HALT:HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com

Today Max Brantley started whining about the children that will be hurt by all these impending budget cuts (Arkansas Times, Feb 28). I guess he always thinks the answer to everything is to throw more federal programs and money at it.

Have you ever heard of the great flood of 1927. My grandfather moved to Memphis in 1927 and he told me about this flood. There was a lady named Memphis Minnie and she wrote about this flood. I always heard that there was lots of great blues music that had come out of Memphis, but I always thought that was overstated and that the Blues was not a significant form of music.

However, at the same time I was listening to groups like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, I had no idea that many of their songs were based on old Blues songs out of Memphis.

One of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs was “When the Levee breaks.” It was based on a song by Memphis Minnie. When I think about the recent increase of federal Spending and federal Deficits under President Obama, it makes me think of this song. In 1927 the rains kept coming and coming and finally the levee broke. Now the federal spending keeps coming and the deficits continue to build up and I wonder when will our government go bankrupt?

Memphis Minnie and Joe Mccoys original.

Led Zeppelin

_________________________

President Obama admits that the Federal Government is out of money but that doesn’t stop him from still borrowing more and more to keep spending it. When will our government go bankrupt? When will the levee break?

Video : Obama “We are out of money”

Evidently Drudge Report  is running a headliner stating that Obama said “We are out of money” — There is no corresponding text to it other than this.

If you think for one second that this isn’t gonna wreck havoc on every industry including advertising then you are living in an illusionary world.

‘WE’RE OUT OF MONEY’
Sat May 23 2009 10:32:18 ET

In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, President Obama boldly told Americans: “We are out of money.”

C-SPAN host Steve Scully broke from a meek Washington press corps with probing questions for the new president.

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.

So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health care system that we’ve got now.

Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything…

Written by TheFounder · Filed Under Advertising Agency News

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute tells how the Republicans can win the federal government shutdown fight with the Democrats. I will be posting portions his his article the next few days. Here is the first part:

With the GOP-led House and the Democratic Senate and White House far apart on a measure to pay the federal government’s bills past March 4, Washington is rumbling toward a repeat of the 1995 government-shutdown fight (actually two shutdown fights, one in mid-November of that year and the other in mid-December).

This makes some Republicans nervous. They think Bill Clinton “won” the blame game that year, and they’re afraid they will get the short end of the stick if there is a 1995-type impasse this year.

A timid approach, though, is a recipe for failure. It means that President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can sit on their hands, make zero concessions, and wait for the GOP to surrender any time a deadline approaches.

To put it simply, Republicans need to hold firm and fight hard.

In other words, budget hawks in the House have no choice. They have to fight.

But they can take comfort in the fact that this is not a suicide mission. The conventional wisdom about what happened in November of 1995 is very misleading.

Republicans certainly did not suffer at the polls. They lost only nine House seats, a relatively trivial number after a net gain of 54 in 1994. They actually added to their majority in the Senate, picking up two seats in the 1996 cycle.

More important, they succeeded in dramatically reducing the growth of federal spending. They did not get everything they wanted, to be sure, but government spending grew by just 2.9 percent during the first four years of GOP control, helping to turn a $164 billion deficit in 1995 into a $126 billion surplus in 1999. And they enacted a big tax cut in 1997.

If that’s what happens when Republicans are defeated, I hope the GOP loses again this year.