After nearly fifty years of ripping off the American public, the government scam known as Social Security is coming undone. In 2010, Social Security revenue will not be enough to pay benefits to retirees. The Associated Press reports:

The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.

It's time to start cashing them in.

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

We have to start tapping into the alleged $2.5 trillion in IOU's in the so-called "trust fund." ???? How do we do that ? Here's how:

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg's municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn't be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

Yes, kiddies, we have to BORROW the money to pay those SS IOU's. That's because the "trust fund" doesn't exist. It's just paper. Congress spent your SS "trust fund" money long ago. Borrowing the money will drive our deficits even higher, and the piece de resistance is….guess who gets to pay back all that borrowed money ???? Why, it's us, the American taxpayers who funded Social Security in the first place !!! We get to pay for it all over again !!! What a deal ! That's your government at work for YOU (stealing your money) !!!

Now, you will hear various government officials say that SS is "backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government." That's supposed to make us feel all warm, fuzzy, and safe, but again….the "full faith and credit of the U.S. government" only means that the government can FORCE us taxpayers to pay for SS…all over again. It means nothing more than that. It only means we've been ripped off, but the government will make make it all good by ripping us off some more. That's the government's definition of "faith." They have "faith" that they can forcibly extract more tax dollars from us after stealing our trust fund.

SS will soon go into permanent deficit status:

In the short term, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security will continue to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes for the next three years. It is projected to post small surpluses of $6 billion each in 2014 and 2015, before returning to indefinite deficits in 2016.

For the budget year that ends in September, Social Security is projected to collect $677 million in taxes and spend $706 million on benefits and expenses.

Social Security will also collect about $120 billion in interest on the trust funds, according to the CBO projections, meaning its overall balance sheet will continue to grow. The interest, however, is paid by the government, adding even more to the budget deficit.

Congress will undoubtedly "fix" SS again, as they've "fixed" it so many times in the past, by raising SS taxes (again) and/or cutting benefits (again). Remember, when SS started FDR promised that the SS tax would never be more than 1% of income. Because Congress has systematically raided the SS trust fund since the 1950's to cover up it's own fiscal irresponsibility, YOUR SS taxes are raised over and over, and YOUR SS benefits are slashed over and over. That's the nature of a scam. A scam ultimately collapses under it's own weight, as did Bernie Madoff's scam, which was a drop in the bucket when compared to SS.

Good thing we aren't in enormous trouble with borrowing money already. Oh wait, we ARE:

The national debt — the amount of money the government owes its creditors — is about $12.5 trillion, or nearly $42,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. About $8 trillion has been borrowed in public debt markets, much of it from foreign creditors. The rest came from various government trust funds, including retirement funds for civil servants and the military. About $2.5 trillion is owed to Social Security.

And don't forget the $55 TRILLION in unfunded Medicare entitlement liabilities. There's that little matter to deal with, and now we have President Obummer about to add trillions more in entitlement liabilities with his boneheaded health care reform. What could possibly go wrong ? Besides everything, that is.

Here's one of those government jackasses prattling on about that "full faith and credit" bilge:

Good luck to the politician who reneges on that debt, said Barbara Kennelly, a former Democratic congresswoman from Connecticut who is now president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

"Those bonds are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States of America," Kennelly said. "They're as solid as what we owe China and Japan."

Well, that's great news. We're sure on solid financial footing with airheads like Kennelly in charge. About as solid as Greece, where rioters have taken to the streets. How long will it be before that happens here ???

In closing, I can only say, if we don't get off of this Big Government ship of fools real soon, all of us will sink together, and that will be the social justice we richly deserve for our collective irresponsibility. Politicians, especially Democrats, always talk about doing this or that "for the children," but if we really want to help our children, we need to get our fiscal house in order to give our children's futures a snowball's chance in hell. As of now, things couldn't look worse. The enduring shame of the greedy baby boom generation looks to be that we indulged ourselves at the expense of future generations. We may be the first ones to leave America worse off than we found it. That is a legacy I can't embrace.

Quote Of The Day: "we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what is in it" – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
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Burning Fiscal Issue: "he's trying to pawn himself off as a fiscal conservative. And yet just in recent weeks, two weeks ago it has come out in news accounts he had a Republican Party of Florida credit card that he charged $130 haircut, or maybe it was a back wax — we are not sure what all he got at that place." – Governor Charlie Crist (R-FL), talking about U.S. Senate primary challenger Marco Rubio, who is leading Crist by 32 points in the latest poll.
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A New York Corruptocrat State Of Mind: Recent scandals in New York…Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Gov. David Paterson, Rep. Charlie Rangel..and now, I give you Rep. Eric Massa, who recently resigned from Congress amid year-long allegations of improper sexual contact with male staffers. This guy is some piece of work. In recent days, Massa said he wouldn't seek re-election because he had cancer. Then he resigned immediately when the sexual allegations came out. Then he said he was pressured out by Democrats because he was against ObamaCare (ObamaCare isn't liberal enough for Massa). Then he went on Glenn Beck's show and said he did grope and tickle a male staffer. Then he went on Larry King's show a few hours later and said he didn't grope anyone. Massa called Obama's Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel "the son of the devil's spawn," and described the following nude shower scene, with Emanuel allegedly threatening Massa that he better vote for ObamaCare or else – "I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me." The White House denies the incident ever occurred. When Larry King asked Massa if he was gay, Massa refused to answer, saying the question was an insult to gay people. If you are interested in this bizarre tale, The Washington Post has a pretty good take on it here.
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ObamaCare To Bring Down Deficits, Part Red Sea: Here's President Obama singing the merits of health care reform, from Fox News:

"Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people's premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade because we're spending our health care dollars more wisely," Obama told an audience at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia.

Obama was so proud of these cost-saving numbers in the latest version of health care reform, he delved into a bit of Washington-speak to back them up.

"Those aren't my numbers," Obama said to the rising applause of the estimated 1,300 in attendance. "They are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress for what things cost."

Sorry, Mr. President. You're numbers are a wee bit off. The actual ObamaCare deficit reduction estimate from the CBO over the next decade – $132 billion. The real deficit increase estimate over the next decade after all the Democrats smoke and mirrors accounting tricks are stripped away from ObamaCare -$460 billion. (link)

Nice try, Obama.
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Canadian Socialist Health Care Paradise: Because almost every pro-ObamaCare Democrat under the sun has come out with some American health care horror story in order to further their cause via emotion rather than logic, I have one such story from that wonderful government-run Canadian health care system, where everyone is covered for everything and life is beautiful all the time (or so say liberals). From the Toronto Sun, this article is titled 'Sick Man Faces Bankruptcy Or Death':

Kent Pankow lives in Edmonton, in a province and a country that is trying to either kill him or bankrupt him.

No sense mincing words.

Suffering from brain cancer, Kent Pankow was literally forced to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. for lifesaving surgery — at a cost to family and friends of $106,000 — after the health-care system in Alberta left him hanging in bureaucratic limbo for 16 crucial days, his tumour meanwhile migrating to an unreachable part of the brain, while it dithered over his case file, ultimately deciding he was not surgery worthy.

Now, with the Mayo Clinic having done what the Alberta Cancer Board wouldn’t authorize or even explain, but with the tumour unable to be totally removed, the province will now not fund the expensive drug, Avastin, that the Mayo prescribed to keep him alive and keep the remaining tumour from increasing in size — despite the costs of the drug being totally funded by the province for other forms of cancer.

Kent Pankow, as it turns out, has the right disease but he has it in the wrong place.

Had he lung cancer, breast cancer, or colon cancer, then the cost of the drug — $4,555 per treatment, two times a month — would be totally covered by Alberta’s version of OHIP.

But he doesn’t.

And so he is not only a victim of brain cancer, he is also a victim of arbitrary discrimination.

Our supposedly universal federal health care system, the pride of most Canadians and the political struggle of America, is only as good as the length of the waiting line and whether you have the right disease at the right time.

After writing more than 150 letters to everyone from the prime minister to virtually all health authorities both federal and provincial, and being ignored in return, Kent Pankow’s wife, Deborah Hurford, decided to finally go public.

Btw, Canadian official Danny Williams, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, chose to have his heart surgery in the United States. Williams said, and I quote, "This was my heart, my choice and my health…I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics." So much for Canada's universal health care paradise.

Exit question – Is MORE bureaucracy really the way we want to go with health care in America ? With ObamaCare, that is exactly what we will get.

President Obama often refers to "the failed policies of the past" to criticize his predecessor, President Bush. One of those Bush "failed policies," according to Obama, was the Bush tax cuts, which the President and practically every other Democrat have railed against for years. There is a reason for such criticism, though it really wasn't the Bush tax cuts alone that caused the problem. It was Bush cutting taxes at the same time he ramped up federal spending that led to federal deficits and a net increase in federal debt of around $4.5 trillion during his tenure in office.

Keep Obama's "failed policies of the past" rhetoric in mind as you read the CBO's latest debt projections on Obama's watch. From the Washington Post:

President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall… "Over the next 10 years, those policies would reduce revenues and boost outlays for refundable tax credits by a total of $3.0 trillion," wrote Douglas W. Elmendorf, the CBO director. Combined with interest payments on that shortfall, the tax cuts account for the entire increase in deficits that would result from Obama's proposals.

If Bush cutting taxes and increasing federal spending was a "failed policy of the past," then how should we describe Obama's cutting taxes and increasing spending at twice the rate Bush did, resulting in twice as much debt as Bush ? Should we call Obama's policies, failed policies of the past on steroids, or what ??? When Obama promised change, I'm betting most of you didn't anticipate a change for the worse.

Any long-term CBO debt projection contains assumptions, of course, and the current CBO projections (through 2020) include assumptions that GDP will increase over 4% per year, that unemployment will gradually fall to 4.8%, and that the price index will remain relatively stable. I don't want to be a pessimist here, but what if those assumptions DON'T come to pass ??? The accumulated debt will then be even greater. Even if the CBO assumptions are correct, we will have a federal debt well over $20 trillion by the end of the decade, with interest payments on the debt soaring to $800 billion annually.

And that renders most of Obama's presidential economic pronouncements to be little more than the politics of the meaningless.

For most of the last year, I thought the Republican party should have been the party of 'no.' Resisting Obama's health care takeover, the stimulus boondoggle, and cap-and-trade….those were definitely times for the GOP to say 'NO'.

But lately, the GOP has been saying 'NO' to things they should be saying 'YES' to, such as the jobs bill and the Congressional deficit reduction committee.

The cornerstone of the $15 billion jobs bill is to give employers tax credits for hiring new workers. How can the GOP be against that, other than to resist the Democrats ? For the last year, Republicans have been rightly calling the stimulus package a failure because of it's enormous cost and because it didn't do enough to help the private sector, but then when the jobs bill comes up to help private sector businesses, including small businesses, the GOP votes against it. The GOPers will say 'we voted against the jobs bill because it's money we don't have, and it will add to the deficit.' That may be true as a standalone policy, but….the GOP voted against the deficit reduction committee !…which could have reduced government spending and voila!, more than offset the cost of the jobs bill. In addition, creating jobs will reduce the deficit by increasing government revenue, which has fallen due to rising unemployment. By voting against both policies, which have traditionally been policies Republicans would embrace, Republicans have in effect voted against their own stated beliefs in tax cuts and deficit reduction.

New Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) and four other Republicans broke ranks with the party to help pass the jobs bill. Good for them. As a result of the GOP helping to shoot down the deficit reduction committee, President Obama is forming his own deficit reduction committee, which is a much weaker substitute for a Congressional deficit reduction committee. Congress is where the legislative authority to make budget cuts resides. The President's committee has no such power. It is more of a cosmetic exercise, and the GOP is partly to blame for that.

The GOPers are saying the deficit reduction committee is just a front for the Democrats to justify tax increases, but GOP involvement could have helped insure that it wasn't. If the Dems had only proposed big tax increases and little in the way of spending cuts (as they probably would have), then the GOP could have rightly highlighted that and pointed out that the Democrats were not serious about reducing government spending. Instead, the party of 'no' missed the boat altogether, and the country missed a chance to reduce the deficit, which is our number one long-term problem.

Thanks for nothing, GOP. After a year of complaining about the lack of bipartisanship, you missed two golden opportunities to engage in it. You just became what you've been complaining about.

In fairness to the GOP, it wasn't only Republicans who voted against the Congressional deficit reduction committee. 23 Republicans voted against it, but 23 Democrats also voted against it. The final vote was 53-46, seven votes shy of adopting the committee. There was a lack of seriousness and bipartisanship from both sides of the aisle, and our deficit problem remains unaddressed. Shame, shame. This is why Americans are dissatisfied with both parties, and the political games they play.

From Bloomberg Press:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

"I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”

The free-market system ? I must have a far different idea of what constitutes the free-market system than our President does. In my version of the free market system, companies like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan don't get to have the taxpayers bail them out when their risky business schemes run amok and result in massive losses for their companies, as well as for the financial system in general. When those companies get bailed out, that isn't the free-market system, it's the welfare state. Perhaps Obama the wealth redistributor has the two confused. Maybe he thinks the welfare state IS the free-market system. As for me, I'm not even too crazy about what the welfare state does to poor people in this country. I'm certainly not going to advocate it for the wealthy.

Let's examine these "savvy businessmen" that President Obama knows, the men whom Obama doesn't begrudge their multi-million dollar bonuses.

We'll start with JPMorgan. You may remember them for a "savvy" little derivative they cooked up in 1994 known as the credit default swap (CDS). The thinking behind the CDS went like this – J.P. Morgan loaned out huge amounts of money in 1994, tens of billions of dollars. By federal law, J.P. Morgan had to keep huge capital reserves on hand in case some of those loans went bad. So the "savvy businessmen" at J.P. Morgan designed a way to free up those capital reserves and mitigate their loan risk at the same time. A third party would serve as an insurance company to guarantee the loans in return for regular premium payments from the banks. The CDS was born, and within a few years, CDS business was booming big time. You may also remember the third party who served as the insurance company for the credit default swaps. It is known as AIG.

As always, it's important to remember that George W. Bush was the President in the 1990's when the CDS's were created and became popular, because everything is Bush's fault.

In fairness to Obama's acquaintance Jamie Dimon, he wasn't at JPMorgan when the CDS was created. Nope. But a few years after the CDS became the hot new financial instrument, Dimon and a partner formed the largest financial conglomerate the world had ever seen. That company was Citigroup. Dimon went on to become CEO of Bank One in 2000, and President of JPMorgan in 2004. He is also on the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and following the real estate crash, credit crisis, and financial system collapse brought on by massive overleveraging on derivatives like the JPMorgan-created CDS, Dimon of the NY Federal Reserve made decisions to lend Dimon of JPMorgan $55 billion to bail out Bear Stearns. Nice work if you can get it. Then JPMorgan bought Washington Mutual. Too big to fail became too bigger to fail.

Here are the bailouts given to Jamie Dimon's various companies:
Citigroup – $45 billion ($25 billion has not yet been repaid) plus additional federal aid
Bank One – merged with JPMorgan in 2004 when Dimon became President of JPMorgan
JPMorgan – $25 billion (all repaid)

And the insurance company, AIG ? They have been bailed out and given other federal aid to the tune of $180 billion. $45 billion of AIG's bailout money has not been repaid, but it was recently announced that AIG is paying their employees $100 million more in bonuses. And the money AIG received from the government went to pay the insurance claims of other banks, like CDS creator JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, etc.

These are some "savvy" mo-fos alright, as long as the American taxpayers serve as THEIR insurance company, insulating the "savvy" schemers against all losses and responsibility for their own actions. Who could ever begrudge multi-million dollar bonuses for such upstanding men as these ? These "savvy" turds really flesh out the old saying 'laughing all the way to the bank.' And the bank is us, the American people. Another word for us is the 'marks.' The banks make their profits from us in the first place, and then when the banks lose the money, we pay again to bail them out. And that is the greatest scheme of all, stamped with a seal of approval by the federal government.

Now let's turn to Goldman Sachs, who got a nifty little $10 billion bailout, all of which has been repaid. Goldman Sachs also got $12.9 billion of the AIG bailout money, more than any other firm, according to the NY Times. Lots of "savvy businessmen" at Goldman Sachs too. Remember who told America that the financial system was on the brink of collapse, and that we needed to pony up $700 billion for TARP ? That was Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who coincidentally was the former CEO of…drumroll please…Goldman Sachs. Small world, isn't it ? Paulson left Goldman Sachs in 2006 to become the Treasury Secretary, near the apex of of the housing bubble. Paulson was at Goldman Sachs for 32 years. Maybe HE should have seen the financial troubles coming, don't ya think ? When guys like Paulson or current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former President of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, tell us how much they hated the bailouts, it comes across as more than a tad disingenuous. These were the guys who watched the financial world spin out of control and didn't say squat until it all blew up in their faces. As Paulson said yesterday, "I do not get concerned about the second guessing, because this was very complicated. It's very hard for people to understand the technicalities." Sure Hank, whatever. Why should anyone second-guess the actions of Goldman Sachs or the rest of the Wall Street gamblers ? Btw, Paulson, overseer of the largest financial bailout in American history, considers himself a champion of the free market. I guess shame is not a trait these guys possess.

When Obama's "savvy businessman" Lloyd Blankfein took over for Paulson as the CEO of Goldman Sachs in 2006, he earned the big bucks right away, as the housing bubble peaked. The risky derivatives financial scheme was paying off nicely at that time. Blankfein earned over $53 million in 2006, and over $53 million again in 2007.

Finally, we should get to WHY Obama calls these men "savvy" and doesn't "begrudge" them their bonuses, while he continually demonizes others who engaged in the exact same business practices…..

Could it be because Goldman Sachs was the largest private donor to Obama's campaign, donating nearly $1 million ? Goldman Sachs was Obama's second largest donor overall. JPMorgan was sixth on the Obama campaign donation list. Standing in third place is Harvard University (every single person mentioned by name in this post attended Harvard University. Another big coincidence, eh ?).

These might be "savvy" men, but they certainly think the rest of us are a bunch of dummies. Maybe they're right, because we keep letting them get away with it.

Btw, credit default swaps, the trading of credit default swaps, and maybe even the insider trading of credit default swaps IS STILL LEGAL. Suckers.

AIG should be dissolved. Goldman Sachs should be broken up and sold. Citigroup should be broken up and sold. THAT is how the free market is supposed to work, no matter what our President might believe.

Here's Speaker Of The House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), talking about job losses:

“…misguided economic policies have failed to create jobs. Since [the President] took office, the country has lost 3.2 million jobs, the worst record since President Hoover…Job losses are taking a real toll on the financial security of American families…According to today’s survey, while the national unemployment rate dropped slightly, it still stands at a near record high."

Pelosi is being pretty hard on President Obama here, isn't she ?

No, not a bit. Pelosi wasn't talking about Obama. The words I quoted above are from August 2003, and San Fran Nan was talking about President Bush's "misguided economic policies." After Bush had been in office 19 months, Pelosi was castigating the President for an unemployment rate of 6.1%, caused mainly by the recession Bush inherited and 9/11. If Bush implemented any "misguided economic policies" that negatively affected unemployment, then Pelosi must be referring to Bush's across-the-board tax cuts for all taxpayers, though that doesn't make any sense. Tax cuts would only assuage rising unemployment, not add to it. Ask Obama, he cut taxes in his stimulus package to assuage rising unemployment.

Now, let me give you the statement Pelosi did make about the current job situation, with unemployment at 9.7% (actually waaaay higher) and a Democratic President at the helm who presided over more than 4 million job losses in his first 12 months in office:

"Today's jobs report marks a welcome step in the right direction for our economy and our families: the unemployment rate is going down. The Recovery Act, which Congress passed one year ago to pull our economy back from the brink of collapse, has already created or saved nearly 2 million jobs so far. Yet our work is far from over. This recession that President Obama inherited has taken the worst toll on our job market since World War II.

Here we have a tale of two Presidents – they both inherited recessions. They both presided over an economy shedding jobs during their first year in office….Notice how Pelosi treats the two Presidents exactly the same, lol. Just kidding. That's the opposite of what Pelosi did. She blamed Bush for recessionary circumstances beyond his control and cast Bush's jobs performance in the worst possible light, while she gave credit to President Obama for recessionary circumstances beyond his control and cast Obama's jobs performance in the best possible light. That's the politicization of jobs.

That's also why I hate most politicians with a passion, and wouldn't trust them to feed my cat while I was out of town, much less trust them to run the country.

It's not only Democrats who politicize jobs, of course. The Republicans are doing their level best to blame job losses on Obama now, and they continually cite Obama's guarantee that unemployment would not rise above 8% if the stimulus package was passed. Okay, so Obama miscalculated. So what ? Who didn't miscalculate the size of this recession ? Almost everyone did, or at least everyone who had it in their power to do something about it. In any case, it's not like Obama was elected President due to his expertise in economics. He was elected due to his soarting rhetoric, not his record of achievement. He didn't have a record of achievement. He's learning on the job right now. That's OUR fault, not his.

I don't blame the job losses on President Obama. It's unfair to do so, any more than it was to blame the 2001-2002 job losses on Bush. If I have any criticism of Obama on jobs, it would probably be his obsession with health care reform in his first year when there were more pressing economic matters. Also, the uncertainty surrounding the future of health care makes the private sector unsure and hesitant. Business people like to know what their costs and risks are prior to making financial commitments, and Obama has introduced a significant amount of uncertainty into the private sector. We don't know what health care will cost. We don't know what energy will cost. We don't know where taxes will be. We don't know what regulations will be put into place. He's subsidizing one company and not another. And lately, since the Massachusetts election, Obama's policies seem like a patchwork quilt of confusion. He's trying to be a liberal, a moderate, and a conservative all at the same time. It almost seems like he's campaigning instead of leading. All his promises come with expiration dates, and a lot of his rhetoric seems tied to the previous day's news cycle, never a good sign for a President. Obama has added more uncertainty to already extremely uncertain times. Then he wonders why banks are hesitant to loan money, after the banks just got devastated from making questionable loans. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see why they are hesitant now.

But the job losses ? No, those are not Obama's fault, just as the majority of the decrease in the job losses have little to do with Obama either, though he'd like you to believe otherwise. They have more to do with the overall stabilization of the economy. We hit bottom (for now), that's all. You can credit TARP and other bailouts and rescue efforts for stabilizing the financial system and the economy, and you can credit the stimulus package for stopping an even worse hemorrhaging of jobs if you wish, even though we can't measure it. I'm sure over $350 billion spent in stimulus so far had some effect, even if it didn't "save or create 2 million jobs" as the President claims. In fact, if we have to give someone the most credit for stopping the financial collapse and therefore saving jobs, it's probably the Fed, who committed $6.4 trillion to the financial rescue effort. Yes, you heard that number correctly. That's $6.4 TRILLION. If you want to get really depressed, go to this CNN Money link for a list of all the financial rescue efforts. In total, THE GOVERNMENT HAS COMMITTED OVER $11 TRILLION. Thus, using the word "credit" to talk about job loss reductions is a mixed blessing at best. The government cures are almost as bad as the disease, maybe worse.

Not that there's anything to worry about.

In his friday meeting with House Republicans, President Obama made the following statement:

"The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. $1.3 trillion. So — so when you say that suddenly I've got a monthly budget that is higher than the annual — or a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true. And what is true is that we came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is, we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade. It had nothing to do with anything that we had done. It had to do with the fact that in 2000, when there was a budget surplus of $200 billion, you had a Republican administration and a Republican Congress, and we had two tax cuts that weren't paid for, you had a prescription drug plan — the biggest entitlement plan, by the way, in several decades — that was passed, without it being paid for, you had two wars that were done through supplementals, and then you had $3 trillion projected because of the lost revenue of this recession. That's $8 trillion. Now, we increased it by $1 trillion because of the spending that we had to make on the stimulus.

Democrats are absolutely giddy with excitement over the above Obama claims. They think Obama the GOP slayer has set the record straight. I am, however, more than happy to fact-check the President's claims here, because a lot of them are either wrong or misleading.

Let's start with that alleged $200 billion surplus Clinton left in 2000.

It never happened. I know most of you probably think it did happen, but it didn't. It was a budgetary trick, a gimmick. Clinton did come close to balancing the budget with his Republican Congress, but there was never a surplus. I addressed this misconception in a previous post. The federal debt actually increased by $17.9 billion in 2000. That's a DEFICIT, not a surplus.

Next, let's address the unbelievably inane Democratic talking point that the Clinton administration left us on a path for budget surpluses for the next decade, which Bush came along and ruined single-handedly.

Those imaginary surpluses of 2000 were gone the very next year, in 2001. Remember, fiscal year 2001 budgeting was done by the Clinton administration and Clinton's Republican Congress (the federal government's fiscal year runs from October 1st to September 30th). When Bush entered office, he inherited a recession too, mostly due to the dot-com bust, later worsened by the after-effects of 9/11. Neither of those events were caused by Bush. There were never going to be any ten-year surpluses. Reality intervened. All Democrats, including Obama, tell us now that deficit spending is peachy-keen and necessary to fix a bad economy, and Bush did his part by enacting his 2001 tax cuts. Somehow, Democrats didn't agree so much then as they do now. Here's how the NY Times described it in May, 2001:

Congress gave final approval today to the biggest tax cut in a generation, voting to reduce all income tax rates over the next five years and to give the weakened economy a quick jolt by sending rebates to taxpayers this summer.

Following 9/11, we had the Afghanistan war, which EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT IN THE SENATE VOTED FOR. The Afghanistan AUMF passed the Senate by a vote of 98-0. That spending came from EVERYONE, not just Bush. Later, came the Iraq AUMF. Democrats in the Senate SUPPORTED that war, by a margin of 29-21. The Senate at that time consisted of 49 Republicans, 50 Democrats, and 1 Independent. It was not controlled by the Republicans. Democrats voted FOR the spending for both wars.

Now, let's move on to the Bush era deficits. This is pretty interesting too.

2002 deficit: $157.8 billion
2003 deficit: $377.6 billion
2004 deficit: $412.7 billion
2005 deficit: $318.3 billion
2006 deficit: $248.2 billion
2007 deficit: $160.7 billion
2008 deficit: $460 billion
2009 deficit: $1.42 trillion

I think we have to look back on those Bush deficits, with the exception of 2009, as the good old days, relatively speaking, no ? It even looks like Bush was heading for a balanced budget, with the deficits dropping in 2005, 2006, and 2007 (and with two wars going, two Bush tax cuts, and Medicare Part D implemented, no less), until the housing sector imploded. Now we have $1 trillion+ deficits projected as far as the eye can see. And if I argued like liberals do, I'd point out that the two largest Bush-era deficits came after the Democrats took over singular command of Congress, and that those two deficits under Democratic leadership were far greater than the previous six years of Bush deficits combined. I might even point out that Barack Obama was in the Senate then, and voted for every budget and spending proposal.

The CBO tells us why the deficit increased so much from 2008 to 2009. From Wikipedia:

The CBO reported in October 2009 reasons for the difference between the 2008 and 2009 deficits, which were approximately $460 billion and $1,410 billion, respectively. Key categories of changes included: tax receipt declines of $320 billion due to the effects of the recession and another $100 billion due to tax cuts in the stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA); $245 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other bailout efforts; $100 billion in additional spending for ARRA; and another $185 billion due to increases in primary budget categories such as Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Defense.

You can't blame any politician for revenue drops during the recession, although Obama tried to in his statement that kicked off this post, by acting like he inherited a $3 trillion revenue drop from Bush. Let's look at how much revenue was lost before Obama stepped into the White House. Here are the revenue numbers:

FY2007 – $2.568 trillion federal revenue.
FY2008 – $2.524 trillion federal revenue.
FY2009 – $2.105 trillion federal revenue.

From this, we see that revenue peaked at $2.568 trillion before the recession. Then it dropped by $24 billion in 2008 and $419 billion in 2009. That totals $443 billion that you could say was lost prior to Obama stepping into the White House……BUT….Obama passed $288 billion in tax cuts in 2009 as part of his stimulus package, so he's responsible for part of that lost revenue. A good deal of it, actually. I don't see $3 trillion in lost revenue that Obama "inherited" here, do you ? I see more like $155 billion,. Plus, 2008 and 2009 were deflationary years. If I adjusted for inflation, that loss would be even less. As for projecting revenue drops into the future to explain things away, our double-talking President would be well-served to remember whose job it is to address that situation. It's HIS job, along with Congress. So liberals can understand how ridiculous Obama's claim is, imagine if President Bush had said the dot-com bust and 9/11 recession was going to cause him to run up $3 trillion in debt 10 years later. Liberals would have made a laughingstock of Bush if he had said something so stupid, and rightfully so. Obama's claim of inheriting $3 trillion in lost revenue is nothing more than Obama claiming he's not up to doing his job.

Let's look at the deficit increases the politicians could control:

Who implemented the stimulus tax cuts ? Obama and the Democrats.
Who implemented TARP ? Bush, Republicans, and DEMOCRATS. Obama voted FOR it. A greater percentage of Democrats voted for TARP than did Republicans.
The increases in Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and defense were supported by both parties, including Obama.

I guess Obama thinks he "inherited" deficits that he and his party actively voted FOR. That makes him a dishonest jerk, a synonym for "politician."

Last, let's look at Obama's incredible declaration that $8 trillion in deficits over the next decade are not his responsibility. He claims he inherited those as well, and also claims he only added $1 trillion to the deficit.

Do I even really need to address this fantastic bit of nonsense ? Obama IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. He spent tons of money to get the job. His party CONTROLS BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS. They can do whatever they want to do, and that includes DEFICIT REDUCTION. I'm sure they'lll get no resistance on that front from Republicans, who've been screaming about deficits from the rafters all year long. Let's look how the federal spending has increased:

FY2002 – $2.011 trillion (first Bush/GOP budget)
FY2007 – $2.729 trillion (last GOP Congressional budget)
FY2008 – $2.983 trillion (Democrat Congressional budget)
FY2009 – $3.518 trillion (Democrat Congressional budget)
FY2010 – $3.83 trillion (Democrat Congressional budget)

What this shows us is that in six years, the GOP-led (or neutral in the Senate) Congress increased spending by about $870 billion in six years (2002-2007). When the Democrats took over Congress, they increased spending by $900 billion in only THREE YEARS (2008-2010). The Democrats are increasing spending over twice as fast as the GOP did, and Obama voted in FAVOR of every one of those budgets. Obama has fixed spending at a rate nearly $1 trillion per year higher going forward than it was only two short years ago, and then he wants to pretend it's someone else's fault. Un-real.

FINDING – Obama is engaging in full-fledged partisan spin. He doesn't even take responsibility for his own votes in the Senate that increased the deficits he now claims he "inherited." He doesn't take responsibility for anything his party voted for during the Bush era. He doesn't take responsibility for his own massive spending increases. All he is admitting to is basically the $862 billion stimulus package, plus a couple other things.

Who does this guy think he's fooling ??? Besides liberals, that is. They LOVE his misdirection. The rest of us know better.

Note to liberals – This was NOT a defense of the Bush administration. Y'all always get confused about that. I was against the Bush deficits, the Iraq War, and the unfunded Medicare Part D too. I don't want to hear any more silly misdirection comments here arguing as if I supported all those things. This was merely a fleshing out of the Democratic and Obaman involvement in things, to shine a little light on the twisting of history that invariably occurs. Our current Prez is a world-class twister. I'm sorry you have to hear that, but unfortunately, it's true. I wish it wasn't.

Update – I just realized I left something important out about Obama's distortions. When Obama said he inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit when he walked in the door in 2009, that included the Bush-era $700 billion TARP spending (that Obama and the Dems voted FOR). What Obama failed to include was that about $500 billion of TARP has been repaid by the banks, reducing the deficit Obama claims he "inherited" to $800 billion. Yet, the 2009 deficit was over $1.4 trillion. Obama nearly doubled the 2009 deficiit, and is raising it even more next year. The man seems incapable of honesty.

When President Clinton declared 'the era of big government is over" in 1996, the federal budget of the United States Of America was $1.56 trillion. A mere fifteen years later, President Obama has announced a $3.83 trillion budget for 2011. I don't think I'm alone in saying the rumors of the death of big government were greatly exaggerated. The increase in spending alone since 1996 ($2.3 trillion) is substantially more than the entire federal budget was in 1996. It's no surprise that federal revenue has not been able to keep up with this spending explosion, and even if it had, imagine the effect that would have had on our economy. Imagine the economy as it is now, but with the federal tax burden DOUBLE what it is currently. Nightmarish.

It's not like GDP increases justify this spending boom either. In 1996, the GDP was $7.762 trillion. Now, it's $14.4 trillion. Our GDP has increased by 85% while our federal spending has increased by 145% over the same period. If our federal spending was in line with GDP, the federal budget should be around $2.88 trillion now, but it's a trillion dollars higher. We've managed to increase spending by a trillion dollars per year above GDP. That's a trillion per year that comes out of the private sector, a trillion per year more that comes out of the taxpayers pockets.

But we don't pay for all these enormous federal spending increases, as bad as that would be for the economy. No, what we do is even worse. We deficit spend and run up the federal debt. We borrow or print the money. The reason this is worse is because when we run up the debt, we are not only indebting future taxpayers for our irresponsibility, but they also have to pay interest on the debt. We pay hundreds of billions of dollars in interest on the debt now, and it we keep on the trajectory we're heading, as it appears we will judging from the latest numbers coming out, by 2019 we would be paying more than $700 billion per year in interest on the debt alone. To put this in perspective, our entire defense budget now is about $644 billion. That $700 billion in interest on the debt would be money flushed down the toilet, of no use to any American.

And now for the bad news. As bad as our economic prospects are already, we have an economic time bomb getting ready to detonate very soon. That bomb is known as the baby boom generation, the largest group of citizens in America. The baby boomers will begin to retire next year, and by the end of this decade, most of them will be out of the workforce. This will have a number of effects on our economy. First of all, consider that much of the economic growth from the mid-1980's until now has come due to the boomers. They entered the workforce, started earning money, and started SPENDING money, leading to economic growth. As the peak earning years of the boomers starts to wane, they will do LESS SPENDING, resulting in less economic growth. Remember, 70-80% of our economy is based upon consumer spending. That spending will start dropping very soon, as the boomers move into retirement. Secondly, just as the boomers leave the workforce, move into retirement, and start spending less money, thereby inhibiting economic growth, they will start putting an enormous demand on Social Security and Medicare, the two entitlement programs that represent the majority of our federal budget.

And guess what ? We aren't prepared to pay those boomers. We have an estimated $55 trillion in unfunded entitlement liabilities on top of our $12.3 trillion current debt, a debt that is projected to reach $21 trillion or so by 2019. There is no money in the mythical Social Security Trust Fund (Congress stole it), and Medicare is on a definite path to bankruptcy, in far worse shape than Social Security.

So, what does it all mean ?

It means we are headed for the perfect economic storm, one that will surely bankrupt our country. We are facing nothing less than an economic tsunami, while our distinguished Congresspersons watch it come, doing nothing. Even worse than doing nothing, they are actively making things worse by ramping up federal spending, deficits, and debt at a rate unprecedented in the history of our country. Congress and the White House have gone beyond irresponsibility. This level of depraved indifference to the economic situation America is facing should be a crime, a very serious crime. And I'm not talking about just Democrats or just Republicans here. It's both parties. Almost all of them are complicit in this criminal negligence.

Think about this – we live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet our federal government has never been able to balance the budget in my entire lifetime. That debt has accumulated and accumulated ever since I was born, and I'm 56 years old. It seems to get progressively worse as each year passes. It's absolutely unconscionable.

The federal government is leading us off the brink into the abyss, and I'm so fed up with it that the words I'm writing here can barely express it. I could care less if Obama says he's' "not an ideologue," or if he complains that he's being "demonized" by the Republicans. So what ? Who gives a flip ? He SHOULD be demonized, as should be every other politician of either party who is part and parcel of this problem, as Obama certainly is. Bush was a part of it too. Democrats, Republicans, I'm sick of them all (although slightly more sick of the Dems and their big government bs, which is the essence of the problem). If I hear one more big spending, big government moron talk about being "compassionate" as they spend us into oblivion, I'm going to turn into Howard Beale from the movie Network and start screaming "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore !' out my window. I don't want to hear Obama blame it all on Bush, and I don't even want to hear the Republicans blame it all on Obama. That's useless political puffery. It's meaningless. What we need are some SOLUTIONS, even if they are painful in the short term, because if we don't come up with them, all of us are going to suffer far more down the road. What I don't want to hear is what I just heard from our President – trifling nods toward fiscal responsibility while he massively increases spending and deficits more and more and more. That is phony political posturing, which solves nothing. We've had enough of that already.

Arrrrrggghhhhh ! No wonder people take Xanax.

P.S. – As bleak as our future is, allow me to point out one bright spot before we all go out and hang ourselves. Here it is – we don't have a long-term unemployment problem. As the boomers retire, starting next year, all kinds of jobs are going to open up for younger workers. In fact, our problem will soon become that we don't have enough workers to fill all the available jobs. The demographics should insure it. So, all you young workers, take heart. You will have jobs…but how you're going to pay all the taxes that my stupid generation is leaving for you is another matter. On behalf of my stupid generation, I sincerely apologize. I never supported the stupid policies of my stupid and greedy generation. I wish all you young people the best of luck. You'll need it to get through the Great Recession ahead.

The official proclamation from the media is that President Obama is a moderate now, after word came from the White House that Obama will propose a three-year federal spending freeze in tonight's State Of The Union address. The official proclamation claims that the President got the message from the Massachusetts senatorial election, and now he's taking bold steps to deal with our disastrous deficit/debt problem, the one thing certain to destroy the economic future of this country.

Let's scrutinize the official proclamation for accuracy.

1. Obama's spending freeze would only cut non-defense discretionary spending. This is the small part of the federal budget, representing only about 20% of federal spending. It excludes nearly all the major expenditures, such as Social Security, Medicare, other entitlements, and defense. Over ten years, the White House says this spending freeze would save $250 billion, but the White House isn't proposing a ten-year freeze, it's proposing a three-year freeze, from 2011 through 2013. Estimated savings – about $15 billion per year for three years. To put this in perspective, the deficit for FY2009 was $1.5 TRILLION. The estimated deficit for FY2010 is $1.35 TRILLION. Obama's spending freeze is like taking a drop of water out of a bucket-full, it's so minor. If this is an example of Obama being a moderate, we're in trouble.

2. Obama already INCREASED non-defense discretionary spending by about $100 billion during his first year in office. In FY2009, President Bush's last budget, that spending was $589 billion. Obama jumped it to $687 billion for FY2010, and he did it during a recessionary period of no inflation. That's not moderate either. That's standard liberal big government policy.

3. Prior to announcing the three-year spending freeze, Obama had already submitted budgets to Congress for the next three years. Those budgets had called for REDUCTIONS in non-defense discretionary spending after FY 2010. As Alex Conant explains:

In the budget proposal that President Obama submitted to Congress last year, his budget office already projected actual cuts and freezes in “non-defense” discretionary spending for the next three years. That’s in part because of the huge increase in that area of spending that the President requested (and received) for the current fiscal year. To be specific: FY2009 (President Bush’s last budget) had $589 billion in non-defense discretionary spending. That number jumped to $687 billion in FY2010 (Obama’s first budget), and then drops to $641 billion in FY2011, $622 billion in FY2012 and $625 billion in FY2013. So for the White House to now boast that it will freeze non-defense discretionary spending is hardly news. If anything, it’s backtracking on its earlier plans to actually cut that area of spending.

By my math, if Obama freezes spending at the FY2010 level, he will actually be spending $173 billion more than his own previous budget proposals called for. Still sound moderate ???

4. Also excluded from Obama's spending freeze will be the rest of his stimulus package (which has now swelled from $787 billion to $862 billion, according to the CBO), the massive spending of ObamaCare if it passes (at least a trillion over ten years and most likely WAY more), and a second stimulus package that is being contemplated ($174 billion). I don't see anything moderate there either.

There's nothing at all moderate about Barack Obama. Those who say there is are playing their typical game of 'Let's Pretend.'

Still, this spending freeze that isn't…this drop in the bucket…this $15 billion pretend spending cut amidst trillions in defcits and massive federal spending and entitlement increases….has liberals in an uproar. As the Nobel-prize winning Princeton professor, NY Times columnist, and alleged economist, Paul Krugman, said of the imaginary spending freeze, "this is appalling on every level." President Clinton's former Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, actually had the audacity (of a dope) to refer to Obama's move as "fiscal austerity." These guys REALLY like to play 'Let's Pretend.' There has been nothing austere about Obama's fiscal policies to date. Nothing. The reactions of Krugman and Rubin are typical of the liberals, er, I mean progressives. You see, progressives have two fiscal scenarios:

1) During lean economic times like this, they advocate massive government spending and tax increases (like Obama's bank tax, health care taxes, carbon tax, etc, etc).

2) By contrast, during flush economic times, they advocate…um….massive government spending and tax increases.

See the difference ? I don't, but somehow progressives do. They must call them progressives because they progressively take away your income, progressively take away your liberty, progressively take away your rights, and progressively ruin America. I can't think of any other reason to call them progressives on the fiscal front.

Far from being a moderate, Obama is the biggest liberal to ever hold the office of President, by far. His little kabuki theater of fiscal responsibility shouldn't fool anyone.

P.S. – Speaking of progressives taking away your rights, I see the progressive anti-free speech crusade is continuing. They are still trying to stop groups from airing ads on television. This time they are trying to censor Tim Tebow's mother. They don't like her Super Bowl ad, where she says she's glad she didn't listen to the doctors who recommended she abort the future Heisman trophy winner. Progressives know we can't have any crazy talk like that floating around, with mothers going around saying they're glad they had their babies and stuff. With this brilliant move, progressives have now placed themselves solidly in the anti-life, anti-free speech camp. You couldn't make this stuff up, nobody would believe it. They are not only against freedom of speech now, they are against human beings as well.

This column is dedicated to the folks who believe ObamaCare, with it's alleged 31 million more people being covered by health insurance, and with it's 2,500 pages of myriad rules, regulations, and taxes being implemented on business and the citizenry by Congress…..will somehow make health care LESS expensive. To all such folks, I bestow upon you the Reality Deniers Of The Year award.

The ObamaCare debacle is so massive and will ravage such a huge slice of our economy that I should have bestowed the Reality Deniers Of The Decade award on the aforementioned people, especially when the previous decade ended only a few days ago, right ?

Except the previous decade didn't end a few days ago, no matter how often we hear the news media say it did. That's something we believe that just isn't so. Because there was no year zero on our calendar, the first year A.D. was year one. That means means a new decade doesn't start until year 11. Our next decade starts on january 1, 2011, not 2010.

That's a small thing, but columnist Walter Williams mentioned it in his latest article, in which he tackled another thing we believe is true but just isn't so. I've even bought into this false belief myself, more than I should have. The belief is that America doesn't make anything anymore, that we've lost our manufacturing sector. This belief comes from all the losses of manufacturing jobs in this country over the last thiry years. The job loss is true, but much of that loss is due to technological advances in industry that make manufacturing less labor intensive. From the Williams piece:

According to the Federal Reserve, the dollar value of U.S. manufacturing output in November was $2.72 trillion (in 2000 dollars). Today's manufacturing worker is so productive that the value of his average output is $234,220. Output per worker is three times as high as it was in 1980 and twice as high as it was in 1990. For the year 2008, the Federal Reserve estimates that the value of U.S. manufacturing output was about $3.7 trillion (in 2008 dollars). If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy, with its own GDP, it would be tied with Germany as the world's fourth richest economy. The GDPs are: U.S. ($14.2 trillion), Japan ($4.9 trillion), China ($4.3 trillion), U.S. manufacturing ($3.7 trillion), Germany ($3.7 trillion), France ($2.9 trillion) and the United Kingdom ($2.7 trillion).

With a manufacturing sector that produces more revenue than the entire GDP of all but two other countries, it sure seems we still make things here in the U.S., lots of things. It just doesn't take as many people to make them. Are we to roll back our technological advances just so we can employ more people ? I don't think so. Such a move WOULD sound the death knell for our manufacturing sector. Just as advances in the agricultural industry over the last century made farming far less labor intensive, so it is with manufacturing today. We could go the China route and pay manufacturing workers slave wages to produce cheap goods, but that isn't a desirable solution either. What we must do is adapt to a changing world. That is always going to be what we have to do to succeed. Instead of saying 'America doesn't make anything anymore,' it would be more accurate to say 'America doesn't make everything anymore.'

The next belief some hold that just isn't true is about the Guantanamo Bay prison. Even President Obama believes closing Gitmo will lessen the fervor of terrorists to attack us. Obama says Gitmo is a key recruiting tool of the jihadist movement. This is absolute nonsense. In order to share Obama's feeling, you have to believe that the simple act of moving the terrorists from Cuba to Illinois will somehow make the terrorists respond, "okay, things are alright now." This is absurdity taken to the nth degree. We'll still be holding the terrorists in prison, it'll just be in a different place. The idea that this will somehow appease the Islamic jihadists is inane. Do you really think they care WHERE Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his like-minded brethren are being held by the U.S. ??? It's the fact WE ARE HOLDING THEM that they care about. The fact we are fighting them in the first place is what they care about. The closing of Gitmo will have zero effect on the recruitment of jihadists. ZERO. ZILCH. NADA. Of course, we could always release more terrorists to Yemen or some other country sympathetic to the jihadists, as we've been doing, in the hopes it will appease the terrorists. That WOULD have an effect on terrorist recruitment. It would go UP by the number of terrorists we released, and it already has. Our lax policies have already resulted in over 70 terrorists going back to the jihadist fight against us. Brilliant policy, eh ? Let's try to appease ruthless murdering religious extremists who wish to establish dominance over the entire world. I'm certain that will work (NOT).

My final belief that just isn't so is about enacting more government entitlements in a country already $12 trillion in debt, that can't pay for all the unfunded entitlements already in existence, and with a government that invariably robs us blind, as it has with Social Security. That is completely insane thinking, but liberals think it's the right way to go, because they somehow believe it's "compassionate." (to bankrupt the entire nation).

But you've all heard me rant on about that enough already, so I'll spare you the details this time. Peace out.

"Without savings, there is no future" – Alan Greenspan

If some of you wonder why I'm obsessed with the rapidly increasing government spending and debt, I'll try to explain it in this post. I'll try to explain what the implications of this unsustainable fiscal irresponsibility will be, what it will mean for the future. There is no bigger long-term threat we face as a country, other than certain national security issues (such as terrorists detonating wmd inside the U.S). Lots of the information contained in this post can be found in The State Of The Union's Finances, A Citizens Guide, put out by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, whose CEO is former Comptroller General David Walker (who everybody in the country should be listening to. I'd make him the next President if I could).

Let's start by defining our financial problem. The federal government is nearly $12 trillion in debt, which is 85% of our GDP. That's bad enough in itself, but about 50% of our debt is owed to foreign countries. The only other time in American history when our debt was this high was during World War II, when it was 122% of GDP. Back then, however, we didn't owe the money to foreign countries. We owed the money to Americans. We weren't selling our country to China and others, as we are doing now.

What's worse than the debt we're in is where we're heading. The following chart shows the projected federal deficits over the next decade:

At this rate, our debt will be 150% of GDP by 2020, far higher than every before in our history. If we continue on this path, our debt would be 350% of GDP by 2050. Even worse than the our annual deficits are our unfunded entitlement liabilities. These are spending commitments the government has made but does not have the money to pay for. They are growing at a rate between $2-3 trillion per year even if we had a balanced federal budget. Currently, the unfunded liabilities stand at roughly $56.4 trillion. Medicare is $38 trillion of this amount. If we add all the unfunded liabilites and our federal debt together, it comes to a $184,000 debt for every single person in the United States, a $435,000 debt for every fulltime worker, and a $483,000 debt for every household. Don't forget that in 2008, 81% of federal taxes were paid by individuals (45% in individual income tax, 36% in payroll taxes). Taxes will have to go up, WAY up. Because rising tax rates have an economic dampening effect, the revenue return lessens, forcing taxes rates up even more, which dampens the economy even more, which forces tax rates up even more, and so on and so forth. Trying to solve the problem via taxation alone will result in an endless downward economic death spiral.

The debt projections show that by 2028, our historic levels of taxation (about 18% of GDP) will not even be enough to cover interest on the debt, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. There won't be any revenue left for education, defense, homeland security, infrastructure, or any other government function. Nada. Interest on the debt will eventually become our single largest government expenditure. That is money flushed down the toilet, providing no government service to any American citizen, and a lot of that interest will go to foreign countries. This is a recipe for certain disaster. If it's not addressed, it will mean the end of our Republic. We will collapse under a mountain of debt. This is not only deeply irresponsible, it's immoral. We are dooming our children's futures. The baby boom generation is on path to leave the country far worse off than they found it, the antithesis of the American dream.

We are showing few signs of reversing the trend of irresponsibility. In the last two years, baseline federal government spending has increased by 20% during a time of no inflation. This is astounding. This number doesn't include TARP or stimulus packages to fight the recesssion. This is just an increase in the annual ongoing cost of the normal operations of the federal government, and it is completely out of control.

There are three primary problems – 1) out of control government, 2) demographics, 3) rising health care costs. Regarding demographics, there are 77 million baby boomers in the country (about 1/4th of the entire population). Over the next decade, those baby boomers will be retiring. On the bright side, all those retiring boomers will take care of our unemployment problem (we will probably need even more workers than are available), but all those retirees will put tremendous pressure on our entitlement programs.

There is no single feasible solution to the problem. We can't grow our way out of it. We can't tax our way out of it. We can't even cut government spending to get out of it. We have to take a synergistic approach. We need to re-prioritize everything from the ground up. We have to cut government spending to the essentials. We have to implement pro-growth business policies. We have to reign in health care costs. We will also have to, as much as I hate to say it, increase levels of taxation to get more revenue. We should restructure our entire tax revenue system so it's the least regressive and the most efficient. I have read that only 76% of our taxes are currently collected. The rest fall through the cracks, via offshore tax havens and various other collection failures.

The other thing that is essential is to forget all about partisan politics, and focus on fixing the problem instead. This is not a partisan issue. It's an American survival issue. We need the President to make this a highest priority (hey, it could happen). The tax cut and spend Republicans have to give it up. The tax and spend even more Democrats have to give it up. Our country is at stake. Yes, it's going to be painful, but we have no other choice. Any political party that stands in the way must be moved out of the way. The American people are catching on. This is also what the Tea Party movement is really about. It's about restoring fiscal sanity to this country before it's too late. The longer we wait, the harder it's going to be to fix this. Where we're at right now with the debt bomb is relative to where we were with the housing bubble six-eight years ago. We don't want to wait until it explodes in our faces before we act. We want to act now, or the next recession will make this one look like a walk in the park.

The federal government's massive ripoff of the American taxpayer continues. The Senate and House have both passed the $1.1 trillion Omnibus spending bill for 2010, and President Obama is expected to sign it. The bill raises spending by about 10% over last year, even though the last time I checked, the inflation rate for this year was negative, as the economy shrunk during the recession. Like I said in a recent post titled 'A Recession-Proof Industry,' there's no recession in Washington D.C.

The spending bill contains 5,000 earmarks in the amount of $3.9 billion, naturally. That might not sound like a lot, relatively speaking, until you consider that the spending portion of Obama's stimulus package (those so-called shovel-ready projects) were basically nothing but thousands of earmark projects bundled together. One count had 9,000 earmarks in the stimulus bill, even though the White House laughably claimed there were none. The White House did this in the typical government way. They simply called the earmark projects something else.

One notable earmark in the 2010 Omnibus spending bill is $2.7 million to study surgery in outer space. Meet George Jetson. There is seemingly no end to the ways Congress can dream up to waste our money.

The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 57-35 along party lines. Democrats were for the huge spending increases, and Republicans were against them. Here are the exceptions:

Democrats Evan Bayh of Indiana, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Claire McCaskill of Missouri voted against the bill. Republican Sens. Thad Cochran of Missouri, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Richard Shelby of Alabama voted for it.

Kudos to Bayh, Feingold, and McCaskill. I spit upon Cochran, Collins, Snowe, Shelby, and the rest of the Democrats.

The spending bill puts America on track for a $1.5 trillion deficit for 2010, not that the big spenders on Capitol Hill give a damn. They'll be voting soon to raise the debt ceiling by $2 trillion, because we are about to exceed the current $12.1 trillion limit, which begs the question, what good is a debt ceiling if they can keep raising it time and again ? That isn't a ceiling. It's more like an elevator to nowhere.

Federal employees also get a 2% raise, because the poor dears only make $30,000 per year more than their private sector counterparts already. Without that 2% raise, the federal employees might have to eat hamburger instead of steak, or endure something equally horrid.

In the past I have compared government spending to that of drunken sailors. I now realize how wrong I was to say that. I apologize to all drunken sailors. When drunken sailors run out of money, they stop spending. When the government runs out of money, they step up the pace and spend even more.

Unless one of the government earmarks is used to perfect alchemy (turn lead into gold), we are in deep doo-doo. It's time to start thinking outside the box……..hey, I have an idea. Let's sell California to China to pay off the $800 billion we owe the Chi-coms. Chinafornia has kind of a nice ring to it, and then the Left Coast liberals can live in the marxist utopia they dream about (which would turn them into conservatives in about two seconds).

Or maybe the alchemy thing. Oh wait, I almost forgot. Obama is the green President. Instead of using lead, we'll have to turn broccoli into gold. It's more environmentally friendly. Better yet, let's turn CO2 into gold !!!! Jackpot !!! I nominate myself to be the Alchemy Czar.

Hey Congress, I need a $30 billion budget, pronto, and see if you can track down Merlin for me.

There is something unseemly about a President who is as unceasingly partisan as is Barack Obama. I don't think I've ever heard this President give a speech where he wasn't shifting blame away from himself and his party, even when it flies directly in the face of the facts. That's one reason many speak of Obama as being in permanent campaign mode (another reason is that Obama IS in permanent campaign mode). Obama has changed the presidential motto from 'the buck stops here' to 'pass the buck.' The President's recent comments about the TARP program serve as a perfect example. Speaking of using the $200 billion in leftover TARP funds for job creation, Obama said this:

"There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other, but this is a false choice."

By "there are those," of course, Obama means Republicans, but that bit of partisanship isn't even the point. There is no "choice" regarding what to do with leftover TARP funds, much less a "false" one. By law, unused TARP funds must be used to pay down the deficit. All Republicans are doing is pointing that out. Obama knows this, but he is engaging in some sleight of hand (TARP magic) to make it appear otherwise. There are no actual savings associated with the leftover TARP funds, because those funds were never spent in the first place, not to mention that all TARP funds came from borrowed or newly printed money. The ONLY thing Obama is doing here is spending nearly $70 billion more for his jobs program. That can be weighed on it's own merits. The President can spare us all the partisan smoke and mirrors.

Next up on the Obama Disingenuous Hit Parade is this statement about TARP from the same speech:

"We were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve."

First of all, The Obama administration didn't take the steps to pass TARP. The Bush Administration passed it. As I remember it, Bush was a member of the "opposition party." Bush's Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, was the driving force in getting TARP passed. More Republicans in Congress voted for TARP than voted against it, so there was some "help" from them too. Also, the Democrats controlled Congress for nearly two years before the financial crisis happened, so I'd really like to know what "decision-making that led to this crisis" the Democrats were against, including Obama himself, who was in the Senate at the time. Finally, when Obama says Bush "decided to hand it over to others to solve," did Bush have some other choice ? What was he supposed to do, "decide" that Obama couldn't takeover the presidency until after Bush solved the crisis ? I don't think so. And if Obama was so unhappy with the "decision-making that led to the crisis," why did he appoint Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treausry and leave Ben Bernanke as the Federal Reserve Chairman ? Those two were instrumental in that decision-making. In summary, Obama's statement is complete partisan garbage.

Later in that same speech, Obama contradicted his own words by admitting that TARP was "launched hastily under the last administration," and argued the policy was flawed (even though Obama repeatedly says Obama saved the financial system with that same policy). If you recall, Obama "hastily" voted FOR the "flawed" TARP bill while he was in the Senate. Obama is some piece of work.

As even the Associated Press is beginning to point out, Obama likes to take both sides of the argument, claiming credit for things he did not do, while at the same time blaming others for things of which Obama approved. This is commonly known as nonsense, and we should expect something better from our President.

1. How can President Obama hold a jobs summit and not invite the Chamber Of Commerce ? That's like holding a football game and forgetting to invite the offense.

2. How can the unemployment rate drop from 10.2% to 10% when 11,000 more jobs were lost in november 2009 ?

3. From 1776 to 1913, the value of the dollar increased by 13%. In 1913, the Federal Reserve was implemented. Since 1913, the value of the dollar has dropped by 92%. Why do we have a Federal Reserve ?

4. Why would the President announce a withdrawal date of july 2011 from a war that is not yet won ?

5. Why would President Obama call the november 2009 jobs report "the best jobs report since december 2007" and talk about White House administration officials hugging each other in joy over the good news, when the november unemployment rate is 10% and the december 2007 unemployment rate was 4.9% ? FYI – the january 2008 unemployment rate was also 4.9%.

6. Why are the extramarital affairs of golfer Tiger Woods a big news story ?

7. If the Federal Reserve prints money out of thin air, backed by nothing, in order to, say, lend $85 billion to AIG, and then AIG pays back that money from profits, isn't the net effect nothing but a devaluation of the dollar ?

8. Isn't a devaluation of the dollar nothing but a hidden tax on the assets of all Americans ?

9. If a citizen continually spends more money than he/she makes, he/she will go bankrupt. How is it any different when the government does the same thing, except that the government will take all the citizens down along with it ?

10. Why would we hand health care over to government control when the part of health care the government does control (Medicare/Medicaid) is already so far in the red ?

11. How can the Obama stimulus possibly be working when it is based upon money borrowed or printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, and is therefore entirely artificial ? (See questions #3, #7, and #8).

12. If question #11 is too confusing, perhaps this will help simplify the matter. Does a man up to his neck in credit card debt improve his financial situation by getting more credit cards ?

13. What is wrong with asking the President of the United States to produce his original birth certificate ?

14. Is there any major Obama policy that is supported by the American people ?

15. Why don't we just put Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in front of a firing squad and save everyone a lot of time and money ?

16. How do tax increases ever help the private sector economy ?

17. Shouldn't there have to be at least one act of Tea Party-related violence (from the Tea Party side) before the media denounces the crazy, violent, extremist Tea Partiers ?

18. On the same subject, why is it considered crazy and extreme to be in favor of fiscal responsibility, liberty, and the U.S. Constitution, as the Tea Partiers are ? What does that say about the state of our country ?

19. On the jobs front, which Obama policies are pro-business ?

20. Why are Democrats now in favor of cutting Medicare, when they've been against Medicare cuts for four decades ?

One of the most useful strategies known to politicians is some variation on the CHANGE theme, one of the keywords in President Obama's 2008 campaign. The electorate almost always desires CHANGE, because politicians almost always foul things up, making CHANGE almost always sound great. I'm hard-pressed to think of a politician who ran on an "I'll keep things exactly the same" platform. If there ever was one, he/she probably lost the election. Here are a few of the CHANGE-based campaign slogans used by politicians through the years:

- Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago ? – Ronald Reagan, 1984, (CHANGE from Jimmy Carter).
- A Chicken In Every Pot. A Car In Every Garage - Herbert Hoover, 1928, (CHANGE that will get you more stuff).
- Back To Normalcy - Warren G. Harding, 1920 (CHANGE from WWI).
- A Time For Greatness - John F. Kennedy, 1960 (CHANGE for the better).
- It's Time To CHANGE America - Bill Clinton, 1992 (general CHANGE)
- To Begin Anew - Eugene McCarthy, 1968 (start the CHANGE all over again)
- CHANGE We Can Believe In - Barack Obama, 2008 (CHANGE, and this time we mean it !)

The CHANGE theme isn't unique to the USA. In 1957, Nikiti Kruschev's CHANGE vision for the Soviet economy was called Catch Up And Overtake America (take heed, leftists. If Marxism was so great, the Soviets wouldn't have needed to "catch up." They never did, btw. They collapsed instead).

CHANGE works with the voters, and obviously, it worked for Obama. He was more CHANGE-believable than John McCain (one of McCain's campaign slogans was also CHANGED-based – Reform. Prosperity. Peace). McCain was a Republican following a Republican administration, and there was also that awkward photo of McCain hugging President George W. Bush. McCain didn't seem as CHANGE-ey as Obama, plus Obama is half-black, giving him many CHANGE bonus points. Clearly, the CHANGE guy who would "fundamentally transform America" and "CHANGE the way Washington D.C does business" was Obama. Our new prez was going to get rid of the lobbyists and special interests, and all that.

But something funny happens after the elections are over. The new President actually has to run things, and CHANGE becomes nothing more than a word. That is illustrated quite well by the way President Obama has conducted health care reform. Listen to this description of how Obama handled the health care discussions, and then tell me how CHANGE-ey it sounds to you. From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's top aides met frequently with lobbyists and health care industry heavyweights as his administration pieced together a national health care overhaul, according to White House visitor records obtained by The Associated Press.

The records, obtained Wednesday, disclose visits by a broad cross-section of the people most involved in the health care debate, weighted heavily toward those who want to overhaul the system.

The list includes George Halvorson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Health Plans; Scott Serota, president and CEO of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association; Kenneth Kies, a Washington lobbyist who represents Blue Cross/Blue Shield, among other clients; Billy Tauzin, head of PhRMA, the drug industry lobby; Richard Umbdenstock, chief of the American Hospital Association, and numerous lobbyists.

The AP in early August asked the White House to produce records identifying communications that top Obama aides…The records list the kinds of people usually involved in Washington policymaking: business, union and trade association executives, lobbyists and political strategists. Wednesday's disclosure was significant because of Obama's campaign promise to change business as usual in Washington, and because he voluntarily released records showing the access of special interests as the administration crafted national health care policy.

Earlier this year, the White House announced agreements under which hospitals and the drug industry promised cost savings in return for the overhaul's expected expansion in the number of insured patients. The arrangements were hammered out in private meetings, drawing comparisons to Vice President Dick Cheney's secret talks with the energy industry as he helped President George W. Bush draft a national energy policy.

White House officials met repeatedly with the American Medical Association, which has pushed hard — over the objections of some physicians — for the health overhaul and a corresponding pay hike for doctors.

It pretty much sounds like the same old, same old to me. The Obama administration gets a couple points for releasing the records of these private meetings (Bush fought against such releases during energy policy discussions), but remember that Obama promised to hold the health care hearings on C-SPAN, which he did not do. Another broken promise.

This special interest catering is why we have health care bills that raise costs instead of lowering them, that mandate coverage for Americans to vastly increase the business of the insurance companies, that don't allow the negotiation of significantly lower drug prices, that guts Medicare Advantage in order to increase AARP's Medi-Gap insurance sales, that allows Medicaid prices to be negotiated with the AMA, and that don't include tort reform (to benefit trial lawyers).

Congressional health care votes are even being bought outright, as in the $100 million bribe to get the vote of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Conservative talker Glenn Beck drew some heat for calling Landrieu a prostitute following that little bit of D.C. quid pro quo. I agree with Beck's criticizers. Why did Beck single out Landrieu ? There are a slew of whores operating inside the D.C. Beltway. Landrieu is but one of many. That's how they do business in D.C. They rob the johns taxpayers blind in order to please the special interests. That's standard operating procedure. The part that gets me steamed is when they call that CHANGE.

Also, I've mentioned this before, but the whores in Washington, D.C. are lying their dishonest fannies off about how much health care reform is really going to cost.

I favor health care reform, but I cannot favor this. Back to the drawing board. It's time for a CHANGE. As usual.

Here's President Obama doing his best Judge Roy Bean impersonation during an NBC interview:

NBC: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — can you understand why it is offensive to some for this terrorist to get all the legal privileges of any American citizen?
Obama: I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.

Vintage Bean – we'll give him a fair trial, and then we'll hang him. What a shining example of American justice.

I'm still waiting for any reporter to ask the obvious followup question…what if KSM is found not guilty ? Will we let him go free ?
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In a related event, the group Organizing For America, formerly known as Obama For America, formerly known as Soiled Panties For America, has identified a true danger to our country. No, it's not KSM coming to New York City to espouse his jihadist hate, or homegrown jihadist Nidal Hasan shooting 40 people at Fort Hood (Obama tried to delay the Congressional investigation into Hasan's massacre. Kudos to Joe Lieberman and others for having none of that). No, those things aren't dangers to America. The REAL danger to America is, wait for it………Sarah Palin's book tour.

"It's dangerous," Organizing for America Director Mitch Stewart said of Palin's book tour. He continued:
"Remember, this is the person who coined the term 'Death Panels' — and opened the flood gates for months of false attacks by special interests and partisan extremists. Whatever lie comes next will be widely covered by the media, then constantly echoed by right-wing attack groups and others who are trying to defeat reform."

Stewart asks supporters to help raise $500,000 to "push back against Sarah Palin and her allies."

Remember, Palin's book isn't even a political tract. It's just a memoir, yet the libs are still going batty over it. I guess free speech IS dangerous to the Soiled Panties For America group, but I'm thinking that's THEIR problem. Btw, the Death Panels will be trying to figure out how to cut half a trillion bucks out of Medicare if the health care reform bill passes, in order that it doesn't "add a dime to the deficit."
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Next up is Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) telling one lie after another about passing the health care reform bill that Americans are against:

Let's review.

Reid said, "everyone agrees we must move forward (with the health care reform bill)."

The truth – a recent CNN poll showed that 72% of Americans are against the Democrats health care bill. Only 26% support it.

Reid said, "our plan saves lives, saves money, and saves Medicare."

The truth – the bill cuts nearly $500 billion from Medicare, and will cost $849 billion. The $849 billion figure isn't even accurate, because the benefits don't kick in until 2014. If the bill is scored from when the benefits start, it costs more like $1.5-2 trillion. More lies and number fudging from the Democrats. Even individual health care premiums rise with this bill.

Reid said, "They'll see the Republican alternative, which I'm sorry to say is non-existent, so obviously it keeps our broken system just the way it is, and let's it get even worse."

The truth – Republicans have offered an alternative, and it drives down costs and insurance premiums, which was supposed to be one of the primary goals of health care reform. The obvious shortfall of the GOP plan is that it doesn't cover as many of the uninsured as the Democrats plan does, but it's actually the Dems plan that makes health care costs rise.

Harry "the Iraq war is lost" Reid never tells the truth about anything. If any Senator loses his seat in the 2010 elections, I hope it's Reid.
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Back when the stimulus package was passed, President Obama claimed that 90% of the jobs created or saved would be in the private sector, and that unemployment would not go past 8%. Both of those claims are demonstrably false, and the administration's claim that 650,000 or a million jobs have been created or saved (the number changes depending on which administration official you talk to) have been exposed as wild exaggerations. Still, I thought the recent attacks by Republican Congressmen on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were over-the-top and politically motivated. You can't expect jobs to turn around this quickly during a recession this serious, and there are some encouraging signs that the recession has bottomed out (for now. The real recession/depression is coming a few years down the road, due to our continued exploding debt). Another problem going forward is our loose fiscal policy, and here's an exchange between Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Geithner that delves into that issue:

Hang on, America. It's going to be a bumpy ride. Anyone who thinks our problems have been solved by merely printing or borrowing tons more money, as our government has done, is in for a very rude awakening.

A recent report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) describes America's long term fiscal outlook:

Weaknesses in the economy and financial markets—and the government’s response to them—have contributed to near-term increases in federal deficits, which reached a record level in fiscal year 2009. While a lot of attention has been given to the recent fiscal deterioration, the federal government faces even larger fiscal challenges that will persist long after the return of financial stability and economic growth…GAO’s simulations continue to show escalating levels of debt that illustrate that the long-term fiscal outlook remains unsustainable

The GAO tells us why our fiscal outlook is unsustainable:

roughly 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue will be spent on the major entitlement programs and net interest costs on the debt by 2019. This is due largely to a substantial increase in interest on federal debt…by 2030 there will be little room for “all other spending,” which consists of what many think of as “government,” including national defense, homeland security, investment in highways and mass transit and alternative energy sources, plus smaller entitlement programs such as Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and farm price supports.

The GAO estimates assume that federal revenue will be 20.2% of GDP, which is already higher than historical levels of taxation.

Currently, our federal debt is over $12 trillion. Here are the debt projections for the next 10 years.

2010 – $14 trillion.
2011 – $15.2 trillion
2012 – $16.2 trillion
2013 – $17.1 trillion
2014 – $18 trillion
2015 – $19 trillion
2016 – $20 trillion
2017 – $21 trillion
2018 – $22 trillion
2019 – $23 trillion

As you can see, our debt is rising at roughly $1 trillion each year.

These numbers do not include the health care reform that is making it's way through Congress, which will be a major increase in the entitlement programs that are already unsustainable. The recently released Senate health care bill is estimated to cost $849 billion over 10 years, but those numbers are bogus. They are hugely underestimated, because Congress uses sleight of hand to arrive at those numbers. The full benefits of the health care bill don't start until 2014, but the taxes (about 14 different taxes in all) start in 2010, skewing the true costs if the bill. If you start calculating the cost of the Senate health care bill from when the benefits start, that makes the cost more like $1.5-2 trillion. Even the $849 billion rigged figure depends on massive Medicare cuts that Congress will probably never have the guts to make (they never have before), along with the fact that the doc-fix of $247 billion was separated out to make the Senate bill look cheaper. As always, our dishonest Congress is being dishonest about the true costs of health care reform. This reform will almost certainly add even more to the deficit and debt, unless even more taxes are raised to pay for it.

There are two ways to deal with our unsustainable fiscal problem. True conservatives (not pretenders like Bush) would say reduce government spending, which has spun completely out of control over the last decade. This is known as the smart way out. Liberals would say increase taxes to levels unprecedented in American history. It would probably take a 40-50% increase in tax levels to pay for all our committments and begin paying down our unsustainable, dollar-killing debt. Such tax increases would also have a business-killing, dampening effect on our economy at a time when unemployment is already skyrocketing and we're trying to climb out of a recession. This is known as the stupid way out.

It's up to you America. They called my father's era The Greatest Generation. From what I'm seeing so far, I'm calling my own era The Greediest Generation. We are bankrupting our children's futures for our own momentary comfort. We can't even face the unsustainable reality that WE CREATED. We just pretend it doesn't exist, while our crooked politicians drive us deeper into the hole and tell us how much they are helping us at the same time. Shame on them, and shame on us for letting them get away with it. Shame on us even more for voting for the biggest liars, the ones who promise us the most goodies as they abandon all sense of financial responsibility and sell us down the river.

Calling all big government advocates !!! It's time to do your patriotic duty for your country. As VP Joe Biden would say, "step up and be part of the deal."

As the Christmas season approaches, what better present could all you compassionate statists, leftists, socialists, communists, marxists, maoists, progressives, and liberals give us than to pay down the massive federal debt that all this out-of-control government spending has rained down upon our heads ? Show those mean old conservative grinches that you big government types are standup people who have the courage of your convictions. Send a big fat check to Uncle Sam to brighten the holidays for all us recession stressed Americans. We know you are the good people (because you keep telling us you are), so I'm going to tell you where to send your money. No need to thank me. Remember to dig deep, and give until it hurts. Your country needs you. The poor and oppressed need you, now more than ever.

Reuters has helpfully written an article on this subject. Here is the essential info:

The U.S. Treasury Department accepts gifts, payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt. Just mail them to the attention of Department G, Post Office Box 2188, Parkersburg, West Virginia, 26106-2188. Make a note in the memo section that it is a gift to reduce the debt held by the public.

The info is also contained on the U.S. Treasury website here.

I'll even help you big government lovers calculate the amount you should send in. According to the U.S. debt clock, the federal debt is just short of $12 trillion. Now I have to figure out how many liberals we have. Let's see…..we have about 250 million adults over the age of 18 living in the United States, and about 20% of the people refer to themselves as liberals according to polling……….soooo, that means there are around 50 million caring liberals in our broke country.

Dividing $12 trillion by 50 million liberals comes to…………

If you all would send in a check for $240,000, then voila!, our debt problem is solved.

Man, this is gonna be great !!! You liberals just paid for health care reform and lots more, because by paying off the federal debt, you saved America from paying over $330 billion a year in interest on that debt. We can use that savings to pay for health care reform, AND have lots left over to institute massive tax cuts, thereby revving up the economy !!! God bless you, every one !!! The recession will be over and jobs will be created !!! It'll be morning in America again !!!

Of course, there's always the possibility that you will think only of yourselves instead of helping others, and not send in any money, but no way do I think you good liberal people would be that selfish. I have complete confidence in you. I'm so excited.

Oh, wait a sec. There is one other thing. Even if you pay off the debt, we'll still have that $106 trillion in unfunded entitlement liabilities hanging over our heads. Rats. Still, I know how you good liberals love your entitlements. You'll certainly want to pay for those, so allow me to recalculate the amount of money you need to send in….$106 trillion plus $12 trillion equals $118 trillion. If I divide that by the 50 million liberals in America……….

You all need to send in a check for $2,360,000. Then we'll be good.

I offer my heartfelt thanks on behalf of all Americans. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

The reason I hold the fiscally conservative political beliefs I do has nothing to do with political parties. Really, I could care less if a Democrat or a Republican is in office. I don't hold an allegiance to either of those tribes. What I look for above all is a politician who is economically intelligent. I look for someone who may provide us a way out of the economic mess we are in, someone who will reverse this unsustainable fiscal course we are embarked upon. We are all in this mess collectively, regardless of political stripe, and I don't care where the solution comes from. I just want a solution. Lately, I haven't seen one. Lately, I've only seen politicians arrive on the scene who make things worse. Barack Obama is making our fiscal situation far worse. George W. Bush made our fiscal situation far worse. During the last couple years of his presidency, Bill Clinton and his GOP-led Congress actually made things a little better, however short-lived it turned out to be. As much of the country squares off along lines of left-right tribal warfare like a bunch of ignorant savages, the real threat to the future of America almost always seems to remain unaddressed amidst the partisan smokescreen. We fiddle while Rome burns.

An article in the Wall Street Journal called 'Taking The National Debt Seriously" outlines this unaddressed threat:

If you think those town hall meetings over health care were fierce, wait until Americans come to understand the threat to our national financial survival posed by the interest on the government's credit card.

When the government spends more than its revenue, there is a budget deficit. These deficits are paid for by Washington selling interest bearing Treasury securities. If the government were ever to default on its promise to pay periodic interest payments or to repay the debt at maturity, the United States economy would plunge into a level of chaos that would make the Lehman bankruptcy look like a nonevent.

It is the interest on the national debt that makes our future unstable. The exploding size of that burden suggests that, short of devaluing the dollar and taking a large bite out of the middle class through inflation and taxation, there is no way to ever pay down that bill.

As of Sept. 30, 2009, the national debt was almost $12 trillion and interest on that debt was $383 billion for the year, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt. The Congressional Budget Office on Oct. 7 estimated the 2009 budget deficit to be almost $1.4 trillion (about 10% of GDP). In August, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimated total government revenues at about $2 trillion. The revenue estimate included $904 billion from individual income taxes. This means the cost of interest on the debt represented more than 40 cents of every dollar that came in from individual income taxes.

Except for a few years in the late 1990s, for decades Washington has spent more than it has taken in each year and borrowed the rest. Taxpayer dollars that could have paid off debt each year have instead been spent on interest to finance debt. Unfortunately, that's a vicious cycle that will likely only get worse.

Imagine that. 40% of our individual income taxes did nothing but pay interest on the federal debt. None of that money paved a road, provided health care, went toward job creation, or helped a single American in any way. That is money we just throw away.

And the only thing our current President has done so far is to make it twice as bad as it was before he arrived on the scene. Get a load of this:

The OMB projects deficits of about $9 trillion over the next 10 years. If that occurs, the national debt will be almost $21 trillion by 2019. However, the actual amount could be much higher. The OMB also optimistically projects $13.5 trillion of revenue increases over the next decade, while minimizing the inevitable rise in interest rates that will come with an expanding national debt.

Forget the political rhetoric, no matter how soaring and inspirational it may sound on the surface. Forget the Democrat vs. Republican horse manure. We are heading for disaster. Look at the actions of our politicians, not the words, not the party. We don't function on hope. We function on a successful economic foundation. That economy is teetering on the brink, and was even before the current recession got under way. Our long term economic forecast would have to get better to be called dismal.

Here is will happen if we don't reverse course immediately, if not sooner.

In stark but simple terms, unless Americans are made aware of this financial crisis and demand accountability, the very fabric of our society will be destroyed. Interest rates and interest costs will soar and government revenues will be devoured by interest on the national debt. Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education, national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained. Left unchecked, this destructive deficit-debt cycle will leave the White House and Congress with either having to default on the national debt or instruct the Treasury to run the printing presses into a policy of hyperinflation.

Faced with this ever-growing financial house of cards that we call America, what is our government doing ???????

Why, creating ever more social and federal programs we can't afford, of course. Massively EXPANDING the cost of government. The federal government is like Alfred E. Newman of Mad Magazine. "What, me worry ?" Our government is so out of touch that it can't even figure out what the real problem is, or if they do know, they won't admit to it. That would require HARD political choices, and our politicians know you don't get elected by making hard choices, you get elected by pretending to be Santa Claus, giving all the kiddies their presents for free. We don't have statesmen running things, we have carnival barkers. We have propaganda.

Wake up, America. Take your country back. Time is running out, faster than you know.

When seeking solutions to health care, who better to look to than our own Hollywood celebrities ? These celebrities have become very wealthy in our capitalist system, and they live in big mansions. Who better to speak out against the evils of insurance company profits (average 3.4% profit margin) than super-profitable celebs ? I only wish film director/child rapist Roman Polanski could have been added to the following Hollywood public service announcement. Many celebrities support him too. You know the old saying in Hollywood, "each Oscar received entitles you to one child rape." What can I say ? Hollywood celebrities are just better than the rest of us.

Alas, I have bad news for our celebs. The Democratic-led Senate Finance Committee just voted down the health care reform public option. How did that happen ? It must be Bush's fault.

But the celebrities aren't the only ones who can make public service announcements these days. The folks over at PJTV have their own PSA, that looks very much like the one above from Hollywood and moveon.org. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect……..satire of the Hollywood satire.

Obviously, there's something wrong with those PJTV people, who must be listening to Glenn Beck. We better kick Beck off the air before a Rwanda-type civil war breaks out in America, as Hollywood celeb Bette Midler said. Yes sirree. Genocide and civil dissent are EXACTLY THE SAME THING. PJTV is probably paid by the insurance industry. What a bunch of right-wing extremists, expecting people to actually PAY for health care services. What can they possibly be thinking ? We don't pay for things in America anymore. That's a failed idea from the past. Ask a celebrity, they'll tell you. Or just shell out some dough and go see a Hollywood movie to forget all your woes for a couple hours. Maybe then you won't even notice the economy shed another 263,000 jobs in september. Not to worry, though. Will Ferrell is doing fine.

"For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months." - President Barack Hussein Obama, narcissist, addressing the United Nations, September, 2009.

I'm sure glad Barry came along and fixed the character and cause of this nation after 232 years of American villainy, aren't you ? On the bright side, at least he didn't call pre-Obama America "The Great Satan." And our President spoke these words in front of an audience that included the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Moammar Gadhafi, and a slew of other human rights violators (many of whom are on the Orwellian UN Human Rights Council).
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"Since Americans can only be prodded into doing something with money, we need to tax crappy foods that make us sick like we do with cigarettes, and alcohol." - pot-smoking comedian Bill Maher, September, 2009.

Unbelievably, Maher calls himself a Libertarian. In reality, he's just another authoritarian left-winger. Someone should familiarize Maher with the words "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It's none of Bill Maher's business who smokes, drinks, or eats what, which Maher would quickly realize if someone took his weed away. Maher's "libertarianism" extends only to his desire to get high. What a hypocrite.
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"Is capitalism a sin ?" - Leni Riefenstahl Award-winning, Castro-loving filmmaker Michael Moore, in a trailer from his forthcoming movie, Capitalism, A Love Story.

The answer from Moore's questionee is "yes," by the way, capitalism IS a sin. Hugo Chavez couldn't have said it better.
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"President Obama didn't make much news on his round of five Sunday talk shows … with one notable exception. The President revealed a great deal about his philosophy of government and how he defines a tax increase. It turns out the President thinks a health-care tax is not a tax if he thinks the tax is for your own good. … Mr. Obama was asked by [ABC] host George Stephanopoulos about the 'individual mandate.' Under Max Baucus's Senate bill that Mr. Obama supports, everyone would be required to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty as high as $3,800 a year. Mr. Stephanopoulos posed the obvious question about this kind of coercion when 'the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don't [buy insurance]. … How is that not a tax?' 'Well, hold on a second, George,' Mr. Obama replied. 'Here's what's happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I've said is that if you can't afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn't be punished for that. That's just piling on. If, on the other hand, we're giving tax credits, we've set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we've driven down the costs, we've done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you've just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that's…' 'That may be,' Mr. Stephanopoulos responded, 'but it's still a tax increase.' (In fact, uncompensated care accounts for about only 2.2% of national health spending today, but that's another subject.) Mr. Obama: 'No. That's not true, George. The — for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore…' In other words, like parents talking to their children, this levy — don't call it a tax — is for your own good. … Mr. Obama complains that 'My critics say everything is a tax increase,' as if that is his political problem. His real problem is that the individual mandate really is a tax, but the President doesn't want voters to think of it that way, because taxes are unpopular." –The Wall Street Journal, September, 2009.

Yes, of course, Obama's penalty for not having health insurance is a tax, no matter what he wants to call it. Obama probably wouldn't consider his cap-and-trade proposal a tax either, but that's exactly what it is. The creative subterfuge being engaged in by Democrats these days is to pass tax increases without calling them tax increases. Instead, they are called penalties, mandates, fees, carbon allowances, etc. Does this stuff actually fool anyone ? (except for liberals, that is). I hope not. Obama isn't "helping the little guy" one bit, in case anyone hasn't noticed (and the media sure hasn't). He's only raising the little guy's expenses, through both direct and indirect means. This brings to mind Ronald Reagan's quote about the most terrifying words in the english language – "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
===
"We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act. And we will meet our responsibility to future generations." - Barack Obama, speaking at the UN climate change conference, September, 2009.

"Responsibility to future generations," eh ? More than a tad ironic, coming from the President who is running up the debt faster than every other administration in history combined, thereby irresponsibly ruining the prospects of future generations.
===
"It doesn't smell of sulfur here anymore. It smells of something else. It smells of hope." - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, addressing the UN, September, 2009.

The "sulfur" smell was Bush, whom Chavez called "the devil" at last year's UN meeting. The "hope" smell is Obama. It's sure nice that we've won over Chavez, don't you think ? Yes, he may be a tyrannical nut who nationalizes industries, shuts down opposition media, and puts opposition political figures in jail, but that's the socialist way. Because Chavez's version of "hope" would be hope of a worldwide socialist revolution, I wonder what it is he likes so much about Obama ??? I can agree with Chavez on this much – something smells alright.

“Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.” - Senator Barack Obama, in a 2006 floor speech preceding a Senate vote to extend the federal debt limit.

Ah, how I liked THAT Barack Obama back in 2006, when he was railing against the irresponsible fiscal policies of President Bush and his GOP-led Congress. I even went out and bought Obama's book, The Audacity Of Hope. Obama seemed different. He was the post-partisan, responsible voice for change. Obama's book turned out to be pretty light on substance, but his rhetorical fluorishes promised a new kind of politics that could bring left and right together for the betterment of the country.

Too bad it was all rubbish. Obama's idea of bipartisanship is to have Democrats write all the bills, to ignore all Republican suggestions, and to have Republicans sit quietly in the corner and go along with whatever Obama and the Dems want. When Republicans refused to do that, an absolute certainty, Obama and company then demonized them as the "failed policies of the past," the "party of no," "racists," "dividers," "rightwing domestic terrorists (my personal fave)," and so on and so forth.

Speaking of the failed policies of the past, Democrats voted as a bloc against raising the federal debt limit back in 2006, when Obama was allegedly so concerned about shifting bad policy choices onto the backs of our children. Since then, after the Democrats took over Congress and eventually the White House, the debt limit has been raised three times. Now the Senate needs to raise it again, because we are going to exceed the current $12 trillion debt limit next month. We're going to have to keep on raising it too, because both the White House and Congressional Budget Office agree that Obama and the Democrats are going to add another $9 trillion to the debt (and the Dems have lots MORE groovy new spending plans they haven't implemented yet.) Apparently, Obama isn't quite so concerned about the burdens our children will have to bear anymore. Instead, he has declared open season on their futures. Ironically, it's the young people who seem to support Obama the most. Go figure. It's like falling in love with your executioner.

The rest of the world has taken notice of America's massive financial irresponsibility and is proposing changes. China wants to back away from buying U.S. debt, alarmed over massive American money printing (backed by nothing). China sees rampant U.S. inflation coming as soon as the recession ends. Can't argue with them there. The UN wants to move to a new world currency other than the dollar for similar reasons. The dollar just hit a new low for the year, and we're still hemorrhaging jobs at an alarming pace, with unemployment at a 26-year high. In addition, the FHA, which has taken over as the new securitized subprime mortgage lender of choice after the private lenders stopped making those boneheaded loans in the wake of the housing meltdown, is coming perilously close to not meeting it's 2% reserve requirements, as the economy continues to tank and foreclosures continue to rise. A new bailout for the FHA, perhaps ? Hey, why not ? What's another $100 billion these days ?

So naturally, with all this "good" news abounding, our Vice President, Joe Biden, recently declared, "The recovery act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy." Sure, Joe, whatever you say. Everything's going great. Keep creating your own reality. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

When all is said and done, the plans of the Democrats are the same as they always are, and as simple as the directions on a bottle of shampoo – Spend. Tax. Repeat.

The children be damned.

Do you believe our federal government is competent ? Do you think it's doing a good job of solving our problems ? Are we getting our money's worth ? Let's run through a checklist.

The government declared a war on poverty about 45 years ago. How'd that work out ? We may not have an exit strategy from Afghanistan yet, but you'd think we'd have one for the war on poverty after all these years. Nope.

What about the war on drugs ? We've put a lot of American citizens in prison on drug charges, giving us the highest incarceration rate in the world here in the land of the free, but drugs are still everywhere. If you want to find illegal drugs in America, you don't have to look very hard.

How about the problem of illegal immigration ? I bet you didn't know that the government fixed that problem back in 1986 with the Immigration Reform And Control Act. Listen to this excerpt from the signing statement from that Act, and tell me if it sounds at all familiar to any discussions of the issue we are having today:

In 1981 this administration asked the Congress to pass a comprehensive legislative package, including employer sanctions, other measures to increase enforcement of the immigration laws, and legalization. The act provides these three essential components. The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here. We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.

In 1986, we had approximately 2.7 million illegal immigrants. Now the estimate is around 13 million, and we're having the exact same discussions about illegal immigration that we had 23 years ago. Good job, government.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Some of you might be thinking of all the super neato government programs that have been put in place to help us, like the Social Security ponzi scam, or Medicare, which is going broke. Plus, Social Security and Medicare comprise the lion's share of our unfunded liabilities, which, when added to our stated national debt of $11.7 trillion, make the real national debt around $56.4 trillion (note – the national debt figures are outdated as soon as they are printed because the debt is rising so fast. The real national debt might be over $58 trillion by now).

FYI – If you want to see the startling truth behind the U.S. economy, check out the U.S. Debt Clock. We are becoming a hollowed out shell of an economic power. It can't last. America, as it stands, is not sustainable (and our idiotic mainstream media wonders what all the protesting is about. "It must be racism," they say. Why do they call those media types "the elite" anyway ? They sound like a bunch of imbeciles to me).

Our government has done a bang up job of not eliminating poverty, drugs, and illegal immigration. It has also done a fine job of living beyond it's means and selling us down the river with massive debt that will destroy the hopes of future generations. It was also instrumental in creating the housing bubble that led to the current recession.

So, obviously, the correct path to follow now is to hand another 17% of our economy over to that same government to "fix" health care, right ? I mean, the government has such an excellent track record of solving economic problems (NOT). Much better than that miserable failure known as the free market (that made us the wealthiest country in the history of the world). After all, the free market has failed to rein in health care costs, right ? Wrong. The government has inserted itself into health care to such an extent that the free market isn't really functioning in health care. The government got into health care in a big way in 1965, and it's influence has grown ever since. This is also the same time period that health care costs have spiraled out of control.

I was listening to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday on television talking about how there isn't enough competition among private health care insurers, how some states are dominated by only a few insurance companies. What Schumer didn't bother to mention was that insurers are limited by law from competing on a national level, across state lines. So, we have the government restricting private health insurance choice on the one hand, and then complaining that there isn't enough choice on the other hand. I don't know how some of these politicians peddle this nonsense with a straight face. Schumer, of course, wasn't advocating to open up competition on a national level among diverse insurance companies. No, because that would make sense. We can't have that. Instead, Schumer was advocating for a public health insurance option, where the government competes directly against the private sector, as if that's even possible. It isn't. Schumer kept saying that government competing with private industry is fine, as long as there's "a level playing field." Schumer said that with a straight face too, somehow. The idea that there could ever be a level playing field between the federal government and the private sector is absurd on it's face, as is Chuck Schumer. A private industry trying to compete with the federal government in health care insurance would be like trying to play a football game against a government team, where the government got to pick the players on both teams, got to pick the referees, got to change the rules of the game after every play, and made your team pay the expenses of it's team. There's little doubt who would win the game with such a "level playing field."

I'd have much more respect for the politicians peddling the public health care option if they'd just tell the truth about it. It's not about "keeping the insurance companies honest" any more than Medicare was about "giving Seniors a choice" in 1965. It's about government control. Don't lie to me and tell me anything different.

In the last nine months, our federal government has bailed out big business left and right. Wall Street, banks, insurance companies, car companies. The federal government serves as a backstop for big business. Big business also happens to be the ones with the deep pockets, lobbyists, and campaign cash to help get the politicians re-elected. It's a cozy little quid pro quo of the nation's power brokers. The elite taking care of their own. The government has also bailed itself out by sending huge chunks of cash to state governments via Obama's stimulus bill. Those government jobs were "saved," even as us schlubs in the private sector lost our jobs. It seems ALL the big boys in our country are "too big to fail," and the enormous bailout price tag is put on the national credit card for some future taxpayer schlubs to worry about. That's a sweet deal for the big boys in and out of government. Their risk is alleviated. Their past sins, which led to these dire financial straits in the first place, are absolved. The taxpayers serve as the sin-eaters and the pain-eaters. Btw, the federal employees health care plan is top-notch. Thank you very much, schlubs.

But with all this bailing out of the big boys, something critical has been forgotten.

70% of the jobs created in this country come from small business. How are we treating our small businesses, the ones who create the lion's share of employment opportunities ???? Let's take a look.

The liberal solution to every conceivable financial woe comes down to basically three words – "tax the rich." Then the liberals spew out inanities about how the top income tax rates used to be MUCH higher, like 70% or 90% (as if that's a good thing). What they don't tell you is that small businesses are scooped up along with the wealthy as liberals cast their tax nets, trolling for rich people. The reason for this is because 75% of small businesses are sub-chapter S corporations, who file their business taxes under the individual income tax code. When the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, causing the top tax rate to increase by 4.6% to 39.6%, small businesses (the job creators) have to pay those increased taxes too. That leaves less money available to successful small businesses for investment, growth, wage increases for it's employees, and/or new job creation.

Reversing the Bush tax cuts is far from the only anti-small business measure being proposed. As part of the ObamaCare reform, the House Committee has propsed a surcharge tax for anyone making over $1 million per year, raising the top income tax rate to 45%. Last month, freshman Democrats in the House (who apparently have a lot more economic sense than many veteran Democrats in the House), sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) objecting to the measures, which they say will hurt small businesses. Here is a portion of that letter:

While the Ways and Means Committee states that the proposed surcharge in H.R. 3200 will only impact 4.1 percent of small businesses, we are concerned that this does not paint a complete picture. According to the Internal Revenue Service's 2002 Statistics of Income, 64 percent of households filing income tax forms with AGI above $250,000 filed as an S corporation or a partnership or filed a Schedule C sole proprietorship tax form. Further, of all small businesses, 75% are S-Corporations where the business income is passed through to the business owners' individual tax return, increasing the chances that it will be impacted by the proposed surcharge.

So, the Ways and Means Committees' 4.1% number of small businesses being affected is an outright lie. No surprise there. I'm only surprised when they don't lie. The letter goes on:

The proposed surcharge will also have a direct negative impact on manufacturers, another industry essential for our recovery. As manufacturers are capital intensive businesses, their taxable income is often higher (nearly 70 percent of the manufacturers that pay at the individual rate have an average taxable income of $570,000). Manufacturing machinery can cost of $1 million and many owners have to save for years to expand and buy new equipment. Yet those profits saved each year would be hit by the new surcharge, which could lead to reduced investment.

Especially in a recession, we need to make sure not to kill the goose that will lay the golden eggs of our recovery…Combined with state taxes, many successful small businesses — the very kind of business that should lead in creating new jobs and help us emerge from this recession — will be taxed at over 50 percent.

A 50% tax rate on job creators……Dumb-da-da-dumb-dumb. Small business can't thrive in such an environment.

The freshmen House Democrats go on to explain how, at a 50% tax rate, small businesses would also be at a huge disadvantage to the big corporations and multinationals, who would still be paying the lower 35% business tax rate. What an unbelievable coincidence. The big boys, after being bailed out and immunized from failure at the taxpayer's expense, and after all their lobbying and campaign contributions, get FAVORABLE TREATMENT FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT over the biggest job creators in the country, small business.

Btw, the letter also mentioned that $21 billion of the stimulus package funds are going to small businesses, the biggest job creators in the country. That comes out to about TWO PERCENT of the $787 billion Obama stimulus total. Do any of you STILL think that was a stimulus package ???? It wasn't. It was mostly just an extraordinarily large appropriations spending package, aka, pork. That's why it hasn't and won't work.

Let's also not forget that cap-and-trade is looming on the horizon, so Obama can "skyrocket" those energy costs for small businesses too. Then, if Card Check passes, the Big O can just drive a lot of small businesses out of business via unionization and it's unaffordable wages and mandates on business. Peachy.

Back to health care reform. The President is trying to sell the health care plan as being pro-small business, but a proposal in the House calls for employers with a total payroll above $250,000 to offer health insurance to their workers or face a surtax of as much as 8 percent. A Senate committee version would require all businesses, except those with fewer than 25 employees, to provide health coverage or pay a $750 fine per year for each worker. I've heard there will be a tax credit for businesses to provide health care (that doesn't help struggling businesses, which are many these days), but if these plans are pro-small business, I'd sure hate to see what anti-small business would look like.

That's why the business community, with the exception of those big and favored few who will prosper under Obama's plans (like Big Pharma or GE) is scared to death of Barack Obama, and is fighting back. I can't blame them. Anti-business craziness abounds.

I guess my only remaining question would be – is Obama trying to destroy this country on purpose, or is he just too stupid to know any better ?

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) computed the day of the year when all the costs of government at all levels are paid for. ATR calls it Cost Of Government Day. This year, that day fell on August 12, 2009. It has taken from January 1st until now to pay for all the costs of federal, state, and local government, plus the regulatory burdens imposed by the government. This year's Cost Of Government Day was almost a full month later than it was in 2008. The biggest reason for the change was the recession, which sparked a massive Keynesian government spending spree (TARP, stimulus, etc). Another reason is the unchecked growth of unfunded entitlement liabilities (Medicare, Social Security, etc).

This year, the cost of government consumed 61.34% of national income. Working people toil 224 days of the year to pay for their government. You can view the Cost Of Government Day report for 2009 here. It makes for some very interesting and disturbing reading.

Put in it's simplest terms, this means that we are becoming slaves to incremental government tyranny. ObamaCare and Cap-and-Trade are some of the next steps in that planned process.

The breakdown of Cost Of Government Day is as follows:
- We work 111 days to pay for federal spending.
- We work 49 days for state and local spending.
- We work 42 days for federal regulations.
- We work 23 days for state and local regulations.

Cost Of Government Day varies from state to state, of course, because each state and locality has a differing burden. The state with the least burden (most free) in 2009 was Alaska (where that radical Sarah Palin governed. No wonder liberals hate her). Predictably, the states with the highest government burdens (least free) were liberal states, with Connecticut being the highest, followed by New Jersey, New York, and California. Liberals LOVE to give their hard-earned money to the government (well, actually, they love to give other people's hard-earned money to the government). Liberals exhibit a plantation mentality, with the government playing the role of master, and the liberals playing the happy slaves whose every need is met by Massuh (at the price of their liberty and free choice). This somehow makes sense to them, though I can never understand WHY it makes sense to them. I run from it like I'm headed for the Underground Railroad.

When you're working 7-8 months per year just to pay off the government burdens, it's only natural that you will be poorer than you'd be otherwise, but somehow liberals can never figure this out either. They are always clamoring for more and more government spending, taxation, and regulation. It's their version of Stockholm Syndrome. They loves them some Massuh. Massuh is SO very good and kind. Massuh is SO very smart.

In an irony so thick you could cut it with a knife, liberals, the willing slaves, call people "racists" when they resist the big government takeovers being planned by President Barack Obama. They actually think it's racist to want to be free from government tyranny, all because Obama's skin is black. They can't see past that singular, irrelevant fact. At this point, crying racism is nothing more than the liberal Pavlovian response to freedom. They can't help it, and they don't understand what the rest of us are so upset about. They don't get that most people don't want to become wards of the state. They are completely baffled when people don't want the government to takeover every aspect of their lives, so they use "racist" as a sort of intellectual firewall. Go figure.

Back to the Cost Of Government Day report. One of the many myths the report destroys is the idea that Obama's stimulus package was actually an economic stimulus package. It wasn't. It was mostly just a bunch of big government appropriations spending under the guise of stimulus, along with spending to prop up, guess who? – the government ("never let a crisis go to waste"). Here's the breakdown of spending in the alleged stimulus package:

- $90 billion for “State Fiscal Relief;”
- $71.3 billion for the Department of Labor, Health and
Human Services and Education (including $16.6 billion for
Student Financial Assistance, $13 billion for Education for
the Disadvantaged, $12.2 billion for Special Education and
$9.7 billion for National Institutes of Health);
- $61.1 billion for Transportation, Urban Development and
Housing (including $27.5 billion for Highway
Construction);
- $57.3 billion for Assistance for Unemployed Workers and
Struggling Families (including 39.2 billion for
Unemployment Compensation);
- $53.6 billion for the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund;
- $50.8 billion for Energy and Water (including $16.8 billion
for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy);
- $26.4 billion for Agriculture, Rural Development and Food
and Drug Administration (including $20 billion for the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program);
- $25.1 billion for Health Insurance Assistance;
- $20.8 billion for Health Information Technology;
- $15.8 billion on Commerce, Justice and Science (including
$4.7 billion on the Broadband Technology Opportunities
Program);
- $10.6 billion on Interior and Environment (including Clean
Water and DrinkingWater State Revolving Funds);
- $7.9 billion on Defense and Homeland Security;
- $6.7 billion on Financial Services and General Government
(including $5.4 billion on the Federal Buildings Fund);
- $4.3 billion on Military Construction and Veteran Affairs.

Another interesting item in the report is how the tax burden of the various states affects the population and prosperity of those states. The report states that between 1997 and 2007, the ten states with the highest tax burdens lost 3 million citizens and $82 billion in income. During the same period, over 2.6 million people moved to the states with no income tax, bringing in about $98.5 billion in income. Hmmm. Those no income tax states must be racist.

Maybe the most important thing to remember about President Obama's first year in office is this – in 2009, taxpayers are confronted with a federal budget that raises spending to over $9,000 for every man, woman and child in America—forever. That's $36,000 for a family of four. EVERY YEAR. And our President has only just begun to "change" America. Change into what, I shudder to think.

In conclusion, keep going to those Tea Parties and townhall meetings. Keep telling your Congressperson what you think. The only ones who can stop this tyrannical government (and it started long before Obama arrived on the scene) is we, the people. Ignore all the name-calling you endure from the leftist slaves and their pet slave media. They are the problem. You are the solution.