,” Cornyn said.

Yes, there are more pressing issues, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time.  We can spend a half hour voting on one amendment to scrub earmarks from the Senate once and for all.  Moreover, it is precisely because eliminating earmarks is such an easy, low-hanging fruit that we should deal with it immediately.  If senators are unwilling to relinquish millions in pork projects, how will they have the courage to cut billions from welfare programs and reform entitlements?

There are also the usual suspects who hold earmarks to be a moral and constitutional responsibility.

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The budget season has officially commenced today with CBO’s release of its annual budget and economic outlook.  Here are some of the major takeaways from the report:

FY 2012 Budget

The topline figure that the media will focus on is the projected $1.070 trillion budget deficit for FY 2012, down from $1.3 trillion last year.  However, as CBO notes several times throughout the report, the reduction in this year’s deficit is predicated on several assumptions.

1)      Revenues:  The entirety of this year’s deficit reduction comes from higher projected revenues, roughly $220 billion.  CBO is forced to score current law, which assumes that the payroll tax cut will expire at the end of February.  Another 10-month extension, which is almost a forgone conclusion, would cost over $100 billion.  Also, the CBO baseline does not include a likely AMT patch, and extension of many annual “tax extenders,” such as the credit for research and development.  It’s very likely that the extensions will wipe out the entire revenue gain from this year over 2011, thereby eliminating the reduction in the deficit.

2)      Outlays:  CBO is projecting $3.601 trillion in spending, up just $3 billion from last year.  Obviously, this projection does not account for a full-year extension of unemployment benefits and doc fix, which could add as much as $70 billion to this year’s spending total.

3)      Defense:  Outlays for defense will be reduced by another $20 billion.

When these factors are accounted for, it is clear that non-defense discretionary spending will not decrease significantly, while mandatory spending will continue to rise.  If you assume the alternative scenario, in which most of the temporary tax and spending measures are extended, the deficit should be about the same as last year; around $1.3 trillion.  In other words, there will be slightly more revenue this year, but increased spending as well.

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Remember Obama’s two-year salary freeze he imposed on federal workers?  Well, as part of his FY 2013 budget, Obama plans to end the pay freeze and offer salary increases to federal workers.  It is in this context that CBO published a report showing that federal workers still earn more than their counterparts in the private sector.

While it is clear that many federal workers (but not all) work hard for their money, it is also clear that they should not be earning more than those who pay their salaries.  It is simply unsustainable for government workers to be earning more than their counterparts in the private sector.

Yesterday, CBO published a report showing that on average, government workers are paid more than those in the private sector with similar jobs and qualifications.  Here are the pertinent findings of the report:

CBO, Jan. 2012

• Overall, federal civilian employees receive total compensation 16% higher than their private-sector counterparts;
• Federal civilian employees receive 2% more in cash wages than private-sector employees;
• The most significant advantage comes in the form of benefits, where federal civilian employees enjoy a 48% advantage over their private-sector counterparts.  Also, workers with no more than a high school education enjoyed the largest advantage over their private-sector counterparts.  The only workers who fare better in the private sector are those with post-graduate degrees.  Obviously, even with the generous benefits package for government workers, there is a limit to how much one can make.  That inherent limit affects the most educated workers.

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Much ink has been poured over the fact that 51% of tax filers paid no federal income taxes in 2009.  There is less attention directed towards the more outrageous statistic; 30% of tax filers had a negative tax liability that year.  In other words, they made money off the tax system.

Those who won the jackpot on tax day benefited primarily from refundable tax credits; the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC, the refundable portion of child tax credit), and the now-expired Making Work Pay Credit.  In 2011, refundable credits cost the treasury about $94.4 billion.   Keep in mind that this is just one small portion of the burgeoning welfare empire, approaching $1 trillion in total federal, state, and local expenditures.   While it would be nice to get rid of these redistributive “tax expenditures” for everyone, we could start with illegal aliens.

Last July, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Collection released a shocking report detailing how illegal aliens are able to utilize a filing loophole to obtain billions in ACTC funds.  While EITC appropriations are protected from illegals (those who don’t engage in identity theft) because they are only awarded to those who provide a valid Social Security number, the same cannot be said for the ACTC.  Illegals can receive the ACTC by merely providing an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) on their 1040 form, which is blithely issued by the IRS.  In 2010, according to the report, illegals received $4.2 billion in ACTC payouts.  That accounts for roughly 15% of all outlays for that refundable credit.

During the December imbroglio over the payroll tax cut, the House inserted a provision to require a valid Social Security number in order to collect the ACTC.  Republicans planned to use the savings as part of the offset package.  Now that the bill, HR 3630, is pending before the conference committee, we must ensure that the ACTC provision is part of a legitimate proposal to offset the cost of the extenders package.

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So this is what the “age of budget austerity” looks like?

Yesterday, the Senate voted against a measure to disapprove of Obama’s request for an additional $1.2 trillion of debt.  Every Democrat (except for Ben Nelson and Joe Manchin) voted against the resolution.  Consequently, pursuant to the Budget Control Act (the “debt ceiling deal”), Obama will automatically get his new credit card.  Our debt will increase by another $1.2 trillion, topping $16.4 trillion by the end of the year.

Here are the relevant numbers that should define Obama’s presidency, yet they will not be disseminated in the major media.  When Obama took office, the total federal debt stood at $10.6 trillion.  By the end of his first term, the debt will be at least $16.4 trillion, an increase of $5.8 trillion.  To put that in perspective, it took us until late 2001 (from our nation’s founding) to accrue $5.8 trillion in debt.  Even President Bush, who was a big-spending Republican, racked up “only” $4.9 trillion over 8 years.

Let’s now explicate the debt figures as a percentage of our economy.  Our total federal debt and our GDP stand at parity.  The debt is $15.281 trillion, while our GDP is 15.294 trillion.  It is unlikely that our economy will grow by more than a 2-2.5% annualized rate in the coming year.  On the other hand, with the additional $1.2 trillion of debt, our national debt will grow by 7.9%.  In other words, our GDP will remain below our gross debt indefinitely.

Unfortunately, the Republicans are not innocent from reproach in this debt crisis.  While every Republican except for Scott Brown voted for the resolution of disapproval, most of them supported the debt ceiling deal that engendered this disaster in the first place.  Only 19 of the 47 Senate Republicans opposed the debt deal, which gave Obama a defacto blank check to raise $2.1 trillion in debt without any transformational budget reforms.  We have already raised the debt ceiling by $900 billion since passage of the Budget Out of Control Act.  Today, by default, Obama was granted the rest.

This just underscores the need to focus on congressional races.  We might win back the Senate in November; however, if we continue to elect those who will vote for similar inane legislation, it will be worthless.

Cross-posted from The Madison Project