Rep. James Lankford (R-OK) responded to President Obama’s FY 2013 budget proposal that fails to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term as promised. The budget also delayed the tough decisions to cut spending and reform entitlements that are needed to avoid a debt crisis.
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I really am offended when I hear that the President claim that his budget cuts 4 trillion in the next 10 years but it really adds to the deficit at least 11 trillion dollars. What kind of funny math is that? Take a look at this article below:
WASHINGTON D.C. – U.S. Senator John Boozman (R-AR) issued the following statement on the release of President Obama’s budget proposal:
“America deserves better than a collection of tax hikes, phony savings and additional debt. The President’s budget proposal is bad for seniors as it takes no steps to protect and strengthen Medicare and Social Security, will hurt chances of an economic recovery through tax hikes and will add $11 trillion more to our already staggering national debt in a 10-year period.”
“This is clearly an election year proposal. Rather than a serious attempt to outline a direction for our economic future, the President is trying to be all for everyone with this plan. Just as the President’s previous proposals have been voted down, I would not expect this one to pass should it come up for a vote in the Senate.”
“This budget proposal from the White House is stark reminder that we need to pass the Honest Budget Act that I have cosponsored. The President’s budget is loaded with gimmicks and accounting tricks that our bill would put an end to so that the American people would have an opportunity to weigh in on a real budget that would get our fiscal house in order.”
“When it comes to our country’s budget, Americans have a right to expect accountability, honesty and responsibility. This proposal has none of those.”
Britain’s Liam Fox has a warning for America: Fix the debt problem now or suffer the consequences of less power on the world stage. The former U.K. secretary of state for defense visited Heritage to explain why the America’s debt is a national security issue.
Britain’s Liam Fox has a warning for America: Fix the debt problem now or suffer the consequences of less power on the world stage. The former U.K. secretary of state for defense visited Heritage to explain why America’s debt is a national security issue.
Fox faced cuts to the armed forces in the United Kingdom during his tenure. He said the amount of interest Britain pays on its debt is larger today than its budget for defense. Fox explained that both Britain and America should be concerned about the impact our national debt has on our security.
“The real issue is the indebtedness of Western nations,” he stressed, “Here in the United States, there is a certain irony in the fact that in order to maintain debt interest payment by the national government, America is having to cut its security budget so that some of that money on the debt interest ends up in Moscow and Beijing.” He underscored to the need for serious reforms to tackle what he described as our “absolutely unsustainable” level of national debt. Western economies, he warned “are up to their necks in debt and if they don’t do something about it, [they] will drown in that debt.”
The government can not spend themselves out of a recession. It doesn’t work. Japan did 8 stimulus packages in the last 20 years but it has never worked. The best approach to get out of a recession was done by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980’s when he cut taxes then we experienced 7% economic growth. However, somehow Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times claims today that the stimulus did work and that we should have done more!!!
Mired in excruciating negotiations over the budget and the debt ceiling, President Barack Obama might reflect that things didn’t have to turn out this way. The impasse grows mainly out of one major decision he made early on: pushing through a giant stimulus.
When he took office in January 2009, this was his first priority. The following month, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with a price tag eventually put at $862 billion.
It was, he said at the time, the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history,” and would “create or save three and a half million jobs over the next two years.”
The president was right about the first claim. As a share of gross domestic output, it was the largest fiscal stimulus program ever tried in this country. But the second claim doesn’t stand up so well. Today, total nonfarm employment is down by more than a million jobs.
What Obama didn’t foresee is that his program would spark a populist backlash and give rise to the tea party. Where would Michele Bachmann be if the stimulus had never been enacted — or if it had been a brilliant success?
To say it has not been is to understate the obvious. The administration says the results look meager because the economy was weaker than anyone realized. Maybe so, but fiscal policy is a clumsy and uncertain tool for stimulating growth, which the past two years have not vindicated.
The package had three main components: tax cuts, aid to state governments and spending on infrastructure projects. Tax cuts would induce consumers to buy stuff. State aid would prop up spending by keeping government workers employed. Infrastructure outlay would generate hiring to build roads, bridges and other public works.
That was the alluring theory, which vaporized on contact with reality. The evidence amassed so far by economists indicates that the stimulus has come up empty in every possible way.
Consider the tax cuts. Wage-earners saw their take-home pay rise as the IRS reduced withholding. But as with past rebates and one-time tax cuts, consumers proved reluctant to perform their assigned role.
Claudia Sahm of the Federal Reserve Board and Joel Slemrod and Matthew Shapiro of the University of Michigan found that only 13 percent of households indicated they would spend most of the windfall. The rest said they preferred to put it in the bank or pay off debts — neither of which boosts the sale of goods and services.
This puny yield was even worse than that of the 2008 tax rebate devised by President George W. Bush. Neither attempt, the study reported, “was very effective in stimulating spending in the near term.”
The idea behind channeling money to state governments is that it would reduce the paring of government payrolls, thus preserving the spending power of public employees. But the plan went awry, according to a paper by Dartmouth College economists James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Transfers to the states to support education and law enforcement appear to have little effect,” they concluded. Most likely, they said, states used the money to avoid raising taxes or borrowing money.
That’s right: The federal government took out loans that it will have to cover with future tax increases … so states don’t have to. It’s like paying your Visa bill with your MasterCard.
The public works component could have been called public non-works. It sounds easy for Washington to pay contractors to embark on “shovel-ready projects” that needed only money to get started. The administration somehow forgot that even when the need is urgent, the government moves at the speed of a glacier.
John Cogan and John Taylor, affiliated with Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, reported earlier this year that out of that $862 billion, a microscopic $4 billion has been used to finance infrastructure. Even Obama has been chagrined.
“There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” he complained last year.
Even if jobs were somehow created or saved by this ambitious effort, they came at a prohibitive price. Feyrer and Sacerdote say the costs may have been as high as $400,000 perjob.
Based on all this evidence, we don’t really know whether the federal government can use fiscal policy to engineer a recovery. We do know it can go broke trying.
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.
Anti-poverty spending has surged 89 percent faster than inflation since 2000. Nearly half of this increase occurred in the past two years. President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on anti-poverty programs, and President Obama has already pushed it above 4 percent of GDP. State and local governments spend an additional 2 percent of GDP on these programs.
Since 2000, Medicaid and Food Stamp rolls have expanded by nearly 20 million. Average benefit levels have grown faster than the inflation rate.
Program success should be measured by reduced government dependency, not increased spending.
Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion).
On my blog www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, I did not see any of them in the recent debt deal that Congress adopted. Now I am trying another approach. Every week from now on I will send you an email explaining different reasons why we need the Balanced Budget Amendment. It will appear on my blog on “Thirsty Thursday” because the government is always thirsty for more money to spend.
In a private conference call with a handful of university students across the country, GOP Presidential hopeful — and President Obama’s former Ambassador to China — Jon Huntsman argued in support of one of the most far-reaching, controversial elements of the conservative political agenda.
As first reported in a broader piece by theHuffington Post, Huntsman argued in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to maintain a balanced budget — an innocuous-sounding, but radical plan pushed by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and numerous other congressional conservatives.
“We’re going to have to fight for a balanced budget amendment,” Huntsman said. “Every governor in this country has a balanced budget amendment. It keeps everybody honest. It’s the best safeguard imaginable.”
At its core, a balanced-budget amendment would make it unconstitutional for the government to spend more than it collects in revenue — a requirement that, without safeguards, would make stimulus and emergency spending impossible.
Faced with a similar requirement, states responded to the recession with budget cuts that exacerbated the downturn.
But Republicans on the Hill have taken the idea a step further to the right by including a provision that would make it functionally impossible for the government to raise taxes. The goal, then, is to force future Congresses to slash or eliminate federal spending programs — which disproportionately benefit the needy and elderly — to bring them in line with a revenue base that’s likely to shrink over time.
It’s unclear whether Huntsman supports this version of a Balanced Budget Amendment, or a less extreme one. But the nature of the idea is such that it allows conservatives to signal their support for slashing programs without providing the unpopular details. And in the GOP primary, this will likely be a key test for candidates hoping to curry favor with influential conservatives like DeMint
Over the last 20 or 30 years I have heard conservatives say that it is a real shame that we are headed towards a bankrupt European liberal socialist kind of state. However, we are now there.
Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.
With seemingly every day bringing more bad news from Europe, many are beginning to ask how much longer the United States has before our welfare state follows the European model into bankruptcy. The bad news is: It may already have.
This year, the fourth straight year that we borrowed more than $1 trillion to support the U.S. government, our budget deficit will top $1.3 trillion, 8.7 percent of our GDP. If you think that sounds bad, it’s because it is. In fact, only two European countries, Greece and Ireland, have larger budget deficits as a percentage of GDP. Things are only slightly better when you look at the size of our national debt, which now exceeds $15.3 trillion, 102 percent of GDP. Just four European countries have larger national debts than we do — Greece and Ireland again, plus Portugal and Italy. That means the U.S. government is actually less fiscally responsible than countries like France, Belgium, or Spain.
And as bad as things are right now, we are on an even worse course for the future. If one adds the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare to our official national debt, we really owe $72 trillion, by the Obama administration’s projections for future Medicare savings under Obamacare, and as much as $137 trillion if you use more realistic projections. Under the best-case scenario, then, this amounts to more than 480 percent of GDP. And, under more realistic projections, we owe an astounding 911 percent of GDP.
At that point does the United States cease being the United States as we have known it?
Meanwhile, counting both official debt and unfunded pension and health-care liabilities, the most indebted nation in Europe is Greece, which owes 875 percent of GDP. That’s right, the United States potentially owes more than Greece. France, the second most insolvent nation in Europe, owes just 549 percent of GDP. Even under the most optimistic scenario, we owe more than such fiscal basket cases as Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.
So far we have been able to avoid the consequences of our profligate ways because the very public turmoil in Europe has helped prop us up as the world’s safe haven for foreign investment. Compared to the euro’s problems, the dollar looks pretty safe. This means that others are still willing to lend us money at absurdly low rates. But that won’t last forever. In fact, already seven European countries, including Germany and Sweden, have better credit ratings than the U.S.
Perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that our welfare state is not yet as big as Europe’s. But the key word here is “yet.” Today, our federal government spends more than 24 percent of GDP. Throw in state and local spending, and government at all levels consumes over 43 percent of everything produced in this country over the course of a year. As bad as that is, it’s still less than Europe, where the average of government spending at all levels is slightly more than 50 percent of GDP. But the Congressional Budget Office projects that federal-government spending in this country is currently on a path to exceed 42 percent of GDP by 2050. Government spending at all levels will exceed 59 percent of GDP. And CBO assumes state and local spending will decline in the future, which seems unlikely.
By way of comparison, today, Ireland is the only country in Europe with a bigger government than the U.S.’s will be in 2050. That’s right, one can look at countries like France and Greece, or even Denmark and Sweden, and realize that we will eventually have bigger governments than those quintessential welfare states have today.
At that point does the United States cease being the United States as we have known it? At the very least, can our economy survive such a crushing burden of government spending, and its attendant level of taxes and debt?
Given this looming disaster, President Obama has just submitted a budget that explicitly rejects “austerity,” avoids any reform of Medicare or Social Security, and adds some $7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years….
My Democratic friends are pretty glum lately. I put this together to help them remember happier times.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own the audio and images used in this video. All audio and images belong to their rightful owner. No copyright infringement intended. This video is made for entertainment and non-profit purposes only.
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I found this video on the internet called “When Democrats ruled” and it was uploaded by jdhenchman on Nov 9, 2010 on youtube with these words: “My Democratic friends are pretty glum lately. I put this together to help them remember happier times.”
Then it shows these 43 events in pictures and plays the Coldplay song “Viva La Vida.”
I have written about this song by Coldplay before and I thought it was proper to discuss some of that again after first listing the 43 events pictured in the video:
1. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on taking up the gavel in January 2007. She lost her speakership as a result of the 2010 election.
3. Rep. John Spratt (D-SC), to Pelosi’s left, first elected in 1982, lost re-election.
4. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has resigned to run for Mayor of Chicago.
7. The S-CHIP bill raised taxes on cigarettes to pay for an expansion of the children’s health care program, although expenses will outstrip the new tax revenue.
10. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) lost her re-election.
12. Rep. Chet Edwards (D-TX), first elected in 1990, lost re-election.
13. Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) gave up the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee after a series of ethics complaints, although he survived a primary challenge and was re-elected in 2010.
14. Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO), first elected in 1976, lost re-election.
16. Rep. Steve Kagen (D-WI), first elected in 2006, lost re-election.
17. The cap and trade bill passed the House but was never voted on by the Senate, and is now considered dead.
18. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), first elected in 1982, lost re-election.
19. Scandal-plagued Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) appointed Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) to President Obama’s old Senate seat, despite allegations that Blagojevich sought to sell the seat. Burris decided not to run for election, and a Republican won the seat.
20. Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID), first elected in 2008, lost re-election.
21. Gov. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) lost re-election despite a strong campaign effort by President Obama.
22. Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), first elected in 1984, lost re-election.
23. During President Obama’s State of the Union, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-NC) interrupted by yelling, “You lie!” Wilson apologized; despite being a top Democratic target, won re-election.
24. Rep. Bobby Bright (D-AL), first elected in 2008, lost re-election.
25. Against the background of the health care law debate and despite a strong campaign effort by President Obama, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley unbelievably lost the Massachusetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown.
26. Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), first elected in 1974, lost re-election.
27. Rep. Dave Obey (D-WI), first elected in 1969 and the third longest serving member of the House, retired rather than face re-election.
29. Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA), first elected in 2006, lost re-election.
30. Sen. Arlen Specter (PA) switched to the Democratic Party after it became clear he would lose the Republican Party primary, then lost the Democratic Party primary.
31. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), first elected in 1992, retired rather than face re-election. He had been the focus of a bitter debate over the health care law’s funding of abortions.
32. President Obama and his advisers routinely speak of complete agreement among economists regarding additional stimulus spending. The Cato Institute took out an ad signed by hundreds of economists, including Nobel Prize winners, who disagreed.
33. Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND), first elected in 1992, lost re-election.
34. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), first elected in 2008 and considered a progressive hero for his biting criticism of Republicans, lost re-election by 18 points.
35. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), first elected in 1992, lost re-election.
37. Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-NC), first elected in 1996, lost re-election. He had been caught on video manhandling students asking him questions on the street.
38. Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-FL), first elected in 2002, chose to retire and instead run unsuccessfully for the Senate seat, coming in third place.
39. Continuing the Bush Administration policy of defending DOMA and retaining Don’t Ask Don’t Tell alienated gays who supported the Democrats.
40. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) hung on to his Senate seat but is severely weakened as Senate Majority Leader.
41. The Obama Administration described how unemployment would drop once the stimulus was enacted, but the actuals have gone in the other direction.
42. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), first elected in 1998, retired rather than run for re-election. He has been critical of his party’s legislative agenda.
43. After the election, President Obama admitted in a morose press conference that his party had suffered a “shellacking.”
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Here is a portion of an article I wrote a couple of years ago about Chris Martin’s view of hell. He says he does not believe in it but for some reason he writes a song that teaches that it exists:
Belief of Eternal Punishment in Grammy Winning Song
By Everette Hatcher
Chris Martin of the rock group Coldplay wrote the song Viva La Vida, and the song just won both the grammy for the “Song of the Year” and “Best Pop Performance by a duo or Group with Vocals.”
In this song, Martin is discussing an evil king that has been disposed. “I used to rule the world…Feel the fear in my enemy’s eyes…there was never an honest word and that was when I ruled the world, It was the wicked and wild wind, Blew down the doors to let me in, Shattered windows and the sound of drums, People couldn’t believe what I’d become…For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter won’t call my name, Never an honest word, But that was when I ruled the world.”
Q Magazine asked Chris Martin about the lyric in this song “I know Saint Peter won’t call my name.” Martin replied, “It’s about…You’re not on the list. I was a naughty boy. Its always fascinated me that idea of finishing your life and then being analyzed on it…That is the most frightening thing you could possibly say to somebody. Eternal damnation. I know about this stuff because I studied it. I was into it all. I know it. It’s mildly terrifying to me. And this is serious.”
I have been following the career of Chris Martin for the last decade. He grew up in a Christian home that believed in Heaven and Hell, but made it clear several years ago that he actually resents those who hold to those same religious dogmatic views he did as a youth. Yet it seems his view on the possibility of an afterlife has changed again….
Let me give a suggestion on why Chris Martin’s view may have changed. Here is a couple of scripture verses from the Bible that may give insight into a possible explanation. God “has planted eternity in the human heart…” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This is a direct result of our God-given conscience. The apostle Paul said it best in Romans 1:19, “For that which is known about God is evident to them and made plain in their inner consciousness, because God has shown it to them” (Amplified Version).
Evidently Chris Martin who said he resented dogmatic religious views a few years ago, has now written a grammy winning song that pictures an evil king being punished in an afterlife. Could it be that his God-given conscience prompted him to put that line in?
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It is my belief that unborn babies have the same human rights that we have. I do think that evil kings will be punished for their evil deeds unless they repent. Deep down I really believe that everyone knows that God exists. I am glad I ran across this video and I will continue to pray for both Chris Martin and for my president.
If you wanted to get serious about budget cuts then why not eliminate the Dept of Education. These budget cuts mentioned below in the budget are just peanuts. We should have meaningful budget cuts that would BALANCE THE BUDGET.
The president’s fiscal 2013 budget includes a 213 page document that contains 210 proposed cuts, consolidations, and other savings. That sounds like a lot until one finds out that the alleged savings would only amount to $24 billion in a $3.8 trillion budget. Not only would the cuts do little to reduce the size of government, they would do nothing to reign in the scope of government.
The following are a few examples of what I’m talking about:
The administration proposes to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Automotive Technology program for savings of $16 million. However, the proposed cut doesn’t reflect a sudden desire to end federal “green” subsidies to car manufacturers. Instead, the administration says “other Federal programs are better positioned to research, develop, demonstrate, and deploy a broad suite of advanced vehicle technologies.”
The administration proposes to cut funding for the Department of Health and Human Service’s Community Services Block Grant program from $679 million to $350 million. The administration cites reports from the HHS inspector general and the Government Accountability Office that “have documented failures in program oversight and accountability.” However, instead of proposing to completely terminate it, the administration says it’s going to fix the program and basically apologizes for having to cut it to meet discretionary spending caps.
The administration proposes to cut funding by $226 million for fossil fuel subsidies administered by the Department of Energy. These subsidies should be eliminated. But they should be eliminated along with all energy subsidies because the federal government should stop trying to pick winners and losers in the energy market. Unfortunately, it appears that the administration is really only interested in scoring political points with the “green” crowd.
The administration proposes to save a whopping $3 million by terminating the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s public broadcasting grant program. The administration correctly points out that the program is duplicative of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. However, the CPB would get another $1 million in funding for an overall budget of $445 million. In other words, the proposed cut would have practically no effect on the federal government’s subsidization of PBS and NPR.
I could go on and on with examples but there’s no point. A glass-half-full type might say, “Well, at least the administration is proposing to cut something.” Unfortunately, the glass is nowhere close to being half full – it’s empty. The administration’s relatively paltry savings would still leave the budget with a projected deficit of $901 billion for fiscal 2013. And the deficit would only be smaller than last year because the government is projected to take in more revenue – not because the government would spend less. Worse, the federal government under this budget would continue to be an intrusive, metastasizing cancer on individual liberty and the economy.
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.
GUIDELINE #5: Improve financial management and reform wasteful programs.
Congress must provide stronger financial management oversight for federal programs, which are losing billions of dollars every year from mismanagement. The following examples of inexcusable waste make a convincing case for reform:
The federal government cannot account for $24.5 billion spent in 2003.16
The U.S. General Accounting Office refuses to certify the federal government’s own accounting books because the bookkeeping is so poor.
Of the 26 departments and major agencies, 18 received the lowest possible rating for their financial management, meaning that auditors cannot even express an opinion on their financial statements.17
The Medicare program pays as much as eight times the cost that other federal agencies pay for the same drugs and medical supplies.18
The federal government made $20 billion in overpayments in 2001.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s $3.3 billion in overpayments in 2001 accounted for over 10 percent of the department’s total budget.19
Recently, the Department of Agriculture was unable to account for $5 billion in receipts and expenditures;
The Internal Revenue Service does not even know how much it collects in payroll taxes.20
Congressional investigators were able to receive $55,000 in federal student loan funding for a fictional college they created to test the Department of Education.21
The Army Corps of Engineers has been accused of illegally manipulating data to justify expensive but unnecessary public works projects.22
A recent audit revealed that employees of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) diverted as much as 3percent of the USDA budget to personal purchases through their government-issued credit cards.23
Over one recent 18-month period, Air Force and Navy personnel used government-funded credit cards to charge at least $102,400 for admission to entertainment events, $48,250 for gambling, $69,300 for cruises, and $73,950 for exotic dance clubs and prostitutes.24
U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) participated in a press conference with GOP Senators in response to President Obama’s budget proposal on February 13, 2012.
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There is no doubt that our deficit spending will ruin us eventually. What kind of nation are we turning over to our kids and grandkids?
President Obama’s budget proposal was unveiled today, generating all sorts of conflicting statements from both parties.
Some of the assertions wrongly focus on red ink rather than the size of government. Others rely on dishonest Washington budget math, which means spending increases magically become budget cuts simply because outlays are growing at a slower rate than previously planned.
When you strip away all the misleading and inaccurate rhetoric, here’s the one set of numbers that really matters. If we believe the President’s forecasts (which may be a best-case scenario), the burden of federal spending will grow by $2 trillion between this year and 2022.
In all likelihood, the actual numbers will be worse than this forecast.
The President’s budget, for instance, projects that the burden of federal spending will expand by less than 1 percent next year. That sounds like good news since it would satisfy Mitchell’s Golden Rule.
But don’t believe it. If we look at the budget Obama proposed last year, federal spending was supposed to fall this year. Yet the Obama Administration now projects that outlays in 2012 will be more than 5 percent higher than they were in 2011.
The most honest assessment of the budget came from the President’s Chief of Staff, who openly stated that, “the time for austerity is not today.”
With $2 trillion of additional spending (and probably more), that’s the understatement of the century.
I’ve already pointed out that the budget could be balanced in about 10 years if the Congress and the President displayed a modest bit of fiscal discipline and allowed spending to grow by no more than 2 percent annually.
But the goal shouldn’t be to balance the budget. We want faster growth, more freedom, and constitutional government. All of these goals (as well as balancing the budget) are made possible by reducing the burden of federal spending.
The Daily Hatch 