I decided to buy a $1,700,000 Bugatti Veyron. But instead I borrowed a ton of money to purchase a Lamborghini Reventon which costs only $1,600,000.
Ka-ching. In Obama math, I just saved my family $100,000. I think I’ll go buy myself some Versace suits to reward myself for my fiscal discipline.
How did I justify this car purchase? Well, every day, I write myself a budget and allocate funds. I don’t actually have the money, but that’s no big deal these days. I allocate huge sums to myriad accounts. And then I tally up the unspent portion and see how much I “saved.” And if I re-allocate that money to another pet project, I count it as a “cut.” And that way I’m justified to do basically whatever the hell I want.
You might say, “That’s crazy. They don’t do that.” But you’d be wrong:
Budget tricks helped Obama save programs from cuts
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press – 4/12/2011WASHINGTON – The historic $38 billion in budget cuts resulting from at-times hostile bargaining between Congress and the Obama White House were accomplished in large part by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway.
Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs — Pell grants for college students, health research and “Race to the Top” aid for public schools, among others — from Republican knives, according to new details of the legislation released Tuesday morning.
And big holes in foreign aid and Environmental Protection Agency accounts were patched in large part. Republicans also gave up politically treacherous cuts to the Agriculture Department’s food inspection program.
The details of the agreement reached late Friday night just ahead of a deadline for a partial government shutdown reveal a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially “score” as cuts to pay for spending elsewhere, but often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.
As a result of that sleight of hand, Obama was able to reverse many of the cuts passed by House Republicans in February when the chamber approved a bill slashing this year’s budget by more than $60 billion. In doing so, the White House protected favorites like the Head Start early learning program, while maintaining the maximum Pell grant of $5,550 and funding for Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative that provides grants to better-performing schools. Food aid to the poor was preserved, as were housing subsidies.
Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including cuts to earmarks, unspent census money, leftover federal construction funding, and $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused bonus money for states that enroll more uninsured children in a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.
More money was actually borrowed and spent in the time it took Congress to negotiate this package ($4 billion a day) than was actually “saved.”
And only in Washington can a budget which spends far more and borrows far more than the year before be seen as “cutting.”
In the movie “City Heat,” Mike Murphy’s (Burt Reynold’s) partner was killed over an extortion deal by gangsters who threw him out of a window. Asked how he died, Murphy said, “Suddenly.”
That’s how the United States of America is going to die, too. Suddenly. Very suddenly.
The U.S. debt exceeds the gross domestic planet of the entire human race. Eventually a few big lenders in that class known as “the rest of the world” are going to want their money. And then it’s Great Depression Part Duex – only this time bigger and scarier than ever – coming to your town soon.
And most Americans are like ants, busy at work (well, the half of the country that actually works and pays taxes, anyway) scurrying around, only dimly aware that there’s a gigantic can of toxic pesticide labeled “U.S. Debt” poised over our thriving little colony.
Democrats WILL NOT actually cut money or spend less. The best we can hope for – and that only after a knock-down drag-out fight in which we played chicken with our political system – is a charade of baits and switches.
A more precise anaology (than ants) for Democrats would be termites. They have been busily eating away at the fabric of American society for decades. The wood of our economic system is almost entirely gone now, leaving only a hollow shell that could completely collapse with a particularly large gust of wind. But they are merely redoubling their efforts to just eat faster.
The word “trillion” has become a household word just in the last three years. Yes, occasionally when talking about the national debt (and few people ever really bothered to do that prior to 2008), the word “trillion” came up. But we all routinely hear that number thrown around now: a trillion. A thousand billion.
Liberals love to argue that we had balanced budgets under Democrat Bill Clinton. But a little history (contained in this article) would demonstrate Congress, and NOT the president, writes the national budget; that Bill Clinton and the Democrats were thoroughly defeated for their terrible policies in 1994, and that it was the REPUBLICAN CONGRESS which controlled the House and the Senate from that point on which actually balanced the budget; and that the Republicans actually massively cut spending largely over Bill Clinton’s objections. You’d know that the very first platform on that incoming 1994 House Republican Congress was A BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT. Bill Clinton didn’t “balance” anything; Republicans did.
Liberals also love to say it’s the Republicans whose policies have led us into now-almost-certain bankruptcy and national implosion (even as they keep recklessly spending while Republicans plead with them to stop being insane). But here’s the reality from the same article cited above:
For the record, the last budget from a Republican President AND a Republican Congress – FY-2007 (passed in 2006) – resulted in a$161 billion deficit at a time when unemployment was 4.6%. That’s what happened the last time the GOP was in control.
What happened when the Democrats took control in January 2007? Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi passed a FY-2008 budget that had a $459 billion deficit – nearly three times the deficit in the immediately previous Republican-passed budget. Three times. And this before the financial crisis that somehow “necessitated” all this massive spending.
Now, that’s a pretty crazy increase under Democrat control. But you aint seen nothin’ yet.
The Democrats passed a FY-2009 budget with a staggering, mind-boggling, totally reckless $1.42 TRILLION deficit.
The FY-2010 budget approved by Reid and Pelosi and signed by Obama had an estimated $1.6 TRILLION deficit.
The deficit has increased from $161 billion in the last budget before Democrats took control of the Congress (FY 2007) to $1.42 trillion in the most recent fiscal year (FY 2009)—an increase of $1.26 trillion or 782%.
With three months remaining in the fiscal 2009 budget, the federal deficit just officially passed the $1 trillion mark. Worse yet, Obama borrowed more than forty cents for every single dollar he spent.
We also suffered a budget shortfall of $94 billion in the month of June, which marks the first June in more than ten years (read, “encompassing the entire Bush presidency”). Bush’s success in raising revenues is bookended by two Democrat presidents who failed.
And now the Democrats aren’t even bothering to pass a budget for the next fiscal year, so they can simply spend without any accountability whatsoever.
The old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats:
In the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, the average deficit was $104 billion (average of final deficit/surplus FY1996-FY2007 data taken from Table F-1 below). In just 3 years under Democrats, the average deficit is now almost $1.1 trillion (average of final deficit/surplus FY2008 and 2009 data taken from Table F-1; FY2010 data taken from Table 1-3). Source: CBO January 2010 Budget and Economic Outlook
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Minority Whip) rightly pointed out on ABC’s “This Week”:
“If you look at the kind of deficit that we’ve incurred over the last three years that the Democrats have been in control of Congress, 60% of the overall deficit from the last ten years has occurred in that period. And frankly with the incurrence of the debt, we’ve seen very little result. That’s why we think we ought to choose another way.”
And yet the media falsely blame BUSH and Republicans for that spending, rather than Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, even though factually speaking the Democrats were ENTIRELY to blame for every single penny that was spent from January 2007 on. Because our Constitution forbids a president from spending; it is CONGRESS that spends.
Right now, liberal newspapers such as the New York Times are decrying the Republicans for “holding America hostage.” How DARE Republicans demand spending cuts? Don’t they care about all the children they’re murdering? ask the liberals who are responsible for 53 million dead babies since 1973.
Liberals also incessantly say, “If we don’t spend more, America will collapse.”
“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.
“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”
And you just try that at home and see how it works out, kids.
Democrats are morally and fiscally insane. And all they have done – along with an ideological propagandist mainstream media’s assistance at every turn – is to redefine insanity as “sane” and sanity as “insane.”
If we do not initiate massive cuts now, America itself is 100% guaranteed to collapse within just a few more years. And when it collapses – and mark my words it will fall like a house of cards in a way that will stun Americans because they’ve believed liberal lies – it will be the poorest who will suffer the most.
All the budget gimmicks and phoney tricks aside, when America implodes, it will be because Democrats spent too much, not because Republicans cut too much.
Start Thinking Right 