Paul M. Jones

It’s nothing new for presidents to give us bloated budgets with phony promises of belt-tightening at the end of the day. But never, ever, in the history of the republic has there been so irresponsibly gargantuan a budget defended by rhetoric so duplicitous as we are now seeing from President Barack Obama.

“We cannot settle for a future of rising deficits and debts that our children cannot pay,” he said last month, and he has talked as well about fiscal discipline, eliminating waste, increased efficiency, more focused policies and how dishonest President Bush was in leaving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “off the books.”

Well, yes, Bush did that thing and he shouldn’t have, but everyone knew that money was being spent and the dishonesty, such as it was, is nothing – zero, zip, nada – next to Obama dressing up as a miser as he promotes a $3.59 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit on its back.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com >> Jay Ambrose >> Opinion Articles - Jay Ambrose.

The actual numbers aren’t just worse than the rosy picture Obama painted for a world after his magical stimulus took effect. They’re worse even than the doomsday scenario he outlined if Congress didn’t pass his stimulus plan.

via Unemployment numbers worse than projected | Les Jones.

So let me get this right. We are currently doing worse, having "done something", than the worst predicted outcome if we had "done nothing". Tell me again how "let the markets operate without interference" was a certain path to disaster?

I reject the premise that capitalism is currently failing to "deliver the goods." The whole point of capitalism is to destroy companies like GM and Chrysler. The whole point of capitalism is to destroy unions like the UAW that favor older and retired workers at the expense of younger workers and workers yet to come. The whole point of capitalism is to destroy the "smart guys" who create defective financial products. The whole point of capitalism is to punish us for electing a government that enmeshes itself with the jokers above. The "current unpleasantness" is a feature, not a bug.

via Cafe Hayek: The whole point of capitalism.

As Roberts points out, it's not the *whole* point, but it's a significant one. It's a profit *and loss* system; the failures need to fail, not be propped up artificially. Only then can their destruction create something better.

Spurring new demands to overhaul the nation's healthcare system, Medicare trustees announced Tuesday that the program's biggest fund for serving the elderly would run out of money in just eight years.

But the announcement, the latest in a succession of dire predictions about Medicare's fiscal condition, also pointed up the chasm separating Democrats and Republicans as the Obama administration and its congressional allies prepare for another major attempt to reshape the U.S. healthcare system.

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"The government-run healthcare programs we already have are unsustainable," said Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, who heads the Republican Study Committee, a conservative House caucus. "It should be obvious that putting more people under the inflexible control of Washington is no way to bring down medical costs, and it's certainly no way to provide healthcare of the highest quality."

via Report: Medicare fund is 8 years from insolvency - Los Angeles Times.

The Federal government can't afford the health-care programs is has *now*, and it wants to create *more* of them? If you want to reduce costs, then reduce regulations and let a free market operate. Hell, I get the idea that even taxpayer-paid vouchers toward high-deductible health savings accounts would be better.

Out in the real world beyond Washington, “structural imbalance” means: Washington politicians are on a spending rampage the likes of which has never before been seen anywhere in human history. The spenders include President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, plus a supporting cast of bureaucrats like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his predecessor, Henry Paulson, and the Democratic majorities in the Senate and House (joined by a few Senate Republicans). These officials are terminally afflicted with what Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, calls “federal spending disease” (FSD) an incurable addiction in which the sufferer is utterly unable to stop spending other people’s money. An intervention by voters is the only effective treatment.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com >> Feds are broke but keep right on spending.

For those of you who know a little about federal personal income or corporate tax, or who just want to get a sense for the scope of the tax increase, I commend to you the more extensive write-up produced by Deloitte Tax. I've clipped some inflammatory excerpts for your morning indigestion, but it is worth scrolling through to get a sense for the breadth and nature of the proposal. The short version is that President Obama is pushing absolutely staggering increases through the corporate and business tax systems. Direct taxes on business are, in general, inefficient and economically disruptive, but they are also peerless in their complexity, which means that few voters and essentially no reporters will make the effort to understand what is being done to them.

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If Barack Obama is bashing somebody in his speeches, he is preparing the media battlespace for a substantive attack to come. It turns out that it matters very much what he says.

via TigerHawk (the audacity of taxes).

Obama's health care plans are very, very expensive, and they mean higher taxes for everyone, not just that elusive klatch of greedy fools who are not in the 95% of working families now allegedly slated for stable or lower taxes. Otherwise, how could Obama hope to pay for it?

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You may recognize these proposals; they are recycled from the Obama budget. Estimated cost savings listed: $215 billion over ten years. That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the "stakeholders" to find. And with a model of stakeholder cooperation like Chrysler before us, that shouldn't be hard.

via Obama's Magical Mystery Tour of Health Care Savings - Megan McArdle.

The White House on Monday projected 2009 and 2010 federal budget deficits far higher than it forecast just two and a half months ago, even as it continued to defy most experts and predict that the economy is headed for a strong comeback starting late this year.

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The new administration budget said that the fiscal 2009 deficit would reach $1.84 trillion, or $89 billion more than forecast in February, while the 2010 figure now is estimated at $1.26 trillion, or $87 billion above the previous number. The fiscal 2008 deficit was $459 billion.

The new figures dwarf the $17 billion in budget reductions and program terminations that President Barack Obama proposed with a flourish last week, reductions that Congress is unlikely to approve in full.

via Deficits soar even with rosy Obama budget assumptions | McClatchy.

President Obama's call last year for "shared sacrifice" doesn't extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration's 2010 budget released this week.

via It's A Good Time To Work For Uncle Sam | Econwatch - CBS News.

The financial health of Social Security and Medicare, the government's two biggest benefit programs, worsened in the past year because of the severe recession.

Trustees of the two programs said Tuesday that Social Security will start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2016, one year sooner than projected last year, and the giant trust fund will be depleted by 2037, four years sooner.

The trustees said Medicare was in even worse shape. They said that the trust fund for hospital expenses will pay out more in benefits than it collects this year and will be insolvent by 2017, two years earlier than the date projected in last year's report.

via Social Security and Medicare finances worsen - More politics- msnbc.com.