In trying to decide who should be our next President, we first have to ask if our current President deserves a second term. This should be based upon his performance in office, not on the political party to which he belongs.

Does Obama deserve a second term ?

Let's look at his record.

I have to start in February 2008, when then candidate Obama brought his campaign roadshow to Ohio. I went to see him speak at Youngstown State University. The three biggest cheers Obama received from Ohioans that day were when he 1) promised to rework NAFTA, 2) promised to close Guantanamo Bay within 12 months, and 3) promised to end the Iraq War in 2009.

Needless to say, none of those things happened. Obama never had any intention of reworking NAFTA. He forgot that promise the minute he left Ohio. As President, Obama has pushed for more free trade agreements, and recently signed free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia. These were the largest free trade deals signed by the United States since NAFTA.

Guantanamo Bay is still open.

The Iraq War ended, but it ended under the timeline established by Obama's predecessor, President Bush. It definitely didn't end in 2009, as Obama promised Ohioans.

Obama lied to my face and to every Ohioan that day in 2008. An inauspicious start. I knew he was lying then, that he was the kind of guy who would tell people whatever they wanted to hear in order to become President. I don't trust those kinds of politicians, which is why I voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. Obama was not only as inexperienced a politico as any who ever ran for President, with zero prior management experience, but he was dishonest as well. I did what I could to defeat him, but alas, it didn't work, and now we're in the toilet.

Obama did keep some of his 2008 promises to Ohioans, like ObamaCare. He also promised to increase federal spending by $874 billion per year that day at Youngstown State, though he didn't put it into those words, because the electorate would have had a negative reaction to that type of honesty. Instead of putting price tags on his spending binge, Obama made all sorts of promises about "investing" in this, that, and almost everything, while never mentioning the costs. This President has never met any spending he doesn't like. Obama has "accomplished" every bit of his spending increase promise, which leads me to the primary reason we shouldn't give Obama a second term in office…he is the most fiscally irresponsible President in American history, bar none.

We have had annual deficits over $1 trillion ever year Obama has been in office. He has run up $4.6 trillion in debt in only 3 years in office. This far outpaces the previous "most fiscally irresponsible" President, George W. Bush, who ran up $4.8 trillion in debt over 8 years in office. Anybody who would vote for a second Obama term after such a record should have his/her head examined. The only people who should be supporting Obama's fiscal recklessness are citizens of China, who stand to gain from our destruction.

And what has all Obama's fiscal insanity accomplished ??? Unemployment is STILL at 8.5%, and it has been over 9% for the majority of Obama's presidency. If you recall, it was 7.6% when Obama took office. We have a huge net job loss during Obama's reign, though to hear him tell it, he is creating all kinds of jobs. That's one reason of many I call him the Great Prevaricator. Unemployment was mostly in the 5% range when Bush was President. Great job, Barry. Not only are you spending us into oblivion and wrecking the future of our country, but we aren't even gaining any temporary benefit from it now. You have managed to be the worst of both worlds. Most amazingly of all, the new ObamaCare spending hasn't even kicked in yet. That starts in full force in 2014. Federal spending is already the highest in the history of the country (barring WWII), and Obama's BIG spending program hasn't even started yet. We are borrowing 43 cents of every dollar the federal government spends WITHOUT ObamaCare spending in place. Imagine what it will be AFTER ObamaCare.

While I'm on the subject of ObamaCare, let's not forget that the Obama admimistration lied about it's costs and effects on the debt. The Great Prevaricator claims ObamaCare will decrease the debt, but he made that calculation by having the CBO measure ten years of revenue against only six years of benefits. That is profoundly dishonest, and sadly typical of the way our government misleads us.

Then the Great Prevaricator has the audacity to pretend increasing taxes on the rich by 5% is going to pay for all his crazy spending increases. That may be his most egregious lie of all. There is NO WAY his numbers come anywhere close to adding up, but I rarely hear a peep about this from the mainstream media. Perhaps there would be a few more media types peeping if 90% of them weren't Democrats. We'd be hearing the truth about the high speed rail to fiscal destruction we are on if the President was a Republican. Of that I have no doubt, but when a Democrat sits in the catbird seat, all we hear about is taxing the rich. I hate to break it to you America, but everyone's taxes will have to go through the roof in one way or another to pay for all this spending and government growth. Those are the facts, even though your illustrious media doesn't want to clue you in to the facts. The prevarication goes far beyond just the White House.

Somebody will also have to explain to me exactly how we are supposed to create jobs in this country going forward when our government spending and taxation levels, our unpaid-for entitlement explosion, and our building Mount Everest of debt are going to drain our pocketbooks and decrease consumer demand for generations to come. How does that work, exactly ??? The unvarnished facts there are, it DOESN'T work. At all. It would be real nice if we had a President who would level with us about these things, rather than the performing circus clown we have in office now.

Just say NO-bama. Change starts at the top. Obama has had his chance, and he failed miserably. It's time to try someone else.

Alternately, you could oppose Mitt Romney and support Obama's reign of destruction because Romney's a Mormon, Romney worked for Bain Capital, or because Romney changed his position on abortion and health care…..but that would make you somewhat of a self-destructive fool, wouldn't it ? We already KNOW Obama is a failure. Romney hasn't had his chance yet. If Romney turned out to be as bad as Obama, we'd be breaking even. But there's a very good chance Romney's policies would be better for the country. I don't know about the rest of you, but when my car falls apart and won't run, I don't try to keep driving it. I get a new one. 2012 is definitely the time for a new car. The Obama-mobile is a lemon.

Four months ago, one of the largest Tea Party groups, Freedomworks, created a Tea Party Debt Commission to address the red ink in which this country is drowning. Because our current non-leader is doing nothing but fiddling while Rome burns, I'm happy to present the results of the Tea Party's work, the Tea Party Budget.

Here's what the Tea Party Budget will do to our debt picture in comparison to non-leader Obama's non-plan, and in comparison to the House GOP plan.

The ten year Tea Party Budget plan would balance the budget in four years, and then start paying off the debt, reducing it to 75% of GDP by 2021 (as opposed to non-leader Obama's Greece-like 120%). Gone would be the trillion+ dollar deficits. Gone would be America's high-speed rail to fiscal destruction. Gone would be the crippling of our children's futures.

And the Tea Party does it without raising taxes.

Here are some of the features:

“Cuts, caps, and balances” federal spending.

Balances the budget in four years, and keeps it balanced, without tax hikes.

Closes an historically large budget gap, equal to almost one-tenth of our economy.

Reduces federal spending by $9.7 trillion over the next 10 years, as opposed to the President’s plan to increase spending by $2.3 trillion.

Shrinks the federal government from 24 percent of GDP — a level exceeded only in World War II— to about 16 percent, in line with the postwar norm.

Stops the growth of the debt, and begins paying it down, with a goal of eliminating it within thisgeneration.To achieve these goals, our plan, among other things:

Repeals ObamaCare in toto.

Eliminates four Cabinet agencies — Energy, Education, Commerce, and HUD — and reduces or privatizes many others, including EPA, TSA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.

Ends farm subsidies, government student loans, and foreign aid to countries that don’t support us— luxuries we can no longer afford.

Saves Social Security and greatly improves future benefits by shifting ownership and control from government to individuals, through new SMART Accounts.

Gives Medicare seniors the right to opt into the Congressional health care plan.

Suspends pension contributions and COLAs for Members of Congress, whenever the budget is in deficit.

The Tea Party budget contains a Balanced Budget Amendment to prevent future Obama-like non-leaders from embarking on courses of fiscal lunacy. It makes the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Here's a very brief description of what is wrong with our federal government:

At the root of these problems is our own federal government — its size, its reach, and many of its policies. Washington is simply too big. Our government is doing too many things it can’t do well, or shouldn’t do at all, with money it doesn’t have. We are borrowing 43 cents of every dollar we spend. Waste and duplication abound. A report published this past March by the Government Accountability Office counted no fewer than 47 job training programs, 56 financial literacy programs, 80 economic development programs, 18 food assistance programs, 20 programs for the homeless, 82 teacher-quality programs spread across 10 agencies, and more than 2,100 data centers. All told, we have nearly 2,200 federal programs. What human being could ever know or monitor them all? Who’s minding this mess?

Perhaps the best summation of this lamentable state of affairs came at our field hearing in Indianapolis,from a young lady named Chloe Minor, age 15: “Government today is making a mess of things. My generation has absolutely no say in the matter. Each of us owes over $44,000 to pay off the national debt. It is obvious to me what is needed in this country is some teenage supervision!”

Yes, when our federal government acts more irresponsibly than any random 10-year old, perhaps teenage supervision is called for. The federal government is a monstrous bureaucratic maze of waste, propped up solely by the continuing rape of hard-working taxpayers. There will NEVER be enough money to feed the ravenous maw of ideologically-driven non-leaders like Obama. The only sane course of action is to rein in our own government. Otherwise, we're headed for the same fiscal collapse that is now threatening Europe. Who could possibly want to follow that path ?

Contrast the Tea Party budget with the failure of the Not-So-Super Committee's weak efforts:

..if the Super Committee succeeds, it will reduce spending by about $1.2 trillion over the next decade, from a steeply rising baseline. Our plan, by contrast, would reduce spending by eight times that amount, $9.7 trillion. Or to put it in percentageterms, assuming they meet their full charge without gimmicks or double-counting, the Super Committee plan would slightly reduce ten-year spending from $44 trillion to $43 trillion, a 2.3 percent trim. Our plan would reduce ten-year spending from $44 trillion to $34 trillion, a 23 percent reduction.

This is what is needed to get our nation off the financial suicide train.

The Tea Party budget was based upon principles in the Tea Party's Contract From America platform, as follows:

1. Protect the Constitution
2. Reject Cap & Trade
3. Demand a Balanced Budget
4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform
5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government
6. End Runaway Government Spending
7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-Run Health Care
8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above’ Energy Policy
9. Stop the Pork
10.Stop the Tax Hikes

All the savings details are too long for me to list here, but you can find all the details at the Tea Party Budget link above.

Because no balanced budget or debt reduction is possible without touching the third rail of politics, the Tea Party budget does address Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Here's what they do with Social Security:

The Challenge. Social Security is going broke, and beginning about 25 years from now will only have enough funds to pay about 75 percent of promised benefits. Benefits are also comparatively meager, and cannot be passed down to one’s heirs, should one die before reaching retirement age.

Our Answer. Successful experiments have proved that we can make this program sustainable and actually improve benefits. How? By harnessing the power of compound interest.Three decades ago, Chile embarked on a bold transformation of its retirement security system. Today, that system is the envy of the world, giving seniors far better benefits than the old, government-run system ever did. Soon after the Chilean reform got underway, three Texas county governments opted out of Social Security in favor of personal accounts. Today, county workers in those three jurisdictions retire with much more money and have significantly more generous death and disability supplemental benefits than do Social Security participants. And those three counties—unlike almost all others in the U.S.—face no long-term unfunded pension liabilities. All state and local governments should have the option of opting into the “Galveston model.” And all young people should have the option of opting into a better future with personal accounts like those found in Chile. The Tea Party Budget embraces the Chilean/Galveston approach, specifically by enacting a modified version of Rep. Jeff Flake’s (R-AZ) SMART Act. That bold reform allows new workers born after 1981 to invest one-half of their payroll taxes (7.65%) in a SMART Account, which they can use to fund their retirement and health care costs in retirement. If they prefer, they can give up their account and opt back into traditional Social Security at retirement.Thanks to this modern approach, our plan:

Improves benefits.
Doesn’t increase the retirement age.
Doesn’t means-test benefits.
Doesn’t cut benefits for people in or nearing retirement.
Doesn’t touch the existing Social Security Disability Insurance program.
Shores up the long-term solvency of traditional Social Security by slowing the growth of benefits (with “progressive price indexing”).
This reform — which we expect to be very popular — reduces federal payroll tax receipts by about $500 billion over the ten-year period—an excellent investment on a better system, and one that is fully paid for in this plan.

This would mark the beginning of the end for the government-run S.S. scam. No longer would the government be able to steal your retirement funds, then turn around and jack up your payroll taxes in Ponzi-like fashion to cover up their misdeeds. I not only say "yes", I say "hell yes !"

There's lot more to say here, but this is getting rather lengthy. I urge you all to read the details of the Tea Party budget. It's the best plan I've heard to date for fixing this mess, though there's still some room for improvement. Maybe I'll address more aspects of the budget in a future post.

One other interesting note. After the Tea Party produced their plan, they were going to present their recommendations to Congress…until the Senate Rules Committee, headed up by Chuck The Schmuck Schumer (D-NY), took away their microphones and locked them out minutes before the hearing was scheduled to start. Fascist jerk.

While the Occupy movement sits around in drum circles spouting inanities like "Capitalism Is Evil" and "Abolish Money", the Tea Party is actually doing work and coming up with solutions. The only problem I see with the Tea Party people is, there aren't enough of them…YET.

In reference to cutting government spending, President Obama likes to say we should use a "scalpel" instead of a "machete".

Obama couldn't be more wrong. We should be using a howitzer instead of a machete on government spending. Using a scalpel just ain't gonna git her done, because we're on an unsustainable fiscal path straight to economic hell.

Unfortunately, we have two political parties of big spenders. We just witnessed the complete failure of 12 members of those big spending parties (the Not-So-Super Committee) to agree on $1.2 trillion in future cuts to future spending increases. The game those two parties played was, they both made offers they knew the other side would reject, then after the Super Committee failed, they both hoped to gain politically by blaming the other side. This is how our leading politicians act when the future of America is on the line. They look after themselves and their party instead of the people. If the two parties, can't even agree on something so minor, what hope is there they will ever implement the changes necessary to put this country back on a sustainable fiscal path ?

It seems the worst thing that can happen in Washington D.C. is for one party to gain complete power.

When Obama and the Democrats gained complete control in 2009-2010, they rammed through unprecedented spending increases and created the largest new entitlement program (ObamaCare) since the creation of Medicare in 1965. They did this with the full knowledge that our current entitlement programs were unsustainable. They did this despite warnings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that ObamaCare would bend the health care cost curve up instead of down. They did this despite the fact that Medicare was already our largest unsustainable entitlement liability going forward, the single biggest future government expense. ObamaCare will add trillions in new spending, and add tens of millions of people to the Medicaid rolls when the states are already struggling to pay for existing Medicaid spending. The Democrats did this when the country was in a major recession with unemployment at 9%. The Democrats made our unsustainable entitlement picture even more unsustainable, and they did it against the will of the American public. The Democrats also made trillion dollar plus deficits routine, and Obama has run up debt faster than any other American president in history. We just passed the $15 trillion debt mark, with no signs of the red ink slowing. Democrat control was a complete and utter failure.

Prior to Obama, we had President Bush and the Republicans in complete control from 2001-2006. What were the results when the so-called "conservative" party was in power ? Massive spending increases, an unnecessary war, and…a new entitlement program (Medicare Part D, the Prescription Drug program) !!! Defense and social spending both rose rapidly under Bush, and Bush accumulated $5 trillion in debt over eight years. Federal spending skyrocketed during the Bush years. If this is what we're calling "conservative" these days, no thank you. Real inflation-adjusted military spending is twice what it was a decade ago, yet the "conservative" Republicans are resisting major defense cuts, as are the Pentagon and the Obama administration. The leading Republican presidential contenders are all acting like hawks, and so is the Obama administration.

It's time for a major reality check for both political parties. While they play their partisan reindeer games, America is going down the tubes. We literally can't afford all this government spending any longer. We can't tax our way out of the problem, and we sure as hell can't "tax the rich" to pay for it all, which is the canard the Democrats keep pimping. Reversing the Bush tax cuts for the rich would add maybe $75 billion in new revenue over the next year. How does that address our $1.2 trillion deficit ? It doesn't. The Democrats are talking economic gobbledygook, and even though the American people agree with increasing taxes on the wealthy, it doesn't get us anywhere near to solving our economic sustainability problem. Not to mention that increasing taxes during this Great Recession would be galactically stupid and take even more money out of the hands of struggling American taxpayers and job creators. Lots of those "rich" people are business owners. The Democrats need to be reminded that those are the people who employ workers. Putting more expenses on their backs will only make matters worse. We're losing enough jobs as it is already.

It's time to refocus our Defense budget on what it is supposed to be for, DEFENSE…of America, not the defense of every country around the world. We can't afford to be the world's policeman any longer. This should be pretty obvious when the federal government is borrowing 43 cents of every dollar it spends. We can't justify spending $900 billion on the military when our Social Security and Medicare programs aren't funded. What does that say about our priorities ? The Republicans need to get off the neocon bandwagon already and admit this. It's indefensible, no pun intended.

The only way to get spending in line is to address the main drivers of current and future spending, and those are – Defense, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and interest payments. Here is a pie chart of the 2012 federal budget:

From the above chart, we see that defense, entitlements (health care/pensions/welfare), and interest consume a whopping 88% of the federal budget. Even if Rick Perry could remember all three of the federal departments he wants to close, that 88% in spending would still remain, and nothing would change. Interest payments may seem relatively small at 6%, but they are growing so fast due to our massive deficits/debt that if we don't get our budget under control, the CBO estimates interest payments will soar to $800 billion per year by 2020. That is a tremendous amount of taxpayer money to flush down the toilet, money that could be used for other things, such as Social Security, Medicare, etc. Our unrestrained debt is stealing the future away. Obama and Congress are doing a great job, but only if the goal IS to destroy the country. Otherwise, we need some major changes, and we need them very soon. It's a shame that all we seem to get is the same old partisan rhetoric leading to nowhere, the same old false choices, the same old entrenched interests, the same old choices of Democrat poison or Republican poison. I'd say we deserve better than that, but I'm not sure we do.

Some day people may realize that the libertarian impulses were right, but I fear it will be too late by then. Many people seem to believe the ideas of limiting government and maximizing liberty are too radical, which actually makes me laugh (instead of cry) considering how extremely radical our current fiscal picture has become. How can things get more radical than pursuing policies of national economic suicide ??? It boggles my mind, as does the massive entitlement mentality that has taken over much of this country. We've become warring special interests instead of a united people. That is something else that has to change before we can hope to address our problems. I'm not optimistic.

Good luck, America. You're going to need it.

Because I have spent the last two posts going after Newt Gingrich to an extent, in fairness I am providing a link to Gingrich's website, where he answers recent charges made against him. I report, you decide (hmmm. Where have I heard that phrase before ? Sounds familiar).
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Larry Elder Treats Chris Matthews Like Chris Matthews And Every Other MSNBC Host Treats Conservative Guests…And Matthews Doesn't Like It One Bit:

Payback is a you-know-what, Mr. Matthews.
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House Rejects Balanced Budget Amendment (link):

The U.S. House of Representatives rejected a proposal Friday to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget, seen by many as the only way to force lawmakers to hold the fiscal line and reverse the flow of federal red ink.

The 261-165 vote, though a clear majority, was 23 votes short of the two-thirds required to advance a constitutional amendment. Democrats voted overwhelmingly against it, apparently swayed by the arguments of their leaders that a balanced budget requirement would force Congress to make devastating cuts to social programs.

Four Republicans joined the Democrats in opposing the measure: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.), Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas.).

$15 trillion in national debt, annual trillion dollar deficits, and Congress doesn't have the votes for a balanced budget amendment. Yet another sign of our destruction.

I expect Democrats to vote against fiscal sanity, but….did I see that right ? Rep. Ryan voted AGAINST the balanced budget amendment ? What's up with that ? Here's Ryan's explanation:

Ryan said he was worried the version of the amendment could pave the way for more taxes, instead of reducing spending, to balance the budget, The Hill reported.

“Spending is the problem, yet this version of the BBA makes it more likely taxes will be raised, government will grow, and economic freedom will be diminished,” Ryan said. “Without a limit on government spending, I cannot support this amendment.”

Can't say I agree with Ryan's logic there. Tax increases may be bad, but this out-of-control debt bomb is far worse.

This is the first balanced budget amendment vote in 16 years. In 1995, a balanced budget amendment passed the House, when Republicans and 72 Democrats voted for it. That effort failed to pass the Senate by one vote, thanks to Democrat obstruction. Think of how much better off this country would be today if we had passed that amendment in 1995, and had not accumulated $10 trillion in new debt since. Thanks for nothing, Dumb-o-crats. This time around, only 25 Democrats in the House voted for a balanced budget amendment. I guess the Democratic party prefers national bankruptcy. In fact, I think that should be Obama's 2012 campaign slogan. DEBT FOREVER ! VOTE OBAMA.
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White House Shooter Made Videos:
I've been wondering why Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, the man suspected of shooting at the White House in an assassination attempt (his bullet was stopped by bulletproof glass), hated Obama so much. Ortega-Hernandez has referred to himself as a modern day Jesus, and called Obama the anti-Christ. As it turns out, Ortega-Hernandez made a video in hopes of being on Oprah's show:

VIDEO: Alleged White House Shooter Oscar Ortega-Hernandez: MyFoxDC.com

I wonder where our modern day Jesus/assassin got that "war for oil" stuff ??? Any liberals out there wish to hazard a guess ? I know how concerned y'all are about political rhetoric leading to violence.

In related news, the Occupy San Diego dumbsh*ts held a moment of silence to express "solidarity" with the shooter, because authorities thought Ortega-Hernandez may have been hanging out with the Occupy D.C. crowd (which seems now not to be the case).

Real brainiacs, those Occupiers. The Occupier arrest count now tops 3,600.
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My, How That Hope Did Change:

Here's candidate Obama in 2008, castigating Bush (justifiably) for Bush's debt accumulation:

"The problem is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents, [and] number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt."

Obama called Bush's spending and debt runup "unpatriotic" then, but now he calls Republicans unpatriotic because they won't spend and runup even more debt. Go figure. Obama has added $4.5 trillion to the debt in less than three years. It took Bush nearly eight years to do the same. If the debt trajectory continues and Obama is elected to a second term, he will add more to the national debt than every other President in U.S. history COMBINED. That is called epic fail, my friends.

Not-So-Super Committee: The congressional Super Committee is tasked with cutting $1.2 trillion from future deficits over the next decade. They can accomplish this by cutting spending or raising taxes. They have 9 days left to complete their mission before automatic cuts to defense and entitlements go into effect. Thus far, the Super Committee has been unable to reach an agreement.

If anything illustrates the ineffectiveness of Congress (and a failure of leadership by the President), this it it. Think about it. Over the last ten years, the federal government has spent about $28 trillion. Over the next ten years, federal spending is projected to be $45-50 trillion. All the Super Committee has to do is cut $1.2 trillion out of the next $45-50 trillion in spending, a miniscule percentage. The Super Committee's job isn't even about cutting spending. They are only talking about cutting the rate of future spending INCREASE. I could cut that much out of the budget in a day, if it took me that long. In fact, I'll do it right now, in about ten seconds. We could cut $1.2 trillion out of the military budget over ten years. That would come to $120 billion per year, out of a defense budget that is already larger than the defense budgets of all the other countries in the world COMBINED, a defense budget that costs almost $1 trillion per year when all associated costs are tallied. There. We're done. That wasn't so hard, was it ?

If the Super Committee can't even agree on these small cuts ($120 billion per year out of future $4-5 trillion budgets), what hope is there that Congress can close our annual trillion dollar deficits ? There is no hope, not with our current Congress, and not with our current President. Ron Paul sounds better all the time.

CBS Sucks: Speaking of Ron Paul, CBS held a 90-minute GOP presidential debate on foreign policy. CBS aired 60 minutes of that debate, and candidate Paul got a grand total of 89 seconds to speak on air. Paul advocates a non-interventionist foreign policy (see – defense spending cuts). Apparently, CBS didn't want to hear it. Paul wasn't the only GOP contender complaining, and CBS's excuse was that they gave the most air time to the candidates highest in the polls. It is not the job of CBS to decide which candidates are legitimate and which are not. That's the job of the voters, and the voters can't make a sound choice if certain candidates are cut out of the debate process. It's the job of CBS to give each candidate an equal chance, and CBS failed miserably.

Cain-wreck: I thought Rick Perry forgetting which government deparments he wanted to eliminate was about as bad as it gets for political flubs. I was wrong. Watch Herman Cain trying to answer a question about whether he agreed with Obama's policy in Libya:

Ouch. That was actually painful to watch. 'Let's see…Libya…that's a country, isn't it ? Golly, there are so many countries that it's hard to keep track [even though we've been at war in Libya for months and it was all over the news]. Libya's trying to develop nuclear weapons, right ? No, that's China…or is it Iran ? Wait, no, Libya is where Qaddafi was at, correct ? Whatever it is, I'm disagreeing with Obama's policy on it, because…I have to…even if I have no idea what I'm talking about'.

Give me a break already. Cain sounded like a college student who didn't study for the entire semester and then stayed up all night cramming for the final. So much information "twirling around" inside his head. Thanks for playing Presidential Jeopardy, Mr. Cain, and please accept this wonderful parting gift, dinner for two at Olive Garden. But please spare us any more of your "views" on foreign policy. Cain would have been better off if he just said, 'hell if I know. I'm a businessman. I don't even know where Libya is'.

Given Cain and Perry's recent responses, I'm starting to think maybe I could run for President. There don't seem to be any qualifications for the job.

Supreme Test For ObamaCare: The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the lawsuit challenging ObamaCare. This is huge. We should find out next year whether we have a constitutional government or a totalitarian government. If the ObamaCare insurance mandate is upheld by the Supremes, the government would be granted almost unlimited power over the citizenry. The government could then tell us what products we have to buy from private companies, what we have to eat and drink, what we have to wear, you name it. There would be no limits to governmental authority. The ObamaCare mandate to purchase health insurance or be fined is an assault on our basic rights and freedom, and possibly the most unconstitutional law passed since the 1930's, when several unconstitutional FDR laws were struck down by the courts.

There have been calls for Justices Thomas and Kagan to recuse themselves from the proceedings. Justice Thomas' wife has been involved in campaigns to repeal ObamaCare, and Justice Kagan worked for Obama and is on record cheering the passage of ObamaCare. It doesn't really matter if they recuse themselves, unless only one of them does, which would swing the balance of the court. We pretty much already know the entire liberal wing of the court will vote for a totalitarian government and approve the unconstitutional ObamaCare mandate. The conservative wing of the court will vote to uphold the Constitution and liberty, and that leaves…Justice Kennedy, the swing vote who will decide the future of freedom in this country. The eventual ruling is almost certainly going to be 5-4 one way or the other. My view is that any Justice who votes to uphold the ObamaCare mandate should be immediately kicked off the Supreme Court for violating his/her oath of office.

The Lord Of The Flies movement takes baby steps…

All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others: “We need to limit the amount of food we’re putting out to curb the influx of derelicts.” – OWS kitchen volunteer Rafael Moreno

All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others, Part II: "If you’re going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back. There’s a lot of takers here and they feel entitled. – OWS protestor Lauren Digiola (link)

Yes, we certainly can't have any entitlement-seekers infecting the Occupy movement of…um…entitlement-seekers. Gotta keep those losers out. The stuff the Occupiers have is THEIRS, dammit !!! They can't be expected to redistribute THEIR wealth to the less fortunate !!! We Are The 99%…except for those homeless derelicts !!!
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Robbing Peter To Pay Paul: "With nine days to go before the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) faces default, a Senate committee on Wednesday is expected to vote on a new plan to address the crisis. … The legislation would … provide USPS billions in cash from taxpayers. Specifically, it would hand over some $7 billion in supposedly 'surplus' contributions the government has made to the Federal Employees Retirement System. Such temporary surpluses, however, are common and are typically erased by normal financial swings or amortization over time. Transfer of the entire pot to USPS leaves taxpayers vulnerable if USPS later falls behind (which, given its condition, is not unlikely) while allowing needed structural reforms to be delayed. … USPS, and mail delivery itself, faces an uncertain future. Comprehensive change is needed to prevent massive losses and virtual bankruptcy. The reforms being considered by the Senate, however, fall short — while putting taxpayers even more at risk for the consequences of failure." –The Heritage Foundation's James Gattuso

I call this the Social Security financial oversight model. When the government sees a pile of money, it can't keep it's grubby mitts off of it. Btw, there is about $17.5 trillion sitting in the retirement funds of Americans if you add all of them together. How much do you think the government money-grubbers would love to gain control of that pile of cash ??? You'd have to subtract the $2.5 trillion sitting in the Social Security Trust Fund from the $17.5 trillion amount, because those SS funds don't really exist (the government already "borrowed" that money), but still, that leaves $15 trillion in our retirement funds, which is almost the exact amount of the national debt. When the cash-strapped government is already thinking about "borrowing" money from the pensions of federal employees, how long will it be until your IRA's and 401K's are taken over ? Lest you think I'm engaging in some fanciful paranoid delusion…the Obama administration already has plans to takeover your 401K's, which it could then "borrow" from. Beware.
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National Debate Loser: And what can we say about Rick Perry ? Trying to list the federal departments he would eliminate, Perry had an epic debate brain fart instead…

"Commerce, Education and the, uh, what's the third one there? Let's see…The third agency of government I would — I would do away with, Education, uh, the, uh, Commerce and, let's see,…I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops."

Doh !!!! I think the third government department Perry was going for there is Lingerie, or maybe Junior Miss. Commodore Perry's presidential battleship may have just sunk.
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When Life Gets Tough, Make Things Up: "From a policy standpoint I think it's really important to know that President Obama was a job creator from day one. Now, was the ditch that we were in so deep that when you're talking to people and they still don't have a job, that's any consolation to them? No. But I'll tell you this: If President Obama and the House congressional Democrats had not acted, we would be at 15 percent unemployment." –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

For the record, under Obama, the alleged "job creator from day one", we have lost about 2.4 million jobs, and nobody outside Pelosi's vivid imagination believes unemployment would have been at 15 percent without Obama's failed stimulus package. Pelosi is a perpetual brain fart.
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Top 1% Denier: Here's an exchange between left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore and a CBS reporter…

Reporter: How are you helping these [Occupy protesters]?
Moore: Because I do well, I want taxes raised on people who do well, including mine.
Reporter: How are you helping these people with your $50 million?
Moore: I don't have $50 million.
Reporter: That's what it's rumored you are worth.
Moore: Well, really. Is that what you do is sell rumors?
Reporter: We're asking you for the truth.
Moore: You're just punk media is all you are. You lie. You lie to people. Stop lying to people. Stop lying.
Reporter: Are you not part of the 1 percent?
Moore: Just don't lie, okay?

I'm still waiting for the FIRST left-wing multi-millionaire like Moore to give their own personal riches away for the "cause". When they start doing that, I'll start taking them more seriously, and not a moment before. Before the wealth redistributors start spending other people's money, how about they spend their own ???
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Unitary Executive Back In Style: "If the Republican Congress won't join us, we're going to continue to act on our own to make the changes that we can to bring relief to middle-class families and those aspiring to get in the middle class". – VP Joe Biden

Whatever you say, Joe, but what about those 15 jobs-producing bills the Republican House has already passed that are sitting in the Senate waiting for the Democrats to bring them up ? In addition, why does every Democrat "jobs package" have to end up costing the taxpayers between $450 billion and $1 trillion ? Do Democrats simply not know our national debt is about to pass $15 trillion any day now ? Maybe their entire party has had a brain fart. The Democrats idea of stimulus is to take a bucket of water out of one end of the pool and pour it into the other end. They seem to believe they can fill up the pool this way. It won't ever work, because it CAN'T work. The real answer is to take money out of the government's hands and put it back into the hands of the private sector where it can do some good. The private sector is where growth comes from, not the government.
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And To Think, THIS Is the Guy They Call The Father Of The Democratic Party: "We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." – Thomas Jefferson

While I'm quoting Jefferson, who in today's society believes these words ?…

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition". – Thomas Jefferson

Not the political left, I can tell you that for sure.

Here's more of Peter Schiff conversing with the OWSer crowd in New York:

I don't agree with everything Schiff said there, but most of it is exactly right. FDR didn't cause the Great Depression. It started a few years before he even took office. There is, however, a great deal of evidence that his policies interfered with economic recovery (read The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, among other sources). What ended the Great Depression was WWII, not any of FDR's economic policies. Speaking of FDR policies, one New Deal policy was the creation of the secondary mortgage market. That started in 1938 with the creation of, drumroll please, Fannie Mae. Fannie created the mortgage-backed security in 1981. Fannie Mae, via the government, started the housing casino market on Wall Street. How'd those government policies work out ???

Here's something else interesting about Peter Schiff. As he tried to tell the OWSers, he warned of the real estate implosion before it happened:

In an August 2006 interview he said: "The United States economy is like the Titanic and I am here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship… I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States." On December 31, 2006 in debate on Fox News, Schiff forecast that "what's going to happen in 2007" is that "real estate prices are going to come crashing back down to Earth". Schiff is one of a minority of economists credited with accurately predicting the financial crisis of 2007–2010 while "nearly all [macroeconomists] failed to foresee the recession despite plenty of warning signs".

Bingo. Schiff was right on the money.

What does Schiff see coming in the future for the United States ? That can be summed up in one word – hyperinflation. It's hard to argue with him. The only question is when it will happen. The main reason will be our debt:

In a March 2009 speech Schiff said that it would be impossible for the U.S. debt to China to be repaid unless the U.S. dollar's value is substantially diluted through inflation. In September 2009 Schiff said that "I would not be surprised to see [gold] at $5,000 over the next several years" and that the 2009 stock market rally was a "bear market rally".

Diluting the value of the dollar to pay the debt is commonly called "monetizing" the debt, and I see no other way for us to payoff our debts either, given our current shortsighted debt-advocating government leadership. Unfortunately, monetization means the value of every asset of every citizen in the country becomes worth substantially less. Whatever method of debt repayment is ultimately used, there is no way to payoff the debt that will not extract tens of trillions of dollars from the citizens of this country. We will most likely be substantially poorer in the future. That's why this massive debt runup is a phenomenally bad idea that will harm this country for a generation or more, and that's why Schiff is recommending a gold investment. Gold, unlike our fiat currency, has a tangible value. The price of gold has risen by around 200% over the last 5 years, so Schiff is not the only person who sees the writing on the economic wall.

And as always, anyone who thinks we can fix our economic woes by imposing exorbitant new taxes on corporations and the rich, or by sending ever more of our hard-earned dollars to the government, should have his/her head examined. The biggest effect of those wrongheaded strategies will be more job losses and the further impoverishment of our citizens, exactly what we don't want.

I keep hearing the Republicans are "The Party Of No", but it's the Democrats who keep rejecting legislation passed by the Republican-led House. Earlier this year, the Democrat-led Senate rejected the House budget proposal. In August, the Senate rejected the House's Cut, Cap, And Balance plan to raise the debt limit and balance the budget. Now, the real Party Of No is at it again. It has rejected a House Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government and provide relief for victims of Hurricane Irene and other disasters. Thus, we face ANOTHER possible government shutdown, because the real Party Of No, the Democrats, can never seem to agree on a budget. They haven't passed one in 2 1/2 years. They didn't even agree to pass Obama's budget. They rejected it unanimously.

The reason the Party Of No gave for its rejection this time is it's usual reason – Democrats don't want to cut spending, even though federal spending is far higher than usual and our deficit is astronomical.

The Senate on Friday rejected the GOP-led House's bill to avert a government shutdown, intensifying a partisan standoff that many in Congress hoped to avoid. The vote was 59-36.

Democrats in the Senate, who are in the majority, oppose Republican efforts to roll back "green" energy programs to pay for aid for victims of Hurricane Irene and other disasters. They say disaster aid, usually a bipartisan issue, should not require cuts elsewhere — especially to programs creating green jobs — as the GOP majority in the House now demands.

The two sides are racing the clock, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to run out of disaster money Monday.

It's deja vu all over again. This also makes me wonder how in the world Democrats are ever going to agree to the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts the Super Committee is supposed to recommend as part of the debt ceiling deal.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), ever the double-talking politician, had stressed the urgency of passing the CR on wednesday, but after the House passed a bill on friday, which Reid and company rejected, he changed his tune:

Earlier this week Mr. Reid was adamant that FEMA’s account was on the brink.

“The agency that rushes to help when disaster strikes will run out of money on Monday. I repeat, Monday,” he said Wednesday as he was pushing for quick action.

But by Friday he said he had been assured there was more time.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republicans’ leader in the chamber, tried to speed the vote up to Friday afternoon, but Mr. Reid objected, saying he wanted the cooling-off period.

“Cool off a little bit. Work this through. There’s a compromise here,” Mr. Reid said Friday, minutes after the Senate blocked back a bill drafted by House Republicans that would have replenished the disaster fund accounts through Nov. 18.

The CR would have kept the government running until 2012 had the Dems not rejected it:

The disaster money fight is tied to a broader bill that would keep the government open into fiscal year 2012, which begins Oct. 1. Congress has not passed any of the dozen spending bills required to fund basic operations, and without a stop-gap bill much of the government would shut down after Sept. 30.

In other words, we could have avoided this entire mess in the first place had Senate Democrats not rejected every budget placed before it while not offering any budget of it's own. The Senate has been in dereliction of it's basic duty for years.

In typical fashion, the fiscally irresponsible Democrats want the FEMA funds to be added to the deficit rather than display any shred of responsibility, which might harm their re-election chances:

Mr. Reid has called for a Monday vote on a new bill he wrote to accept the House-passed FEMA funding level, but to tack the additional spending onto the deficit rather than find cuts elsewhere.

Anybody remember the PAYGO legislation the Democrats passed a couple years ago, where the Dems proudly crowed about how federal spending would all be paid for now ??? The Democrats forgot all about that legislation the moment after it was passed. They scammed the American people. We've added $4 trillion to the debt in the 2 1/2 years Obummer has been President. The Democrats consistently vote for more fiscal irresponsibility, as they are doing here. They aren't just The Party Of No. They are The Party Of No Honor. Their lies flow like a river.

There's another reason Harry Reid wants a "cooling-off period" over the weekend:

Senate Democrats also have a major campaign event to raise money from high-dollar donors at the luxurious Kiawah Island in South Carolina this weekend.

Party on, Democrats. We know whose money you really care about…your own. While the Democrats wine and dine their well-heeled cronies (like the green entrepreneurs who funded Solyndra) on paradise island this weekend, I guess the business of the people can wait. Who cares if FEMA runs out of money on monday ? If that happens, I'm sure the Democrats can spin things to make it seem like the GOP's fault. That should be easy for a political party that has spent the last three years blaming everything on Bush, while it simultaneously destroys the economic future of this country.

Speaking of Solyndra, Barry's pals from Solyndra testified before Congress yesterday, if you can call pleading the 5th testifying. Here's a small example of the transparency and forthright honesty displayed by the Solyndra boys:

"Was the White House duped by Solyndra, or did they ignore the information to put green energy in a better light, or for more onerous reasons," asked Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, a Republican.

One of Solyndra's main financial backers was also a big fundraiser for Obama in 2008 and lawmakers have questioned whether that played a part in the loan guarantee.

Lawmakers wanted to know the nature of several meetings between the Solyndra executives and White House aids over the last couple of years.

"On advice of my counsel, I invoke the privilege afforded by the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and I respectfully decline to answer any questions," was the response from each executive to every question.

Peachy. I guess the Solyndra boys had two choices – either plead the Fifth or say "I don't recall" like Hillary Clinton and the other Clintonistas did when asked about their scandals. The faulty memories of all those smart Clinton folk was known as Arkansas Alzheimer's back in the day.

I'll end with one comment about the Republican Fox/Google debate the other night. I'd vote for anybody on that stage over Barack Obama in 2012. Democrats keep talking about how Republicans would rather defeat Obama than help the American people. In my view, defeating Obama and helping the American people are the exact same thing. There is no distinction between the two.

"Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires. "That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that." – Barack Obama, on monday.

Yes, it would be hard to argue against that…if it was the truth. But it's not the truth. Our President is a big fat liar. Here's AP Factcheck:

President Barack Obama makes it sound as if there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries…The data tell a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

Obama says the top !% should pay their "fair share" of taxes, leading us to believe the rich are getting away with something. Wrong. From 2010 IRS data, it is known that the top 1% of earners in this country pay 38% of the federal income taxes, while making 20% of adjusted gross income, which means they are paying nearly double their "fair share". The top 20% of earners pay 87.3% of the federal income taxes. On the other end of the scale, nearly 50% of the workers pay no income taxes. The top 5% of earners pay more in income taxes than the bottom 95%. Enough of this "fair share" nonsense. Obama's tax proposal has nothing to do with fairness. Plus, the top 1% have a median income of $380,000 per year, not millions and billions. There are very few people in the million dollar earning range. In a country of 310 million people, only 236,000 have incomes above a million bucks. That's 0.007% of the population, and they already pay 20% of total federal income taxes. If anyone thinks taxing those few folks more is going to close a $1.6 trillion deficit and pay for the rest of us, you better think again.

In his latest speech, which comes on the heels of his speech proposing $447 billion in new stimulus measures, the President has proposed $3 trillion in deficit reduction. According to the Prez, his deficit reduction will consist of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and $1.5 trillion in tax increases, but as usual with this President, things are not what they appear to be. Let's take a closer look at that proposal.

On the spending side, Obama is counting as cuts $1 trillion in savings on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There's some major deception by the big fat liar here:

$1 trillion saved by ending combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans and some independent budget analysts say this is a gimmick because the troop drawdowns were already under way and amount to an accounting adjustment.

In other words, Obama is counting as savings $1 trillion in military spending that was never going to happen anyway. The real savings here is zero. The President is not the only big fat liar in this area. The Republicans also counted the phantom military savings as deficit reduction in their House budget proposal.

Obama's plan is really a $2 trillion deficit reduction package, 3/4's of which consists of various tax increases. Here are the rest of Obama's proposed spending cuts:

MEDICARE AND MEDICAID: $248 billion in reductions to Medicare. About 90 percent of the Medicare cuts would be squeezed from service providers such as drug companies, hospitals and nursing homes. Starting in 2017, the plan would significantly increase what many seniors pay for premiums, copayments and deductibles. Medicaid and other federal health care programs would be cut by about $73 billion. Among the proposals would be measures designed to reduce federal Medicaid payments to states.

OTHER MANDATORY SPENDING: $260 billion in cuts to other mandatory spending programs, including $33 billion by ending income support payments to farmers. The plan also would reduce federal workers' paychecks by 1.2 percent over three years, saving the government about $21 billion over 10 years. The plan estimates savings of nearly $78 billion by reducing waste and abuse in federal programs.

All I can say is, if a Republican President proposed cutting Medicare/Medicaid payments and raising premiums, copays, and deductibles, every liberal from coast to coast would be screaming about how the Republicans don't care about seniors and the poor. Remember the reaction to the Ryan plan ? And don't forget that ObamaCare already allegedly cuts $500 billion from Medicare. Also, notice the 2017 start date for the increased costs to seniors. Those would conveniently start right AFTER Obama completed his second term. What courage. And liberals, did y'all notice that Obama wants to cut the salaries of federal workers ? What about collective bargaining rights ? Oh wait. Those federal workers don't have them. Never did. When will you launch the 'Recall Obama' campaign, like you did to legislators in Wisconsin, or the 'Repeal SB5' campaign, like you did in Ohio ? Hmmm ? I can't hear you….

On the tax side, Obama wants to end the Bush tax cuts for couples making over $250,000, limit tax deductions for the wealthy, and end some corporate loopholes and subsidies. This comes on top of the $1 trillion in spending cuts the super committee is working on as a result of the August debt deal. The rosiest way to look at all this is, if the entire $3 trillion in revenue increases and spending cuts over ten years is enacted, our annual deficit will drop ALL THE WAY DOWN TO $1.3 TRILLION !!! Hurrah !!! Mission Accomplished !!! Four More Years !!! Four More Years !!! It's not exactly Morning In America, but AT LEAST IT'S NOT THE GREAT DEPRESSION !!!

I just thought of something. Doesn't conventional economic wisdom say one shouldn't raise taxes during a recession ??? I thought so, and here's what one of the leaders of our country said a couple years ago…

"The last thing you want to do is raise taxes during a recession, because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy, and further put businesses in a hole" – Barack Obama, August 2009.

Yes, I agree. Maybe somebody should introduce this Barack Obama to that other Barack Obama guy. Who knew there were two of them ?

If any of you are wondering why I haven't mentioned the proposed Buffett Rule…it's because there ISN'T a proposal:

…the administration said it wanted the Buffett Rule to be a guiding principle for tax reform. But that was it on details. "We're not going to give the Congress a detailed proposal for how to meet that specific principle now because there's lots of different ways to do that," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Monday.

Perhaps on another day, once the administration figures it out.

There's nothing that irks me more than left-wing demands for enormous new federal spending stimulus programs to boost the economy, after we've already spent trillions on those types of stimulus. Such calls seem to be all the rage these days in left-wing circles. I can't turn on a political television program without hearing this insanity being offerred as a solution to our economic woes. Lefties generally accompany their stimulus spending demands with fond reminiscences of the New Deal, along with references to our "manufactured debt crisis", as if those evil right-wingers are making the whole thing up. The favored left-wing conspiracy theories have the GOP "manufacturing" a debt crisis because right-wingers A) Hate black people, and/or B) Want Goldman Sachs to make bigger profits. And lets not forget the ever popular, C) War for oil.

What the leftos can NEVER bring themselves to accept is D) Reality.

So let's gently remind those tin foil hat wearing, conspiratorial code word seeking, ADHD afflicted, left-wing folks once again…

If we don't change course on our spending/debt explosion, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) has estimated where our federal tax dollars will go by 2020, just nine short years from now:

When I point out this information, the lefto reaction is usually to condemn Bush, after which the leftos propose yet more spending and more debt (as in their stimulus proposal). They condemn the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush administration, and then they recommend more fiscal irresponsibility as a solution. Somehow, such contradictory rhetoric makes sense to them, though to me it sounds a lot like a mental disorder.

The #1 reason I warn of our debt/deficit situation all the time has nothing to do with political ideology. It's all about economics. It's about dollars and cents. On our current economic trajectory, by 2020, we will be taking $900 billion out of taxpayer pockets just to pay interest on the debt. In case the leftos have forgotten (assuming they ever knew), $900 billion is a hell of a lot of money. We'd basically be flushing $900 billion down the drain EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Those interest payments would fund no government program, and would help not one American do anything but become poorer. Imagine the negative effects of that on the nation. If, on the other hand, we stop accumulating this incredibly destructive debt, the enormous amount of money we save could fund all kinds of programs, even ones that leftos like !

Imagine it's 2020, and 92% of federal spending goes to interest on the debt, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That wouldn't leave any money for anything else. Government services would collapse, or else we'd have such prohibitive levels of taxation that our economy would collapse in a different way from the destruction of wealth. When mentally challenged leftos look at this information, they see no problem whatsoever with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending, even those are the drivers of the future spending explosion. Their level of denial is mind boggling. These same people must look at the water all over the ground after a storm and say "it can't be due to the rain !"

The leftos, of course, can't think past the ends of their own noses. They can't see past right now, today. They can't see the lefto big government future is one where everyone is taxed to death, goods are too expensive to buy, economic growth is retarded, the government runs everything, and we the people are powerless, dependent serfs who can't look sideways without coming under suspicion of breaking a law. This is how things work in every left-wing controlled government. It has always been that way, and it always will be that way. So, to left-wing thugs everywhere, I say, "Viva la revolucion!", you clueless fools. May heaven help you should you ever get exactly what you're asking for. Only then will you slow learners realize what you have lost.

Lest anyone should think I'm some kind of footsoldier for the GOP, I'll say this. The GOP is only marginally better on fiscal issues, and on other political issues, they are worse. But if you want to know how truly messed up this country is, and how insane and pervasive the lefto influence has become……the most demonized political movement in this country is the one that proposes we don't go down this road of spending/debt craziness, the one that actually promotes fiscal responsibility, the Tea Party movement. The TPers are called radical and extreme by the lefto radicals and extremists. Now that I think about it, in a country that has gone fiscally looney tunes, that might actually be a compliment of sorts. As they say, in a world gone mad, the sane man must appear crazy. If you need an example of this, look no further than the balanced budget amendment proposed by the Republicans. That came from the Tea Party coalition in the House Of Representatives. The Democrats were overwhelmingly against a balanced budget amendment. If being against balanced budgets ain't radical, I don't know what would be. Maybe one of the Democrats can attempt to explain how paying $900 billion each year in interest on the debt would be a good thing. Let them try. I can hear the Dems now in 2020, saying "it's Bush's fault !", after Obama has run up about $10 trillion in debt. Can't wait.

One thing I've learned about President Obama – when he rails against "politics as usual", as he did in his redundant primetime speech to the country last night, you can rest assured that he will engage in politics as usual, relentlessly. The President had nothing new to say on the subject of the debt limit ceiling last night, but he made a campaign speech on television anyway. Obama carried on about how a "balanced approach" must be used in cutting spending and the deficit. He carried on about how revenue increases must be included as part of that balanced approach, as he has for the last couple months (prior to that the President was perfectly content to raise the debt limit with NO deficit reduction measures included). The President did his politics as usual routine, blaming Bush and Republicans for basically everything. Nothing new there either.

Here's the kicker. After going public for the nth time about how Republicans are intransigent for not raising revenues as part of the debt limit deal, it turns out that the White House had already endorsed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) plan, which included NO REVENUE INCREASES. This means that when the President was standing in front of the American people railing against the Republicans for not raising taxes, he had already backed a Democrat plan that didn't raise taxes. It doesn't get more "politics as usual" than that, or more dishonest.

Of further interest is, where did Harry Reid's plan come from ? He had no plan prior to the weekend. We've been waiting patiently for Democrats to propose a plan. None was forthcoming until now, at the the 11th hour. What happened ? Here's a strong clue from the Washington Post:

A Republican aide e-mails me: “The Speaker, Sen. Reid and Sen. McConnell all agreed on the general framework of a two-part plan. A short-term increase (with cuts greater than the increase), combined with a committee to find long-term savings before the rest of the increase would be considered. Sen. Reid took the bipartisan plan to the White House and the President said no.”

If this is accurate the president is playing with fire. By halting a bipartisan deal he imperils the country’s finances and can rightly be accused of putting partisanship above all else. The ONLY reason to reject a short-term, two-step deal embraced by both the House and Senate is to avoid another approval-killing face-off for President Obama before the election. Next to pulling troops out of Afghanistan to fit the election calendar, this is the most irresponsible and shameful move of his presidency.

After rejecting the bipartisan plan, Obama endorsed a similar Democrat plan a day or two later. Why ? For one, Democrats will get the credit for a Democrat plan, but more importantly, Sen. Reid changed ONE element of the plan – it will get us past the 2012 election, which seems to be of utmost (or sole) importance to this President.

Reid's plan calls for $2.7 trillion in spending reductions over 10 years, and as I said previously, it includes no revenue increases. Prior to endorsing Reid's plan, Obama said repeatedly that he'd veto any such Republican proposal that focused only on spending cuts. That has been where the debt limit negotiations broke down every time, over revenues. But when the Democrats propose a spending-only plan, Obama magically sees the light and agrees. Amazing what a difference a 'D' or an 'R' next to a Congressperson's name can make, isn't it ?

Listen to when Reid's announced his plan:

Reid’s statement [announcing his plan] follows an hour-long meeting he attended at the White House with President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Separately, Boehner told House Republicans on a conference call Sunday afternoon that he hoped to present a revised debt-ceiling bill on Monday, with a vote possible Wednesday.

The House GOP bill could be a short-term extension, which Reid said would be “a non-starter” in the Senate.

“Tonight, talks broke down over Republicans’ continued insistence on a short-term raise of the debt ceiling, which is something that President Obama, Leader Pelosi and I have been clear we would not support,” Reid said in his statement.

Except that Reid had supported the bipartisan plan, according to the Republican aide. Obama was the one who shot it down.

Translation – Obama told Reid and Pelosi he wanted a plan Democrats could take credit for, even though the ideas in the plan were all promoted previously by Republicans or were part of bipartisan negotiations. Obama wanted a plan that would get him through the 2012 elections, and it didn't matter if Obama and the Democrats had to reverse their position on everything they had said previously about tax increases. Obama even had the audacity to continue to rail against Republican anti-tax increase sentiments AFTER he had agreed to a spending-only plan that he could pretend came from the Democrats.

This President is all about politics as usual.

I haven't had time to analyze Reid's plan completely yet, but in the smoke and mirrors department, it looks pretty smoky and mirrory so far. $1 trillion of the "spending cuts" come from alleged savings on winding down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which were winding down anyway. In other words, Reid's plan projects spending that was never going to happen, and then counts reductions in that imaginary spending as "savings". In fairness, the 2011 House Republican budget plan did the same thing.

Reid's plan also excludes entitlement reform, which means the biggest drivers of future spending are still out there driving. Both Reid's plan and House Majority Leader John Boehner's (R-OH) plan kick spending cut decisions down the road, which isn't making Republicans, who are serious about spending cuts, very happy. Boehner may have a tough time getting his plan through the House. Some Democrats aren't very happy about the lack of tax increases in either plan, but I imagine Senate Democrats will largely follow the President's wishes regarding the Reid plan, albeit after some perfunctory grumbling.

Eight days to go…and the political beat goes on.

I found the following current event quotes on The Patriot Post.

Insane The New Sane: "The same politicians who spent $1.7 trillion more than they collected, in just this year alone, say the problem is that private citizens are not paying enough. … [B]ecause the political class has made the national debt so high, it is able to insist that taking a chance on the power of liberty is an irresponsible gamble. Because the government lives so far beyond its means, it would be irresponsible to provide it with reduced means. This is how we have reached the madness of a moment when the national debt is used as an argument against spending reductions, or growth-oriented tax and regulatory policies. The insane problem becomes a weapon against rational solutions." –columnist John Hayward

There's nothing for me to add to that. Well said.

Moron Of The Week: "Isn't the Tea Party — I'm not trying to call them names or anything. I just want to ask a very serious question: Aren't they exactly what the Founding Fathers feared most? Which is people who are ignorant about the way the world works come to power. That is what the Founding Fathers hated the most. They were not for direct democracy" –HBO's Bill Maher

I'm still trying to figure out why Bill Maher has a political television show on HBO. His neverending ignorance on political matters is astounding. In the above quote, Maher not only demonstrates a cluelessness about the Founding Fathers and the original Boston Tea Party (it was about TAXES, Mr. Maher), he also doesn't seem to understand that today's Tea Party is not a direct democracy, it's a protest movement and only one of many political forces in this country. The Tea Party does not govern. Our elected representatives perform that function. That is and always has been a representative democracy. The "serious question" Bill Maher asks here is a complete joke.

Leadership Failure: "Meanwhile, the World's Greatest Orator bemoans the 'intransigence' of Republicans. OK, what's your plan? Give us one actual program you're willing to cut, right now. Oh, don't worry, says Barack Obluffer. To demonstrate how serious he is, he's offered to put on the table for fiscal year 2012 spending cuts of (stand well back now) $2 billion. That would be a lot in, say, Iceland or even Australia. Once upon a time it would have been a lot even in Washington. But today $2 billion is what the Brokest Nation in History borrows every 10 hours. In other words, in less time than he spends sitting across the table negotiating his $2 billion cut, he's already borrowed it all back. A negotiation with Obama is literally not worth the time." –columnist Mark Steyn

The extent of Obama's leadership on the debt limit has been to say he wants revenues raised along with spending cuts, and he didn't even care about spending cuts until the Republicans forced him to care. That's how this President leads…by following.

Hijacking The Tax And Spend Crowd: "Here's the thing about Obama. He ran as a transformational president. He sees himself as transformational. He always has. What occurred between 2008 and 2010 is the Tea Party. And the Tea Party has stopped that kind of transformation from occurring because it has hijacked the Republican Party and the John Boehners of the world who would have cut a deal with the president of the United States. It has hijacked the Republican Party and it has now become substantially just a no-tax party as opposed to a party that cares about the deficit. I think no tax trumps their caring and concern about the deficit." –CNN's Gloria Borger

Poor Obama. His transformational dreams were crushed by the Tea Party. Sniff, sniff. Cry me a river. In reality, it was, well, reality that crushed Obama's unrealistic dreams. Plus, if any party NEEDED hijacking after the big spending, debt accumulating Bush years, it was the Republican party. Thank goodness the Tea Party arrived on the scene and changed the discussion, because without it we wouldn't even be talking about reining in the sole cause of our fiscal unsustainability – big government.

Speaking of which…

The Left Calls It 'The Plan': "Forget all the numbers being tossed around in Washington — the millions and billions and trillions of dollars being taxed, borrowed, printed and spent as the country approaches the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline. … Forget the fact that such 'entitlements' as Social Security and Medicare — social-insurance programs that the public long thought to be actuarially sound — have been exposed as little more than legal Ponzi schemes, paying today's benefits out of tomorrow's borrowed receipts. Instead, just ask yourself this simple question: When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks? For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about — the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state." –columnist Michael Walsh

This reminds me of a USA Today article from a few months ago, titled "Americans Depend More On Federal Aid Than Ever". Here's a piece of it:

Americans depended more on government assistance in 2010 than at any other time in the nation's history, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. The trend shows few signs of easing, even though the economic recovery is nearly 2 years old.

A record 18.3% of the nation's total personal income was a payment from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs in 2010. Wages accounted for the lowest share of income — 51.0% — since the government began keeping track in 1929.

Americans got an average of $7,427 in benefits each in 2010, up from an inflation-adjusted $4,763 in 2000 and $3,686 in 1990. The federal government pays about 90% of the benefits.

"What's frightening is the Baby Boomers haven't really started to retire," says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes of the 77 million people born from 1946 through 1964 whose oldest wave turns 65 this year. "That's when the cost of Medicare will start to explode."

If you think things are bad now, America, prepare yourselves. You ain't seen nuthin' yet. Unless we change course dramatically, in a decade we'll be looking back at these times as the good old days.

The political left in this country wants the citizenry to be dependent, and, btw, disarmed. A passive and helpless population is more easily controlled.

My closing quote comes from our "transformational" President himself, though it sounds more like politics as usual to me.

Blaming Bush: "We don't need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs. The Constitution already tells us to do our jobs — and to make sure that the government is living within its means and making responsible choices. … We don't need a balanced budget amendment. We simply need to make these tough choices and be willing to take on our bases. And everybody knows it. … It turns out that our problem is we cut taxes without paying for them over the last decade; we ended up instituting new programs like a prescription drug program for seniors that was not paid for; we fought two wars, we didn't pay for them; we had a bad recession that required a Recovery Act and stimulus spending and helping states — and all that accumulated and there's interest on top of that." –Barack Obama

Maybe we wouldn't need a balanced budget constitutional amendment if the government showed any indication it could live within it's means or discipline itself, but it has not done that. When I hear Obama whining about a balanced budget amendment, all I hear is him thinking, 'but how will I spend and borrow more money ? How will I play politics and buy votes ?'

That radical right-wing lunatic fringe known as the Tea Party has led the way to the introduction of House legislation known as H.R. 2560, aka Cut, Cap, And Balance. Wait until you get a load of what these Republican wingnuts are proposing:

H.R. 2560, The Cut, Cap, and Balance Act, is based on the framework first proposed by the Republican Study Committee in June 2011. The bill makes cuts $111 billion in FY 2012, places firm caps on future spending, and – contingent upon House and Senate passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment – grants President Obama’s request for a debt limit increase. The House of Representatives is expected to vote on H.R. 2560 on July 19, 2011.

1. Cut – We must make discretionary and mandatory spending reductions that would cut the deficit in half next year.

2. Cap – We need statutory, enforceable caps to align federal spending with average revenues at 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with automatic spending reductions if the caps are breached.

3. Balance – We must send to the states a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) with strong protections against federal tax increases and a Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) that aligns spending with average revenues as described above.

With each passing day our nation’s fiscal health gets worse, leaving our children and grandchildren falling further into debt. Democrats seem to have given up, proposing even more borrowing in response to our massive debt addiction. With the problem growing larger every day, we must move quickly and unite behind a plan to cut spending and get our budget into balance.

Can you believe it ? These insane-in-the-membrane Republicans actually believe Congress should balance it's budget. They believe we SHOULDN'T bankrupt the country via deficits and debt. They believe there should be a LIMIT to federal spending. Clearly, we have to nip this foolishness in the bud. If we don't, this radical idea of fiscal responsibility may start to catch on, like a virus. The House wingnuts are voting on the Cut, Cap, And Balance plan today, where they will most likely pass it.

Luckily, we also have sane Democrats in Congress and the White House, who know fiscal responsibility is for losers. These sane Democrats know that borrowing trillions upon trillions of dollars forever couldn't possibly have any negative ramifications (unless a Republican is in the White House). These sane Democrats know that spending should never be limited, and endless tax increases are the only answer. What could go wrong ? The sane Democrats know the answer to our economic maladies is found in what I call the Democrat three step approach – 1) Tax, 2) Spend, 3) Repeat. Sane Democrats know their approach can lead only to economic welfare, with an emphasis on the "welfare" part. You citizens won't have to worry about anything if you follow the sane Democrats. You most especially won't have to worry about what to do with all the extra money in your pocket. The sane Democrats will decide what to do with that after they relieve you of your money responsibility to make your own fiscal decisions. I mean, after all, they are smarter than you, and that's why our government is on such solid financial footing today. They went to Harvard.

The sanest Democrat, President Obama, freaked the hell out at the thought of the government having to live within a budget. If anybody knows fiscal responsibility is for the birds, it's Obama. He knows balanced budgets are a threat to the very fabric of the nation, or something. Obama sanely threatened to veto fiscal responsibility. Here's a statement from the White House:

The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 2560, the “Cut, Cap and Balance Act of 2011.” Neither setting arbitrary spending levels nor amending the Constitution is necessary to restore fiscal responsibility. Increasing the Federal debt limit, which is needed to avoid a Federal government default on its obligations and a severe blow to the economy, should not be conditioned on taking these actions. Instead of pursuing an empty political statement and unrealistic policy goals, it is necessary to move beyond politics as usual and find bipartisan common ground.

Take that, you Republican Tea Party wingnuts. Obama don't want to hear about no "unrealistic policy goals" like a balanced budget. What a loony idea. "Politics as usual" demands that these deficits and debt accumulation continue on and on. Obama knows the two parties must "find bipartisan common ground" by continuing with the sane Democrat plan of increasing spending and raising taxes.

Here's the sanest of the sanest Democrat's pronouncements:

The President has proposed a comprehensive and balanced framework that ensures we live within our means and reduces the deficit by $4 trillion

Right on, Mr. President. Reducing the deficit by $4 trillion "ensures we live within our means", except for the other $5-6 trillion of deficits you are projected to run up, of course. But what's $5-6 trillion more in deficits among friends, eh ? We'll keep that on the down low.

Heck, the next thing you know, the wingnut Republicans will be asking the Democrats in Congress to produce an actual budget, which the Dems haven't done in over 800 days and counting. Those radical right-wingers just never stop making irrational demands, do they ?

Remember this in 2012, folks. I suggest you all get bumper stickers to spread the news – Vote For Fiscal Irresponsibility. Vote Democrat In 2012. It's the "sane" thing to do.

You can always tell the statesman from the politician. The politician is the one who manipulates, deceives, and spins. The politician is the person with his finger in the wind, constantly trying to gauge public opinion so he knows what to say or do, in order to win the next election. The politician is the person who depends on you not remembering what he said or did yesterday, when he contradicts his own words and actions today. We have lots of politicians in Washington D.C.

Barack Obama is a very good politician.

These days, Obama has been attempting to portray himself as the grownup in the room, the guy who wants a comprehensive deficit reduction plan, if only those darned Republican obstructionists weren't standing in his way. This comes on the heels of Obama running up deficits and debt faster than any President in American history. Columnist Charles Krauthammers points out the fallacy of Obama's words today in a column titled "Call His Bluff" (Obama warned Rep. Eric Cantor (R-NY) not to call his bluff). Krauthammer does remember yesterday:

President Obama is demanding a big long-term budget deal. He won’t sign anything less, he warns, asking, “If not now, when?”

How about last December, when he ignored his own debt commission’s recommendations? How about February, when he presented a budget that increases debt by $10 trillion over the next decade? How about April, when he sought a debt-ceiling increase with zero debt reduction attached?

All of a sudden he’s a born-again budget balancer prepared to bravely take on his own party by making deep cuts in entitlements. Really? Name one. He’s been saying forever that he’s prepared to discuss, engage, converse about entitlement cuts. But never once has he publicly proposed a single structural change to any entitlement.

Hasn’t the White House leaked that he’s prepared to raise the Medicare age or change the cost-of-living calculation?

Anonymous talk is cheap. Leaks are designed to manipulate. Offers are floated and disappear. Say it, Mr. President. Give us one single structural change in entitlements. In public.

I'm reminded of what I heard House Majority leader John Boehner (R-OH) say yesterday, that negotiating with Obama is like dealing with Jello. The President doesn't propose anything solid, except for tax increases. When it comes to spending cuts, the President will discuss, engage, and converse, but he never makes an actual proposal. Have any of you ever heard him make one ?

Another question we need to ask is why Obama opposes a shorter-term deal. That would be better than no deal. It would be far better to extend the negotiating period than to exceed the debt limit, would it not ? Krauthammer supplies the answer again:

As part of the pose as the forward-looking grown-up rising above all the others who play politics, Obama insists upon a long-term deal. And what is Obama’s definition of long-term? Surprise: An agreement that gets him past Nov. 6, 2012.

Nothing could be more political. It’s like his Afghan surge wind-down date. September 2012 has no relation to any military reality on the ground. It is designed solely to position Obama favorably going into the last weeks of his reelection campaign.

Barack Obama is a very good politician. That's why he manipulates the public by preying on fears of Social Security checks not going out in August, when our President knows darn well that they will go out.

That's also why the President talks about superfluous things, such as tax loopholes for corporate jets. Obama the politician is counting on your knee jerk reaction against tax breaks for the wealthy. What he doesn't tell you is where those corporate jet tax loopholes came from. But Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) told us this last night on the Greta Van Susteren show:

'[The corporate jet tax loophole] was in the stimulus package. None of us voted for the stimulus package. This was called accelerated depreciation. It's a tax policy that the president put into his stimulus package and passed. Now he's saying that it's a corporate jet loophole. It applies to lots of things, airplanes included. What I find interesting about this one particular issue was it never came up in our debt negotiations, it never came up in discussions. The first time I heard about a corporate jet loophole, which was in the stimulus package, was when he mentioned it six times in a press conference. "

The Democrats put in the corporate jet tax loophole, Obama signed it into law, no Republicans voted for the stimulus package…but now Obama uses his own tax loophole against the Republicans in deficit reduction negotiations. He says Republicans are protecting the corporate jet tax loophole that Obama signed into law. How does he get away with this stuff ?

And btw, the Republican budget, the Ryan budget, did away with those types of loopholes. The Democrats would not hear of it. They already rejected the House Budget in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Here's Ryan again:

Look, I understand it plays for good politics and class warfare and makes it look like all we care about is that corporate – who cares about that corporate jet loophole? It's – we want to get rid of all those loopholes in tax reform. And what people don't tell you is our Republican budget? That's exactly what we proposed doing! We're saying clear out the brush of loopholes and lower everyone's tax rates so we can create jobs in the economy. That way the government doesn't lose any money but we clean up the tax code and we're not picking winners and losers in the tax code. General Electric paid no taxes but made a lot of money. UPS, another big company, paid about a 34% tax rate and their competitor, DHL, paid 24%. So there's something wrong with the fact that we're taxing a lot of our employers more".

Yes, the class warfare card does play well to an uninformed public. That's why Obama and the Democrats do it. It works for them, even when it's a bunch of hooey.

Barack Obama is a very good politician. He's just not much of a man.

The Democrats keep angling for tax increases as part of the debt limit deal. They don't bother to tell you that taxes are already going to increase by $1.5 trillion in 2013 when the ObamaCare taxes kick in. They also don't tell you the Bush tax cuts expire again at the end of 2012, right after the next elections. No, they don't tell you these things as they propose $2 trillion more in tax increases as part of the debt limit deal. The reason they don't tell you is, the Democrats are jockeying to pass the most massive tax hikes in American history in exchange for vague promises of future spending cuts that the Democrats hope to avoid ever making. That's their game. The Dems have pulled this bait and switch routine before (Bush I, Reagan). That's why the Democrats all jumped to approve Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) Plan B proposal, the one that allowed OBAMA to make future spending cuts in exchange for a debt limit increase. The Democrats hope to wriggle out of those cuts, or turn them into bogus cuts. The Dems could propose increasing spending by another $3 trillion, then do a "bogus cut" for $2 trillion, and say 'look, we cut the $2 trillion like we promised. Aren't we wonderful ?' Then the media would pretend not to notice that the only thing that happened was another trillion dollars in spending was approved. This phony tactic has been used a lot. It seems the only thing our government ever really "cuts" is the rate of it's own growth, which isn't a cut at all. It's a spending increase. Obama the politician talks about cutting the deficit in half, leaving out the part about how that still leaves us with an $800 billion deficit, larger than any in American history prior to Obama arriving in the White House. The Dems are angling for a tax increase bomb the likes of which this country has never seen, because the last thing the Dems want is to have to stop spending your money. That would loosen their grip on you, and they like having their hands around your throat. They like it a lot.

Yes, Obama's a very good politician. And that's no compliment.

When dealing with a political Jello-fish like the President, the only thing to do IS call his bluff. Here's what Krauthammer recommends:

The Republican House should immediately pass a short-term debt-ceiling hike of $500  billion containing $500  billion in budget cuts. That would give us about five months to work on something larger.

I agree with this strategy. The debt limit talks are going nowhere. They fell apart again yesterday. If the Republicans wait until D-Day on August 2nd, they will lose this political battle, and we won't get any spending cuts. The Democrats don't look at this as a debt limit deal or a budget negotiation. They look at it as a political contest to gain the upper hand. So should the Republicans. If they force congressional Democrats to vote on a smaller proposal that passed the House, it would put the Democrats on record and shift the onus to them. And if it passed the House and Senate, Obama's hand would be forced. Imagine the political fallout against Obama if he vetoed that bill. Yes, let's call his bluff. It's better than nothing America, and nothing is what we have now.

It would also be nice if we sent The Politician packing in 2012 and replaced him with a statesman (or stateswoman)…but I don't want to get ahead of myself.

As the political class bickers over the debt ceiling, I can't help but wonder – How did we get to trillion+ dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see ? How did this country get so far off track ? Could you have even imagined trillion+ dollar deficits prior to 2009 ? I couldn't.

The recession is the obvious answer, but it goes beyond that. The recession technically ended in the middle of 2009, but try telling that to the American people when unemployment is still 9.2%. The recession may have ended, but the recovery has been anemic, and this country's finances are in the crapper (which explains why the recovery is anemic. The future don't look so bright, and the people with the money know it).

Near the end of 2008, President Bush okayed the $700 billion TARP bailouts, and the term 'Too Big To Fail' was added to our lexicon. That shocked everyone, myself included. Who ever thought the American taxpayers would have to bail out the fat cats ? Unbelievable. Then President Obama came along and fired his economic weapons, in the form of a trillion bucks of so-called stimulus (much of which wasn't stimulus at all). That shocked everyone, myself included. Obama asked the taxpayers to bail out the government and the auto companies…more fat cat bailouts. Obama also asked the taxpayers to bailout the unions, and asked the taxpayers to bail out pretty much everyone, including the taxpayers themselves (strange concept that).

The Democrats keep asking for tax increases to close the trillion+ dollar spending gap the Democrats have largely created (yes, I said it). The Republicans think spending cuts are in order.

For myself, I say we adopt the 'let's get back to 2008' plan as a start. I should probably call it the 'let's get back to 2007' plan, because in 2007 the deficit was only $160 billion. Who would have ever thought a few years ago that a $160 billion deficit would look so damn good by comparison ? But we'll go with 2008, when the deficit was $458 billion. Even that sounds good compared to the $1.6 trillion deficit we have today. Obama would be dancing in the halls of the White House if he could reduce the deficit to the LARGEST DEFICIT BUSH EVER HAD IN A FULL YEAR AS PRESIDENT. As I said before, the media would probably canonize Obama if he merely reduced the deficit to the LARGEST DEFICIT IN THE HISTORY OF THE COUNTRY PRIOR TO 2009. It seems expectations have been substantially lowered these last few years (I'm trying really hard to push the joke about affirmative action out of my head right now. Forgive me).

What would it take to get back to 2008 ? I call it the Before Barack plan, if you will.

Let's look at the numbers to see where we went so far off track. Here's a spending comparison between 2008 and 2011. That's B.B. and A.B. (Before Barack and After Barack).

Total federal spending
2008 – $2.98 trillion
2011 – $3.81 trillion

Well, shoot ! There's most of the problem already ! Spending is $900 billion more than it was a few short years ago. Add that new spending to the Bush's $458 billion 2008 deficit, and that drives the deficit up to $1.35 trillion right there.

But we need to know where to cut, so lets' dive a little deeper into those numbers. Here's a spending breakdown.

Defense Spending
2008 – $729 billion
2011 – $964 trillion

Aha ! The "anti-war" Obama (suckers) has shot Defense spending through the roof ! Let's cut $235 billion off Defense spending to get back to 2008 levels. Bye bye Afghanistan. Bye bye Libya. Bye bye Iraq. It's time to defend America, in many senses of the word. Btw, the pantywaist Democrats just proposed a $90 billion Defense cut over 10 years as part of the debt ceiling deal. They should be much bolder than that, and you're lucky if you ever hear a Republican talk about Defense cuts. They should be much smarter than that. Our Defense budget is much too large, and should be discussed BEFORE discussions of Social Security and Medicare cuts are brought up (though we need to trim those also).

Pensions Spending (Social Security, etc)
2008 – $659 billion
2011 – $800 billion

Here's another $150 billion increase. It breaks my heart to cut Social Security, because that program would be sound had the government thieves not robbed it blind all these years, and had they invested the money in consverative instruments instead. There is supposed to be $2.5 trillion in the Trust Fund, but as I've said many times before, that's a mirage. The government stole the money. The government should have to make good on that money without putting the taxpayers on the hook all over again. This is a great argument for privatization, but that's a subject for another time. The problem is, the government is broke…or is it ? The government owns about 650 million acres of land in this country. It's time to hold a government land sale to raise some money for the stolen Social Security funds (can the citizens sue Congress over it's SS thievery ? That would be interesting). And it goes without saying that the government should keep it's grubby mitts off SS in the future.

Health Care Spending (Medicare, Medicaid, etc)
2008 – $671 billion
2011 – $900 billion

There's another $230 billion increase. Health care costs have been increasing rapidly, but this is government health care were talking about. The government dictates the reimbursement rates. Cut it.

Education Spending
2008 – $101.8 billion
2011 – $100 billion

Well, shut my mouth ! Obama actually cut something. Only by a billion dollars, but it's better than nothing. This probably infuriates liberals, which is nearly always good for the country these days (things weren't always like this. Liberals used to accomplish some good things in this country, before they were taken over by Leftists).

Welfare Spending
2008 – $322 billion
2011 – $500 billion

A $178 billion increase. Some of this increase is attributable to the recession. No doubt about that. The solution here is mostly to get people back to work, which is why Obama and the Democrats anti-business policies are so friggin' stupid. Speaking of which, did I say yet that we should repeal ObamaCare ? If not, we should. The last thing we need right now is MORE welfare. Let's get our fiscal ship of state back on solid ground first. That and job creation are jobs number one and number one (note to Democrats – thus spending cuts AND targeted tax cuts for job creation, instead of your counterproductive 'soak the rich' class warfare policies).

Let's total up these spending increases so far ($235 billion + $150 billion + $230 billion + $178 billion = $793 billion). Let's round it to $800 billion in needed spending cuts. Some of these cuts can come from the rest of federal spending (about $500 billion) that I haven't talked about.

$800 billion in spending cuts reduces the deficit by half. We have $800 billion left in deficits. Now let's talk about revenue. In order to get to the 2008 deficit of $458 billion, we need to raise revenue by $342 billion yet. That's easy. We just need to put people back to work (okay, it's not easy, but it's straightforward). If we return unemployment to the 5% range, we'll get the needed revenue. In 2008, federal revenue was $2.534 trillion. In 2011, it's $2.2 trillion. There's your revenue gap. My friend The Reverend will talk about how "revenue is at a 60-year low", but that's ridiculous. Federal revenue was lower in 2005 than it is now. That's six years, not sixty, and high unemployment is the ONLY reason revenue is down now. How he does go on though. What a sight.

After ALL this is addressed, then we can talk about taxing corporate jets, millionaires, and billionaires to help with the rest. Our tax code is a holy mess, like nearly everything else the government does, and it needs to be straightened out.

Getting to Before Barack doesn't solve all the problems. It leaves us with the problems we had under Bush, and those are still some pretty big problems. But they pale in comparison to what has happened under Mr. Hopeandchange.

I will get all the usual criticism from liberals about how I'm so mean and don't care about the people, and so forth. I'm used to it. It's just how liberals are, as if $14.4 trillion in debt, a $1.6 trillion deficit, and the current path to bankruptcy is somehow going to help the people. It isn't, of course. Just the opposite is true. These things are the greatest threat to the American citizens, and that's why I keep harping about these issues. Liberals believe we can tax and spend our way out of our problems, but their view is childish and not based in reality. There aren't enough rich people in the country to fund everything for everyone else, and reversing the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% is a drop in the bucket compared to our fiscal problems. Those tax cuts won't change anything. Liberals are always on the lookout to grab somebody else's money, and they act aggrieved when they can't do it. That's the mindset of a thief, and also of a Leftist. I have never felt entitled to another person's money. I don't understand how people can think that way. I believe in helping the truly poor and needy, but that doesn't cost $3.8 trillion per year. Not even close. Government at all levels consumes over 46% of the entire GDP of this country. That is way out of kilter, and it has happened due to the ascendancy of big government liberalism in BOTH major political parties. It's time to stop it now, before it's too late.

The Democrats in Congress may not be able to do their jobs and produce a budget, but they have finally been embarrassed into producing a plan to address our record deficits. All hail the Democrats ! It's about time, since the Dems control the Executive Branch and the Senate. In other words, the Dems are the majority. The Republicans only control the House.

The first thing I noticed about the Democrat deficit plan was…it doesn't get rid of the deficits. Here's the Washington Post's charitable description of the Democrat effort:

Senate Democrats have drafted a sweeping debt-reduction plan that would slice $4 trillion from projected borrowing over the next decade without touching the expensive health and retirement programs targeted by President Obama.

Sounds great, WaPo…as long as you don't actually think about it. The Democrats "sweeping" plan would cut $4 trillion from President Obama's projected 10-year deficits of $9.5 trillion, leaving us with an accumulation of $5.5 trillion in new deficit spending over the next decade. With interest, that would increase the national debt by another $7.5 trillion or so. That doesn't exactly solve the problem, does it ? Keep in mind that the all-time debt runner-upper champion, prior to Obama, was President Bush II. Bush ran up the debt by around $5 trillion over 8 years. Obama has already run up the debt by $4 trillion in 2 1/2 years, and the Dem "deficit plan" would add another $7.5 trillion to this. Normally, such a plan would be referred to as "going from the frying pan into the fire" rather than being hailed as an achievement, but politics leads people to make silly claims.

Being a Democrat deficit-reduction plan, it's pretty easy to figure out what their major recommendations would be – tax increases and cuts in defense spending.

…Senate Democrats are proposing to stabilize borrowing through sharp cuts at the Pentagon and other government agencies, as well as $2 trillion in new taxes, primarily on families earning more than $1 million year, according to a copy of the plan obtained by The Washington Post.

"stabilize borrowing". LOL. Good one. Do you get the feeling this WaPo article was written by a Democrat ? If not, this next part should convince you:

With debt-reduction talks under way between Obama and congressional leaders, Senate Democrats are unlikely to adopt the blueprint. However, it has gained broad support among those eager to chart a path to solving the nation’s budget problems without making politically painful cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

See, the Democrats aren't going to actually adopt their own deficit reduction plan (because actual leadership by the Dems would create political risk), but the Dem poseurs want to show they can solve our budget problems without dealing with SS or Medicare, according to this WaPo writer. Never mind that the Democrat deficit reduction plan DOESN'T solve the budget problems, and that's precisely BECAUSE it doesn't deal with SS or Medicare, which comprise the majority of the budget.

One Democrat did comment on the plan:

“The very strong feeling was we needed to get this into the conversation, because it provides an alternative view,” said a Senate Democrat familiar with the blueprint, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not been publicly released. “What’s striking is how modest the changes need to be to get us back on track.”

Running up $5.5 trillion in new deficits over the next decade will "get us back on track" ? I assume this anonymous Democrat must be a co-sponsor of Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul's (R-TX) bill to allow states to legalize marijuana. He's definitely smoking something. The only way the Dem plan could be considered "on track" is if you believe returning to Bush-level deficits is on track. I do not. We'll only be on track when our budget is back in the black.

The real reason Senate Democrats produced a deficit plan is a political one. They want to counter the current negotiations between President Obama and House Republicans (legislation must originate in the House):

On Friday, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) visited the White House to brief Obama and Vice President Biden on the blueprint, which differs significantly from the framework under discussion with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other leaders.

“I explained to the President and Vice President how the Senate Budget Committee Democrats developed a plan that achieves $4 trillion in deficit reduction in a balanced and fair way,” Conrad said in a statement. “It is my hope the plan will help influence the bipartisan negotiations and help them reach a comprehensive and balanced deficit reduction agreement.”

By "balanced deficit reduction", the Democrats mean, 'let's raise taxes". By "fair", they mean raise taxes on the wealthy. They know the Republicans will not agree to raising taxes in such a weak economy, with unemployment at 9.2%. Speaker Of the House John Boehner (R-OH) just said he would accept a smaller debt ceiling deal of $2 trillion in spending cuts rather than raise taxes.

I suppose I shouldn't be too critical of what's going on. At least both the Democrats and Republicans are now proposing ways to reduce deficits and debt, rather than increasing them radically, as both Bush and Obama have done. That is a step in the right direction.

Here are some details of the Democrat plan:

Under the blueprint, the top income tax rate would rise to 39.6 percent for individuals earning more than $500,000 a year and families earning more than $1 million. That group, which constitutes the nation’s richest 1 percent of households, would also pay a 20 percent rate on capital gains and dividends, rather than the 15 percent rate now in effect.

In addition to raising rates for the very wealthiest families, the blueprint proposes to obtain fresh revenue by targeting offshore tax havens and corporate shelters. It would also scale back the array of tax breaks and deductions known as tax expenditures, perhaps by focusing on the wealthiest households, which claim an average of $205,000 in tax breaks each year on average income of $1.1 million.

The blueprint would take nearly $900 billion from the Pentagon over the next decade — the same amount recommended by Obama’s fiscal commission. It would slice more than $350 billion from domestic programs. And it would produce interest savings of nearly $600 billion attributable to reduced borrowing.

Only about $80 billion would be cut from Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health programs, and nothing from Social Security

As usual, the Democrats want to go after corporations and investment capital, but that also goes after job creators and wealth producers, not a great idea right now (when are liberals ever going to learn that you can't be pro-job and anti-business at the same time ?). No wonder White House spokesmen have been saying people don't care about the unemployment rate or GDP growth. They must think we're pretty dumb. I think those White House spokesmen are pretty dumb, because we do care, at least those of us who haven't been brainwashed into believing corporations and investment capital are evil.

When the federal deficit was reported as $1.5 trillion last year, that was real bad news. This year's $1.6 trillion deficit is also real bad.

But the truth is far worse. That $1.5 trillion figure consisted of what the government spent in excess of the revenue it took in, but it does not include any new unpaid liabilities the government accrued during the year. According to a USA Today analysis, the amount of new liabilities the government accumulated in 2010 is staggering:

The federal government's financial condition deteriorated rapidly last year, far beyond the $1.5 trillion in new debt taken on to finance the budget deficit, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The government added $5.3 trillion in new financial obligations in 2010, largely for retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. That brings to a record $61.6 trillion the total of financial promises not paid for.

This gap between spending commitments and revenue last year equals more than one-third of the nation's gross domestic product.

Medicare alone took on $1.8 trillion in new liabilities, more than the record deficit prompting heated debate between Congress and the White House over lifting the debt ceiling.

Social Security added $1.4 trillion in obligations, partly reflecting longer life expectancies. Federal and military retirement programs added more to the financial hole, too.

The $5.3 trillion figure is the real 2010 deficit. Anyone still think we don't have a serious fiscal problem ???

Unlike the government, businesses are required to record liabilities when they are taken on. Companies can't accrue liabilities without reporting the loss to their shareholders, but that's exactly what the government does do. The government records no spending until it writes a check. This deceptive accounting trick allows the government to greatly distort it's financial situation, making things appear far better than they really are (and it's about as sad as it gets when a $1.5 trillion deficit is the optimistically distorted government spin).

A few posts back, I wrote about why we must address entitlements. That is reinforced here. You will notice that the Medicare and Social Security entitlement liabilities accumulated in 2010 come to $3.2 trillion. That greatly exceeds all the revenue the federal government received in 2010. Federal revenue was about $2 trillion.

The amount of the government's unfunded liabilities is a number so large that it's difficult to even get your mind around it. USA Today tried to put it in perspective:

The $61.6 trillion in unfunded obligations amounts to $527,000 per household. That's more than five times what Americans have borrowed for everything else — mortgages, car loans and other debt. It reflects the challenge as the number of retirees soars over the next 20 years and seniors try to collect on those spending promises.

I don't know about your household, but mine is going to have a very difficult time coming up with $527,000 to cover the government's promises, and I seriously doubt we have enough rich people in the country to cover them, as liberals would have us do. How are the wealthiest 2% supposed to pay for the other 98% ? Those numbers don't add up, especially when the wealthiest 2% are already bearing much of the tax burden. The bottom 47% pay nothing in income taxes.

Despite these ominous numbers, liberals keep their ideological heads buried firmly in the sand:

Michael Lind, policy director at the liberal New America Foundation's economic growth program, says there is no near-term crisis for federal retirement programs and that economic growth will make these programs more affordable.

"The false claim that Social Security and Medicare are about to bankrupt the United States has been repeated for decades by conservatives and libertarians who pretend that their ideological opposition to these successful and cost-effective programs is based on worries about the deficit," he says.

Notice that Mr. Lind offered NOTHING in the way of explaining how we will pay for all this, other than vague promises of "economic growth" that may or may not occur. That would have to be some kind of record economic growth to general an additional $527,000 per household. Color me skeptical.

USA Today points out one other important fact:

The government has promised pension and health benefits worth more than $700,000 per retired civil servant. The pension fund's key asset: federal IOUs.

Those federal IOU's mean YOU, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. Here's an idea to partially address this situation – don't let government workers retire until they are 65, like the rest of us do.

If liberals get their way (and so far they are getting their way. Entitlements have done nothing but increase over the last 11 years, not to mention the last 75 years), we are going to see tax increases the like of which we've never seen before in this country. I used to say total taxes would have to double to pay for all the government's promises, but now I'm not sure even that would be enough. They might have to triple or quadruple. Imagine what that would do to Mr. Lind's assumed "economic growth". It would destroy it, thus requiring taxation to go higher yet, resulting in a neverending downward economic spiral.

That's why when I hear Democrats saying Republicans will "end Medicare as we know it", I think to myself "God, I sure as hell hope so", because spending $5 trillion above what the government takes in every year leads only to financial destruction, which does grave harm not only to seniors, but to all of us. Having wealthier senior citizens pay 30% more for health care insurance, as they would under Rep. Paul Ryan's plan, sure sounds preferable to tripling everyone's taxes, at least to me.

It would also be helpful if the Democrats offered a real solution of their own, but that hasn't happened. Someone will have to remind me again why I'm supposed to vote for Democrats, because I can't think of a reason when the Dems are punting on the most important economic issues of our lifetime. And liberals are not only punting, they are actually calling for MORE debt, like true crackheads. Then liberals turn around and disingenuously blame the Bush tax cuts, as if that extra $150-400 billion in revenue per year is going to solve the problem. What a demented joke that is.

I thank USA Today for pointing out the truth. It's about time somebody did.

Here's why, by the numbers.

Total federal revenue for FY2011 will be about $2.2 trillion.

Here are the three biggest federal expenditures YTD:
Medicare/Medicaid – $815.1 billion
Defense including wars – $698.5 billion
Social Security – $711.8 billion

Medicare, Defense, and Social Security expenditures YTD comes to $ 2.225 trillion. These three areas are consuming ALL the revenue the federal government takes in. There is no money left for anything else. The other $1.6 trillion the federal government will spend this year is all borrowed. This is known as the deficit. The federal government is borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar it spends.

The federal government has spent beyond it's means for a long, long time, which is why we have a $14.4 trillion federal debt, but the government isn't even coming close to paying for itself these days, and President Obama isn't making any realistic efforts to address the problem. His 10-year budget proposal added another $9-13 trillion to the debt, and his budget assumed economic recovery, the implementation of ObamaCare, an end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and a reversal of the Bush tax cuts for the top 2%. Obama's budget still leaves us on the road to nowhere. Incredibly, Obama tried to peddle his 10-year budget plan as one that reduces the deficit, as if it was fiscally responsible. It is anything but that. Obama is the Nowhere Man.

As bad as things are now, they are about to get much worse. We have future unfunded entitlement liabilities in excess of $114 trillion. $79.1 trillion of that is Medicare. This means we have made enormous future entitlement commitments that we have not funded. And as everyone knows, health care costs are going up much faster than the economy is growing. Those unfunded entitlement liabilities are going to get a lot larger.

The Government Accounting Office (GAO) put out this chart in 2008 comparing entitlement growth to GDP growth. This shows how entitlement spending will rise:

Entitlement spending is growing three times faster than GDP, and the GAO's projection was made BEFORE ObamaCare was implemented. ObamaCare created massive new entitlements. It adds 20 million new people to Medicaid. Obama, like Bush before him, added to the entitlement problem (Bush's Prescription Drug plan has an unfunded future entitlement liability of $19 trillion. That's in addition to the $79 trillion Medicare/Medicaid liability).

Politicians like to create programs and promise people all kinds of things, but politicians don't like to pay for those programs and promises. Politicians want all the pleasure without any of the pain. It helps them get elected, but what they are ultimately doing is selling this country down the river with their unsustainable schemes.

A Heritage Foundation chart shows, using a 30-year tax to GDP average of 18%, Medicare/Medicaid, ObamaCare, and Social Security will consume ALL federal revenue by 2049. There won't even be room in the federal budget for Defense spending.

In summary, entitlements are doubling and tripling in size beyond economic growth. Historic levels of taxation can no longer support them and the rest of the government. We have massive entitlement commitments we have not funded….and we are ALREADY $14.4 trillion in debt, with a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, and no end to the deficits in sight.

Anyone who doesn't recognize this problem is engaging in willful blindness…which leads me to the Democrats. They are busy ripping apart Republicans who have proposed measures to deal with this coming fiscal crisis, like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), but the Democrats are proposing no solutions of their own that will address the problem. Shame on them. If they don't like Ryan's plan, or any other Republican plan (there are several), then how about the Democrats do the jobs they were elected to do and come up with their own plan(s) ! The Dems think ripping the GOP's ideas will give them an advantage in the 2012 elections, and that's all they care about. They hope nobody will notice they have no solutions of their own. As an example, listen to how Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz answered a question put to her about how the Democrats will address the problem:

There is the message of Democrats. They got nuthin', other than demonizing Republicans. The citizens of this nation deserve a lot better than that.

Even though I write about politics, I hate politics. More precisely, I hate most politicians. I have never seen a bigger bunch of lying thieves in my life than the people we elect to run our country. It would take a hearty dose of sodium pentathol to get most of them to tell the truth. I think the first definition of the word 'politician' in the dictionary should be 'professional liar'. Mirriam-Webster should be notified immediately.

Not that I'm cynical or anything.

And when I think about our current President, the word 'politician' springs immediately to mind. With all the problems this country faces, we badly need a leader in the Oval Office right now, but instead we have a politician. We have a politician who cares more about his political party than he does about solving the problems of our country.

Obama rips Republican proposals to eliminate the deficit/debt to shreds, but if you notice, he proposes nothing of his own to eliminate the deficit/debt. He only proposes measures to massively increase the deficit/debt, as he did with his 10-year budget proposal. That's not a leader. That's a politician.

Obama formed a Deficit Commission in 2010 to make it appear he was committed to addressing the deficit/debt, and then he completely ignored the recommendations of his own Deficit Commission. That's not a leader. That's a politician, putting forth a smoke screen.

Obama is STILL talking about eliminating the Bush "tax cuts for the rich". What he doesn't tell you is, he could have eliminated those tax cuts any time he desired in 2009 or 2010. The Democrats had complete control of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government for those two years. As much as Democrats whine about the rich ONLY paying a 35% federal income tax rate, the highest rate, you'd think they would have reversed those tax cuts on day two of Obama's presidency, but they didn't. Why not ? There are two main reasons. First is the fact that reversing the Bush "tax cuts for the rich" won't come anywhere near to solving our deficit/debt problem, and the Democrats all know it. Secondly, the Democrats WANT to keep that issue alive so they can use it as a weapon in the 2012 elections. If they had reversed those tax cuts, it would not be an issue (and the deficits/debt would still be going up by trillions year after year). Democrats want to keep using that issue as a smoke screen. These are not the actions of leaders. They are the actions of politicians.

Obama's own life doesn't even match his class warfare rhetoric. Here's what the President said about taxing the wealthy:

"I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me. They want to give back to the country that's done so much for them. Washington just hasn't asked them to."

But on Obama's own tax return, our wealthy Prez made every effort to pay LESS in taxes to the government:

"[I]n 2009, Obama took itemized deductions of $514,819, a foreign tax credit of $59,372, and a deduction for interest on his home of $52,195. He was also able to take a deduction for $49,000 he contributed to his self-employed retirement fund. If he had not taken these deductions, he would have paid taxes on an additional $675,386, which in his income bracket would have meant he owed somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 more in taxes at the top marginal tax rate of 35 percent. Furthermore, he instructed the Nobel committee to donate his entire $1.4 million Nobel Prize directly to 10 charities, thereby avoiding the necessity of declaring the money as income on which he would have owed an additional $490,000 in taxes. If the president is so appalled at the rich and their ability to hire accountants to take advantage of each and every deduction, why doesn't he simply take the standard deduction on his tax return, like most Americans?" –columnist Linda Chavez

Clearly, the President doesn't have the strength of his own stated convictions. That's because he's not a leader. He's merely a politician.

So here we are, $14.3 TRILLION in debt, with the highest single year deficit in American history at $1.65 TRILLION, and all our President can do is conjure up doomsday scenarios of what wil happen if the Republican spending cuts go through. Here are a couple excerpts of Obama ripping proposed Republican spending cuts:

"Worst of all, this is a [Republican] vision that says even though America can't afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can't afford to care for seniors and poor children…Under [Republicans'] vision, we can't invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail. I mean, we would be a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places that we thought — that we used to call the Third World."

According to Obama, we will become a Third World country if the Republican cuts are enacted. Well, I have a question for our President. What kind of country will we become if we keep borrowing 40 cents out of every federal dollar spent, as we are doing now under Obama's "leadership" ? What kind of country will we be when the debt is $20 TRILLION or $25 TRILLION, and the people we are borrowing from realize we are a terrible credit risk ? It's coming, sooner rather than later. This President's "leadership" is like the captain of the Titanic saying the real danger to the ship would be in changing course and NOT hitting the iceberg. With all due respect, I don't think so Skippy.

The President is basically endorsing the unsustainable status quo. That may be smart politics. It may even win elections for Democrats in 2012, as a popular backlash against Republican spending cuts manifests itself….but it sure as hell ain't leadership.

If you want to know how much of a tax increase it would take to close our federal budget gap (that would take a $1.65 TRILLION tax increase this year), here's Mark Alexander of the Patriot Post to put it in perspective:

Stop reading this and add up all the paychecks you received from January 1 through April 12 of this year. Now, write a check for that amount to the government. In essence, you have done just that, for as the Tax Foundation recently announced, April 12 was this year's Tax Freedom day, meaning "Americans will work well over three months of the year, from January 1 to April 12, before earning enough money to pay this year's tax obligations at the federal, state and local levels." According to the Cato Institute's Dan Mitchell, this is the good news. "The bad news is that Tax Freedom Day only measures the direct and immediate impact of taxation. It doesn't measure the overall burden of government." If the federal government were to collect enough taxes this year to fund all its spending, Tax Freedom Day wouldn't come until May 23.

In order to fully fund our federal government, we'd have to work another month and half each year just to pay our federal taxes. And this doesn't even count the taxes necessary to cover the state and local government budget shortages. It's not a stretch to say we'll soon be working half the year just to pay the government unless spending is seriously curtailed. Government has grown and grown and grown over the years, and our current fiscal nightmare is the result. It would take oppressive, economy-killing tax increases to merely tax our way out of it. That is the truth. Working half the year for the government is basically what the Democrats are offering as a "solution", and things will only get much worse as the baby boomers retire and Medicare/Social Security expenses start to skyrocket. The Democrat model is European socialism, which is a very odd thing to model when you consider the European socialist countries are all going broke too. Modeling failure isn't very intelligent. When our President starts to get serious about our fiscal challenges, that's when you will know you have a leader instead of a politician. Until then, good luck America. You'll need it. Wear a lifejacket, because we ARE going to hit the iceberg. Hope the water isn't too cold. And until we find a leader and unite behind him/her, you can also expect to hear a blizzard of obfuscation, finger pointing, blame shifting, lies, spin, equivocation, and outright BS from all the usual politicians.

Yesterday, I was expecting to hear President Obama lay out his plan for eliminating our $1.6 trillion deficit and start dealing with our $14.3 trillion debt. What I heard instead was an Obama 2012 re-election campaign speech. If Obama was looking to fan the flames of partisan division, he certainly accomplished that. His speech was highly partisan. If Obama was looking to actually solve our dire fiscal situation, as you would expect from the leader of the country, then he failed miserably. You lose, America.

Even if you are naive enough to believe every word Obama said in his speech (which would require a huge dose of naivete), his "plan" doesn't come anywhere near to solving our problems. He proposed $4 trillion in deficit reduction over ten years, with half of that coming from shadowy promises of unnamed spending cuts, and the other half coming from tax increases, with many of those also falling into the shadowy category. About the only solid proposal he made was reversing the Bush tax cuts for the top 2%. That's hardly a new idea, and certainly didn't warrant a new speech from the President.

Even if Obama's shadowy, vague, half measures plan magically materialized into reality, it still doesn't come close to dealing with our fiscal problems. I'm starting to wish the Republicans would go along with reversing the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% just so we can eliminate that canard from the conversation. As I pointed out in my last post, taxation is not the problem. SPENDING is the problem. Reversing the Bush tax cuts is not the cure-all the Democrats make it out to be, but it seemed to be the central "solution" proposed by Obama. At best, Obama's so-called "balanced approach" brings a $4 trillion scalpel to a problem that requires an $11 trillion sledgehammer. At worst, as I'm much more inclined to believe after a lifetime of listening to politicians making vague promises, it will do nothing but raise taxes again and again as spending continues to increase. It's the same tax and spend crap I've been hearing from Democrats for decades. The key point is, Obama's "plan" will still increase spending and increase the debt. It solves nothing. In fact, in a speech that was supposed to be about deficit reduction, our President spent half of it talking about all the spending he wants to do, which should give us all a strong hint as to his true intentions. He says he wants to cut spending at the same time he defends it and calls for more.

In light of this, I don't have much in the way of specifics to report on Obama's deficit reduction efforts, because he didn't offer many specifics. Obama use his bully pulpit to punt the ball on responsibility yet again, which has become his pattern.

The one area the President did do a decent job was in describing our fiscal problem, so I'll focus a bit on that:

Even after our economy recovers, our government will still be on track to spend more money than it takes in throughout this decade and beyond. That means we’ll have to keep borrowing more from countries like China. And that means more of your tax dollars will go toward paying off the interest on all the loans we keep taking out. By the end of this decade, the interest we owe on our debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion. That’s the interest. Just the interest payments.

Then, as the Baby Boomers start to retire and health care costs continue to rise, the situation will get even worse. By 2025, the amount of taxes we currently pay will only be enough to finance our health care programs, Social Security, and the interest we owe on our debt. That’s it. Every other national priority – education, transportation, even our national security – will have to be paid for with borrowed money.

Ultimately, all this rising debt will cost us jobs and damage our economy. It will prevent us from making the investments we need to win the future. We won’t be able to afford good schools, new research, or the repair of roads and bridges – all the things that will create new jobs and businesses here in America. Businesses will be less likely to invest and open up shop in a country that seems unwilling or unable to balance its books. And if our creditors start worrying that we may be unable to pay back our debts, it could drive up interest rates for everyone who borrows money – making it harder for businesses to expand and hire, or families to take out a mortgage.

The President is exactly right about that part. The seriousness of the need for us to reduce our debt/deficit situation cannot be overstated. Our very future as a country hangs in the balance. Unfortunately, his "plan" leaves this sorry vision of the future in place. It doesn't change any of it. Instead of putting forth a real plan to eliminate the deficit/debt, our illustrious President chose instead to engage in divisive partisan gamesmanship in yet another failure of leadership. His speech wasn't really about addressing the fiscal problems he described above. It was about scoring political points against Republicans.

Two days ago, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pointed out that the United States doesn't have any "credible strategy" to reduce it's deficit/debt load. After Obama's speech, we still don't. The IMF pointed out a few other things worth noting as well:

The US lacks a “credible strategy” to stabilise its mounting public debt, posing a small but significant risk of a new global economic crisis, says the International Monetary Fund.

In an unusually stern rebuke to its largest shareholder, the IMF said the US was the only advanced economy to be increasing its underlying budget deficit in 2011, at a time when its economy was growing fast enough to reduce borrowing.

To meet the 2010 pledge by the Group of 20 countries for all advanced economies – except Japan – to halve their deficits by 2013, the US would need to implement tougher austerity measures than in any two-year period since records began in 1960, the IMF said.
In its twice-yearly Fiscal Monitor, the IMF added that on its current plans the US would join Japan as the only country with rising public debt in 2016, creating a risk for the global economy.

Carlo Cottarelli, head of fiscal affairs at the Fund, said: “It is a risk that if it materialises would have very important consequences… for the rest of the world. So it is important that the US undertakes fiscal adjustment in a way sooner rather than later.”

Somebody want to explain to me again how Obama has restored America's standing in the world ? It seems the world hasn't received the memo.

We need serious leadership right now, more than we have since the 1930-40's. Instead, we have the unbearable lightness of Obama. That's a loss for all of us.

We're over six months into FY2011 (the government's fiscal year runs from October 1-September 30), and Congress has still not passed a budget for FY2011. There will be a government shutdown at midnight unless Congress can pass a budget or another temporary continuing resolution (CR) today.

First, I must say…Heckuva job, Congress. Thanks for NOT doing the job we elected you to do. Thanks for proving to me once again how well-founded is my skepticism of the government, as if the $14 trillion federal debt and the $1.6 trillion deficit wasn't proof enough already. If I find any solace from a government shutdown, it will come from the fact that members of Congress won't get their paychecks (at least I hope they won't).

The last action I heard about was the CR that passed the GOP-led House yesterday. It contained $12 billion in spending cuts, would fund the Department Of Defense for the rest of the year, and fund the rest of the government for another week. President Obama said he would veto it if it reached his desk. Democrats voted against it, saying they wanted the one-week CR to maintain spending at current levels. So much for all the Democrat calls for compromise I heard on the airwaves yesterday, but even if the CR did pass, the budget issue would not be resolved. The standoff continues.

If you want to know how things deteriorated to this level, I can answer that in one word – politics (which is another reason I distrust the government). Our politicians care more about their parties than they do our country. This goes for both parties, but I have particular animus toward the Democrats in this regard. Remember, the Dems had total control of Congress and the Presidency until January. They could have done their job and passed the FY2011 budget any time they wanted to, but they didn't. Why not ? Because they knew if they passed the big spending budget they wanted to pass, it would lessen their chances in last fall's elections. As Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) said on Fox News last night, the Dems didn't pass a budget because it was "a political hot potato". In other words, the Democrats put the well-being of their party above the well-being of the country. But their self-serving political stunt didn't work. Republicans made big gains in Congress and took control of the House. Now, Congress is locked in an ideological battle of wills. The Dems could have easily avoided the current shutdown scenario, which makes me wonder if what's going on now wasn't the Democrats backup plan all along. Democrats knew spending had to be cut, but they want the Republicans to take the heat for it, because particular spending cuts, especially to domestic programs, aren't popular, even when they are necessary.

On the core issue of spending cuts, I agree with the Republicans a lot more than I do the Democrats. Obama's ten-year budget proposal that increased federal spending by $9 trillion, increased taxes by $2 trillion (it reversed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, among other tax increases), and increased the federal debt by $13 trillion over the next decade was an epic failure of leadership, a complete joke. Obama looked at the biggest long-term problem we face as a country, and then he punted the ball. He abdicated all responsibility. I can't begin to take him seriously since then. I no longer care what he has to say on economic matters. I just want him out. I will vote for a ham sandwich over Obama for President in 2012. He's not a leader. He's a coward, or worse (you can fill in your own Obama motivation here).

Spending must be cut. That is undeniable. Anyone with a shred of honesty has to admit that much. We are living in a fictitious economy fueled by debt. The federal government is borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar it spends. It is beyond obvious that it isn't sustainable. We're on a high-speed rail to financial destruction, yet we can't get Congress to agree on $61 billion in spending cuts, which represents less than a 2% cut from a $3.8 trillion federal budget. Hard to believe.

That being said, I do have some problems with the GOP's cuts. They all focus on domestic spending, which certainly must be cut, but of the GOP proposals I've seen, NONE of them cut the Defense budget. This is outrageous. While I certainly support funding the troops in the field, as we must do, there is much to be cut in the area of Defense. We have nearly 500 military bases in about 100 countries around the world. There's no reason for this. WWII is long over. The Cold War is over. It's time for us to stop being the policeman of the world. We can't afford it any longer. When Republicans cite the Constitution as it's justification for the federal government to "provide for the common defense", they are correct. However, the framers meant that the federal government should defend THIS country, not South Korea, Japan, Europe, etc., etc. Our first President, George Washington, warned against "foreign entanglements". Later, President Eisenhower warned against the "military industrial complex". Today's Republicans and Democrats should take note of our fiscal situation and make some major Defense adjustments. I'm all for defending this country, and when we were attacked on 9/11 it was appropriate for us to go after the terrorists and their state-sponsored supporters in Afghanistan, but enough is enough. The Deparment Of Defense needs to be cut like everything else. It will take an all hands approach to correct the course of our ship of state.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said the GOP's budget policy riders are interfering with a budgetary agreement between the two parties. Reid said Republicans were “focusing on ideological matters that have nothing to do with funding the government". Said policy riders include defunding ObamaCare, defunding Planned Parenthood, and weakening the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions. I don't know what world Reid lives in, but in my world, DEFUNDING ObamaCare and Planned Parenthood have everything to do with funding the government. Ideology is certainly involved, just as ideology was involved with funding these programs in the first place, but, I repeat, WE ARE $14 TRILLION IN DEBT AND HAVE A $1.6 TRILLION DEFICIT. Everything should be on the table. We have to reinvent our idea of what government can and should do for us. If we don't, we face a certain finanial meltdown. Thems the facts.

In closing, I hear Democrats and liberals across the land moaning and crying over the Republican spending cuts, such as Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to cut $6 trillion in spending over a decade (which actually doesn't go far enough fast enough), but I ask you this…has anyone heard a plan from the Democrats in Congress or the Executive branch to fix our debt/deficit problem ??? Anyone ??? I haven't, and the last I heard, Democrats were also supposed to be our governmental leaders. Rather than leading, it seems they've chosen to bury their heads in the sand and throw dirt at Republicans to gain a partisan advantage. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to admire such behavior, which is why I don't. Put up or shut up, Democrats. I've heard enough of what the Democrats are against. They should man up and present their own plan to right our fiscal ship, before we collectively sink into the sea. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

As for anyone's particular political beliefs, they should be secondary right now. Everyone is going to have to accept some spending cut they don't like. Yes, it would be fan-frigging-tastic if we could give every citizen in the country everything their little heart desires for free, but that ain't realistic. In fact, that gimme attitude is a large part of the problem.

Our great leaders address the pressing problems of their times. That's what George Washington did. So did Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Truman, JFK, and Reagan. Taking on their responsibilities is what made these leaders great.

The most pressing problem of our time is DEBT. Some would say it's jobs, but that's only in the short term. It's the debt crisis that will ultimately sink our ship of state if we do not address it. It is the job of our leader, our President, to confront this crisis of our time.

Yesterday, Barack Obama proved he is not a great leader. Instead, the President released his new 10-year budget and proved he is no leader at all. It almost makes me sick to report this. National Review has the lowlights from Obama's budget request:

$3.73 trillion — total spending this year (25 percent of GDP, highest levels since World War Two).

$46 trillion — total spending over the next decade.

$8.7 trillion — total new spending over the same period.

$26.3 trillion — Total new debt, including entitlement obligations, predicted by 2021. [Note from King - This doesn't mean the federal debt would increase by this amount, because we don't include future entitlement obligations in our debt numbers]

$7.2 trillion — Total deficit predicted by the end of the decade.

$1.1 trillion — How much the White House estimates the proposal will reduce the deficit over the next ten years.

$4 trillion — How much the president’s deficit commission recommended reducing the deficit over the next ten years to avoid financial catastrophe.

$1.6 trillion — The projected annual deficit for 2011 (11 percent of GDP), up from $1.3 trillion in 2010.

$2 trillion — Amount the budget will raise taxes on business and upper-income families over the next ten years, which includes letting the Bush-era tax rates expire in 2012 (for incomes $250,000 and up).

$50 billion — Amount the administration plans to spend this year on infrastructure and transportation “investments.”

$30 billion — Amount dedicated to a “National Infrastructure Bank to invest in projects of regional or national significance to the economy,” including the much-touted high-speed rail initiative.

$77.4 billion — Funding allocated for the Department of Education, a 22 percent increase from 2010 levels, and a 35 percent increase from 2008 levels.

$29.5 billion — Total spending on the Department of Energy, a 22 percent increase from 2008 levels.

$9.9 billion — Funding allocated for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a 30 percent increase from 2008 levels.

$150 billion — Total amount the White House plans to spend next year on research and development programs.

8.2 percent — Predicted unemployment rate in 2012.

Zero — Political risk the president was willing to assume by proposing meaningful reform to entitlement programs. That said, Republicans haven’t exactly been willing to stick their necks out either, at least not yet.

Jake Tapper of ABC News summed it up best when he said, "At no point in the president’s 10-year projection would the U.S. government spend less than it’s taking in.” The LOWEST deficit projection over Obama's 10-year budget is $607 billion. Obama's LOWEST deficit projection is higher than any in the history of the country prior to 2009 when Obama took office.

Even Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic, an Obama fan, had something intelligent to say on the subject – "To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you're fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama's cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America's fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end".

Exactly. The swarms of young people who flocked to the polls to elect Barack Obama in 2008 were in effect signing their own economic death warrants.

After this abdication of responsibility by Obama, 2012 can't get here fast enough for me. I wrote recently that the new "centrist" Obama sounded good, but we'd find out from his actions whether he had really changed, or whether it was just words, political doubletalk. Now we know it was just words, and nothing more.

Here's a newsflash for liberals – Obama's 10-year budget includes allowing the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 to expire in 2012. It didn't make much difference, did it liberals ? We're still headed into debt hell with or without those tax cuts. I hate to say I told you so, but…I told you so.

After failing miserably to address our biggest economic problem, President Obama had the audacity of non-hope to say his budget represents "tough choices and sacrifices". Surreal.

Speaking of surreal, listen to how the Associated Press begins to describe Obama's budgets:

WASHINGTON – Putting on the brakes after two years of big spending increases, President Barack Obama unveiled a $3.7 trillion budget plan Monday that would freeze or reduce some safety-net programs for the nation's poor but turn aside Republican demands for more drastic cuts to shrink the government to where it was before he took office.

This is why the American public is so misinformed. The AP characterizes it as "putting on the brakes after two years of big spending increases" when Obama just proposed INCREASING federal spending by nearly $200 billion this year over 2010 levels. That doesn't put the brakes on anything. It presses the gas pedal.

The bottom line is – Obama's 10-year budget plan would add $13 trillion in debt over the next decade, and that's the rosy scenario, because Obama's plan assumes complete economic recovery. Obama's "rosy" scenario would have our national debt at about $27 trillion in ten years. Does anyone remember Obama's first 10-year budget plan ? That one added $9 trillion to the debt over ten years. Now, it's up to $13 trillion. Maybe the AP can tell me again how that equates to "putting on the brakes", because my calculator is telling me just the opposite.

Think about this – Obama has already added about $4 trillion to the debt in a little over two years. If he could serve for 10 more years, by his own projections he'd add about $17 trillion to the debt in twelve years. Here's the kicker. THE ENTIRE ACCUMULATED DEBT IN THE HISTORY OF THE COUNTRY WAS ABOUT $10 TRILLION BEFORE OBAMA BECAME PRESIDENT. Democrats were rightly upset that the country ran up $5 trillion in debt under the alleged conservative Bush, but now Obama makes Bush look like the model of fiscal responsibility by comparison. That is no easy feat, but Obama has embraced enough fiscal insanity to accomplish this in only TWO YEARS.

Time for a new President, America. This one isn't a leader. He's just a politician, and not even a wise one. He's ruining the country at breakneck speed. The Tea Party movement is right.

The Congresssional Budget Office projects the 2011 federal deficit will be $1.5 trillion. Funny how this came out the day AFTER the State Of The Union address. Purely coincidental, I'm sure.

The Washington Post knows where to place the blame:

The still-fragile economy and fresh tax cuts approved by Congress last month will drive the federal deficit to nearly $1.5 trillion this year, the biggest budget gap in U.S. history, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.

The economy has certainly played a part in reducing revenue to the government (by about $400 billion per year), but the only "fresh tax cut" Congress enacted last month was President Obama's temporary payroll tax holiday, estimated at $112 billion. All the other "fresh tax cuts" the Post is referring to weren't tax cuts at all, they were simply extensions of current tax rates that have been in place for years. There was also a tax increase in the recent tax deal. The estate tax will go from 0% to 35%.

But what infuriates me about our media is this – they almost never identify the REAL source of our trillion+ dollar deficits. The real source of our record deficits is – government spending. It's so obvious that it takes an entire liberal media to obfuscate the fact.

Allow me to explain as simply as I can.

In FY2007, the federal government spent $2.729 trillion. We had a deficit of $160 billion that year. This was after the Bush tax cuts had been in place for years and we were fighting two wars.

In FY2010, the federal government spent $3.456 trillion (down from Obama's requested FY2010 budget of $3.720 trillion). The deficit was $1.29 trillion.

What this reveals is – as federal spending increased by $730 billion per year between 2007 and 2010 (during a non-inflationary time), the deficit increased by roughly $1.1 trillion per year during the same time period. Spending increases, not tax cuts, accounted for the overwhelming majority of the deficit (over 70% of it). The rest ($400 billion) was due to falling recession revenues. I suppose we could have enacted massive tax hikes during the Great Recession to cover the difference, but that would have done much harm to the American people and the economic recovery effort, as most everyone except economically-challenged left-wingers agrees.

Thanks to the historic failure of the outgoing Democrat-led Congress to do it's job and pass a budget for FY2011, we don't have a budget. We're operating on a series of short term spending authorizations. President Obama did release a FY2011 Budget Request back in February 2010, but he has spent a lot more money since that time, so why bother even mentioning it ? What we know is that we face a $1.5 trillion deficit this year.

Keep that $1.5 trillion deficit figure in mind as you listen to this from the previously linked Washington Post article:

Lawmakers scrambled Wednesday to respond to the darkening budget picture, with Republicans pressing their call for sharp and immediate cuts in domestic spending. Twenty-one Senate Republicans, meanwhile, unveiled a plan to amend the U.S. Constitution to require balanced budgets, a top priority of the tea party movement.

Democrats resisted both initiatives, arguing that amending the Constitution, a lengthy process that requires a vote in all 50 state legislatures, would do little to address the current problem. They dismissed as "drastic" a proposal by House Republicans to slash $100 billion from the current budget, arguing that cuts of that magnitude would endanger a million jobs on public- and private-sector payrolls at a time when the unemployment rate already stands at 9.4 percent.

Un-freaking-believable. Democrats think a $100 billion cut in spending, following the aforementioned $730 billion annual increase in spending over the last few years, is "drastic". This is after federal spending literally DOUBLED over the last decade, going from $1.789 trillion in 2000 to twice that much now. That spending explosion is why we have trillion dollar deficits. That's why we have a $14 trillion national debt. There is NO OTHER REASON, and it's about time we face up to it, even if Democrats would rather not.

According to a recent Gallup poll, even the majority of Americans don't want to face the truth. They are against most spending cuts:

Americans don't want many spending cuts, but if you ask Americans if they want their taxes raised, they also say no, they don't want that either. Americans want government services, they just don't want to pay for them.

I call this Adventures In Denial. It can't last much longer. We're going broke because of it.

The new Republican-led House voted to repeal ObamaCare yesterday by a vote of 236-181. It was a bipartisan effort, with four Democrats joining Republicans in the repeal effort….oh alright, it wasn't very bipartisan at all. The repeal legislation will now move on to the Democrat-led Senate, where it will die. Even if it did somehow pass the Senate, I think I can say with confidence that Obama will veto repeal of his signature legislation.

Democrats have been trumpeting the fact that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit by $230 billion over ten years. Republicans are extremely skeptical of that figure. The Beacon Journal ran a New York Times article on friday supporting the notion that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit. Because the article left out a lot more than it explained, allow me to elaborate.

The CBO did score ObamaCare as reducing the deficit by $230 billion over ten years. That much is true, but there's a lot more to that story. The Times left out HOW this alleged deficit reduction would occur. From the American Spectator:

The Congressional Budget Office, in an email to Capitol Hill staffers obtained by the Spectator, has said that repealing the national health care law would reduce net spending by $540 billion in the ten year period from 2012 through 2021. That number represents the cost of the new provisions, minus Medicare cuts. Repealing the bill would also eliminate $770 billion in taxes. It's the tax hikes in the health care law (along with the Medicare cuts) which accounts for the $230 billion in deficit reduction.

Thus, repealing ObamaCare would REDUCE federal spending by $540 billion, REDUCE taxes by $770 billion, and eliminate Medicare cuts. Maybe it's just me, but I think these things were worth mentioning by either the New York Times or the Akron Beacon Journal, seeing as how they are, you know, alleged NEWS organizations.

They also might have mentioned that adding over 20 million people to the Medicaid rolls, as ObamaCare would do, would further burden state governments that are already in the red and trying to figure out how to cover their budgetary shortages.

They also might have mentioned that Medicaid is ALREADY in fiscal trouble, even without ObamaCare:

Medicaid—the joint federal–state health insurance program for numerous categories of the poor—has significant problems. Medicaid spending growth is unsustainable, increasing over 6 percent annually (in inflation-adjusted dollars) during the past two decades.[2] Medicaid growth has resulted in three federal bailouts in the past decade, and its growth is crowding out other state priorities, such as education, transportation, and law enforcement.

Yet, we're supposed to believe adding over 20 million more people to Medicaid will make things better ? Here's what CMS, the government office that manages Medicare/Medicaid, had to say:

Despite Medicaid’s enormous problems, Obamacare expands it dramatically. Beginning in 2014, states are required to cover all individuals below 138 percent of the federal poverty line with Medicaid.The CMS estimates that this will increase enrollment in Medicaid by 23 million individuals in 2014 at an added annual cost of over $70 billion.

Obamacare requires that states increase Medicaid reimbursement rates for PCPs to applicable Medicare payment rates for 2013 and 2014 to encourage PCPs to treat Medicaid patients. The estimated annual cost of raising the reimbursement rates by state is provided in Table 1. However, on January 1, 2015, both the mandate and the federal funding paying for it expire.

The "Table 1" mentioned above in reference to increasing reimbursement rates to physicians, is known as the "doc fix." Here is Table 1:

If you read the print at the top of Table 1, you will see that the CBO ObamaCare cost estimates do not include the $3-6.83 billion annual "doc fixes." Nor does it include the additional healthcare costs incurred by the states.

The Wall Street Journal noted other bogus cost estimates within ObamaCare:

The accounting gimmicks are legion, but we'll pick out a few: It uses 10 years of taxes to fund six years of subsidies. Social Security and Medicare revenues are double-counted to the tune of $398 billion. A new program funding long-term care frontloads taxes but backloads spending, gradually going broke by design. The law pretends that Congress will spend less on Medicare than it really will, in particular through an automatic 25% cut to physician payments that Democrats have already voted not to allow for this year.

Finally, let's look at the the government's track record on estimating healthcare costs. From the Daily Caller:

Tthe House Ways and Means Committee estimated that the original Medicare hospital insurance program would cost $9 billion annually by 1990. Actual spending that year was $67 billion.

The same committee predicted in 1967 that the total Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. Actual spending was $110 billion.

In the case of Medicaid DSH — a program that reimburses states for payments to hospitals that treat Medicaid and uninsured patients — CBO estimated in 1987 that payments would amount to less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost that year was $17 billion

As is typical of our federal government, costs usually exceed the estimates…by a whole bunch.

If you want to know why Republicans are extremely skeptical, these are a few of the reasons why. Count me as extremely skeptical too. I've seen our government in action too many times to have much faith in them (see: $14 trillion debt, the rape of the Social Security Trust Fund, $55 trillion in unfunded entitlement mandates, etc, etc, etc). Now the government is telling me that adding tens of millions of people to the entitlement rolls for healthcare will reduce the deficit…and I'm supposed to believe them ???? Sorry. I can't suspend my disbelief that far. What ObamaCare gives us is what almost all Democratic programs give us – tax and spend. That is the precise mindset I'm dedicated to defeating, before we all go broke.

The federal government is currently over $14 trillion in debt. In two-three months, Congress will have to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit or the federal government will begin to default. Such a default would wreak economic havoc on our nation. Many Republicans are demanding spending concessions in return for raising the debt limit. They want to put a plan in place to balance the budget over time in exchange for raising the limit. I call this the sane position. Some other Republicans and conservatives want to draw a line in the sand and vote against increasing the debt limit at all (Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is circulating a petition against raising the debt limit). I call this the insane position. We will have to raise the debt limit, no question. There is no way to go from a $1.3 trillion deficit to a balanced budget in two or three months. There isn't even a proposal on the table to do that. Republicans have been calling for a $100 billion spending cut in their first year controlling the House, and frankly, I'd be surprised if they even accomplished that much when the GOP doesn't control the Senate or the Executive Branch. We will NOT be balancing the federal budget in 2011. You can take that to the bank (preferably a Chinese bank).

The Obama administration has cautioned Republicans against "playing chicken" with the debt ceiling. I call this the other insane position, because it tacitly endorses business as usual, which has produced $5.2 trillion in new debt over the last four years of Democratic congressional rule. Spending restraints should be put in place. A plan to balance the budget MUST be put in place. We cannot continue on our current path of irresponsibility. That would wreak havoc on everyone's future.

Debt ceiling demagoguery abounds. Ironically, things were very different during the previous presidential administration. In 2006, then Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) voted AGAINST raising the federal debt limit (He was for playing chicken before he was against it). Also voting against raising the limit was current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Here's what Reid said about increasing the debt limit way, way back in the olden days, four years ago:

“If my Republican friends believe that increasing our debt by almost $800 billion today and more than $3 trillion over the last five years is the right thing to do, they should be upfront about it. They should explain why they think more debt is good for the economy.

How can the Republican majority in this Congress explain to their constituents that trillions of dollars in new debt is good for our economy? How can they explain that they think it’s fair to force our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren to finance this debt through higher taxes. That’s what it will have to be. Why is it right to increase our nation’s dependence on foreign creditors?

They should explain this. Maybe they can convince the public they’re right. I doubt it. Because most Americans know that increasing debt is the last thing we should be doing. After all, I repeat, the Baby Boomers are about to retire. Under the circumstances, any credible economist would tell you we should be reducing debt, not increasing it.Democrats won’t be making argument to supper this legalization, which will weaken our country. Weaken our county.”

Sen. Reid's words made a lot of sense back in 2006, but now, of course, he's taking the opposite position in favor of raising the debt limit. Even worse is this December 2010 video clip, where Reid puts partisan politics at the forefront of the debt limit vote:

You see, to Reid, it's all about who can be blamed for increasing the debt limit. He wants to push as much blame off on Republicans as possible. That's why the Dems didn't raise the debt ceiling when they has control of both houses of Congress. It's all about politics, baby.

Democrats are by no means alone in politicizing the debt limit vote. Here's what Sen. Jim Demint (R-SC) wants, according to The Right Scoop and Human Events:

DeMint says that even with a balanced budget amendment, which he spoke favorably of, he still will not vote to raise the debt limit since he hasn’t created this debt problem. And he encourages the young freshmen to not allow the other Republicans to talk them into it because they didn’t create this problem either. He wants the people who created this problem to take the blame for raising the debt limit:

Demint is pulling an Obama (2006 version) here. We could have quite a debate over who the "people who created this problem" are, but suffice it to say, many of them were Republicans. Also, since when do Congresspersons get to abdicate responsibility for any problems they didn't create ? In another context, Demint's logic could be used to tell incoming Democratic congressional freshmen to defund the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, because, you know, they didn't create those problems. It doesn't work that way. Responsibility is for everyone in Congress. That's the job (or at least it's supposed to be).

It is possible the new Republican-led House Of Representatives will vote against raising the debt limit (at first), but in the end, the debt limit will be raised, because it has to be raised. There really isn't another feasible option.

My final bit of surreal comedy gold for today comes from Obama's 2006 speech against raising the debt limit. Heeeeer'es Barry:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” [Obama] said on March 16, 2006. “Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, 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 . Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit.”

Sure, Barry, whatever you say. There has never been a leadership failure on the debt front like your own.

In 2006, every Democratic Senator voted AGAINST raising the debt limit, and all but two Republican Senators voted FOR raising the debt limit. Sen. Demint voted FOR raising the debt limit. Keep that in mind as you listen to almost everyone from both parties taking the exact opposite position now. These are your alleged leaders, and they are unmasked. They put their political parties above the people of the United States Of America.