There are two crises facing Social Security. First the program has a gigantic unfunded liability, largely thanks to demographics. Second, the program is a very bad deal for younger workers, making them pay record amounts of tax in exchange for comparatively meager benefits. This video explains how personal accounts can solve both problems, and also notes that nations as varied as Australia, Chile, Sweden, and Hong Kong have implemented this pro-growth reform.
Social Security Series Part 6
Personal accounts would cause the economy to grow.
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute has asserted that three things would happen if Social Security was privatized.
1. Lower tax rate on work, encouraging job creation.
2. Less government spending, leaving more resources in productive sector.
3. More private savings, fueling investment.
Dan Mitchell goes on to say that this “is exactly what you would expect if you replace a tax and transfer entitlement scheme with private savings and wealth accumulation.”
José Piñera discusses privatizing social security on FBN
Now that Osama bin Laden has been successfully dispatched to the eternal damnation he so richly deserves, Washington is ready to return to the more mundane question of whether the Obama administration will be allowed to spend this country into oblivion.
The next big fiscal fight will be over when and how to increase the debt limit. The administration has been hard at work trying to shape the message and public opinion. Unsurprisingly, much of that message is less than 100 percent accurate. Here are some myths about the debt ceiling and the upcoming debate about raising it:
1. Failure to pass means defaulting on our debts. If there has been consistent message from the White House, it that the United States can’t afford to “default on our debts.” That is almost certainly true. However, refusing to raise the debt limit does not mean defaulting on our debts. The U.S. Treasury currently takes in more than enough revenue to pay both the interest and the principal on the debts we currently owe. And if the Obama administration is truly worried about whether it will do so, then it should urge Congress to pass the legislation proposed by Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) requiring the Treasury Department to pay those bills first. It is true that, once we had paid our debt-service bills, there wouldn’t be enough money left over to pay for everything else the Obama administration wants to spend money on. The government would have to prioritize its expenditures — sending out checks for the troops’ pay and Social Security first. Other spending would have to wait. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says that not spending money Congress has appropriated is “the same as default.” It is not. It is economizing, which is what you do when you are out of money.
There is nothing wrong with forcing government not to spend money that it had planned on spending.
2. Failure to pass the debt-ceiling increase on time would be unprecedented. Both the administration and the media sound as if we are at the edge of zero hour, the time at which economic Armageddon will erupt if we have not raised the debt ceiling. That’s not quite so. It is true that Congress has never refused to raise the debt ceiling. But it has, in fact, frequently taken its time doing so. In 1985, Congress waited nearly three months after the debt limit was reached before it authorized a permanent increase. In 1995, four and a half months passed between the time the government hit its statutory limit and the time Congress acted. And in 2002, Congress delayed raising the debt ceiling for three months. In none of those cases did the world end. It won’t this time, either.
3. It’s always a “clean bill.” The administration is also insisting that it would be shocking for Congress to add any conditions to the debt-ceiling increase. But such conditions are far from unprecedented. There have been numerous amendments and conditions attached to debt-ceiling bills throughout the years. Remember Gramm-Rudman-Hollings? The classic spending-control plan was added to the debt-ceiling vote in 1985.
4. This is not about future spending. The administration insists that raising the debt ceiling is just about paying for spending that’s already occurred. Not quite. Depending on how high it is raised, it may be about paying only for spending that is already authorized — or much more. Authorized and spent are not the same thing. There is nothing wrong with forcing government not to spend money that it had planned on spending. Moreover, Tim Geithner is reportedly calling for an increase in the debt ceiling big enough to last through the 2012 election, which would enable a lot of new spending.
5. Only Republicans oppose raising the debt ceiling. The media and the administration want to turn this into a partisan fight. The ongoing narrative is that radical Republicans in thrall to the Tea Party want to wreck our finances, while Democrats responsibly want to pay our bills. In truth, a number of prominent Democrats are on record opposing a debt-limit increase without substantial reductions in spending. They include Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.), Mark Pryor (D., Ark.), and Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.). Even Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) normally a reliable liberal vote, has been expressing ambivalence. And the most prominent spending limit liable to be offered as a condition for raising the limit, the CAP Amendment proposed by Sen. Bob Corker (R. Tenn.) is cosponsored by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.). The real story is that a small group of extreme liberals wants to keep spending more in the face of bipartisan opposition.
So far, Republicans have not been very good about presenting their message. If they want to win this fight, they are going to have to do a lot more to correct the record.
According to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the U.S. government will reach its legal borrowing limit–the debt ceiling–on August 2. What will happen if the White House and congressional Republicans don’t reach an agreement before then? Will the U.S. be forced to default on its debt? In her latest appearance on Bloomberg TV, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy explains the facts about the debt ceiling by separating economic myth from economic reality.
Myth 1: If a deal is not reached by August 2, the U.S. will default on its debt.
Fact 1: The Treasury Department can prioritize payments in order to avoid a default.
Myth 2: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised the government won’t be able to pay Social Security benefits.
Fact 2: There are approximately $2.6 trillion dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund. Those assets can be used to pay benefits. Furthermore, there is already trillions of dollars of interagency debt that counts toward the $14.29 trillion debt limit. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner could convert that interagency debt into publicly-held debt, preventing not only a technical default but also preventing any delay in government payments.
Myth 3: The Treasury cannot use the Social Security Trust Fund to delay a default past August 2.
Fact 3: While the Treasury can’t use money from the Social Security Trust Fund, it can “disinvest” from other trust funds to pay for benefits.
When I hear all these big numbers that the Republicans want to cut trillions out a long time from now but very little out this year. It appears to me that they are cowards. Ron Paul is different though. President Obama is scared to cut too.
Jagadeesh Gokhale is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, member of the Social Security Advisory Board, and author of Social Security: A Fresh Look at Policy Options University of Chicago Press (2010).
President Obama’s dire alarms over the approach of the federal debt ceiling, and subsequent calls for $4 trillion in debt reductions over 10 years, are starkly lacking key ingredients: substance and coherence as to what such a fiscal package should contain.
House Republicans, by contrast, have a program for long-term economic stewardship — Cut, Cap and Balance — that would deliver much larger savings than anything the president has put on the table. Before appreciating why such a program would be better, one must consider why a deal to achieve $4 trillion in savings over the next decade — whatever its contents — would be insufficient.
Given the weak economy, budget savings of $4 trillion will not be implemented immediately, but will be back-loaded with a multiple-year lag. However, estimates made by the Social Security and Medicare trustees and actuaries suggest that those two programs face cumulative, inflation-adjusted, long-term (75-year) fiscal gaps totaling $39.2 trillion. This implicit debt will accrue interest and grow larger over time. The cumulative interest cost of that shortfall over 10 years, under a conservative, inflation-adjusted interest rate of 2.9 percent per year (the rate used by the Social Security actuaries), amounts to $13 trillion — implying that not making any fiscal adjustments for the next 10 years will increase the budgetary imbalance to $52.2 trillion. Thus, scheduling a heavily back-loaded reduction of those costs by just $4 trillion through 2020 is unlikely to improve the federal government’s fiscal condition.
The alternative to increasing the debt limit without sufficiently large spending reductions will amount to kicking the deficit can ahead, to just beyond the 2012 elections.
These are conservative estimates, because they include only shortfalls in entitlement programs and assume that the recent health care reform (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010) will appreciably reduce Medicare’s net unfunded obligations. But these estimates exclude the sizable increases in non-entitlement shortfalls and increases in future state Medicaid costs resulting from health care reform — not to mention the fact that Congress is likely to strike the proposed future reductions in Medicare, as it has routinely done for decades.
Thus, for a 10-year, $4 trillion budget deal to significantly reduce the nation’s long-term fiscal imbalance, we will have to stick to fiscal discipline well beyond 2020, which means not enacting new unfunded entitlement benefits or rapidly increasing spending. The fate of the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, which was abandoned as soon as budget surpluses emerged, does not bode well for a similar deal now unless it is accompanied by constraints against reversals by future Congresses — constraints that the Cut, Cap and Balance program would introduce.
In order to prevent lawmakers from initiating new entitlement (or “investment”) programs with inadequate funding schemes, those constraints should be an integral part of the next budget deal. And such a budget process constraint should itself be protected from repeal except through a large supermajority in Congress. The political price of voting for tax increases to fund new benefits would dampen lawmakers’ enthusiasm to expand entitlements — in contrast to the adoption of the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003 or last year’s health care reform, where lawmakers were shielded from the political costs of actually paying for the new programs.
The alternative to increasing the debt limit without sufficiently large spending reductions will amount to kicking the deficit can ahead, to just beyond the 2012 elections. We’ll then tolerate fierce campaigns soliciting support for liberal and conservative visions of a long-term budget fix. Chances are, however, that a polarized electorate won’t yield an unambiguous mandate for the direction of fiscal adjustments beyond 2012.
President Obama is exhorting legislators to swallow bitter medicine now because doing so will only become more difficult as the 2012 election draws closer. But had he seized the pro-budget-reform momentum generated by his own Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission last year, things may have turned out better for him politically and for the nation economically. Now we may remain in the current policy limbo until after next November, caught between the irresistible force of entitlement spending and the immovable object of Republican opposition to tax increases.
Along the way, we’ll increase the debt limit, one back-loaded bit at a time, without much prospect of avoiding an even larger fiscal calamity down the road. Maybe it’s time for the one sure way of curing this disease: to shred and discard the federal credit card by enacting Cut, Cap and Balance.
Midnight in Paris is as much a pleasure to watch as Woody Allen’s best films even though it’s not as good — the fantasy is so powerful. This time travel film takes us, and its main character, Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful screen writer, back to the Paris of the 1920’s where we meet the artists and literati who made the city the brilliant center that we all go to Paris looking for — even those too young or unworldly to realize it.
Gil is ensconced in a fancy hotel with his beautiful fiancee, Inez — of course that’s part of the fantasy, too, that and the French food. She and her rich, conventional right wing parents are dutifully intent on seeing the sights — Versailles and all that — guided by a know-it-all smart guy and his adoring girlfriend, but Gil — vaguely discontent, and yearning to be a serious novelist, has another agenda. He withdraws from family fun to search out his own Paris — the Paris of his imagination — and wonder of wonders at the stroke of midnight, finds it.
Swept off mysteriously in a chauffeured car, he’s delivered to the intellectual and artistic soirees of 1920’s Paris, where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rub shoulders with Hemingway and Picasso while Cole Porter plays the piano [partial list of famous people], and eventually everybody who is anybody ends up at Gertrude Stein’s for intellectual discussions, artistic critiques, gossip and lovemaking.
Oh how marvelous to encounter Hemingway (Corey Stoll), young, darkly handsome, intense, having just published his first novel speaking in the dead-pan of his writing style about courage under fire (“I’ve read all you work,” Gil tells him though at this point Hemingway’s only published one book). How delicious to see Zelda dive too deep into the absinthe with the Princeton-elegant Scott guiding her to the next party. And joy of joys, how wonderful that our very American Gil with Wilson’s farm-boy drawl, patent simplicity and naïve aura (though he is a successful screenwriter, Woody Allen has his cake and eats it to on that one) not only meets but draws to himself Picasso’s mistress, played by Marion Cotillard looking like the dancer Olga Khokhlova whom Picasso loved at the time. (So much for prissy, materialistic Inez, in any time zone.)
And. here’s something really valuable, Gil gets a focused critique on the pages of his novel by none other than Gertrude Stein – it’s going to serve him in good stead back in his own time. To see Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein sitting under Picasso’s famous, groundbreaking portrait of Gertrude and looking exactly like her is a high point of the movie and feels, for the moment, a high point of life (they really don’t have the same facial structure but Bates and Woody’s camera pull it off).
Gil’s travel back to the 20’s in the chauffeured car is smooth but some of the other time travels lurch and are less believable, and are accompanied by preaching about the value of being of one’s own time that sounds like forced virtue.
And Allen seems so in love with the idea of this movie that he hurries through characters, settling on caricatures for his artists and writers from the past rather than on real people, let alone the creators they were, engaged in hot struggles to develop their modes of expression. For all the fun it is to engage with Hemingway, his clipped, cliché-ridden courage talk is so obvious it’s camp, and while Adrien Brody does a great look-alike caricature bit of Salvador Dali, it’s a bit, not a person. So if you have another way of being in Paris at its beautiful best (appealing photography) and chatting with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Matisse and Picasso, by all means do it.
If not, see this movie. It’s a treat: once again we have to thank Woody Allen for giving us great pleasure, the most fun, and a fantasy fulfilled.
Yvonne Korshak
Comments very welcome. Scroll down, click on “comments,” write in comment box and click on “post.” Emails are private, no emails ever appear with comments.
I love it when the facts come out and contradict the liberal spin on things. “Why Hasn’t the Earth Warmed in Nearly 15 Years?”by Patrick J. Michaels.
Patrick Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of our Government and our Lives.
Added to cato.org on July 18, 2011
This article appeared on Forbes.com on July 15, 2011.
There is no statistically significant warming trend since November of 1996 in monthly surface temperature records compiled at the University of East Anglia. Do we now understand why there’s been no change in fourteen and a half years?
If you read the news stories surrounding a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Boston University’s Robert Kaufmann and three colleagues, you’d say yes, indeed. It’s China’s fault. By dramatically increasing their combustion of coal, they have increased the concentration of fine particles in the atmosphere called sulphate aerosols, which reflect away solar radiation, countering the warming that should be occurring from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Further, if this is true, then (as is usual in climate-world), “it’s worse than we thought.” After all, China will eventually reduce their sulfate emissions as their population becomes affluent enough to demand something better than miasmic air. Indeed, they are already beginning to clean things up, and when they finally do, all the cooling particles will be gone and the earth will warm substantially.
Reality may be a bit simpler, or much more complicated. But the reason this is all so important is that if there is no good explanation for the lack of warming, then an increasingly viable alternative is that we have overestimated the gross sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide in our computer models.
One problem is that we really don’t know how much cooling is exerted by sulfates, or whether they are just a convenient explanation for the failure of the forecasts of dramatic warming. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which grants itself climate authority, states that our “Level of Scientific Understanding” of the effects range between “low” and “very low,” with a possible cooling between zero (none) and a whopping 3.5 degrees (C) when the climate comes to equilibrium (which it will never do). That’s a plenty large range from which to pick out a number to cancel about as much warming as you’d like.
Kaufmann’s team looked into how sulfate uncertainty impacted its results and decided that it was relatively minor. However, we can’t find any independent test showing that the geographic “fingerprint” of a dramatic recent increase in sulfate cooling is actually being observed. More on this in a minute.
The other problem — and climate flatliners hate me for pointing this out — is that the beginning of the period of “no warming” includes the warmest year in the instrumental record, caused by the great El Niño of 1997-1998. In a modestly warming world, starting off at or near an anomalously high point pretty much assures little or no warming for years afterward.
Kaufmann’s team (and others) have duly noted that El Niño cycles are one factor partially responsible for the lack of recent warming. There’s little doubt of this. Further, if you back out solar changes and volcanism, as they did, you can convince yourself that there is still an underlying “residual” warming trend, but it is masked by all these variables. This has been done repeatedly in the scientific literature, which, until now, did not include increasing the sulfate effect on recent temperatures.
Where is the test of the hypothesis that sulfates are indeed responsible for the lack of warming? In this paper, it’s simply “modeled-in” as it fits the data well. That’s correlation, not causation.
There is very little exchange of air between the northern and southern hemispheres, and basic climate science shows that most sulfates from China will rain out before they get across the thermal equator. In fact, there is a great deal of literature out there published by luminaries like the Department of Energy’s Ben Santer and NASA’s James Hansen claiming relative cooling of the northern hemisphere from sulfates, compared to the southern.
So, if it is indeed sulfates cooling the warming, given that there is no net change in global temperature, then the northern hemisphere should be cooling since 1998 (the first year in Kaufmann’s paper) while the southern warms. Here are the sad facts:
The opposite is occurring. Why this test was not performed eludes me. Perhaps that is because it provides yet another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that we have simply overstated the sensitivity of surface temperature to changes in carbon dioxide.
During his third news conference on the debt crisis, President Obama says Congress does not need a constitutional amendment to do its job, the constitution “tells us to do our job.”
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The problem with President Obama’s comments above is that he really does not see the tremendous increase in federal spending as the problem. He blames everything else!!!! He says we do not need the balanced budget amendment but uncontrolled federal spending is the reason we need it!!!
The White House is quietly encouraging the Reid-McConnell talks.
Meantime, there is talk of pandering to the tea party radicals in the unwieldy House by letting them pursue referral of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.
Ratification would take years. If enacted, such an amendment would amount to the same abdication of political responsibility to make wise and responsible cuts in spending as has been evident in the debt-ceiling debate.
It is obvious to me that the Balanced Budget Amendment is needed because of the “abdication of political responsibility to make wise and responsible cuts in spending” that Brummett is talking about and we have all seen for decades.
Abstract:Republicans in the House and Senate have announced that they will force votes on balanced budget constitutional amendments. While the Senate and House versions of the current BBA are similar, there are some important differences that Members of Congress and the American people need to understand. For example, the Senate version makes it more difficult to enact revenue-neutral tax reform, while the House version would waive its tax limitation in times of military conflict. How Congress resolves these differences could determine whether future Congresses and Presidents balance the budget without increasing taxes.
Congress is preparing for a historic debate over what role—if any—a balanced budget amendment (BBA) to the U.S. Constitution should play in relation to the United States’ statutory debt ceiling. Some conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have demanded a vote on a balanced budget amendment. Other conservatives have gone as far as to demand passage of a BBA in the House and Senate as a precondition to passing a debt limit increase.
If the Senate and House were to pass identical versions of a BBA, the constitutional amendment would then be sent to the states for ratification.[1]
Republican leaders in the House and Senate have declared that a vote will be scheduled in both chambers on their respective versions of a BBA. The differences between the two versions are significant: Clearly, not all BBAs are created equal.
The provisions that vary between the House and Senate versions of the BBA may have dramatic policy implications for federal spending. For instance, the two versions of the BBA diverge significantly on such threshold questions as how each amendment’s provisions apply during times of “military conflict” and the number of votes required to waive the constitutional mandate that the budget be balanced during a fiscal year.
According to Roll Call, Republicans in the House and Senate have announced that they will force votes on balanced budget constitutional amendments.[2] The Senate is expected to vote the week of July 18, 2011, while the House is expected to vote on another version of the BBA during the same week.
While the Senate and House versions of the current BBA are similar, there are some important differences that Members of Congress and the American people need to understand. How Congress resolves these differences could determine whether future Congresses and Presidents balance the budget without increasing taxes.
The Senate BBA
Senator Mike Lee (R–UT) and Senator Jon Kyl (R–AZ) introduced a BBA that would cap spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), require supermajority votes to increase the debt limit or raise taxes, and prohibit the judiciary from using a BBA as authority to unilaterally order tax increases to balance the budget.[3]
Senator Lee’s version of the BBA included the following three pillars:
Requiring a balanced budget for each fiscal year;
Limiting federal spending to no more than 18 percent of GDP; and
Requiring a supermajority vote in both Houses of Congress in order to increase taxes, raise the debt ceiling, or run a specific deficit in a particular year.[4]
This version of the BBA, Senate Joint Resolution 5 (S.J. Res. 5), departed from the Contract with America version in that prior incarnations of the BBA did not include a spending cap.
Senator Orrin Hatch (R–UT) drafted a BBA that garnered unanimous support from all 47 Republican Senators. Senator Hatch introduced this BBA, referred to as Senate Joint Resolution 10 (S.J. Res. 10), on March 31, 2011.[5]
On June 29, 2011, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–KY) introduced an identical measure, Senate Joint Resolution 23 (S.J. Res. 23),[6] which was then read onto the Senate Calendar on June 30. The McConnell BBA contains the following provisions:
Section 1.Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year, unless two-thirds of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a roll call vote.
Section 2.Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed 18 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States for the calendar year ending before the beginning of such fiscal year, unless two-thirds of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific amount in excess of such 18 percent by a roll call vote.
Section 3.Prior to each fiscal year, the President shall transmit to the Congress a proposed budget for the United States Government for that fiscal year in which—
total outlays do not exceed total receipts; and
total outlays do not exceed 18 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States for the calendar year ending before the beginning of such fiscal year.
Section 4.Any bill that imposes a new tax or increases the statutory rate of any tax or the aggregate amount of revenue may pass only by a two-thirds majority of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress by a roll call vote. For the purpose of determining any increase in revenue under this section, there shall be excluded any increase resulting from the lowering of the statutory rate of any tax.
Section 5.The limit on the debt of the United States shall not be increased, unless three-fifths of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress shall provide for such an increase by a roll call vote.
Section 6.The Congress may waive the provisions of sections 1, 2, 3, and 5 of this article for any fiscal year in which a declaration of war against a nation-state is in effect and in which a majority of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress shall provide for a specific excess by a roll call vote.
Section 7.The Congress may waive the provisions of sections 1, 2, 3, and 5 of this article in any fiscal year in which the United States is engaged in a military conflict that causes an imminent and serious military threat to national security and is so declared by three-fifths of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress by a roll call vote. Such suspension must identify and be limited to the specific excess of outlays for that fiscal year made necessary by the identified military conflict.
Section 8.No court of the United States or of any State shall order any increase in revenue to enforce this article.
Section 9.Total receipts shall include all receipts of the United States Government except those derived from borrowing. Total outlays shall include all outlays of the United States Government except those for repayment of debt principal.
Section 10.The Congress shall have power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation, which may rely on estimates of outlays, receipts, and gross domestic product.
Section 11. This article shall take effect beginning with the fifth fiscal year beginning after its ratification.
The Senate is expected to commence debate on S.J. Res. 23 during the week of July 18, 2011.
—Brian Darling is Senior Fellow for Government Studies in the Department of Government Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Classic Ron Paul: “I expect deficits to explode, not come down” 4/9/1997, C-SPAN Steve Brawner in his article “Safer roads and balanced budgets,” Arkansas News Bureau, April 13, 2011, noted: The disagreement is over the solutions — on what spending to cut; what taxes to raise (basically none ever, according to Boozman); whether or not […]
U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor at the 2009 DPA J-J Dinner U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor at the 2009 Democratic Party Jefferson Jackson Dinner, Arkansas’s largest annual political event. (Did you notice that besides Mike Ross, EVERY OTHER DEMOCRAT THAT PRYOR MENTIONS DOING SUCH A GREAT JOB IN WASHINGTON IS NO LONGER IN OFFICE, SNYDER, LINCOLN, and BERRY)
Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment Steve Brawner in his article “Safer roads and balanced budgets,” Arkansas News Bureau, April 13, 2011, noted: The disagreement is over the solutions — on what spending to cut; what taxes to raise (basically none ever, according to Boozman); whether or not to enact a balanced budget amendment (Boozman says yes; […]
It’s Simple to Balance The Budget Without Higher Taxes Steve Brawner in his article “Safer roads and balanced budgets,” Arkansas News Bureau, April 13, 2011, noted: The disagreement is over the solutions — on what spending to cut; what taxes to raise (basically none ever, according to Boozman); whether or not to enact a […]
Debunking White House Pro-Tax Increase Propaganda This Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation mini-documentary debunks White House pro-tax propaganda with a point-by-point rebuttal of a video narrated by Austan Goolsbee of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. http://www.freedomandprosperity.org Steve Brawner in his article “Safer roads and balanced budgets,” Arkansas News Bureau, April 13, 2011, noted: The […]
Steve Brawner in his article “Safer roads and balanced budgets,” Arkansas News Bureau, April 13, 2011, noted: The disagreement is over the solutions — on what spending to cut; what taxes to raise (basically none ever, according to Boozman); whether or not to enact a balanced budget amendment (Boozman says yes; Pryor no); and on […]
The more than 350 federal judges that Reagan appointed during his eight years in office also constitute an important legacy. He named close to half of all lower-court federal judges, more than any other president. He also elevated conservative William H. Rehnquist to Chief Justice of the United States and appointed three Associate Justices, including the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative. Almost as important as the Rehnquist nomination was that of Antonin Scalia, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge and a former scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Scalia has been unwavering in his opposition to affirmative action, abortion and what he has called the “liberal jurisprudence” that undergirded judicial activism.[xxxviii]
As Reagan stated in 1986, his goal was a federal judiciary “made up of judges who believe in law and order and a strict interpretation of the Constitution.”[xxxix] The man in charge of the selection progress, Attorney General Edward Meese III, emphasized that the administration aimed “to institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”[xl]
The president persuaded the Senate to approve his judicial nominations because he was able to forge a broad coalition among traditional conservatives like Strom Thurmond, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee; New Right conservatives like John East of North Carolina and Jeremiah Denton of Alabama; and moderate but law-and-order Republicans like Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. That changed abruptly when Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986 and named Joseph Biden of Delaware chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
On May 11, 2011, I emailed to this above address and I got this email back from Senator Pryor’s office:
Please note, this is not a monitored email account. Due to the sheer volume of correspondence I receive, I ask that constituents please contact me via my website with any responses or additional concerns. If you would like a specific reply to your message, please visit http://pryor.senate.gov/contact. This system ensures that I will continue to keep Arkansas First by allowing me to better organize the thousands of emails I get from Arkansans each week and ensuring that I have all the information I need to respond to your particular communication in timely manner. I appreciate you writing. I always welcome your input and suggestions. Please do not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you in the future.
Government auditors spent the past five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them—costing taxpayers a total of $123 billion annually—fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve.
The stimulus set aside $350 millionfor a national broadband coverage map—even though one private firm stated it could create one for $3.5 million.
Fannie Mae—now backed up by taxpayers—paid $6.3 million in legal defense costs for ousted executives such as Franklin Raines. An additional $16.8 millionwas spent defending Fannie Mae’s regulators in litigation against the former executives.
The Census Bureau spent $2.5 millionon Super Bowl ads, and on-air mentions by sportscasters.
New documents reveal that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lost 1,000 computersin 2008. Not to be outdone, Homeland Security officers lost nearly 200 guns in places like restaurant restrooms, convenience stores, and bowling alleys. Several of the guns ended up in the hands of criminals.
Some say the world will end in fire and some say in ice.
But in Washington, a lot of people say it will end if we don’t continually raise the debt ceiling.
The statutory debt limit, or debt ceiling, represents the maximum amount of debt the federal government can carry at any given time. The limit was created in 1917 so that Congress wouldn’t have to vote every time the government wanted to increase the amount of debt (which was becoming a more and more frequent occasion). Since then, the Treasury Department has had the authority to issue new debt up to whatever the limit is to fund government needs. Last year, the limit was raised to $14.3 trillion, an amount that is about to reached.
As it approaches, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said failing to raise the limit would likely mean the U.S. would default on its debt, creating “real chaos” in place of the fake chaos that’s out there now. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said that failing to raise the limit would be “deeply irresponsible” and and Austan Goolsbee, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, has said that not raising the limit would create “the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”
Eh, maybe.
As Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, has pointed out, we’ve maxed out the nation’s credit card in the past without such dire results. In the mid-1980s, the mid-1990s, and in 2002, for instance, the debt limit wasn’t raised for months at a time and the government got along just swell. The government has a big bag of tools it can use, ranging from playing around with the amount of spending that is liable to the limit to prioritizing interest and debt payments over other outlays. Interest on the debt for this year is projected to be about $225 billion and government revenue is expected to be around $2.2 trillion, so the government can easily pay the vig and avoid defaulting.
What it shouldn’t do is simply keep piling on the debt. The limit has been raised no fewer than 10 times in the past decade. When Republicans ran the White House and the Congress, they voted overwhelmingly to charge it and Democrats, including Sen. Obama, hollered bloody murder. In 2006, he called the need to yet again increase the debt limit “a sign of leadership failure.” Now that Dems run the show, the GOP has suddenly rediscovered its inner cheapskate.
So it goes.
The boldest plan to rein in spending and debt comes from newcomer Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a Tea Party favorite who dispatched Republican incumbent Bob Bennett in the primaries before coasting to victory in the general election last fall. Lee has vowed to block passage of a debt-limit increase unless Congress signs on to his balanced-budget amendment which would cap annual federal spending at 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The amendment would require a super-majority of two-thirds in the Senate and House of Representatives. Lee’s bill is competing with another Republican proposal from Sens. Hatch (Utah) and Cornyn (Texas) to cap spending at 20 percent of GDP. The Hatch-Cornyn bill has weaker rules on its higher cap as well.
In 2010, spending came to about 24 percent of GDP and it’s expected to come in around 25 percent of GDP in 2011. Since 1950, total federal revenues have averaged 17.8 percent and have reached higher than 20 percent exactly once. Spending over the same time has averaged just under 20 percent.
Whether Lee’s proposal carries the day — and there’s a strong case that its passage would do more to calm financial markets than simply bumping up the federal credit line — neither the Democratic nor the Republican leadership has yet to advance a serious proposal to cut spending and reduce outstanding debt. Indeed, both the president’s budget proposal for 2012 and the generally non-existent Republican response are not only deeply irresponsible but clear signs of insanity.
That ain’t right. But it does help explain why a government that has increased spending over 62 percent in real dollars can no longer get by on a $14 trillion debt ceiling.
The opposite is occurring. Why this test was not performed eludes me. Perhaps that is because it provides yet another piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that we have simply overstated the sensitivity of surface temperature to changes in carbon dioxide.
The Daily Hatch 