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 | Read More »
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, | Read More »
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 | Read More »
The good folks at the RNC took a look at what Obama promised in Iowa four years ago …. and the record of failure that followed. The result is the following video, “Failed Promises: Iowa Edition” along with a little research to demonstrate Obama’s failure: In Des Moines, Iowa, four years ago Obama promised that when “We’ve made the changes we believe in,” we’d be | Read More »
2011 was a disastrous year for our debt. Yes, the Republican Congress prevented Obama from passing his budget, which would have added $1.6 trillion in new deficit spending. Instead, they passed a budget that added an additional $1.3 trillion to the national debt. Overall, federal outlays in FY 2011 (which ended September 30) were $141 billion more than the previous year. For FY 2012, thanks | Read More »
“It’s going to take a lot more than a few accounting gimmicks and unrealistic assumptions to cure our budget ailment” Yesterday, the media was agog with glee over reports that CBO is projecting an annual deficit “below $1 trillion for the first time in four years.” How did they arrive at that conclusion? This projection was extrapolated from the Treasury Department’s report of the first | Read More »
I used ta do a little but a little wouldn’t do it So the little got more and more I just keep tryin’ ta get a little better Said the little better than before Guns N’ Roses
The day has arrived. Our total debt has surpassed $15 trillion. At the close of business on Wednesday, the debt stood at $15.033 trillion, and is on the cusp of overtaking our GDP. Overall, the federal debt has risen $4.41 trillion (41.5%) since Obama took office and $6.36 trillion (73%) since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007. Our GDP has grown by only | Read More »
Let’s forget the fact that Obama’s entire Stimulus 10.0 is a counterintuitive proposal that doubles down on the very failures that precipitated this speech. Let’s also disregard the fact that enshrining unemployment insurance as a permanent handout will perpetuate unemployment. And more union-induced, short-term money drops on infrastructure will do nothing but stimulate traffic jams. Let’s focus purely on the very numbers that the administration | Read More »
The latest CBO budget and economic outlook is using baseline assumptions that are as realistic as flying unicorns. Although they project a decade of mediocre growth and moderate deficits, even such a dismal projection is a pretentious view of reality. On the budget side, CBO’s baseline outlook portends a $1.284 trillion deficit this year, and $3.487 worth of deficits over the ten-year budget frame, from | Read More »
DISCLOSURE: Repair_Man_Jack is a psuedonym for a person who works as a Civil Servant for the United States Federal Government. “A lot of people with budgetary responsibility are planning for a shutdown instead of for next year’s budget,” said Diane Breckenridge, who works in the office of the secretary of Health and Human Services. “It doesn’t add to the productivity of the government.” (HT: Washington | Read More »
Greg Sargent, the Washington Post’s in-house left-wing activist, has a hilarious post up analyzing the latest WaPo poll. (The post was originally entitled, “The pubic agrees with Dems, but they don’t know it,” although eventually someone caught on and fixed the typo.) Everybody has typos; what’s more enduringly amusing is Sargent’s effort at spin:
Obama accepts the new political reality and capitulates on his long campaign to sell what may call the largest tax increase in American history. Senior Presidential Advisor David Axelrod tells the Huffington Post President Obama will accept an across-the-board continuation of Bush-era tax cuts. According to Axelrod, “We have to deal with the world as we find it.” Yes, elections have consequences. After making “well | Read More »
Do deficits matter? The Obama Administration has been in something of a quandary lately as to whether to primarily emphasize its plans to spend more taxpayer money as “stimulus” or to paint itself as fighting against deficits. The former has the advantage of looking like the White House is doing – or trying against GOP opposition to do – something about the economy and its | Read More »
The Spectator’s Phil Klein alerts us to the release of the Annual Report of the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees. The Trustees have found that due to the recession, benefits paid out are overtaking revenues brought in even faster than projected. The trust funds for these programs will be bankrupt sooner than expected but more importantly, the programs will become a serious drain | Read More »
![[RS]](/t/img/logo-footer.jpg){kind=logo}