President Obama does not deserve to be reelected. By refusing to address the greatest challenge this nation faces -- our financial security -- Mr. Obama has failed the American people. Despite warnings from the IMF, the credit ratings agencies, China -- our principal foreign creditor -- and the American people, the president continues to offer up budgets and programs that ignore the dire trajectory of Medicare and Social Security spending, putting the future of this nation at risk.
Let's get specific. This week Mr. Obama set forth a budget calling for yet another trillion-dollar deficit, the fourth in four years. Through certain spending cuts, some gimmickry (counting not spending on two wars as deficit reduction) and $1.5 trillion in tax hikes, the budget gap is projected to shrink to $575 billion in 2018, comfortably beyond the range of the country's political telescope. I'm projecting myself to be handsome and muscular by 2018...
Each of the proposal's major provisions scratches a partison itch: raising taxes on the wealthy, imposing new fees on banks, eliminating tax cuts on oil companies, spending $476 billion on transportation projects (mollifying construction crews teed off at the Keystone veto), allotting $30 billion for (guaranteed voting blocks) police, teachers and fire department workers, and so on. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget summarizes, the president's budget stabilizes our debt at 76 percent of GDP -- "roughly double historical debt levels." This is not acceptable. Amen!
#2
Raising taxes will increase the recession. Cutting spending will increase the recession. Failure to do both, and substantially more than proposed, will collapse the economy completely. We've been kicking this hand grenade down the road for quite a while; got a graphic example of what comes next from an Iranian in Siam.
#3
Cutting government spending will also collapse the economy. A spike in interest rates will collapse the economy. There is pretty much nothing the government can do that will grow the economy at even a middling rate. Saying this to the electorate will guarantee a loss at the next election.
The electorate with its profound economic and arithmetical ignorance is its own worst enemy.
So meanwhile, it's business as usual and kicking the can down the road. At least a politician can get half the votes in a election by robbing Peter to pay Paul.
#4
Analysis of the budget effect over the next 5 years: Cuts in uniformed personnel proposed eliminating eight Army brigades, five Marine infantry battalions and four of the Corpss tactical air squadrons. The Air Force would lose 303 aircraft and six fighter squadrons, while the Navy jettisons seven cruisers and 2 dock landing ships.
#5
"Cutting spending will increase the recession."
Fallacy.
Government does not "produce" anything but more government. Government jobs and workers are a net negative on the true economy.
For every dollar tied up in the government is a dollar that is not working in the economy.
#6
Choices : Ron Paul With : Occupation Party Support and Second Gadfly Republican Ticket Against : Mitch : Or Other Mainstramer ! Choices : Ron Jeremy Thuh : Hedgehog / Wanna Fuck Party : And Occupation Party ! Roseanne Barr / Roseanne : Green Party And Occupation Party ! Mason : The Bell Jar Party And Vice Pissee : dr.susanblock.com : too !
Government does not "produce" anything but more government. Government jobs and workers are a net negative on the true economy.
You're just not thinking. The true economy is what it is, and is not constrained by your ideology-driven distortion. A government produces a few things, like military security than private industry can't (thank God). Production and expenditure are not the same. Economic growth by increased production has only the barest superficial resemblance to economic growth produced by borrowing from abroad. By those standards the US has had little or no 'true' economic growth for many years.
A decent cut in government spending will immediately take money out of circulation. It will immediately render a few thousand government employees unemployed, their expenditures will immediately drop, and this will show up in the national economy very quickly.
The way out is through this conundrum, and people will suffer until the economy is re-engineered. That may not happen. But something will happen, always has.
#8
His budget covers TWO years, ambitious little shit, isn't he.
Covering the time he's NOT in office.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
02/14/2012 19:15 Comments ||
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#9
"their expenditures will immediately drop, and this will show up in the national economy very quickly."
Then it should behoove the Government to allow the economy to recover outside of "stimulus". It matters. The Military and road building is not what the government is spending money on, it's crap like bad mortgages and bailouts and unions and fake companies.
It's still temporary economy and one that does not pay for itself.
#10
"There is pretty much nothing the government can do that will grow the economy at even a middling rate."
I don't know about that. Removing bans on offshore oil exploration and pipeline building would drop the price of oil which would help the economy a lot.
#11
and Harry Reid is deathly afraid of his Democrat minions having to take a position on this piece of shit budget. Hence, Mitch McConnell will force it to a vote so they have to go on record before the election
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/14/2012 21:01 Comments ||
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#12
>Government does not "produce" anything but more government. Government jobs and workers are a net negative on the true economy.
Wrong. Government produces Land Rights, Patent defence and copyright-defence and police. The economy would also work a lot better if it charged for them based on their value, rather than on harming comparative advantage taxes (sales, income, employment).
#13
If readers of Rantburg cannot agree that government use of resources is costly, the country is doomed. We in economics call it the "budget constraint.". But heck, most economists don't seem to believe in budget constraints anymore, so I guess we are all in good company.
A continuation of the news about MMFA and Obama coordinating their message for us proles...
News Corp
o Fox News Channel
o Fox Business Network
o Fox News' websites
Conservative news sites
o WorldNetDaily
o BigHollywood.com
o NewsMax
o BigGovernment.com
Conservative think thanks
o The Heritage Foundation
o American Enterprise Institute
o Cato Institute
News Corp executives
o Rupert Murdoch
o Chase Carey
o David DeVoe
o Lawrence Jacobs
o James Murdoch
Conservative donors
o Peter Thiel
o Richard Mellon Scaife
o Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
o John M. Olin Foundation
o Koch Family Foundations
Fox News executives
o CEO Roger Ailes
o Senior vice president Michael Clemente
o Vice president of news Sean Smith
o Vice president of new editorial product Jay Wallace
o Fox Business Network executive vice president Kevin Magee
Fox personalities
o Glenn Beck
o Sean Hannity
o Bill O'Reilly
Fox senior production and corporation staff
o Hannity executive producer John Finley
o On the Record executive producer Meade Cooper
o O'Reilly Factor senior executive producer David Tabacoff
o Fox & Friends executive producer Lauren
Political figures
o Carly Fiorina
o David Vitter
o Eric Cantor
o John Boehner
o Mitch McConnell
o Michele Bachmann
o Steve King
#3
Interestingly these are the same types of news providers that are under attack here in the U.K.
They're being singled out for "hacking" voice mails, when it's an open secret that other (left-wing) news-papers did it far more, and lefty news-papers are getting a free pass.
Very worrying. I'd put money on it being $0r0$ behind it.
#8
Brock is apparently a drug-abusing paranoid. More: http://freebeacon.com/report-fringe-group-media-matters-works-with-white-house-to-attack-conservatives/
#12
If you have any doubts about the true political leanings of the Democrats, the tactics of Media Matters is straight from the pages of Lenin's tactics to discredit the Socialist Democrats and the Cadets after 1917.
The Democrats have gone from liberal to totalitarian.
Remember, all of the great and most blood thirsty and most oppressive in the history of the world were all socialist or communist:
Hitler and the National Socialist Party
Mussolini
Lenin and Stalin and the Communists
Pol Pot and his Brand of Communism
Mao and his brand of Communism
At some levels, the Taliban and Al Aqaeda are Communistic.
The fact that Media Matters wants to harass individual employees of Fox by publishing personal information on them is enough to scare the crap out of me. If they can do that to a Fox reporter, what is to stop them from doing it to a conservative teacher or professor or a county employee or even me...if they hack my computer and read some of the things I've said about the left over the years.
This is dangerous and very ominous to me.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
02/14/2012 16:40 Comments ||
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#13
The fact that Media Matters wants to harass individual employees of Fox by publishing personal information on them is enough to scare the crap out of me.
The ad-hominem argument sophistry takes a totalitarian turn, aided by the internet.
Perhaps the answer is for journalists to become anonymous, or to only publish collectively.
#16
Very worrying. I'd put money on it being $0r0$ behind it.
You hit the jackpot. Soros has been funding Media Matters for years though the groups he funds. A few years ago he dropped all pretense and gave $1 million to Media Matters directly. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. The Clinton crony Center for American Progress was instrumental in MM's founding and lavish funding.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.