Actual U.S. Debt Exceeds GDP Of Entire Planet

Here’s one for you to put in your pipe to smoke on.  Even if the U.S. were to seize the wealth of the entire planet, and even if we taxed all the wealth of not only the rich but the miserably poor as well, we STILL couldn’t pay off the debts that Democrats demand that we keep adding to until after we’ve reached that “straw that broke the camel’s back” point:

True U.S. debt exceeds world GDP by $14 trillion
Obama 2010 budget deficit now 5 times larger than nation’s output
Posted: March 21, 2011
By Jerome R. Corsi

As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget  deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.

That figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. GDP for 2010 was $14.861 trillion. World GDP in 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, was $61.936 trillion.

“As government obligations continue to spiral out of control and the U.S. government shows no willingness to make the magnitude of spending cuts required to return to fiscal responsible, the U.S. economy is headed to a great collapse coming in the form of a hyper-inflationary great depression,” says economist John Williams, author of the website Government Shadow Statistics.

Statistics generated in Williams’ most recent newsletter demonstrate the real 2010 federal budget deficit was $5.3 trillion, not the $1.3 trillion previously reported by the Congressional Budget Office, according to the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government as released by the U.S. Department of Treasury Feb. 26, 2010.

The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget  deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit based on data reported in  the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government is that the official  budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including  Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they  occur.

The calculations in the 2010 Financial Report are calculated on a GAAP basis  (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) that includes year-for-year changes  in the net present value of unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs  such as Social Security and Medicare.

Under cash accounting, the government makes no provision for future Social  Security and Medicare benefits in the year in which those benefits accrue.

“The broad GAAP-based federal deficits, including the Social Security and  Medicare unfunded liabilities, have been in the $4 trillion to $5 trillion range  in 2008 and 2009, and 2010’s deficit again likely was near $5 trillion,  remaining both uncontrollable and unsustainable,” Williams wrote.

“The federal government cannot cover such an annual shortfall by raising  taxes, as there are not enough untaxed wages and salaries or corporate profits  to do so,” he warned.

In his analysis of the 2010 Financial Report of the United States, Williams  listed both an official accounting and an alternative.

“The estimate of a broad 2010 GAAP-based deficit at $5 trillion is mine,” he  noted. “At issue with the published report, consistent year-to-year accounting  was not shown, with a large, one time reduction in reported 2010 Medicare  liabilities, based on overly optimistic assumptions of the impact from recently  enacted health care legislation.”

U.S. Government GAAP Accounting  Federal Budget Deficits U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the United States,  2002-2010 (John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics, ShadowStats.com)

Williams argues the total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and  Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, have effectively placed the U.S.  government in bankruptcy, even before we take  into consideration any future and continuing social welfare obligations that may  be embedded within the Obama administration’s planned massive overhaul of health  care.

“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into  balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100  percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a  federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”

Williams argues the U.S. government has condemned the U.S. dollar to “a  hyperinflationary grave” by taking on debt  obligations that will never be covered by raising taxes and/or by severely  slashing government spending that has become politically untouchable.

“Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a  solution to not having enough money to cover  obligations,” he cautioned. “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have  committed the system to its ultimate insolvency, through the easy politics of a  bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross  mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency.”

He is concerned that the Federal Reserve will supplement its current policy  of Quantitative Easing 2, or QE2, under which the Fed intends to purchase by  mid-year 2010 another $600 billion of Treasury debt with “QE3.”

“These actions (QE2 and QE3) should pummel heavily the U.S. dollar’s exchange  rate against other major currencies,” he concludes. “Looming with uncertain  timing is a panicked dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated paper  assets, which remains the most likely event as a proximal trigger for the onset  of hyperinflation in the near-term.”

Williams predicts that the early stages of hyperinflation will be marked by  an accelerating upturn in consumer prices, a pattern that has already begun to  unfold in response to QE2.

“For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to  assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving  wealth and assets,” he advises.

Williams suggests that physical gold in the form of sovereign coins priced  near bullion prices remains the primary hedge in terms of preserving the  purchasing power of the dollar, as well as stronger major currencies such as the  Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.

And as totally insane as that is, it might well even be worse than that.

$61.936 trillion sounds like a lot.  And that’s the official figure for the International Monetary Fund’s estimate for U.S. indebtedness.  But the IMF is giving credibility to a figure that makes that $62 trillion seem almost manageable:

I Can Give You 200 Trillion Reasons Why We Need To Cut Government Spending NOW
By Michael Eden     March 7, 2011

Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way.  Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.

For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Enron-style accounting?  From our government?  Say it aint so!!!

It’s isn’t a matter of IF America will financially collapse; it is only a matter of WHEN.  And “WHEN” is SOON.

And it will necessarily happen because Democrats are genuinely depraved.

Recklessly spending money on fools’ projects that your grandchildren will become debt slaves just trying to pay the interest on is immoral.

I can only keep begging Republicans to turn the Democrats’ demonization game back at them.  Democrats are running around on their talking points denouncing Republicans as “extremists” who want to kill poor people.

Bullcrap.

It is DEMOCRATS (I call them “Demoncrats,” for “Demonic Bureaucrats”) who want to implode America and kill tens of millions of American people by plunging this country into a great depression that will make the last one in the 1930s seem like a fun-filled day at the beach.

It’s not going to be the richest people who starve to death and die miserably in the cold.  It’s going to be all the people liberals love to say they care about – when in reality all they do is cynically manipulate them toward their own increasingly certain doom.

Don’t you dare forget that it has been LIBERALS who have been dreaming of undermining and imploding America financially since Cloward and Piven back in the 1960s.  And now we’ve got a JUST-ex SEIU official on tape plotting to send America into a financial crisis that will dwarf anything ever seen.

If you have a true death wish, and you vote Democrat, then by all means keep doing so, because they will give you the destruction and nihilism that you seek.  That’s the real meaning of Obama’s “hope and change.”

ObamaCare Increases Health Cost By $311 Billion While Threatening Access To Care

Just in case you didn’t catch it, it’s official: ObamaCare was packaged and sold entirely based on lies.

CMS Study Shows Health Care Law Increases Costs–$311 Billion in 10 Years
By Tom White, on April 23rd, 2010, at 11:43 am

US Senate Morning Briefing

Last night, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released his long-awaited report on the Democrats’ health care spending bill. The report states, “[W]e estimate that overall national health expenditures under the health reform act would increase by a total of $311 billion during calendar years 2010-2019. . . .” This was an assessment that was requested by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell prior to the final votes on health care in the House, but CMS told Republicans that they couldn’t complete an analysis in time for the vote. Given the report’s findings, it’s easy to see why Democrats decided to rush ahead with a vote before the report could be completed.Reporting on the CMS analysis last night, the AP wrote, “President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law will increase the nation’s health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation. A report by economic experts at the Health and Human Services Department said the health care remake will achieve Obama’s aim of expanding health insurance — adding 34 million Americans to the coverage rolls. But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs. It also warned that Medicare cuts may be unrealistic and unsustainable, driving about 15 percent of hospitals into the red and ‘possibly jeopardizing access’ to care for seniors.”

But in the run-up to the vote, indeed throughout the year-long debate on health care, Democrats and President Obama repeatedly insisted that their unpopular legislation would control costs and save the government money. In December, President Obama announced, “We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care. Families will save on their premiums. Businesses that will see their costs rise if we do nothing will save money now and in the future.” Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) insisted at the beginning of debate in the Senate, “The Republican Leader just a few moments ago says that this bill raises costs. With all due respect to my good friend from Kentucky, that statement is false.” And Democrats repeatedly cited a CBO report saying that if all the Medicare cuts are implemented, the bill could save $130 billion over the next decade. This was pointed to by everyone from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to rank-and-file House Democrats like Ohio Rep. John Boccieri.

But as the AP story explains, “The [CMS] report acknowledged that some of the cost-control measures in the bill — Medicare cuts, a tax on high-cost insurance and a commission to seek ongoing Medicare savings — could help reduce the rate of cost increases beyond 2020. But it held out little hope for progress in the first decade. ‘During 2010-2019, however, these effects would be outweighed by the increased costs associated with the expansions of health insurance coverage,’ wrote Richard S. Foster, Medicare’s chief actuary. ‘Also, the longer-term viability of the Medicare … reductions is doubtful.’”

As Sen. McConnell said when President Obama signed the health care bill, “Most Americans out there aren’t celebrating today. . . . People oppose this bill not because they don’t know what’s in it, but because they know exactly what’s in it. . . . They know you don’t have to slash Medicare by half a trillion dollars to get lower premiums. . . . People know you won’t save money on health care by spending another $2.6 trillion on health care. . . . They know you don’t reduce the deficit by creating a massive new government program that even Democrats have described as a Ponzi scheme. They know you can go a long ways towards doing all these things without creating a brand new entitlement at a time when we can’t even cover the cost of the entitlements we have.”

Once again, studies by neutral observers have shown that Democrats’ claims about their health care bill just do not match reality. This was a flawed bill rushed through because Democrats wanted to “make history.” But Americans know better. At a time of record deficits and debt, this irresponsible health spending bill should be repealed and replaced with legislation that actually addresses health care costs.

All one has to do is look at Obama’s plunging polls in the aftermath of the passage of ObamaCare to verify that the American people did not want and do not want this “boondogglization” of the American health care system.  Polls across the board show Obama’s approval plunging dramatically since health care “reform” was shoved down the nation’s throat: Quinnipiac has Obama’s approval at a lowest-ever-measured 44% – with a majority disapproving of him; top-pollster Rasmussen has Obama at only 47% – with a whopping 52% disapproving of him; and the RCP average has Obama WELL below a 50% approval.  Barack Obama is no longer in any way speaking for or representing the American people.

It turns out this is the same guy who is on tape at least eight times saying all the health care negotiations would all be on C-SPAN – and then he went to closed-door meeting after closed door meeting that resulted in a health care bill that NOBODY knows anything about.  It turns out that this is the same guy who promised he would unite the country in a bipartisan manner – and instead broke that promise and became the most polarizing and divisive president in history.   This is the same guy who said he would NEVER allow health care to pass by the awful partisan reconciliation tactic – and then he did exactly what he promised he wouldn’t do.  This is the guy who repeatedly promised that he wouldn’t tax anyone making less than $250,000 a year – and now everyone knows he’ll break that central, fundamental promise.  This is the same guy who demonized Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for doing what his own chief of staff had just done only the day before.

I can go on.  For example, I can talk about how his administration promised up and down that the $787 billion (subsequently massively upwardly revised to $862 billion) stimulus – which will actually cost $3.27 TRILLION – would keep unemployment under 8%.  Obama sold a massive lie to sell a massive porkulus.  And now we’re paying for a fat pile of lies.

Now we find out that this fundamental liar told yet another massive, fundamental lie.

Now we find out that Barack Obama personally and repeatedly lied to the American people about the cost of his precious boondoggle ObamaCare:

“I pledged that I will not sign health insurance reform — as badly as I think it’s necessary, I won’t sign it if that reform adds even one dime to our deficit over the next decade — and I mean what I say.”

You loathsome, vile LIAR.

You said whatever you thought you needed to say to get the American people to jump into bed with you.  Then you raped them.  And then moved on to the next lie and rape.  And the next lie and rape after that.

Now, you think this is terrible news about the terrible ObamaCare power-grab?  You aint seen NOTHING yet.  Have a gander at this:

Not one of its major programs has gotten started, and already the wheels are starting to come off of Obamacare. The administration’s own actuary reported on Thursday that millions of people could lose their health insurance, that health-care costs will rise faster than they would have if the law hadn’t passed, and that the overhaul will mean that people will have a harder and harder time finding physicians to see them.

The White House is trying to spin the new report from Medicare’s chief actuary Richard Foster as only half bad because it concludes that, while costs will increase, only 23 million people will remain uninsured (instead of 24 million previously estimated).

But looking at the details of Foster’s report shows the many, many danger signs for Obamacare and how many of its promises will be broken:

1. People losing coverage: About 14 million people will lose their employer coverage by 2019, as smaller employers terminate their plans and workers who currently have employer coverage enroll in Medicaid. Half of all seniors on Medicare Advantage could lose their coverage and the extra benefits the plans offer.

2. Huge fines for companies: Businesses will pay $87 billion in penalties in the first five years after the fines trigger in 2014, partly because they can’t afford to offer expensive, government-mandated coverage and partly because some of their employees will apply for taxpayer-subsidized insurance.

3. Higher costs for consumers: Tens of billions of dollars in new fees and excise taxes will be “passed through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and devices prices and higher premiums,” according to Foster. A separate report shows small businesses will be hit hardest.

4. A program created to fail: The new “CLASS Act” long-term-care insurance program will face “a significant risk of failure,” according to Foster. Indeed, he finds, “there is a very serious risk that the problem of adverse selection will make the CLASS program unsustainable.”

5. Spending increases: Under the new law, national health spending will increase by $311 billion over the coming decade. And instead of bending the federal spending curve down, it will move it upward “by a net total of $251 billion” over the next decade.

6. “Free-riders”: An estimated 23 million people will remain uninsured in 2019, roughly 5 million of whom would be undocumented aliens; the remainder would be the 18 million who decline to get coverage and who will pay the penalty.

7. Spending reductions are fiction: Estimated reductions in the growth rate of health spending “may not be fully achievable” because “Medicare productivity adjustments could become unsustainable even within the next ten years, and over time the reductions in the scope of employer-sponsored health insurance could also become an issue.”

8. You can’t keep your doctor: Fifteen percent of all hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers treating Medicare patients could be operating at a loss by 2019, which will “possibly jeopardize access to care for beneficiaries.” Doctors are threatening to drop out of Medicare because cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates mean they can’t even cover their costs.

9. Coverage but no care: A significant portion of those newly eligible for Medicaid will have trouble finding physicians who will see them, and the increased demand for Medicaid services could be difficult to meet.

This is an objective report by administration actuaries that shows this sweeping legislation has serious, serious problems.

And there’s more: Joint Economic Committee Republicans explain in a new report the impact of a rarely mentioned $14.3 billion per year tax on health insurance, effective in 2014. They find this tax will be mostly passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums for private coverage. It will cost the typical family of four with job-based coverage an additional $1,000 a year in higher premiums and will fall largely, and inequitably, on small businesses and their employees.

States are fighting back. The Florida legislature voted Thursday to place a state constitutional amendment on the ballot that would ban any laws that compel someone to “participate in any health care system.” It requires a 60 percent vote to succeed. The legislation is modeled after the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act, which has been introduced or announced in 42 states.

It just makes you want to cry.  Fifteen percent of hospitals are going to close, tens of thousands of doctors will leave medicine, and yet millions of people are going to start swamping the healthcare rolls.  If I wanted to destroy our healthcare system, that’s how I’d do it.

On top of that – something that will crash the system even sooner – is the fact that more and more healthier people will increasingly pay the fines and opt out of ObamaCare, will more and more sick people enter the system.  The result will be a social catastrophe.  Our very worst enemy couldn’t have engineered our downfall better.

Business after business have been and will continue to be writing down billions and billions of dollars in profits to cover the huge costs of ObamaCare.  These are businesses that would have hired workers, only now the skyrocketing costs of paying for ObamaCare for their employees will keep that hiring to an absolute minimum.

Barack Obama proudly and arrogantly said, “You Can Measure America’s Bottom Line By Looking At Caterpillar’s’” – and then he torpedoed Caterpillar’s bottom line.

Unemployment is going to be soaringly high for years – as even the Obama White House acknowledges.  Now you know why.

What’s the result of the Democrats’ idiotic policies?  Ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who just told us that sky-high “unemployment is likely to remain unacceptably high for a long time.”

The unemployment rate “is still terribly high and is going to stay unacceptably high for a very long time,” Geithner said.

Of course, if unemployment is going to stay “unacceptably high” for “a very long time,” you’re pretty much accepting it, aren’t you?

Meanwhile, there will be trillions of dollars in additional spending that Obama and the Democrats refused to allow the CBO to count: such as the SIX TRILLION DOLLARS it will cost Americans to buy ObamaCare policies or face fines.

The Titanic wasn’t as big of a disaster as ObamaCare.  If we can’t repeal and replace it, it will bankrupt the country.

April 8 CNNMoney Headline: ‘Jobless Claims Soar’

Let’s see: new home sales plunge to their lowest levels since 1963, while jobless claims soared to the highest levels seen since December 2008 (when Obama was routinely comparing the economy to the Great Depression).

Clearly, everything is just going swimmingly under Barry Hussein.

Jobless claims soar
By Chavon Sutton, staff reporterApril 8, 2010: 11:59 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance for the first time jumped last week, according to government data released Thursday.

There were 460,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended April 3, up 18,000 from an upwardly revised 442,000 the previous week, according to the Labor Department’s weekly report. […]

The report also said that 4,550,000 people filed continuing claims in the week ended March 27, the most recent data available. That figure, the lowest level since Dec. 20, 2008, was down 131,000 from the preceding week’s 4,681,000 claims, and below the 4.63 million economists expected, according to Briefing.com.

The 4-week moving average for continuing claims was 4,648,250, a decrease of 36,000 from the preceding week’s revised average of 4,684,250.

Continuing claims data exclude people whose benefits expired or those who have moved to state or federal extensions. It reflects those filing each week after their initial claim until the end of their standard benefits, which usually last 26 weeks.

The numbers forced the Associated Press to trot out their favorite Obama-apologist adverb.  They said “jobless claims increased ‘unexpectedly.’”

Last week Obama was trumpeting government unemployment numbers that did not budge the 9.7% unemployment rate as if all his asinine policies had somehow been vindicated:

“Today is a promising day,” Mr. Obama told workers assembled inside Celgard LLC, the Charlotte, N.C.-based company that makes parts for high-tech batteries. “We are beginning to turn around. More Americans are now getting up, getting dressed and going to work.”

But however the government did its calculations, private payrolls actually fell in March.

The illusory numbers Obama trumpeted were front-page headlines for the major media.  But then the usual “unexpected” revisions come, and the liberal propaganda machine suddenly loses interest in the story.

Meanwhile, underemployment, which many economists view as the “real” unemployment measure, increased to 20.3%.  When people give up looking for work, or finally give up and settle for a job far beneath their potential, they “fall” off the jobless rolls.  We could actually have Great Depression unemployment levels, and still show artificially low unemployment numbers. Discouraged workers who give up are not counted in official unemployment statistics, and over a million unemployed workers aren’t being counted.

The fact is that a total of 6,130,000 workers had been unemployed for 27 weeks or more in December 2009, the most ever since the data were first collected in 1948, and more than double the 2,612,000 unemployed for a similar length of time only a year ago.  Does that sound like Obama is succeeding???

People said of the Great Depression: “It wasn’t so bad if you had a job.”  FDR kept optimistically promising that relief was just around the corner.  Meanwhile, his policies prolonged the depression by seven years until finally even his own Treasury Secretary said:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939 unemployment was 20.7%.

Obama keeps telling us how magnificently we are recovering, and the dinosaur lamestream media keeps reporting it as if it were true.

Meanwhile he keeps piling on shocking and totally unsustainable deficit levels that will ultimately implode the U.S. into a Great Depression unlike anything we have ever seen.

But under Obama, unsustainable is the new normal.

When we  finally awaken to our sobering senses, we will find we have been led by the nose and duped by lies.

Interview With Tim Geithner, Poster Boy For An Administration That Has No Clue

From NBC’s “Meet the Press,” with David Gregory interviewing Treasury Secretary ‘Turbo Tax’ Timothy Geithner.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  You know, what the government did was to step in and make sure we’re providing the tax cuts and investments necessary to arrest the crisis, get credit markets starting to open up again.  And we did that, that plan worked.  But we’ve got a ways to go before…

GREGORY:  But that’s a big question, whether or not–yes, you have growth for the first time in four quarters.  But is any of this growth sustainable without government intervention?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  It will be, it will be.  But what the government has to do in a crisis is to provide a bridge until the economy can repair itself and businesses are confident enough to start to invest again.  And again, you’re starting to see it again.  Businesses now, I think they’ll say–you talk to people across the country, they’ll say that they feel that things are more stable now and for the first time they see orders starting to pick up.  And what’ll happen is they’ll start to invest again, they’ll start to bring people back onto their payroll and this will get more momentum.

GREGORY:  But that happened hasn’t yet–hasn’t happened yet.  We’ll get into that a little bit more in just a minute.

The question about consumer spending that really drove the market down on Friday, it’s off, biggest level that it’s been off in nine months.  Again, people are not consuming.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  There’s nothing new in those numbers on Friday.  They were in the GDP report.  No incremental news in those numbers.  So again, the overall picture for the economy is that consumers are a little more confident now, confident enough to start to spend again, investments starting to spend again. You know, there was another number on Friday that showed business confidence, in the Chicago survey, showing a little more optimism about the future, too. And–but, you know, again, this is a tough economy still, it’s going to take some time.  But we’re committed to making sure we’re reinforcing this progress we’ve seen.

But that is just a load of baloney, as Gregory pointed out.  Here’s a link to an AP article bearing the title, “Consumer Spending At Lowest In 9 Months.”  And the opening paragraph of that article begins with the words, “Consumer spending plunged in September by the largest amount in nine months.” [I used a different article because I know how articles that don’t pitch the Obama line tend to get deleted].

Seriously, exactly which part of that does Mr. Boy Genius Tim Geithner – who was so brilliant that we desperately needed him even though he was too incompetent or dishonest (or both!) to know how to pay his own taxes – fail to understand?  Consumers AREN’T “a little more confident,” Turbo Tax; they’re a LOT LESS confident!

The “growth” in GDP was almost entirely fueled by government spending.  That is a trend toward utter catastrophe and Zimbabwe-like hyperinflation, rather than anything positive.  It is absolutely unsustainable.  It is a terrible sign of artificially-generated growth by debt-fueled spending, rather than a sign for any kind of hope.

When our Treasury Secretary has his head so buried up Obama’s butt that he can’t understand simple realities, we are in a giant load of trouble.  And the anvil is being cued to drop as we speak.

Let’s go on.  Maybe Geithner and the Obama administration have some kind of solution, some kind of plan to help get us out of the problem they don’t even understand exists in the first place:

GREGORY:  Do we need another cash for clunkers program to stimulate the economy?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  I don’t think at the moment–well, let me start this way, David.  About half of the money in the Recovery Act, tax cuts and investments, are still ahead of us.  So there’s a lot of force still moving its way through the system now, and you’re going to see that continue to provide support for the economy going forward.

I interrupt at this point to point out that the Obama administration is literally refuting itself here  Geithner says the stimulus is going to creating beneficial impact.  But Obama’s chair for his Council for Economic Advisers claimed the exact opposite, saying:

“By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth.”

So which is it?

And pardon me while I mockingly laugh at an administration that is publicly literally talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.

In any event, when Geithner confidently declares that the stimulus that never really did squat in the first place is going to continue to continue to produce wonderful changes in the first place, you don’t have to go any farther than another key Obama official to see that that just isn’t true.

I’ve also got to point out that it is increasingly obvious that the cash for clunkers program was an unmitigated disaster.  First of all, it is now a documented fact that all the cash for clunkers program did was spur people to buy cars they were already going to buy within a matter of a few months anyway.  All the government did was move 4th quarter car sales into the 3rd quarter.  Second, we now know that the best and most impartial evidence demonstrates that the taxpayers forked out a whopping $20,000 for every car sold under the program.

In other words, it was an even bigger disaster than Republicans predicted it would be when they overwhelmingly opposed the program.

But we continue with Gregory and Geithner:

GREGORY:  Could you have had more impact if more of that money were paid out? You still have about $500 billion of the stimulus that has not been paid out yet.  How long will it take to get paid out?

SEC’Y GEITHER: Actually, I–again, it was designed to pay out over two years, because we knew it was going to take a long time to repair the damage we started with earlier this year.  So it was designed to pay out over this period of time.  And I think it’s actually delivering better results sooner than we would expect.  I think we’re seeing better outcomes in the financial sector, in the economy than many of us would’ve thought when we sat there with the president in Chicago at the end of last year.

GREGORY:  Right.  Well, but that’s not exactly true, because the president’s team said you’d keep unemployment to 8 percent if you didn’t have the stimulus, so.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  No.  No, you’re right, the unemployment is worse than almost everybody expected.  But growth is back a little more quickly, a little stronger than people thought, and growth is a necessary condition.  With growth jobs will come, but growth has to come first.  But just look at the financial sector.  You know, you’ve had banks repaying money with interest. Taxpayers are getting substantial earnings on this big investment in the financial system, and that’s delivering good, good returns for the American taxpayer.

Again, Geithner is utterly filled with fecal matter.

“Unemployment is worse than almost anybody thought”?  That was basically Vice President Biden’s line back in July.  And it was utterly idiotic when Biden said it back then.  Apparently, the Obama administration only has ears that hear liberals’ prognostications.  Republicans widely predicted the stimulus would utterly fail to create jobs.  That was why virtually every single one of them voted against it.  All kinds of economists said it would fail.  But they suffered from the flaw of not being liberals.

When high-level officials like Biden and Geithner say things like, “almost everybody was just shocked,” it shows how utterly insulated and ignorant these clowns who are running our government truly are.

Basically, 47% of the country didn’t vote for Obama.  And the 47% were the ones who turned out to be right.

The Obama administration consists on a bunch of weasels who are trying to dodge their central economic claim.  They said their massive stimulus (which actually cost taxpayers $3.27 TRILLION, by the way) would prevent unemployment from reaching 8%.  They were wrong.  Everything they thought was wrong.  And now “everybody” but them should be held responsible for their failure.

GREGORY:  Let’s talk about claims of success about jobs.  The White House says 640,000 jobs have been created or saved by the $800 billion stimulus.  There are Republicans who say the number is bogus, that it’s just PR.  John Boehner, leader of the Republicans in the House, as you well know, circulated a quote from an economist at Carnegie, Carnegie Mellon University, and I’ll put it up on the screen and you can look at it:  “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called `jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason:  how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” You’ve got a lot of experience in the economy.  Is this PR or fact?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  This is fact.  Again, at–when the president took office, this economy was falling at the rate of 6.5 percent at an annual rate per year, fastest rate in decades.  We were losing three-quarters of a million jobs a month.  Now, the pace of job loss has slowed dramatically, the economy’s now growing again.  It’s growing not just because the effects of the Recovery Act.  Many people opposed the Recovery Act, said it wasn’t going to work.  It’s working, it’s delivering what it should result–what it should, it should produce.  Value of Americans’ savings are up almost 35 percent since the beginning of the year.  Interest rates down.  These are substantially powerful returns on the Recovery Act, and they are delivering what they were designed to deliver.

GREGORY:  OK.  What is a saved job?  How do you measure that?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  A, a saved–well…

GREGORY:  It’s not something an economist recognizes as an actual fact.

Thank you, David Gregory.  You must work for Fox News, given the fact that the White House has been demonizing Fox News as a propaganda outlet due to the fact that it presents the facts rather than Obama’s propaganda.

The Associated Press joined Fox News in Barry Obama’s doghouse by pointing out the fact that the administration was playing all kinds of ridiculous shenanigans with their job claims.

And we can go back months into the past and see that the Obama administration has stubbornly insisted as stating as fact what was months ago revealed to be blathering nonsense:

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX): “The administration, including the vice president, has claimed that stimulus policies have added 150,000 new jobs to the level of employment. We see this cited almost daily by the administration. Can you substantiate that claim?”

Mr. Keith Hall, Commissioner Of Bureau Of Labor Statistics: “No. That would be a very difficult thing for anybody to substantiate.”

“Created or saved” is a meaningless superficial category created by meaningless superficial people to advance a meaningless superficial agenda.

It doesn’t matter how deceitful the Obama’s bogus claims are, because they are liars without shame and they don’t give a damn about reality.  And they can’t solve the unemployment problem because they can’t get past their own propaganda.

Gregory goes on a little later and points out:

GREGORY:  Right.  But my, but my point is that this should not be overstated, the impact of the stimulus should not be overstated.  Here’s the facts about how many jobs have been lost since the stimulus:  2.7 million.  And you’ve got 14 states who have double-digit unemployment.  You can look at the top five, with Michigan at the top with 15.3 percent unemployment.  So you say it could’ve been a lot of worse.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  David…

GREGORY:  A, it’s still very bad, and B, the stimulus has had only a minimal effect.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Actually–no, no, I wouldn’t say that.  I said actually, even those numbers understate it, because there’s lots of people who are underemployed, working less they would like.  So again, this is a very tough economy.  It’s only been three initial months of positive growth.  It’s going to take some time for unemployment to come down and for jobs to get created again.  And that’s why it’s important to–for people to recognize that we have a responsibility to keep working at this so we’re reinforcing the recovery.

GREGORY:  How high will unemployment go, do you think?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Don’t know for sure, but it’s likely still rising and it, it probably going to rise further before it starts to come down again.

GREGORY:  Double digits?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Most economists think we’ll probably get there, and–but again, the economists think–and, you know, there’s a lot of uncertainty in this.  Economists don’t know that, don’t know that much about the future, David.  But they say that they think we’ll start to see net jobs created at the beginning of the year, sometime around the beginning of the year, in the first quarter sometime.

I have to begin by correcting David Gregory.  He said that Obama had lost 2.7 million jobs since he passed his stimulus.  ABC News, reporting facts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had a very different number:

Approximately 3.3 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus act passed, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But what are 600,000 jobs between friends?

And when Geither says that “most economists think we’ll get [to double digit unemployment], realize that we are going to get there VERY SOON.  Geithner is talking about the wonderful effect the stimulus has had on employment even as the unemployment rate is expected to climb to at least 10% when the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for October come out.

And respected economic analysts such as Meredith Whitney – who accurately predicted the 2008 economic crash when most of her fellows were whistling a very different tune – has gone on the record predicting unemployment rates of 13% or higher in our future.

Okay.  Things are bad and they’re going to get a lot worse.  But the Obama adminstration has some kind of plan, right?  I mean, RIGHT?

Nope.  Beyond “Blame Bush,” they’ve got NOTHING.

GREGORY:  What should the administration be going specifically to reduce unemployment at this point?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  The most important thing is to get growth growing again at a strong pace.

GREGORY:  Right.  But what can the government…

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  That’s the most…

GREGORY:  …what should the government be doing?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  The government’s doing exactly what it should be doing. It’s, it’s making sure that there are tax cuts to business and families, investments in improving infrastructure, creating incentives for businesses to spend again, relief for state and local governments and getting this financial system back on its feet.

Gregory could have pointed out that the government ISN’T actually doing ANY of these things.  Tax cuts?  They plan tax increases.  What the Obama administration calls “tax cuts” have been “redistribution of wealth” as the government takes money away from producers and hands it to non-producers.  And to small businesses?  Are you joking? Geithner claims that stimulus investments have imporoved infrastructure.  The problem is and always has been that not enough of the stimulus program ever went to infrastructure in the first place.  And what exactly what incentives has Obama provided for businesses to spend again?  The fact is, Obama is trying to force businesses to spend more on healthcare, more on job-killing minimum wages, more on electricity, all of which will result in them having a lot LESS to spend on anything else.

That’s okay though, I suppose.  Geithner would have spent the rest of his time quibbling over details and pumping sunshine if Gregory had stopped him at his last paragraph.

What Gregory did was continued to push Geithner for SOMETHING that Obama could offer as an economic solution.  Something.  Anything.  And Geithner had nothing.

GREGORY:  But do you need more stimulus?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  I don’t think we need to make that judgment yet, David. Again, there’s–about half of the money committed by the Congress is still working its way through the system by design.  It was designed to work over two years.  So we’re not in a position yet where we need to make a choice about whether it’s going to take more than that…

GREGORY:  Right.

[Please go back to what I demonstrated earlier, i.e., that Obama’s own chair for the Council of Economic Advisers actually said the precise opposite.]

We now continue the documentary about the fact that Tim Geithner and Barry Obama have absolutely no clue whatsoever how to fix the economy.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  …to bring growth back.  And again, that’s only a bridge. You’re not going to get real recovery until it’s led by the private sector, by businesses.

GREGORY:  So I want to be clear, additional stimulus you don’t think is needed right now.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Not, not yet.  Now, Congress is looking at extending unemployment insurance, some other targeted programs that would expire without additional action.  You’ve heard Congress today–you heard–saw Congress this week start to talk about extending the first-time homebuyer tax credit, some other measures.  We think those will be helpful things for the economy as a whole, and they’ll also provide some added support.

GREGORY:  Let me talk about the deficit and the debt.  These are alarming numbers, you said they are.  Let’s look at the deficit since Inauguration Day: $1.2 trillion, now $1.4 trillion; it’s up 17 percent.  The overall debt, Inauguration Day:  $10.6 trillion, now $11.9 trillion.  What’s it going to be a year from now?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Well, it’s going to have to come down.  Now it’s too high, and I think everybody understands this.  You know, we’ve got these two central imperatives:  restore growth, create jobs.  But make sure people understand we’re going to have to bring those fiscal deficits down as growth recovers. First growth, though.  Without growth, you can’t fix those long-term fiscal problems.  But you’re not going to have a recovery that’s going to be strong enough unless people are confident we’re going to have the will to go back to live within our means.

GREGORY:  How do you bring it down, though?  Do taxes have to go up?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Well, we’re going to have to do–we’re going to have to make some hard choices.  The–but we’re not really at the point yet, David, we’re going to know what’s going to be the best path forward.  The president’s very committed to bring down these deficits, and he’s very committed to doing so in a way that’s not going to add to the burden on people, people making less than $250,000 a year.

GREGORY:  But wait a minute, though, what are hard–I mean, I think a lot of people, it’s fair to say, what are hard choices?  I mean, what hard choices have been made so far?  Are you going to raise taxes?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  We’re going to have to bring our resources and our expenditures more into balance.

GREGORY:  So it’s possible.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Well, again, the president’s committed to make sure we get this economy back on track.  We’re bringing down this deficit over time.  And to do so…

GREGORY:  Mr. Secretary, you talked about hard choices, so why can’t you give a straight answer to whether taxes have to come up…

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Because…

GREGORY:  …when you have a deficit this big?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Because, David, right now we’re focused on getting growth back on track, OK, and we’re not at the point yet we have to decide exactly what it’s going to take.  And I just want to say this very clearly.  He was committed in the campaign to make–he said in the campaign and he is committed to make sure we do this in a way that is not going to add to the burden on people making less than $250,000 a year.  Now, it’s going to be hard to do that, but he’s committed to doing that and we can do that.

GREGORY:  You can do it, but it’s still a chance that you’d have to raise taxes and go back on that if you’ve got a debt this big.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  We’re going to have to do it in a way that’s going to help to meet that test, meet that commitment, the commitment he made, to do it in a way that’s fair to Americans and make sure we do it in a way that’s going to allow–provide for growth and recovery going forward.  But we can do this. You know, this is not beyond our capacity as a country to do.

GREGORY:  But…

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  But first things first.

GREGORY:  Right.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  And unless we have a recovery, our long-term debts are going to be worse.  Now, you didn’t raise health care yet, but what’s happening on health care now is very encouraging.  Because if you look at what independent analysts say now, if you look at these bills moving their way through the Congress, they will make a substantial difference in reducing the rate of growth in healthcare costs over the long term and they will help bring down those long-term deficits.

GREGORY:  But there is going to be a heavy burden on the middle-class through, through health care by taxes going up, by premiums going up.  It will affect the middle-class.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  You know, I, I, I don’t think that’s the way to look at it. The–our tax–our healthcare system today imposes enormous burdens not just on businesses, but on families.  There are very high hidden costs to our current system.  And the best way to add to our long-term deficits, and the best way to add to those burdens is not reform health care today.

GREGORY:  But it doesn’t answer the question about premiums going up with an individual mandate and taxes going up on so-called Cadillac plans and other parts of this bill as they’re moving their way through the process that would increase taxes.

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Right.  Again, I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it.  I think you have to look at the entire system today and the cost that presents.  And if you look at those…

GREGORY:  Well, why isn’t that the right way to look at it if that’s the reality of what the legislation would do?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  No.

GREGORY:  How else should it be looked at?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  Well…

GREGORY:  Yes, there are, there are ballooning costs with the existing system, but the remedy still includes tax cuts–tax hikes, does it not?

SEC’Y GEITHNER:  No.  What the, what the bills moving through Congress do, and these are very important, they expand coverage, they will make care more affordable and they will reduce the rate of growth in healthcare costs.  And in that sense they’re going to provide a more fair system, so families are not going to live with the fear that if they lose their job they’re going to lose health care, they’re going to be denied healthcare coverage and they’re going to be able to afford a basic package of care that’s going to make sure they can provide for their families.

GREGORY:  Just a couple of minutes left…

Gregory turned the discussion to bonuses to AIG executives.

I’m not even going to begin to get into the terrible calamity that Obamacare will be if it passes.  Costs will go up massively.  People will pay more and get less.  There will be rationing.  A lot of people will unnecessarily die early deaths of medical neglect.

In what may be the most frightening thing of all to those who value liberty, the phrase “shall” granting the government sweeping powers and responsibilities appears a whopping 3,425 times.  That’s three thousand, four hundred and twenty-five times the government forces you to do something.  This is legislation that will give the government an all-encompassing mandate to dominate our lives.

And about the taxes Gregory mentioned?  Here’s a fun little trivia fact you can know about the 1,990 page health care bill:

According to that group, along with the word “shall” being used 3,425 times in the legislation, the word “tax” was used 87 times, “taxable” used 62 times, “excise tax” used ten times, “taxes” used 15 times, “fee” used 59 times, and “penalty” used 113 times. They also provided a list of 13 specific tax hikes contained within the bill, and even were so kind to include page numbers.

You want taxes?  Then you’ll LOVE H.R. 3692:

October 29th, 2009 by Legislative Staff

1. SMALL BUSINESS SURTAX (Sec. 551, p. 336) – $460.5 BILLION
   
2. EMPLOYER MANDATE TAX* (Secs. 511-512, p. 308) – $135.0 BILLION
   
3. INDIVIDUAL MANDATE TAX* (Sec. 501, p. 296) – $33 BILLION
   
4. MEDICAL DEVICE TAX* (Sec. 552, p. 339) – $20 BILLION
   
5. $2,500 ANNUAL CAP ON FSAs* (Sec. 532, p. 325) – $13.3 BILLION
   
6. PROHIBITION ON PRE-TAX PURCHASES OF OVER-THE-COUNTER DRUGS THROUGH HSAs, FSAs, and HRSs* – (Sec. 1802, p. 1162) – $2.0 BILLION
   
7. TAX ON HEALTH INSURANCE POLICIES TO FUND COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS RESEARCH TRUST FUND* (Sec. 1802, p. 1162) – $2.0 BILLION
   
8. 20% PENALTY ON CERTAIN HAS DISTRIBUTIONS* (Sec. 533, p. 326) – $1.3 BILLION
   
9. OTHER TAX HIKES AND INCREASED COMPLIANCE COSTS ON U.S. JOB CREATORS – $56.4 BILLION
   • IRS reporting on payments to certain businesses (Sec. 553, p. 344) – $17.1 BILLION
     
   • Delay implementation of worldwide interest allocation rules (Sec. 554, p. 345) – $26.1 BILLION
     
   • Override U.S. Treaties on certain payments by “insourcing” businesses (Sec. 561, p. 346) – $7.5 BILLION
     
   • Codify economic substance doctrine and impose penalties (Sec. 562, p. 349) – $5.7 BILLION
10. OTHER REVENUE-RAISING PROVISIONS – $3.0 BILLION

TOTAL TAX INCREASES: $729.5 BILLION

*Violates President Obama’s pledge to avoid tax increases on Americans earning less than $250,000

My point in bringing this to you was simply to point out that if you have ever seen a circus that featured a bunch of clowns wildly driving around and crashing into each other in little clown cars or tricycles, you pretty much understand what it looks like inside the White House.

These people have no clue.

And the new United States of America under Obama, launched with such great fanfare, is – like the Titanic – on a collision course with a giant iceberg.

Democrats’ Effort To Fearmonger Path To Socialized Medicine Has Been Tried Before

In the mainstream media narrative, Sarah Palin is demonized as “about half a whack job” and her statement about “death panels” is literally interpreted in a way I’d love to see them apply JUST ONCE to the Constitution.  Conservatives were denounced as an “angry mob,” as “un-American,” and as exhibiting Nazi characteristics by the Democrat Speaker of the House.

The media loves to talk about rightwing fearmongering.

I’d like to say a little more about leftwing fearmongering.

How about the one that we need to pass health care reform in order to get our economy out of the toilet?

A smattering of various Obama “warnings” fearmongering health care:

– “We must lay a new foundation for future growth and prosperity, and a key pillar of a new foundation is health insurance reform.”

– Obama cast retooling the U.S. health-care system as crucial to the nation’s economic success. Reform would help rein in the national deficit and rebuild the economy, he argued, in a way that would help middle-class workers, whose wages have stagnated in recent years largely because of spiraling health-care costs.

– WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama warned on Thursday that the United States would not rebuild its economy unless political leaders joined him immediately on a perilous political drive for healthcare reform.

– President Obama warned Wednesday night that health-care reform is central to rebuilding the economy “stronger than before,” and without congressional action on health-care reform, “We’re guaranteed to see Medicare and Medicaid basically break the federal budget.”

And our last Obama “warning”:

“The country has to reform its health care system or else not only are you going to continue to have people really going through a hard time, we’re also going see a continuing escalation of our budget problems that can’t get under control,” Obama told Moran. “I think America has to win it here.”

In the dialogue surrounding health care, Obama warned against “scare tactics,” which he said are fostering anxiety and serving to distract Americans from the plan’s principles.

What’s nice about the last one is that it includes fearmongering on the one hand with warning against “scare tactics” on the other.  Obama tells us one the one hand that our economy will plummet unless we implement ObamaCare, and then demonizes everyone who has a different fearmongering message.

It doesn’t matter that Obama’s urgings that we pass health care “reform” will lower our costs and boost are economy are entirely false:

Under questioning by members of the Senate Budget Committee, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee do not propose “the sort of fundamental changes” necessary to rein in the skyrocketing cost of government health programs, particularly Medicare. On the contrary, Elmendorf said, the measures would pile on an expensive new program to cover the uninsured.

Though President Obama and Democratic leaders have repeatedly pledged to alter the soaring trajectory — or cost curve — of federal health spending, the proposals so far would not meet that goal, Elmendorf said, noting, “The curve is being raised.” His remarks suggested that rather than averting a looming fiscal crisis, the measures could make the nation’s bleak budget outlook even worse.

It also doesn’t seem to matter that, given that the “reforms” Obama is seeking wouldn’t take effect until at least 2013, there is little reason to rush headlong into anything other than opportunistic partisan demagoguery.  And yet Barack Obama was out there rushing “reform” and calling August 1st “the people’s deadline” even as polls showed “the people” overwhelmingly wanting Congress to take time crafting health care legislation.

Interestingly, these tricks of fearmongering health care “reform” in the name of averting economic calamity and trying to rush the process through have been tried before.  Think Bill Clinton, First Inaugural Address, 1993:

But all of our efforts to strengthen the economy will fail—let me say this again; I feel so strongly about this—all of our efforts to strengthen the economy will fail unless we also take this year, not next year, not 5 years from now but this year, bold steps to reform our health care system.

In 1992, we spent 14 percent of our income on health care, more than 30 percent more than any other country in the world, and yet we were the only advanced nation that did not provide a basic package of health care benefits to all of its citizens. Unless we change the present pattern, 50 percent of the growth in the deficit between now and the year 2000 will be in health care costs. By the year 2000 almost 20 percent of our income will be in health care. Our families will never be secure, our businesses will never be strong, and our Government will never again be fully solvent until we tackle the health care crisis. We must do it this year.

The combination of the rising cost of care and the lack of care and the fear of losing care are endangering the security and the very lives of millions of our people. And they are weakening our economy every day. Reducing health care costs can liberate literally hundreds of billions of dollars for new investment in growth and jobs. Bringing health costs in line with inflation would do more for the private sector in this country than any tax cut we could give and any spending program we could promote. Reforming health care over the long run is critically essential to reducing not only our deficit but to expanding investment in America.

What’s interesting about this is that liberals depict the Clinton years as the time when the streets were lined with gold and every child went to bed in a warm house with a full tummy.

So the point would obviously be, either Clinton was fearmongering health care in a way that did not turn out to be true at all, or the “glorious Clinton economy” is itself a fabrication.  Because somehow Bill Clinton had to flounder along with no health care reform.

We need to put some things into historic perspective: 1) Bill Clinton so mismanaged the country his first two years in office that it led to the largest political tsunami ever experienced in American history as Republicans took over in an unprecedented landslide 1994 election.  2) Many of the benefits that Bill Clinton has received credit for were actually enacted by the Republican Congress (example: welfare reform).  3) Bill Clinton benefited from an economy that was just recovering from a severe recession at the end of the Bush I administration as Clinton took over.  By contrast, George Bush II – like Barack Obama now – had a significant recession handed to him that will count against his average performance.  In President Bush’s case, that recession was compounded by the worst attack on American soil in nearly 200 years  in the 9/11 terror attack.  4) Bill Clinton changed the way unemployment figures were calculated back in 1994 – making comparisons to previous eras appear far more rosy than they really were.  5) The “Clinton Budget Surplus” is in reality a myth.  In actuality, Clinton created a smoke and mirror illusion by transferring “public debt” costs which are calculated as part of the budget over to “intergovernmental holdings” (eg., by borrowing from Social Security) which are not counted as part of the public debt.

I might also point out that Bill Clinton’s famous statement from his State of the Union Speech in January 1996 – “THE ERA OF BIG GOVERNMENT IS OVER” – tacitly recognized the new Republican era, and which in reality was the ultimate reason why the Clinton economy became ultimately successful.

Democrats were wiped out in 1994 as Republicans swept into power when Americans became fed up with Democrat incompetence and massive spending.  And Bill Clinton was wise enough to recognize the handwriting on the wall.  As a result, he transitioned into a fiscal moderate and avoided the fate of his party.

But now the man who recognized that “The era of big government is over” is back to his pre-1994 ways.  Bill Clinton has joined Barack Obama with the very same big spending, big government socialistic mindset that brought the Democrats to such historic disaster in 1994.

There are many things we can do to improve our health care system.  That goes without saying.  But the Democrat’s presentation that opposing their system is opposing “change” or “reform” is simply asinine.  If any change is better than our present course, than we should just nuke ourselves and be done with it: that would be “change,” after all.  We need to recognize that there is good reform and there is bad reform – and government-run health care is simply “bad” reform.

ObamaCare suffers from massive policy problems that go right to the heart of the greater debate surrounding the size of government, the size of Obama’s unprecedented deficits, and the unsustainable size of our debt.  Democrats have a real problem explaining how they are going to spend $1.6 trillion and yet bring down costs – especially given the CBO’s damning analysis.  They have a problem explaining how they’re going to take hundreds of millions out of Medicare and yet not affect the quality of care to Medicare beneficiaries.  And they have a problem explaining how they’re not going to end up transferring over a hundred million Americans out of their employee-based health care and into the “public option” when good analysis sees exactly that happening (and see also here).

The American people listened to Obama fearmonger his way to the gigantic stimulus package that will ultimately cost Americans $3.27 trillion.  The stimulus has been deemed by the American people as being so unsuccessful that fully 72% of Americans now say “returning the unused portion of the $787 billion dollar stimulus to taxpayers would do more to boost the economy than having the government spend it.”  People are turning against what they increasingly recognize as big government socialism.

We need to STOP health care “reform” until it includes tort reform such as loser pays, until it includes an end to state and federal mandates, until it includes allowing our 1300 private insurance companies to compete across state lines.  And we need to STOP health care “reform” until it EXCLUDES giving full medical coverage to more than 12 million illegal immigrants, until it excludes “public options,” excludes “Co-Ops,” and excludes any other device that becomes a backdoor guarantee to government health care.

Democrat Position: We Have To Spend To Keep From Going Bankrupt

There’s stupid, really stupid, truly stupid, and Democrat stupid.

Try to follow Joe Biden’s argument (if you dare!):

(CNSNews.com) – Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

“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.”

Spend your way out of bankruptcy.  There you go.

It sounds really good.  But I’ve got a couple neighbors on my street who tried it – and it turns out that it doesn’t work out all that good.

You see things walking your dog every evening.  Like what kind of cars people own, and what kind of expensive “toys” they have in their garage, and whether or not they’ve had pools installed or not.

There are two homes that are now standing vacant on my street.  And both of them had two expensive luxury cars in the driveway, and a number of toys such as jet skis (in one) and quads (in the other) in the garage.  And one had put in a below-ground swimming pool.  Both couples were young enough that I wondered, “Where did they get the money to buy all this stuff?” up until the very day I saw the moving trucks and then the foreclosure signs.

Nope.  You don’t spend to keep from going bankrupt.  You spend to go bankrupt even FASTER.  And, for the record, it is invariably excessive spending that puts people on the racetrack to bankruptcy in the first place.

Now, in business, or even in homes, one might make a relatively expensive purchase that will so reduce costs during the lifetime of the “gadget” that it justifies the initial outlay.  A new computer system that will streamline and optimize the accounting system; a new refrigerator that replaces a worn-out, energy-wasting unit.

Now, no rational business owner or homeowner would make such major purchases if they are already deeply in debt: the best move for either would be to pay down their highest-interest debts, which would save FAR more money in the long run.  Buying more stuff would just add to your already-too-high payments.  Even a sound purchase is unsound if you don’t have the cash on hand to pay for it.  I think budget experts such as Suze Orman (who offers such rare pearls of wisdom as “Saving is good; going into massive debt is bad”) would agree with me on this one.

But is Joe Biden talking about a big purchase that will save money down the road?

No.

Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Elmendorf just got through telling Congress that the health care legislation at issue does not achieve “the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.”  And then he went on to say that, “And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.”

ABC News’ Z. Byron Wolf reports:

Answering questions from Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota at a hearing of the Senate Budget Committee today, Elmendorf said CBO does not see health care cost savings in either of the partisan Democratic bills currently in Congress.

Conrad:  Dr. Elmendorf, I am going to really put you on the spot because we are in the middle of this health care debate, but it is critically important that we get this right.  Everyone has said, virtually everyone, that bending the cost curve over time is critically important and one of the key goals of this entire effort.  From what you have seen from the products of the committees that have reported, do you see a successful effort being mounted to bend the long-term cost curve?

Elmendorf:  No, Mr. Chairman.  In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.  And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.

Conrad:  So the cost curve in your judgment is being bent, but it is being bent the wrong way.  Is that correct?

Elmendorf:  The way I would put it is that the curve is being raised, so there is a justifiable focus on growth rates because of course it is the compounding of growth rates faster than the economy that leads to these unsustainable paths.  But it is very hard to look out over a very long term and say very accurate things about growth rates.  So most health experts that we talk with focus particularly on what is happening over the next 10 or 20 years, still a pretty long time period for projections, but focus on the next 10 or 20 years and look at whether efforts are being made that are bringing costs down or pushing costs up over that period.

As we wrote in our letter to you and Senator Gregg, the creation of a new subsidy for health insurance, which is a critical part of expanding health insurance coverage in our judgement, would by itself increase the federal responsibility for health care that raises federal spending on health care.  It raises the amount of activity that is growing at this unsustainable rate and to offset that there has to be very substantial reductions in other parts of the federal commitment to health care, either on the tax revenue side through changes in the tax exclusion or on the spending side through reforms in Medicare and Medicaid.  Certainly reforms of that sort are included in some of the packages, and we are still analyzing the reforms in the House package.  Legislation was only released as you know two days ago.  But changes we have looked at so far do not represent the fundamental change on the order of magnitude that would be necessary to offset the direct increase in federal health costs from the insurance coverage proposals.

In other words, the Obama administration is going to spend a ton of money in order to buy something that will cost even more money than the thing it replaces.

Not exactly a Consumer Reports “Best Buy” recommendation.

So we’re back to the young homeowners on my block who splurged and splurged and splurged on toys and luxery items and fancy cars until long after they were already broke.  And then they went “bye-bye.”

Don’t listen to Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  They are genuinely clueless idiots who will quickly spend this country into bankruptcy all the while assuring us that they are somehow spending us out of bankruptcy.  It doesn’t make any sense in your small business, it doesn’t make any sense in your home, and even though the federal government has a giant printing press to “make money,” it doesn’t make any sense in the White House.

Obama’s Vs. Bush’s Deficit In One Truly Scary Picture

Want to see something really scary?

Stop and think about this picture.  Realize that Democrats – who are and have been demagogues in every sense of the word – repeatedly positioned themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility against Bush spending.

And then the moment they get the chance – from the very first nanosecond – they blow up the budget deficit the way terrorists blew up the World Trade Center towers.

And, before anyone object to the comparison to terrorism, let me clarify myself even further.  Terrorists can only do so much damage.  What Obama did to the federal budget dwarfs anything terrorists could have done to us.  The commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation in history has declared total war on fiscal responsibility.  It’s actually woefully inadequate to compare what Obama did to the budget to a mere terrorist attack.

The Heritage Foundation introduces the discussion this way:

President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious. The Washington Post has a great graphic which helps put President Obama’s budget deficits in context of President Bush’s.

Let me put it another way: Suppose I punch you in the mouth 100 times, sending you to the hospital on life support with a face that will never again be the same no matter how many reconstructive plastic surgeries you have.  Would it make you feel better if I told you that – next time around – I’d only punch you in the mouth fifty times?

The man who exploded a nation’s debt in a way never before seen in the entire history of the human  species is poising himself to take credit for his fiscal responsibility by only exploding it half as much as his initial nuclear blast.  And we’re actually supposed to be grateful for it!

It needs to be mentioned that this is just the spending Obama has proposed in the first 6 months of his term along with the forecasted trends that spending will entail.  It only stands to reason that the actual future spending will only increase, and these already truly terrifying numbers will only get worse over the next few years.  We literally aint seen nothin’ yet.

The generally reliably liberal Washington Post has said this:

President Obama’s ambitious plans to cut middle-class taxes, overhaul health care and expand access to college would require massive borrowing over the next decade, leaving the nation mired far deeper in debt than the White House previously estimated, congressional budget analysts said yesterday.

In the first independent analysis of Obama’s budget proposal, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that Obama’s policies would cause government spending to swell above historic levels even after costly programs to ease the recession and stabilize the nation’s financial system have ended.

Tax collections, meanwhile, would lag well behind spending, producing huge annual budget deficits that would force the nation to borrow nearly $9.3 trillion over the next decade — $2.3 trillion more than the president predicted when he unveiled his budget request just one month ago.

Although Obama would come close to meeting his goal of cutting in half the deficit he inherited by the end of his first term, the CBO predicts that deficits under his policies would exceed 4 percent of the overall economy over the next 10 years, a level White House budget director Peter R. Orszag yesterday acknowledged would “not be sustainable.”

The result, according to the CBO, would be an ever-expanding national debt that would exceed 82 percent of the overall economy by 2019 — double last year’s level — and threaten the nation’s financial stability.

“This clearly creates a scenario where the country’s going to go bankrupt. It’s almost that simple,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, who briefly considered joining the Obama administration as commerce secretary. “One would hope these numbers would wake somebody up,” Gregg said.

Probably not, given that we are a ship of fools captained by the worst fool in American history.

You know what is interesting?  Look at what the Democrats said against Bush’s – now in historical context against Obama’s – incredibly tiny deficits (you DO realize that Bush’s deficits virtually amount to a rounding error compared to Obama’s massive ocean of red ink, don’t you?).  From the Left Coaster:

CBO Budget Deficit Estimates Too Low-Dems Attack Bush

After the Congressional Budget Office officially issued the staggering news of $400+ billion deficits for this year and next, the Democratic candidates on the campaign trail in unison hit Bush hard today on his fiscal mismanagement. Several even got in some good lines while doing so. […]

Those figures prompted criticism from Democrats, such as Howard Dean, who has called for a repeal of Bush’s tax cuts. “The president has not only destroyed three million jobs, he is destroying the financial future of our children with these crazy tax cuts for the top 1 percent,” the former Vermont governor said in a telephone interview.

“It’s obvious this administration doesn’t have the slightest clue about how to get this economy back on track, get Americans back to work and get our nation’s finances under control,” said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who added, “it is time to admit what millions of unemployed Americans already know – that the economic policies of George W. Bush are the worst in our nation’s history.”

Said Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut: “The tide of red ink is rising higher than ever before. And the best George W. Bush can do is ask the American people to hold their breath. That’s unfair to our kids and unacceptable for our economic health.”

John Edwards, a senator from North Carolina, said the record deficits indicate it’s time to say “enough of the unaffordable tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy … and enough of pretending that deficits just don’t matter.”

Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, cited the deficits as well as job losses as proof that the president’s “tax-cut economic policy is failing, it’s not helping ordinary taxpayers.”  […]

But the best line of the day came from Bob Graham.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, in a variation of a line from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, said Bush “is telling the world that Americans shall defer any price, unload any burden on our children, postpone any hardship for ourselves to give tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.” […]

There are three items from the CBPP analysis that should be in the Democrats’ line of attack next year: […]

In other words, two-thirds of the $10 trillion deterioration is a direct result of actions taken by George W. Bush. […]

If the Democrats cannot win an election on those issues, then frankly the country deserves what it gets. These are George Bush’s deficits, and the voters need to be reminded of that every day between now and next November.

For the record, unemployment was 4.4% in 2006 when Nancy Pelosi and Democrats took over the House and Harry Reid and Democrats took over the Senate.  And the Dow was close to 12,000.  But, apparently, total Democrat control of the House and the Senate somehow still never translated into any kind of Democrat responsibility for the slide that only began after they took power over Congress.

Democrats – being demagogues – repeatedly blamed the deficits on the Bush tax cuts (because it enrages them that the American people should be allowed to keep more of the money that they earn).  But the reality is actually quite straightforward, as the Wall Street Journal evidences:

Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues. This truth has been proved at both state and federal levels, including by President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts on income, capital gains and dividends. Those reductions have raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history.

Liberals cannot even allow for the possibility that tax cuts might generate more revenue.  So – as the following New York Times article exemplifies – they must be perennially surprised when tax cuts create larger tax revenue by stimulating more investment.  It simply astonishes liberals that if government allows me to keep more of what I produce, that I might be inspired to try to produce even more.

“For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion.

On Wednesday, White House officials plan to announce that the deficit for the 2005 fiscal year, which ends in September, will be far smaller than the $427 billion they estimated in February.”

It wasn’t Bush’s tax cuts that created deficits; they clearly RAISED revenues, rather than lowered them.  What created the deficits was massive spending (on 9/11, on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on Katrina, on the huge Bush Medicare drug benefit, etc. etc.).

Massive spending.  You know, like Obama is doing now – ONLY A HELL OF A LOT WORSE THAN ANYONE IN HUMAN HISTORY HAS EVER EVEN CONTEMPLATED BEFORE.

But let’s put blame where blame belongs: Presidents are responsible for deficits.  As Democrats repeatedly pointed out.  Which is why any fair-minded Democrat (as though there actually were any) should be screaming in rage at the Obama insanity.

Now we see what massive hypocrites and incompetents Democrats truly are.  They didn’t scream at Bush’s deficits because they wanted fiscal responsibility; they only demagogued an issue for rhetorical benefit.  They falsely positioned themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility – which was a joke even before Barack Obama came along and demonstrated it for the sickest and most twisted joke ever told.

As a conservative, I DO criticize the huge deficits under George Bush.  And I apply that same “fiscal responsibility” lens on Obama and see the worst economic manager in the history of the world.

Ali Obama And The Forty Czars: A Frightening Story

Ali Baba had his forty thieves.  Ali Obama has at least 31 czars (reported today to be as high as 34) — and counting.  Whether Ali OBama’s czars also qualify as “thieves” or not, I shall leave to you to determine.

Reuters has a story entitled, “Obama fashions a government of many czars,” that begins, “Name a top issue and President Barack Obama has probably got a “czar” responsible for tackling it.”  Personally, I kind of like the “czar-free” government our founding fathers fashioned for us better.

Apparently I’m not alone in my preference.  Even Democrat Robert Byrd is one the record arguing that “President Obama’s ‘czar strategy’ is an unprecedented power grab centralizing authority in the White House, outside congressional oversight and in violation of the Constitution.”

Taxpayers for Common Sense have been trying to keep track of all the Obama czars.  It’s difficult given the lack of accountability and openness that has emerged from the administration that said they’d make accountability and openness their hallmarks.  These czars have no accountability to anyone but Obama.  Democrats would be screaming bloody murder if George Bush had done such a thing, but mum has been the word as Barack Obama has ran an end-run around the Constitution (which has appallingly little regard for czars) and around Congressional oversight.

Too many czars (The Daily Citizen)
Pub Date: Jul 08, 2009

It has taken President Barack Obama less than eight months to do what imperial Russia could not do in 400 years.

Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that Obama has appointed 31 “czars.” That’s more than ruled Russia during its entire imperial history.

Obama has appointed a California water czar, a Mideast peace czar and a Mideast policy czar, a pay czar (to determine how much the private sector should pay, not the government), a health care czar, an energy czar and a green jobs czar, a Sudan czar, a climate change czar and numerous others, with the promise of more to come. And, if you can’t keep track of all the czars, don’t worry. Obama has also appointed an information czar.

The president should feel right at home when he visits Russia this week.

Few of these czars require any congressional approval, but Obama has given many of them power over cabinet-level officials who are subject to confirmation.

Taxpayers for Common Sense says all these appointments don’t guarantee that the federal bureaucracy will work any better. If anything, the group notes, the appointments simply add another layer to that bureaucracy, something that rarely makes the government more responsive to taxpayers.

More worrisome is the clear trend towards the government, especially the federal government, getting involved in an increasing amount of our daily lives. Equally troubling is the idea that the solution to any problem that faces us is a stronger hand on the reins.

The czars did Russian no favors. We have no reason to expect they will do the United States any good.

Robert Byrd used the words “unprecedented power grab” to describe Obama’s “centralizing authority.”  I’m getting really fed up with Obama’s “unprecedented power.”  When I googled the phrase “unprecedented power” and “Obama” I got 3,370,000 hits.  Which is about 3, 370,000 hits too many.  And really scary hits, too, such this one from Money Morning:

The plan clearly grants the central bank unprecedented new powers to conduct comprehensive examinations of almost any U.S. financial company, as well as any of that company’s foreign affiliates. It would also give the central bank oversight of any commercial company that owns a banking charter known as an industrial loan company, according to The Journal.

There’s also various synonyms for “unprecedented,” such as “sweeping”:

Washington (AP) – Health care overhaul legislation from President Barack Obama’s congressional allies would create a federal insurance czar with sweeping new powers to oversee medical plans nationwide, an idea already drawing fierce criticism.

Liz Peek in a Wall Street Weekly piece entitled “Obama’s Czars Play Russian Roulette With Business” describes the much-more-harmful-than-helpful role of massive federal control over more and more of our economy and our way of life:

To date, this administration has seemed more interested in penalizing and correcting businesses than in inspiring growth and profitability. Oversight measures are abounding, big and small. Next week the Treasury is set to release its plan for financial regulatory reform, which was meant to simplify the tangled web of overseers now in place – a system that grew up piecemeal as the banking and trading sector grew in size and sophistication. The word is that instead of reducing the number of agencies, Treasury Secretary Geithner will propose two new ones. Why? Because the congressional committees that are charged with monitoring these organizations refuse to give up power. I have to laugh.

When you stop and think about it, Obama is seizing total control of everything while simultaneously arguing his administration really isn’t responsible for anything.  That’s what makes me laugh.

Rahm Emanuel, Ali Obama’s chief of staff, said something only a couple of weeks after the election – before Obama assumed his “unprecedented power” – that serves to show that none of this has been a coincidence.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

This seizure of sweeping, unprecedented power in the name of “crisis” in order to gain political advantage should truly frighten you if you understand history.

Jonah Goldberg wrote,

Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation.  Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency (Liberal Fascism, p. 43).

You can go back to a February 13, 2009 Wall Street Journal article to see that Barack Obama is firmly in precisely such a fascist crisis-hyping tradition.

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

Michael J. Boskin wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined.  It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.

The Associated Press says:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year, exploding the record federal deficit past $1.8 trillion under new White House estimates.

Budget office figures released Monday would add $89 billion to the 2009 red ink — increasing it to more than four times last year’s all-time high as the government hands out billions more than expected for people who have lost jobs and takes in less tax revenue from people and companies making less money.

The editorial board of the  liberal Washington Post writes:

To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product. Under the CBO’s most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 — roughly double what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113 percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.

And all of this reminds me of the Cloward-Piven strategy:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

I genuinely believe that Barack Obama – a follower of Saul Alinsky as well as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate when he belonged to it to go along with a long and deep relationship with leftist radicals – is pursuing a “heads we win, tails you lose” strategy.  If the economy somehow picks up under all of this massive spending and even more massive debt, then Democrats win big and Republicans lose.  If – much more likely – the economy crashes under its own massive weight due to hyperinflation as interest payments on the debt soar, then a starving, terrified people will scream for help from their government.  And Democrats will win the pure-socialist totalitarian state they have always envisioned.  Either way, Obama liberals believe they will win big.

Ali Obama and his 31 (or is it 34?  Incredibly, the media seems to have stopped reporting the growing number!) czars are no friends of America or the Constitution that framed its laws.  And whether Obama and his gang of czars intend to or not, their “redefinition of the role of government in our economy and society” will very likely overwhelm our entire way of life and send it crashing down.

Even Liberals Beginning To Warn Of Obama ‘Debt Tsunami’

We are heading for a cliff, and Barack Obama keeps pushing the accelerator to the floorboard.

It is bad.  It is so bad even the liberals on the editorial board of the Washington Post are aware of it.

The Debt Tsunami: The CBO’s latest warning on the long-term deficit is scarier than ever

Sunday, June 28, 2009

THE CONGRESSIONAL Budget Office has a tough job: to provide America’s lawmakers with a reality check on their tax and spending plans. Not surprisingly, the CBO’s projections are not always received cheerfully. Both President Obama and leading congressional Democrats were less than thrilled when the CBO estimated that the costs of universal health coverage would be much higher than advertised. To be sure, projecting the cost of legislation involves making assumptions and constructing models that may or may not prove accurate 10 years down the road. Nonetheless, the CBO, with its tradition of scholarly independence, is the best available arbiter, and Congress must heed its numbers — like them or not.

Now comes the CBO with yet more news of the sort that neither Capitol Hill nor the White House is likely to welcome: its freshly released report on the federal government’s long-term financial situation. To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product. Under the CBO’s most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 — roughly double what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113 percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.

This huge mass of debt, which would stifle economic growth and reduce the American standard of living, can be avoided only through spending cuts, tax increases or some combination of the two. And the longer government waits to get its financial house in order, the more it will cost to do so, the CBO says.

It’s actually worse than the Washington Post editorial board states.  The 113% debt-to-GDP ratio cited by the Post used a different measuring standard than what the Congressional Budget Office uses today.  When the debt-to-GDP raises to 82% in 2019, it will be the equivalent of 144% when converted to the same standard that was used to calculate the WWII figure.

Let me illustrate: in 1945 the debt-to-GDP was 115% as found at scribd.com (it actually went to 121% in 1946); the same chart – which runs to 2007 – shows the debt-to-GDP as 65% in 2007.  But the Congressional Budget Office figure for the year 2007 shows the debt-to-GDP as 36.9% in 2007 (and 40.8% in 2008).  Clearly very different numbers.

So we have to do some converting to make the numbers comparable.  And what we find when we take that into account is that our debt-to-GDP ratio in 2019 will be 144.4% rather than 82% [65/39.6 = 1.76;     82 X 1.76 = 144.44].

So, if the Washington Post is going to provide us with debt-to-GDP figures from 1945, they need to state the current and future debt-to-GDP figures in the same terms.

Not only will our debt-to-GDP be considerably higher than it was at the highest point in our nation’s history due to Barack Obama’s frankly insane spending, but other factors need to be considered which reveal the real truth to be even worse yet.

Namely, during the WWII and post-WWII era, American productivity was at its height.  U.S. industrial capacity literally stunned the world.  We could built more tanks than the Germans believed possible; we could build so many aircraft that by wars’ end the U.S. were able to fly more planes on one single mission than Japanese intelligence said existed in the entire world.  And as the war ended, and as American factories geared toward peacetime production to provide a world whose industry had been devastated by war, we were able to produce as had never been seen before.

This is clearly not true anymore.  Today, we are watching our industrial capacity go bankrupt, in a trend that started years ago and has accelerated dramatically in recent times.

You cannot spend your way out of debt; you can only produce your way out of debt.  When American productivity was at its apex, we could recover from a high debt-to-GDP ratio.  But what can we do now and in the future, when we have lost that productive capacity?  Exactly how will we produce our way out of anything?

As another problem that is about as serious, during the WWII era America rationed and saved.  Even as Americans were rationing every commodity for the war effort, they were also investing in war bonds and Treasury bills.  So when the United States government went into high debt in the 1940s, who did they owe that debt to?  American citizens.  And as the U.S. government repaid that debt, it was being fed right back in to the U.S. economy.

Is that true anymore?  Not even close.  The U.S. population no longer rations, and it certainly doesn’t save.  And thus today, our debt is largely owned by foreign countries (particularly China).  So as our debt goes up and ever upward, the U.S. government is most certainly NOT feeding the American economy when it makes its interest payments; it is feeding China’s economy.

So, in real terms, our debt-to-GDP will be higher than it’s ever been (144.4% in 2019, soaring way past the 200s in 2038), and at the same time our means to accommodate that debt will be at an all-time low.  Thus, while our debt went down steadily after 1946, it will be going up dramatically as we enter our very bleak future.

In other words, we’re screwed.  We are really, truly screwed.

And as shocking as these numbers already are, they do not take into account the trillions of dollars that will be racked up as the Democrats advance their government health care agenda and their cap-and-trade fiasco.  The former will add trillions of dollars in costs even as the latter muzzles our economic output to the tune of trillions of dollars.

As the government tries to calculate the cost of health care “reforms,” realize something: in 1965, nobody (but conservatives) ever even began to dream that the Medicare program would soar to an unfunded obligation that is now over Thirty-six TRILLION dollars.  The next time someone tells you that the government will be able to create “savings,” remind him of the $36 trillion black hole known as Medicare.  And then laugh hysterically in his face.

It won’t get better.  Rather, it’s going to get so much worse that it would frankly be less frightening to be having Jason Voorhees chasing you around in a horror movie.  The baby boomer generation began qualifying for Social Security in 2008.  In two years, they will begin to qualify for Medicare.  From that point on, wave after wave of 77 million retiring baby boomers will begin to swamp the system for the next 20 years.  Talk about a “tsunami.”

To make matters even worse, our population is aging, and health care costs are going to “necessarily skyrocket” (to borrow a phrase Obama used to describe the costs that would result from his energy plan) no matter what we do.  In 1945, we had a worker-to-retiree ratio of 42 workers paying into the system for every retiree consuming benefits.  Now we have a 3-1 ratio.  And by 2030 it will be only 2-1.  It kind of makes me miss those 50 million potential workers that we murdered in the abortion mills.

There is no possible way out system can escape disaster.  And on top of that, we have a president and a Congress that is compiling more debt faster than any president and Congress in history, bar none.  President Obama racked up more debt in his few months in office – $1.8 trillion – than President Bush did in seven years (dealing with 9/11, two wars, and Hurricane Katrina to boot).

A New York Post article points out:

And these deficits aren’t merely a temporary result of the recession; the president’s budget would run deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year for the next decade.

The national debt would double. In other words, Obama would run up as much government debt as every president in US history from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. Put simply, he’d dump $84,352 per household of new debt into the laps of our children and grandchildren over the next decade.

Given what we face, does more spending and more debt at a faster rate than has ever been compiled in human history seem sane to you?

One day, not very far off now, Americans will realize that they voted for their nation’s national suicide in voting for Barack Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress.  They will realize that they voted for their children or grandchildren to struggle, and quite possibly starve to death as their country collapses under the weight of its own massive debt.

But until that time, we will continue merrily along as we hurtle faster and faster toward food riots and a total societal collapse.

The beast is coming.  I pray you will be ready.