The Daily Hatch

Spoof of President Obama’s possible commercial in 2012

My sons Hunter (pictured above) and Wilson traveled to Yosemite with our friend Sherwood Haisty Jr. from March 21 to March 27th.

In his article “Let’s talk deficits,” Arkansas Times, Feb 25, 2010, Ernest Dumas contended that paying for two wars was to blame in part for the deficit.

Heritage In Focus: Hijacking Troops for Pork

Brian Riedl is the author of the article “The Three Biggest Myths About Tax Cuts and the Budget Deficit,” (Heritage Foundation, June 21, 2010), and the next few days I will be sharing portions of his article.

Brian Riedl is The Heritage Foundation’s lead budget analyst and has built a solid reputation for interpreting, explaining and reforming the often arcane realm of federal budget policy.

Indeed, much of the current backlash against runaway federal spending can be attributed to Riedl’s work. As far back as 2002 and 2003, his writings exposed the beginnings of a federal spending spree that was pushing real federal spending to more than $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II.

Myth #2: Future deficits are “the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.”

Fact: These policies play a relatively minor role in the growth of future deficits. 

During his 2010 State of the Union Address, President Obama asserted: 

At the beginning of the last decade, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.[7]

In other words, according to President Obama, the massive budget deficits are President Bush’s fault, but the data do not support this assertion. President Bush implemented the three policies mentioned by President Obama in the early 2000s. Yet by 2007—the last year before the recession— the budget deficit had stabilized at $161 billion. Since the combined annual cost of these three Bush-era policies is now relatively stable, they cannot have suddenly caused a trillion-dollar leap in budget deficits beginning in 2009.[8]

President Obama made this claim by comparing the costs of the three policies against a “current-policy budget baseline”—a snapshot of what the budget would look like for the next decade if today’s tax and spending policies are maintained. The President’s claim assumes that the cost of these policies (more than $4 trillion) comprises more than half of the projected $8 trillion baseline deficit over 10 years.

The first problem is the President’s current-policy baseline deficit of “$8 trillion over the next decade.” He likely began with the 10-year, $9 trillion deficit in the White House’s budget baseline released in 2009 and then subtracted his own stimulus law that had already been incorporated.[9]

Yet this $8 trillion baseline vastly understated the 10-year budget deficit. It assumed trillions more in tax revenues than the CBO baseline assumed under the same policies. It also assumed that spending growth on regular discretionary programs, which has doubled over the past decade, would slow to approximately 2 percent annually for most of the decade. This smaller baseline deficit makes the cost of the wars, tax cuts, and Medicare drug entitlement appear larger in proportion to the deficit.

A more realistic and up-to-date measure would begin with budget data from the more neutral CBO. According to CBO data, maintaining today’s tax and spending policies, assuming a gradual troop drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan, will produce $13 trillion in deficits over the next decade.[10]

In contrast, the 10-year cost of extending the tax cuts ($3.2 trillion), the Medicare drug entitlement ($1 trillion), and Iraq and Afghanistan spending (approximately $500 billion, assuming a gradual troop drawdown) adds up to $4.7 trillion, a little more than one-third of the $13 trillion in baseline deficits.[11] (See Chart 2.) This contradicts the President’s claim that most of the deficits result from those three policies.

My sons Hunter and Wilson traveled to Yosemite with our friend Sherwood Haisty Jr. from March 21 to March 27th.

Rex Nelson wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on April 2, 2011 a great article called “Arkansas Bucket List.” The readers of his blog http://www.rexnelsonsouthernfried.com came up with a list of things you must do at least once in your life to be considered a well-rounded Arkansan. Nelson asked others to add their suggestions at his website. I am going through the list slowly.

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1. Pick pecans from a Delta pecan orchard on a November afternoon.

2. Have your photo taken on the Arkansas-Texas line in downtown Texarkana. (I have been to the Texarkana post office where the state line splits the post office in two. We used to sell brooms to Buhrman Pharr Hardware in Texarkana, Arkansas until they closed in 2002. Below is a picture of their building.)According to the Texarkana Gazette dated September 21, 1955, W. J. Buhrman of Connecticut came to Texarkana in 1880 with ten cents in his pocket, an unbounded confidence, healthy determination and the will to do.  In the 1880’s, Texarkana was a small village.  There was a limited number of buildings in the vicinity of the railroad station and dirt roads.  Beyond the railroad station, was vast wilderness and small farms.  Most of the farmers were poor except for the large planters along the Red River.  Apparently, during the late 19th century in Texarkana, sawmills and lumber yards were the main businesses.  With his vision and determination, W.J. Buhrman sold the idea of starting a hardware  business to J. L. Chatfield. 

Buhrman-Pharr Hardware Company Historic District

Elevation drawing of the Buhrman-Pharr Hardware Company retail building

BUHRMAN-PHARR HARDWARE COMPANY HISTORIC DISTRICT, TEXARKANA, MILLER COUNTY

SUMMARY