Thanks so much, Mr President

[sirs]

Debt now equals total U.S. economy

Our children, their children, and their children's children are much obliged     

[sirs]

Obama's Bubba-inspired game plan

Posted: February 17, 2011

Learning nothing from his party's November "shellacking," President Barack Obama offers a 2012 budget that proves, yet again, he believes in government as fervently as President Ronald Reagan believed in the individual.

Obama ignores the recommendations of his own bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, as well as polls showing voters want smaller government, and smugly proposes more spending, higher taxes and even bigger government. Obama then holds a press conference and, with a straight face that would have shamed Baghdad Bob, claims his budget "will not be adding more to the national debt."

The Obama-loving leftist media won't be critical. After all, MSNBC just aired a special called "President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon."

Obama's '12 budget ? and its 10-year projection ? adds nearly $9 trillion in new spending over the next decade. It nearly doubles our national debt from the current $13.5 trillion to more than $26 trillion by 2021. It imposes nearly $2 trillion in additional taxes. It leaves untouched the three major entitlements ? Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid ? that account for nearly half the budget. After 10 years, it leaves an annual budget deficit of some $700 billion, or nearly 50 percent more than President George W. Bush's 2008 budget ? and even that assumes rosy scenarios on GDP growth and tax revenues. Only in the area of non-defense discretionary spending did Obama propose the most inconsequential of cuts.

Erskine Bowles, the Democrat deficit commission co-chair and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, said the budget is "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare."

Predictably, an Associated Press piece on the budget led with this sentence: "Putting on the brakes after two years of big spending increases, President Barack Obama unveiled a $3.7 trillion budget plan Monday that would freeze or reduce some safety-net programs. ..."

What brakes?

In Obama's first two years in office, he increased federal spending by nearly 30 percent over fiscal year 2008 and added $3.5 trillion in new debt. He sold that spending as one-offs, emergency measures like TARP-expansion and "stimulus" designed to "rescue" the economy from a depression. Obama's 2012 proposed budget stays at that high level ? with new spending ("investments") and higher taxes taking the place of the alleged one-time-only "emergency" spending.

The budget includes taxes hikes on individuals, small businesses, corporations and estates. It increases taxes on capital gains and dividends. Americans for Tax Reform said: "Rather than focusing on Washington's overspending problem, the budget calls for higher taxes on families and small businesses to pay for even more government spending. Under the Obama budget, tax revenues will grow from 14.4 percent of GDP in 2011 to 20 percent of GDP in 2021. ... Add it all together, and this budget is a 10-year, $1.5 trillion tax hike over present law. That's $1.5 trillion taken out of the economy and spent on government instead of being used to create jobs."

So here's the 10-point game plan for Obama, lifted from the 1994 Clinton playbook:

- Give lip service to the "peril" of the debt and deficit, and offer to rein in spending. Then do nothing of the sort.

- Wait for the Republicans to call the budget unserious, a charge the GOP will make even more loudly than back in '94, given the influence of and pressure by the tea party.

- Dare them to make cuts, especially on entitlements.

- Denounce Republican-proposed cuts as irresponsible, that they "mortgage our nation's future."

- Dare the Republicans to threaten to shut down the government. Even better, hope that they go through with it.

- Watch the nightly newscasts parade "victim" after "victim" who can't pay bills or take a night class or enroll in a training program or ...

- Turn House Speaker John Boehner into a crumb-snatching, heartless, ice-water-in-veins ghoul the way Clinton did Newt Gingrich.

- Wait for Gallup to produce polls "blaming" Republican intransigence for the government shutdown. Watch the Republicans blink and accept a larger budget than they want ? but a much smaller one than Democrats want.

- Kick entitlement reform down the road, and let a future president and Congress to deal with.

- When the deficit goes down ? and the economy performs better than it would have if left to Obama/Reid/Pelosi ? take credit. Cruise to re-election.

Yes, free-market economists and conservative and libertarian think tanks will produce persuasive studies to show how the economy suffered under Obama's tax, spend and "invest" policies. Not to worry. They will be ignored.

Post-presidency, the globe-trotting Obama will offer sage advice about this and that, while raising money for the Obama Presidential Library. Then he'll kick back in his lounge chair, light up a cigarette and enjoy a CNN "news" special report: "First Black President of the World: The Barack Obama Phenomenon."

Baghdad oBOBma

[sirs]

I knew we were in for real budgetary trouble with Obama, but his recent statements on the subject make me wonder whether he is so brainwashed with liberal ideology as to be divorced from reality -- or worse.

Based on his tireless rhetoric, it would appear that he thinks -- contrary to all evidence, including the failure of his $868 billion stimulus package to create jobs -- that even more spending would finally lead to jobs. This, though even his economic advisers have warned us not to expect unemployment levels to reduce to acceptable levels for years.

In the meantime, as wrongheaded as he is about government spending's creating jobs, he's outright delusional about what he's doing to the national debt -- and that's giving him the benefit of the doubt.

On our current course of runaway discretionary and entitlement spending, we will bankrupt the nation, yet Obama refuses to get serious about meaningfully curbing discretionary spending and is obstructing and demagoguing entitlement reform.

If this doesn't get your attention, then you are asleep, in denial or irresponsibly apathetic. For if you were engaged, you would have heard or read about Obama's stunning statements on the budget earlier this week.

He said, with a startling degree of casualness, "We will not be adding more to the national debt. ... We're not going to be running up the credit card any more."

Now juxtapose that sentence with the facts, even as he presents them. He has pledged to freeze -- at already unacceptably high levels -- domestic spending for five years. What cuts he would make over the next 10 years would only total $1.1 trillion -- an average of just over $100 billion a year.

Look at Obama's own budget deficit projections for the next decade, beginning with 2012. 2012: $1.101 trillion,
2013: $768 billion,
2014: $645 billion,
2015: $607 billion,
2016: $649 billion,
2017: $627 billion,
2018: $619 billion,
2019: $681 billion,
2020: $735 billion,
2021: $774 billion.
Total for 10 years: $7.205 trillion -- an average deficit of $720 billion per year.

You simply cannot square these numbers with Obama's statement that he wouldn't be adding to the debt, unless he's actually confused about the difference between "deficits" and "debt," and that's almost as scary a thought as the numbers themselves.

That is, when you operate at staggering deficits that will add almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars to the debt each year, you are adding to the national debt; you are continuing to run up the national credit card. A third-grader could understand that.

So tell me: What do you make of a man who presents a projected 10-year budget that, best case, would add $7.205 trillion to the national debt but simultaneously tells you he won't add to the debt?

What would it take to startle this man into reality? He can't blame this on Bush anymore. He owns the record 2011 debt and his 10-year budget. President Bush's deficits before the extraordinary 2008 one -- with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, etc. -- averaged about $300 billion, and the deficit was just $161 billion in 2007. That's right; just four years ago, our deficit was 10 percent of what it is today, $1.65 trillion.

A fiscally prudent president on the heels of that monstrous TARP year deficit of $1.3 trillion (it was more like $800 billion when you factor in TARP repayments) would have said, "We're going to drastically cut back and never have another deficit fiasco like that again."

But Obama saw the Bush 2008 deficit not as a warning sign to restore fiscal responsibility, but as an excuse to ratchet up federal spending to record levels in order to redistribute wealth and advance pet liberal causes -- and that's precisely what he's done. Many of us warned that much of the spending he engineered in the stimulus was not a one-time affair, but new self-perpetuating programs. Sure enough, here we are at $1.65 trillion.

When Republicans proposed to cut just $100 billion from the continuing resolution, Obama and his shameless party called their proposal "Draconian," as if to say that it's immoral unless it bankrupts the nation. Is it Draconian not to spend $65 million on a tribute to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy? Is it not Draconian to impoverish our children and grandchildren?

Regardless of Obama's deeper motives, the reality is that he doesn't want to be responsible with our money because he intends to continue to play mad economic scientist with his failed experiments and keep throwing mega-dollars at walls, such as with this high-speed rail boondoggle, until there's nothing left to hurl.

Frankly, it's hard to comprehend why there's as little outrage and noise about this as there is. It's as if we are all walking the nation off the plank while our pied piper president tells us everything is going to be fine.


Responsible Adults can't ignore these #'s

[sirs]

Obama's Louis XV budget

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 18, 2011

Five days before his inauguration, President-elect Obama told The Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road. He then spent the next two years kicking - racking up $3 trillion in new debt along the way - on the grounds that massive temporary deficit spending was necessary to prevent another Great Depression.

To prove his bona fides, he later appointed a deficit reduction commission. It made its report last December, when the economy was well past recession, solemnly declaring that "the era of debt denial is over."

That lasted all of two months.

The president's first post-commission budget, submitted Monday, marks a return to obliviousness. Even Erskine Bowles, Obama's Democratic debt commission co-chair, says it goes "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare."

The budget touts a deficit reduction of $1.1 trillion over the next decade.

Where to begin? Even if you buy this number, Obama's budget adds $7.2 trillion in new debt over that same decade.

But there's a catch. The administration assumes economic growth levels higher than private economists and the Congressional Budget Office predict. Without this rosy scenario - using CBO growth estimates - $1.7 trillion of revenue disappears and U.S. debt increases $9 trillion over the next decade. This is almost $1 trillion every year.

Assume you buy the rosy scenario. Of what does this $1.1 trillion in deficit reduction consist? Painful cuts? Think again. It consists of $1.6 trillion in tax hikes, plus an odd $328 billion of some mysterious bipartisan funding for a transportation trust fund (gas taxes, one supposes) - for a grand total of nearly $2 trillion in new taxes.

Classic Obama debt reduction: Add $2 trillion in new taxes, then add $1 trillion in new spending and, presto, you've got $1 trillion of debt reduction.

It's the same kind of mad deficit accounting in Obamacare: It reduces debt by adding $540 billion in new spending, then adding $770 billion in new taxes. Presto: $230 billion of "debt reduction." Bialystock & Bloom accounting.

And what of those "painful cuts" Obama is making to programs he really cares about? The catch is that these "cuts" are from a hugely inflated new baseline created by the orgy of spending in Obama's first two years. These were supposedly catastrophe-averting, anti-Depression emergency measures. But post-recession they remain in place. As a result, discretionary non-defense budget levels today are 24 percent higher than before Obama - 84 percent higher if you add in the stimulus money.

Which is why the supposedly painful cuts yield spending still at stratospheric levels. After all the cuts,
Education Department funding for 2012 remains 35 percent higher than in the last pre-emergency pre-Obama year, 2008.
Environmental Protection Agency: 18 percent higher.
Energy Department: 22 percent higher.

Consider even the biggest "painful cut" headline of all, the 50 percent cut in fuel subsidies for the poor. Barbaric, is it not? Except for the fact that the subsidies had been doubled from 2008 levels. The draconian cut is nothing but a return to normal pre-recession levels.

Yet all this is penny-ante stuff. The real money is in entitlements. And the real scandal of this budget is that Obama doesn't touch them. Not Social Security. Not Medicaid. Not Medicare.

What about tax reform, the other major recommendation of the deficit commission? Nothing.

How about just a subset of that - corporate tax reform, on which Republicans have signaled they are eager to collaborate? The formula is simple: Eliminate the loopholes to broaden the tax base, then lower the rates for everyone, promoting both fairness and economic efficiency. What does the Obama budget do? Removes tax breaks - and then keeps the rate at 35 percent, among the highest in the industrialized world (more than twice Canada's, for example).

Yet for all its gimmicks, this budget leaves the country at decade's end saddled with publicly held debt triple what Obama inherited.

A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans - for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault - and sets Obama up perfectly for reelection in 2012.

Obama fancies his happy talk, debt-denial optimism to be Reaganesque. It's more Louis XV. Reagan begat a quarter-century of prosperity; Louis, the deluge.

Moreover, unlike Obama, Louis had the decency to admit he was forfeiting the future. He never pretended to be winning it.

[sirs]

President Obama's Fiscal Year 2012 federal budget is an example of shoddy math and non-transparent government at work. The 2012 Federal Budget fiscal shell game is as curious for what items are included as for what Team Obama chose to exclude.

The FY12 Budget, on page 129, discusses the Administration?s admirable intent to crack down on businesses that are delinquent in paying taxes. This is a good idea. Team Obama then "proposes a suite of legislative and administrative debt collection reforms that will yield more than $5 billion of additional collections over the next 10 years from individuals and businesses that have failed to pay taxes." The government proposes doing this by hiring an additional 5,100 IRS workers. Bad idea.

The FY12 budget makes little effort at transparency and does not show the long-term cost of hiring new government workers. President Obama still doesn?t seem to understand that government can?t create jobs that grow the economy. Any job that the government creates comes at the cost of increased federal, state or local spending which, ultimately, has to be paid with tax dollars or borrowed money. Second, the President's budget focuses only on the revenue he believes will be recovered by these additional IRS workers rather than the cost of the recovery.

Let me peel back the onion on how the government works, and let's also consider the cost, since the President chose not to do so.

Each federal worker is hired through the civil service or through a government contractor which provides employees to the federal government. Upon hiring, these new workers require training. Support and infrastructure for these employees is quite costly as these new employees need office space, furniture, phones, laptops.

Since IRS enforcement employees are often in the field, they also require extensive help desk support, supplies, and they incur travel costs.

In addition, government employment comes with a generous compensation, benefits and retirement package.

The total life cycle costs of the average government worker billed to the American taxpayer is about $3,200,000.00

The approximate life cycle cost of President Obama's 5,100 new federal workers at the IRS is a whopping $16.32 billion dollars. This comes on top of the Administration's proposal of "more than $240 million for a targeted set of new, revenue-generating tax enforcement initiatives aimed at closing the tax gap" (p.129). And, as the past two years have shown, the federal government isn?t known for running programs efficiently or cheaply.

The President's Budget claims that "when fully in place by 2014, these new efforts are expected to yield about $1.3 billion a year in additional tax revenue" (p.129).

I say: "Oh frabjous day! Calloo-Callay!"

Consider: the Administration is proposing to spend almost $17billion in new costs for the American taxpayer in order to "yield" about $5 billion. If only the Obama Administration would (or could) do the math! Team Obama's inability to understand that it doesn't make sense to spend $17B in order to get $5B may be one of the reasons why the Obama Administration has bloated the budget and the deficit by over 300% in the two years they have been in office.

Furthermore, Obama's budget states that it ?includes several common sense initiatives through which Treasury can lead partner agencies to maximize collection of unpaid debt from individuals and businesses"(p.129).

Here's a proposal that costs taxpayers next to nothing: Mr. Obama, clean up your own back yard.

Federal government workers currently owe $3 billion dollars in back taxes, yet these workers continue to receive paychecks without garnishment of their wages by the federal government. These delinquent taxpayers are even eligible for salary and step increases, bonuses, paid holiday leave, paid vacation leave and promotions.

President Obama could enforce a zero-tolerance policy for tax-delinquent federal workers. This ?common sense initiative? would help the Administration to meet its proposed "yield' with a bit to spare--and all at no additional cost to taxpayers.

The FY12 budget says Obama is committed to "eliminating trillions of dollars in budget gimmicks" and that Obama "made a commitment to restoring fiscal responsibility" (p. 19). Even a cursory examination of the FY12 budget shows that Team Obama seems determined to misunderstand the message sent by millions of voters last November. They indicated a desire for a more limited government, less intrusive in its reach, and less hectoring in its message.

Obama has done little other than layer one budget gimmick over another. And, while the Administration disingenuously insists that it is committed to restoring fiscal responsibility, American taxpayers can only conclude that Obama really means: not on my watch.

[Plane]

Most of the people we elect as President , Senator or Congressman, have been Lawyers by training and profession, why don't we start electing accountants and CPAs?

[Xavier_Onassis]

We tend to elect people who have some degree of charisma.


CPA's and accountants generally are rather uncharismatic.

[Plane]

I am tired of charisma.

[sirs]

Me too.  Give me some stodgy, bald headed, fat, honest, accountant

[sirs]

Nothing more clearly illustrates the utter irresponsibility of Barack Obama than his advocacy of "high-speed rail." The man is not stupid. He knows how to use words that will sound wonderful to people who do not bother to stop and think.

High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher than in the United States. But, without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the high cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.

Building a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco may sound great to people who don't give it any serious thought. But we are a more spread-out country than England, France or Japan. The distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco is greater than the distance from London to Paris-- by more than 100 miles.

In Japan, the distance between Tokyo and Osaka is comparable to the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the population of Osaka alone is larger than the combined populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco-- and Tokyo has millions more people than Osaka. That is why it can make sense to have a "bullet train" running between Osaka and Tokyo, but makes no sense to build one between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

However little President Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics-- and especially political rhetoric. "High-speed rail" is simply another set of lofty words to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like "investment in education" or "investment" in any number of other things, which serves the same political purpose.

Who cares what the realities are behind these nice-sounding words? Obama can leave that to the economists, the statisticians and the historians. His point is to win the votes of people who know little or nothing about economics, history or statistics. That includes a lot of people with expensive Ivy League degrees.

To talk glibly about spending more money on "high-speed rail" when the national debt has just passed a milestone, by exceeding the total value of our annual output, for the first time in more than half a century, is world-class chutzpa. The last time the U.S. national debt exceeded the value of our entire annual output, it was due to the cost of fighting World War II.

When World War II ended, in less than four years of American participation, we began paying down the national debt. But our current national debt has been expanding by leaps and bounds in peacetime-- and with no sign of an end in sight for the next decade.

Since more than 40 percent of our national debt is owed to foreigners, this means that goods and services produced by Americans, equal in value to more than 40 percent of our current output, will have to be sent overseas, free of charge, by either this generation or the generations that follow.

Since the generations that follow cannot vote today, the Obama administration's latest budget keeps the spending increasing, while regaling us with wonderful plans for big reductions in government spending-- years from now, after Obama is gone.

Make no mistake about it, spending wins votes, and votes are the ultimate bottom line for politicians. If fancy words and lofty visions are enough to get the voters to go along with more spending, then expect to hear a lot of fancy words and lofty visions.

One of the most successful political ploys is to promise people things without having the money to pay for them. Then, when others want to cut back on the things that have been promised, blame them for lacking the compassion of those who wrote the checks without enough money in the bank to cover them.

If all else fails, politicians can always say that we can pay for the things they promised us by raising taxes on "the rich." However, history shows that, when tax rates go up to very high levels, people put more of their money in tax shelters, so the government ends up collecting less revenue than before.

But history is so yesterday. What is far more exciting is to think of high-speed rail in the future, even if it is speeding us toward bankruptcy.


Uncharismatic Accountants, please apply