Archive for the ‘Government Spending’ Category

Actually, there are no spending cuts at all, ever, period

This chart shows why federal spending never goes down under any plan.

The Ryan plan boasts $6.2 trillion in savings over 10 years. So that takes the projected national debt in 2021 from about $28 trillion all the way down to $22 trillion.

So we get a $22 trillion debt under the Ryan Plan . . . 10 years from now — instead of the $28 trillion debt Obama wants to give us.

Doesn’t sound like much of a plan to me.

And this is Paul Ryan’s chart.

So there’s really not a whole lot of difference between the Ryan budget plan and Obama’s spendaholism. Yet Dems, such as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, call Ryan’s plan economic terrorism against the elderly and the poor.

The best we can say about the Ryan plan is that it’s a little bit less worse than the Obama budget.

So . . . not so good.

I like Paul Ryan. He’s a really smart dude. But we can do better than this.

Back to the drawing board.

The stock market has been in a tailspin downward since the infamous debt ceiling deal was reached on Monday — a deal that will add $8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

Follow the money. That will tell you if raising the debt ceiling without real spending cuts was a good idea.

Latest on crashing stock market here >>>

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Well, the Senate is prepared to vote on the bill. It’s a fait accompli. It is going to happen, and depending on where you look, everybody’s claiming to be winners, and in other places you look everybody’s claiming to be losers. If everybody lost, it means it’s probably a pretty good deal. If everybody’s unhappy, it’s that line of thinking. I look at this, ladies and gentlemen, and I see an absolute, total waste of effort, a total waste of time. It’s gonna come down now to how dispirited people are and just how much they want to continue to fight for this, because what happened here is typical Washington. It’s the same old, same old. There’s nothing really new in this in the way it all happened when you boil it all down.

We’re gonna reach a new debt limit here today sometime, and then we’re gonna reach another debt limit in three or four months, and then we’re gonna reach another debt limit, and we’re gonna keep spending, and we’re not gonna change the baseline any at all. And we’re gonna be told it’s the best we can do with just one-third of the government, meaning the House of Representatives.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, how many of you believe that there are budget cuts in the new debt ceiling bill? You’ve heard that there are cuts, have you not? We’re cutting here, we’re cutting there. Yeah, well, what I want to know is why would anybody believe that this deal includes any significant cuts in spending? If it really cuts spending, why would we have to raise the debt limit by $2.4 trillion? Why? And we’re still gonna get downgraded, and the markets are still not happy, and all the reasons we were sold for doing this have turned out to be bogus. Vladimir Putin, he’s out hunting. He says the United States is “a parasite on the world economy.” A parasite, meaning our growth is all phony.

It’s all based on borrowing, it isn’t real, and we are gobbling up all the resources around the world just to sustain our spending. We’re really not the rich country that we are is what Putin means. It’s all borrowed, it’s all fake, it’s all phony. We’re parasites. All the numbers in this deal are just government math. Government math’s even crazier than Farrakhan’s Million Man Math Made Easy. Rand Paul has an open letter on his website: To paraphrase Senator Jim DeMint: When you’re speeding toward the edge of a cliff, you don’t set the cruise control. You stop the car. The current deal to raise the debt ceiling doesn’t stop us from going over the fiscal cliff.

“At best, it slows us from going over it at 80 mph to going over it at 60 mph. This plan never balances. The President called for a ‘balanced approach.’ But the American people are calling for a balanced budget. This deal does nothing to fix the overreaches of both parties over the past few years: Obamacare, TARP, trillion-dollar wars, runaway entitlement spending. They are all cemented into place with this deal, and their legacy will be trillions of dollars in new debt. The deal that is pending before us now,” get this, “Adds at least $7 trillion to our debt over the next 10 years.” Not $2.4 trillion; $7 trillion. “The deal purports to ‘cut’ $2.1 trillion, but the ‘cut’ is from a baseline that adds $10 trillion to the debt.”

As you well know, because we’ve been explaining this in easily understandable detail all week. I love the illustration. We could prepare a budget that is a freeze next year that doesn’t spend a dime more than this year, and it would be scored as a nine and a half trillion-dollar cut because of the baseline, because of how the budget is expected to grow. “This deal, even if all targets are met and the Super Committee wields its mandate — results in a BEST case scenario of still adding more than $7 trillion more in debt over the next 10 years. That is sickening.” Folks, I’m gonna give you a little history. I remember when this program started — well, even before it started here, when I was in Sacramento and the show started in 1984 — getting phone calls throughout the years from people concerned about the national debt, and I pooh-poohed it.

I told these people, “You know I’ve been hearing about the national debt my whole life.” My grandfather was telling me about the national debt. My dad told me about the national debt. Everybody talked about the national debt and how it’s gonna consume us one day and it’s outta control, and I said, “I’ve been hearing it for years and years and years, and we’re still here. I’ve been hearing this national debt business for years and years and years, and we’re richer as a nation, and we’re more prosperous than ever.” So I said, “This national debt business? Big deal. We owe it to ourselves, so it’s really not any big deal.” Now, at the time that I was saying that, it was still manageable in size.

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That fact should tell you all you need to know about this farce. He’s lost the Tea Party.

THE HILL: The debt-limit deal announced on Sunday night is expected to attract more than 60 votes in the Senate, but its outlook in the House is much more cloudy.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will need Democratic votes to clear the bill through the lower chamber. How many remains unclear.

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GLENN BECK: Don’t be fooled. We’ve just been betrayed by Washington.

A deal on the debt ceiling is near and Washington still hasn’t gotten serious about the fundamentals. It hasn’t gotten serious about default. It certainly hasn’t gotten serious about the future. When Harry Reid hails a “bipartisan compromise” you know we’re doomed.

Republicans and Democrats have just negotiated away the future of our children behind closed doors. The big compromise on Capitol Hill features elaborate triggers, tranches, Hornswogglers, Snozzwangers, Super Duper Commissions that will make the Snozzberries taste like Snozeberries, and a whole bunch of other convoluted gibberish that will, no doubt, come with loopholes and create entire new bureaucracies. What it doesn’t do is fix the problem.

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HERITAGE: Today or tomorrow, the Senate and House will vote on the Budget Control Act of 2011, which would increase America’s debt ceiling. The deal relies on an insufficient level of cuts, a “super committee” tasked with brokering a grand bargain that will lead to massive tax hikes, massive defense cuts, or both. It remains insufficient to the task at hand and the standards which Heritage Action for America has set forth during the course of the debate.

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HERITAGE: If you’re a liberal, there is a lot to love from the latest debt limit deal coming out of Washington. Like many of the other plans that have been floated around town (except for Cut, Cap, and Balance), it lays the groundwork for massive tax hikes or the gutting of defense or both while “protecting” entitlements from critically necessary reforms – all things liberals love.

The latest deal closely mirrors the last couple floated around and voted on. It would create a “Joint Committee” that is tasked with finding at least $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. The difference between this bill and the last couple are the deadlines and penalties imposed on this committee.

By November 23, 2011, the committee must produce a proposal and Congress must then vote on that proposal by December 23, 2011. Either this proposal is enacted or a Balanced Budget Amendment (a stripped down BBA, which would allow for tax hikes to balance the budget) is sent to the states, and then the debt ceiling can be increased again by $1.5 trillion.
If both the committee and the BBA fails, then across-the-board cuts would apply to the budgets for fiscal years 2013 – 2021.
A review of the bill finds the across-the-board cuts ($1.2 trillion) will be evenly split between security and non-security programs. That means that $600 billion will come from security spending, with the Pentagon likely to absorb most of those cuts. In other words, the cuts are incredibly weighted against defense.
Medicare would be subject to cuts under the trigger, but they would only come from Medicare doctors’ payments. This is bad…and something Washington has tried before. Cutting reimbursement rates will result in doctors taking less Medicare patients, which is why Congress never follows through on cuts which already exist in law. In other words, it will never come to pass.
There seems to be little incentive for liberals to work with conservatives to find additional deficit reductions, especially on the spending side. Either they hold strong for tax hikes and “conservatives” give in, or they block all progress and defense gets gutted. Entitlements remain untouched. Doctors ultimately get made whole through yet another “doc fix.” No consequences for liberals.
So why the acrimony from liberals? The only possible answer is that they didn’t get their tax hikes and defense cuts right now. Oh, and there was not another big-government stimulus tacked onto the proposal like so many had requested.

In truth, the spending “caps” increase each year, instead of decreasing or remaining the same, and the “cuts” still result in more government spending in FY2013 and beyond.

In 2010 there was a committee like this, and look what happened, government grew. All of the other 16 committees grew government, hiked taxes and simply added to the problem. Remember 1982, and 1990? Tax hikes, no spending cuts actually took place. We are heading down the exact same road, and this so-called “super committee” handed the liberals a win wrapped in a bow paid for by the American people.

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It’s obvious to any moron that this is just another backroom political deal, not any kind of solution to the debt problem. We’re reducing the debt by $1.2 trillion so we can increase debt by $9 trillion over the next 10 years. So instead of adding $10 trillion to the debt, we’ll only be adding $9 trillion to the debt.

CNBC: Stocks turned lower, erasing an early rally Monday after ISM manufacturing index hit its lowest level since July 2009 and amid worries the nation’s rating may still be downgraded despite a debt deal.

Stocks opened sharply higher after top U.S. lawmakers sealed a deal to raise the debt ceiling one day ahead of a deadline for a potential default.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average turned lower, led by Home Depot [HD 34.31 -0.62 (-1.77%) ] and Merck [MRK 33.2201 -0.9099 (-2.67%) ], after closing sharply lower last week. The blue-chip index tumbled almost 200 points from its session high this morning.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS: Ending a perilous stalemate, President Barack Obama and congressional leaders announced agreement Sunday night on an emergency deal to avoid to avert the nation’s first-ever financial default. The arrangement would cut more than $2 trillion from federal spending over a decade.

The dramatic agreement, with scant time remaining before Tuesday’s deadline, “will allow us to avoid default and end the crisis that Washington imposed on the rest of America,” Obama said. Default “would have had a devastating effect on our economy,” the president said at the White House, relaying the news to the nation and to financial markets around the world. He thanked the leaders of both parties.

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THE HILL: The deal includes $1.2 trillion in spending cuts up front and creates a select bicameral committee to find another $1.6 trillion in savings later in the 112th Congress.

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This deal will never get through the Tea Party caucus in the House. For this to pass, it will need a lot of Democrat votes. The only thing that’s good about this is the vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment. The spending cuts are smoke and mirrors.

REUTERS: U.S. lawmakers were close to a last-gasp $3 trillion deal on Sunday to raise the borrowing limit and assure financial markets that the United States will avoid a potentially catastrophic default.

“We’re very close,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican who is playing a key role in the debt ceiling negotiations.
White House senior adviser David Plouffe said there was general agreement on a deal that would cut the deficit in two stages. It was first time the White House had acknowledged that both sides were close to a deal.

The first $1 trillion in cuts have been largely agreed on by lawmakers. Under the emerging deal described by congressional aides, a further $1.8 trillion would be recommended by a special committee appointed by Congress and automatic measures would implement the planned cuts if Congress failed to vote on them.

“It is clear that in the first stage we’re going to get … an extension of the debt ceiling, a first set of spending cuts over $1 trillion, and then you’re going to get this committee that will be charged with reporting out hopefully a balanced deficit reduction,” Plouffe told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

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Illegal immigrants fleeing back to Mexico . . . where the jobs are.

Well, this is one way to stop illegal immigration — kill the U.S. economy.

SACRAMENTO BEE: There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California – and the Sacramento region – because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.

“It’s now easier to buy homes on credit, find a job and access higher education in Mexico,” Sacramento’s Mexican consul general, Carlos González Gutiérrez, said Wednesday. “We have become a middle-class country.”

Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.

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