More Money Down the Drain; Economic Woes Continue
Obama and the Democrats continue to spend taxpayer money and rack up our debt. The House panel, last night, passed the supplemental war bill worth more than $106 billion. The supplemental bill includes funds not just for the two wars we are currently fighting, but also for foreign aid, car rebates, and the Flu. The bill passed by a very narrow margin 226 – 202, with an almost united opposition from Republicans. If foreign aid caught your eye, then you were paying attention. Obama and the Democrats were sneaky and stuck several billion dollars worth of IMF funds to bailout foreign banks; as if AIG wasn’t enough. Republicans were strongly opposed to another bailout, especially in a war supplemental.
I guess we are supposed to feel sympathetic to Obama’s lack of sleep due to the deficit? Pardon me for saying so, but I couldn’t care less. He continues to sign these bills and propose legislation/policies which all require massive amounts of government funding. My sympathies are also few and far between because I too have not been sleeping. I’m actually up every night researching and writing to attempt to stay on top of the latest news items and stay abreast of all the crazy things this administration is doing. If possible I’d like to record every time Obama tramples on the constitution… Needless to say, that’s a lot of sleepless nights.
One of Obama’s agenda items is his health-care plan which is a deceitful little gem…passed off as a competitive option to private industry, when intelligent individuals who have contracted with the government already know, anything that competes with the government loses.
His health-care plan is therefore a farce and it will require individuals who work for a living and pay taxes, to pay for those who do not. It’s another entitlement program that will raise taxes and put a massive burden on all Americans.
Senate sources say the latest cost estimates for health care legislation are around $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Two Senate staffers, one Democratic and one Republican, said Congressional Budget Office estimates put the cost of the Finance Committee version of the bill at around $1.6 trillion.
Even with all the spending, Obama truly believes we will have economic growth:
President Barack Obama said he is “confident” that he won’t have to raise taxes on most Americans to close the budget deficit as long as the economy picks up steam.
“One of the biggest variables in this whole thing is economic growth,” the president said in an interview with Bloomberg News at the White House. “If we are growing at a robust rate, then we can pay for the government that we need without having to raise taxes.”
Obama has repeatedly said he would keep his campaign pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of working Americans while rolling back tax breaks for households making more than $250,000 a year.
“I’m confident that we don’t have to raise taxes on ordinary working families,” he said.
But he already has. He raised taxes on cigarettes, a product that most lower income households consume. Food products, and other goods have also had taxes tacked onto them. Obama’s plan may not be to outright raise taxes, but they are already hiding them in miscellaneous goods. Obama’s health-care plan also paints an entirely different story, requiring $600 billion in new taxes to fund
the program. I’m not sure if Obama is completely deluded, a great liar, or both.
The fact that Obama believes that we will have incredible amounts of economic growth, when Forbes and others have already compiled a list and conducted studies on future GDP growth for those countries with a moderate to larger sized economies – proving that the United States and the United Kingdom would be two of the most repressed/stagnant, is just ludicrous. Obama recently told Bloomberg that he expected the unemployment rate to go to 10%, and although it is a lagging economic indicator, you cannot expect an unemployment rate to go back down to below 4% in 6 months when it took almost 18 to get there. Roubini also doesn’t believe that the unemployment rate will stop at 10% but rather upwards to 11% by year end. Roubini also predicts that we could see another recession in the future if the proper actions are taken by the government and the Federal Reserve. I have absolutely no confidence in either entity and Roubini fears that if the correct actions are taken now, we could wind up in an inflationary crisis over the next couple of years – of which I believe to be inevitable.
How’s that Hope and Change working out for ya?
The Obamacare Deception
Obama’s health-care plans are another example of ideologues bent on passing a failed program based on an elitist idea that all people are entitled, not by the Constitution, but by their own arrogance. Elitists believe that since they have gobs of money to throw at problems, so should everyone else. The goal of all of this is to create an eventual single-payer system. The Democrats that are proponents of of this system realize that change is not a good thing if it occurs too fast. The objective is to ween people off of their private insurance by making it too expensive/costly for companies to provide it while the public sector competes with private industry. (We have seen some of this insane thinking with the HELP bill).
The other deception to this is the tax increase that will occur to pay for the plan. An estimated $600B worth of taxes would be required to enact this legislation. Was it not Obama who said he would not raise taxes on working, middle class Americans? Hmmm… hold onto your ankles while bending over America!
The below video clip provides a great explanation of the deception:
My question for Obama: Does honest debate mean telling health-care providers not to meet with Republicans, much like Baucus did, or yelling “We Won” and basically telling the GOP to shut up and listen? This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that this deception is used to pass legislation.
I also love my grandmother and my parents, and any person who is older or needs special care will become expendable and too costly to the government. The government will take money from medicare and medicaid as well to pay for this massive entitlement program.
Tom Daschle had said the following: “Health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.”
Quantity does not mean quality, and quality is something the government has long forgotten. We will all be required to pay for this so don’t kid yourself – You cannot have something for nothing and the government must “borrow” money to give it away. The money will either come from our pockets or another country like China. Canada and Europe use a VAT (something already brought up by the liberals) to help pay for their universal health care; count on more tax ideas coming out of DC.
The Truth About PayGo (Pay-As-You-Go)
As Michele Bachmann points out the devil is in the details:
What the Administration would like for you to think is that by enacting this policy, Washington wouldn’t be able to spend a dollar unless they save a dollar and the national debt would cease to swell as it has these past several months.
However, this is really a charade – and the details tell the story. First of all, this PAYGO has no impact whatsoever on entitlement spending — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which make up a very sizable portion of the budget. They’d continue to grow on autopilot. In fact, even if this PAYGO were fully enforced, entitlement spending would continue to grow 6% a year without offsets.
Second, this PAYGO includes an enormous $3.5 trillion loophole. The President’s proposal specifically exempts a wide array of expensive policies. Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget remarked that, “This is like quitting drinking, but making an exception for beer and hard liquor.” And, Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee has criticized the plan, adding, “I’m not for waiving PAYGO for $3.5 trillion of items, much of which I think ought to be paid for.”
And more from the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Obama must think the press and public are dumb enough to buy it, because there he was Tuesday re-selling the same “paygo” promises that Democrats roll out every election. Paygo is “very simple,” the President claimed. “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.”
WSJ, Obama and the politburo have no respect for middle America, of course they think we are stupid!
That’s what Democrats also promised in 2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that “the first thing” House Democrats would do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that “Republicans had let lapse.” By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12 times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP, spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.
Nancy Pelosi strikes me as the fiscally responsible type, the type that really cares what happens with taxpayer money. Well, I guess she does care, but that’s only when it’s used to pay for her botox injections and her flights back and forth to San Fran. in military aircraft.
The truth is that paygo is the kind of budget gimmick that gives gimmickry a bad name. As Mr. Obama knows but won’t tell voters, paygo only applies to new or expanded entitlement programs, not to existing programs such as Medicare, this year growing at a 9.2% annual rate. Nor does paygo apply to discretionary spending, set to hit $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2010, or 40% of the budget.
Does this not provide incentive to the government to create more entitlements to try and prove that PayGo was put to good use? New entitlements on top of too many old entitlements…
This loophole matters, because on the very day Mr. Obama was hailing paygo the House Appropriations Committee was gleefully approving a 12% increase in 2010 nondefense discretionary spending, the third year running that Democrats have proposed double-digit increases. Or consider that the 2010 budget resolution included a $2 billion increase for low-income heating assistance as an entitlement change that should be subject to paygo. But Congressional Democrats simply classified it as discretionary spending, thereby avoiding the need for $2 billion in cuts elsewhere. C’est-la-paygo.
Mr. Obama’s new proposal includes even more loopholes. There’s an exception for Congress’s annual alternative-minimum tax “patch,” which is worth at least $576 billion over 10 years; for any of the Bush tax cuts that Mr. Obama decides he wants to extend past 2010; and to protect against planned cuts in Medicare doctor payments. These carve-outs alone spare Democrats from having to come up with some $2.5 trillion in spending cuts or new taxes. To add insult to profligacy, the rules also allow the Administration to run huge early deficits for its looming health-care bonanza, and only pay for it later — say, after 2012.
The President also revived the myth that paygo was somehow responsible for eliminating budget deficits during the Clinton years. In fact, that brief era of balanced budgets was due to: mid-decade spending reductions by a GOP Congress elected on a balanced-budget pledge; an excessive cut in defense spending to 3% from 5% of GOP across the decade; and an unsustainable revenue boom due to the dot-com bubble. But harking back to the 1990s lets Mr. Obama avoid having to defend his own spending record.
The real game here is that the President is trying to give Democrats in Congress political cover for the health-care blowout and tax-increase votes that he knows are coming. The polls are showing that Mr. Obama’s spending plans are far less popular than the President himself, and Democrats in swing districts are getting nervous. The paygo ruse gives Blue Dog Democrats cover to say they voted for “fiscal discipline,” even as they vote to pass the greatest entitlement expansion in modern history. The Blue Dogs always play this double game.
Ahhh yes, more Kabuki theater, as Michelle Malkin so succinctly puts it.
The other goal of this new paygo campaign is to make it easier to raise taxes in 2011, and impossible to cut taxes for years after that. In the near term, paygo gives Mr. Obama another excuse to let the Bush tax cuts he dislikes expire after 2010, while exempting those (for lower-income voters) that he likes. In the longer term, if a GOP Congress or President ever want to cut taxes, paygo applies a straitjacket that pits those tax cuts against, say, spending cuts in Medicare. The Reagan tax reductions would never have happened under paygo.
We are so Scr—d! It’s like a game of chess they are playing – no concern for the country, just for their own political interests. If Obama is ousted in 2012 it makes it that much harder for the incoming administration to resolve the mess he created.
National Sales Tax Anyone?
Sounds like our very own EU VAT coming to the U. S. of A. How lucky we are that the usual common sense of Congress and the President is kicking in! When the economy is recessed and there is the possibility it could get worse with an impending bond implosion or inflation in the coming months, why not raise taxes on everyone?
I know that liberals see this as a great idea. They can raise taxes on all those evil fat-cats, actually wind up hurting the middle and lower class, all to pay for their own fiscally irresponsible habits.
As lawmakers toy with the idea of an across-the-board sales tax on just about everything, tax reform advocates are starting to drum up opposition with the same fervor they employed during last month’s anti-tax tea parties.
The idea of a national sales tax was once unlikely. But now that the federal government is doling out billions in stimulus spending and bailouts, and looking for billions more for health care reform, the prospect could be gaining some traction.
The frenzy over the idea kicked up after a Washington Post article Wednesday reported that Congress is starting to pay closer attention to this largely academic proposal and that the Obama administration, though shushing speculation, is soliciting advise from supporters of the idea.
“It should certainly raise alarm bells that they think they can inject it into the debate,” said Phil Kerpen, policy director at Americans for Prosperity.
The value-added tax, or VAT, as it is called, amounts to a tax-on-everything — or TOE, for the acronym-inclined. It’s a tax on goods that’s applied in pieces throughout the chain of production and distribution and results in an increase in the cost of virtually everything you buy.
The fact that the United States has dug its own hole regarding our debt where Bush and Obama combined can be blamed for a lot of it (I should also state that the liberal congress who has been there since the end of 2006 is also a huge culprit when it comes to voting on and setting budgets). The National Debt is around $11.3T and growing at a steady pace, while the GDP is somewhere between $13 & $14T, seeing negative growth and possible stagnation in the out years. This spells disaster for anyone in financial analysis, who understands debt ratios.
Inflation at this point is inevitable and that will mean higher prices for every American. Each individual household is also responsible for $668,621 based on the latest article out of USA Today. This obligation includes the total federal debt obligations per household as well as the average debt obligation for an American household at a personal level. My question is this: With median household income below $60K in the U.S. (if debt was all your income was used on – no taxes, no food, gas, clothes, shelter etc.), – do you think Americans would be able to pay that off in their lifetime? Buhbye American Dream…
The sad fact is that Americans became spoiled – the government was not a good role model, and the sense of saving and living within one’s means quickly flew out the window.
What USA Today, because it’s biased, fails to do is disclose the fact that 2008 alone cannot be blamed for the debt obligations of American citizens tied to the government like serfs. The Stimulus package, the omnibus package and the budget of Barack H. Obama has increased deficit spending unlike anything this country has seen and his debt obligation alone is more than all presidents in history combined. His out year budgets are also something to shriek at – he did not have to spend this much money, although the liberal propagandists will spin it and continue to say it was a crisis and he had to do what was necessary because he inherited this mess – I call Shenanigans! Use Reagan’s model to dig out of a recession/depression – not FDR’s fallacious one, in which he hurt rather than helped.
It should be no surprise to anyone that in order to balance the budget and pay off this debt, taxes have to be raised. Taxes have to increase to sustain the ever increasing size of government and due to the large drop in tax revenue for 2008 filing it really was an inevitable idea of the beltway gang.
Raising taxes while people are already hurting will make things much worse. This proposal of a sales tax, much like the EU VAT, will be dreadful on our economy and on average regular “Joe’s.”
Rasmussen just conducted a poll asking Americans what they thought about a national sales tax at this point in time. A whopping 68% of respondents were against the tax and only 18% approved. If the White House is really using polling data to govern it may want to take a look at this one!
If the U.S. VAT passes I’ll be happy to point out to the young college-aged waiters that they no longer get tips – just like Europe! 
You voted for it!
California Goes Galt!
California made its voice heard today when a proposal for higher taxes, being passed as ‘solvency’ for California, was rejected via a vote by the people.
California has been engaging in various protests, tea parties, tax revolts, what have you, over the course of several months to make a point to the state legislature, as well as the rest of the country. Folks, I hate to say it, but with our current out of control government and spending practices in D.C. the rest of the nation could very well end up like the state of California and sooner rather than later!
Ahhhhhnold tried to pass another budget measure which would increase taxes on anything from cigarette butts to pets to raise revenue for the state. This didn’t fly with Californians – quite interesting for such a blue state! Maybe some of the citizens are beginning to realize that the progressive/liberal policies enacted through the state legislature have done incredible amounts of damage. The unfortunate outcome may in fact be that the rest of the states will have to bailout California, which could set a horrible precedent for any other state going through tough economic times.
California voters overwhelmingly rejected five of six budget referendums yesterday which would have approved higher taxes as a means to patch budget woes in the Golden State. Had the measures passed, the state would still have faced a $15.4 billion deficit. With the failure of the measures, the state now grapples with $21.3 billion in red ink.
Out of control spending and high taxes driving business out of state are at the core of California’s budget problems. Now voters in a tax revolt have overwhelmingly rejected more of the same from California lawmakers, choosing instead a path that could force budget cuts and spending restraint. Imagine that.
The only measure on the ballot that passed was one that bars state officials from receiving a pay increase during tough economic times.
Left wingers are up in arms over the voters’ decision, because they loves taxes and government control! So leave it to the nasty, hateful liberals to call those who voted against the measure a moronic mob! The only morons I see are those who continue to vote for these liberals who implement horrible and irresponsible policies that cause these disasters and hurt California citizens.
