Tag: Federal spending

Killers, baby and otherwise

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The Center for Disease Control Loses Its Grip
-Paul Rahe

Meanwhile, at the National Institutes of Health, the Director is saying Ebola in the US is a problem because his budget was cut.

That cut was in Obama’s budget. This did not trouble the Obama NIH when they needed millions for Lesbian Obesity research.

Nonetheless, the Dems are “blaming Bush,” whose protocols for disease control were rejected by Obama.

Note that the CDC’s spending remains out of control.

The cost of CDC’s gun control, NaCl pogrom and chasing down escaped, infected lab animals apparently prevented them from doing their job.

And they still don’t have a handle on Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68).

The Statists think we’re stupid. And you can tell how many of us actually are stupid by looking at the number of people who would vote for Obama again.

Update, Oct 13, noon: It turns out that the GOP baby killers actually increased the CDC budget by 8.2 percent on Jan. 13th, 2014. The president had proposed a $270 million decrease from fiscal 2012. The House of Representatives passed the omnibus spending bill 376 to 5, giving the CDC $6.9 billion, over half a billion more than the president proposed.

Still, the Dem’s Surreality Based Community is blaming the GOP for the Ebola problem.

Update, Oct 13, 5:20PM
This,

“…the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients,”

is beyond belief.

Update, Oct 15, 4:57PM A WORD ON THE NIH BUDGET

“…after the Republican takeover in ’94, the NIH budget rose until the Dems took over Congress in 2006. The Pelosi/Reid Congress was the first to flatline the NIH budget in nominal dollars.”

But, read the whole thing at the link above. You will find a further link to a Brief History of NIH Funding: Fact Sheet, written by the Congressional Reasearch Service.

Copyright 2005-2019

Protection racket

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I don’t remember where I found the link to the ThinkProgress post entitled Republicans Reject Obamacare ‘Fix’ Because It Includes Too Many Consumer Protections, and I am certainly not going to risk sending them any traffic by providing it here. Still, the hypocrisy should be noted for its humor. The post castigates House Republicans for rejecting a Democrat bill that allowed insurance companies to provide consumers with the plans Obama promised them they could keep.

The Democrat version differed from the bill the Republicans (along with 39 Democrats) did pass in that the Democrat version:

1- Did not allow new policyholders to buy the plans
2- Mandated that insurers notify policyholders of exchange options
3- Mandated that existing rate review processes apply to renewed plans

In other words, it put further burdens on insurance companies – making it unlikely they could even offer the plans in the new few weeks. Both “fixes” allow the plans to be sold and, therefore, equally violate consumer protection by offering the plans the Democrats call “substandard” “junk.”

There is a more humorous aspect, however. The consumer protection laws ThinkProgress finds so important absolutely prohibit false advertising and fraud. Those are crimes the President committed when he repeatedly lied about Obamacare. What consumers need is protection from the President.

Copyright 2005-2019

The #SeekRenters

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The sequester debate isn’t about spending cuts, it’s about a tiny slowing in the rate of increase of funds transferred to Federal rent seekers. Noted in the Wall Street Journal: The Unscary Sequester

In Mr. Obama’s first two years, while private businesses and households were spending less and deleveraging, federal domestic discretionary spending soared by 84% with some agencies doubling and tripling their budgets.

… from 2008-2013 federal discretionary spending has climbed to $1.062 trillion from $933 billion—an increase of 13.9%. Domestic programs grew by 16.6%, much faster than the 11.6% for national security.

Transportation funding alone climbed to $69.5 billion in 2010 with the stimulus from $10.7 billion in 2008, and in 2013 the budget is still $17.9 billion, or about 67% higher. Education spending more than doubled in Mr. Obama’s first two years and is up 18.6% to $68.1 billion from 2008-2013.

… total discretionary domestic spending is up closer to 30% from 2008-2013. The sequester would claw that back by all of about 5%.

… The sequester will surely require worker furloughs and cutbacks in certain nonpriority services. But most of those layoffs will happen in the Washington, D.C. area, the recession-free region that has boomed during the Obama era.

If Mr. Obama were really serious about improving the equality of income distribution, he might consider that a positive. According to Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, about

“…15 cents of every dollar from the entire federal procurement budget stays in or around the government’s hometown. …”We’re seeing an enormous transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the Washington economy,” said Fuller.”

Upton Sinclair was a socialist, but when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” he was on to something; though he did neglect to mention the mendacity of politicians in fostering said ignorance. The threats issuing forth from the Obama administration – to prioritize cutting baby food and meat inspection rather than not funding the next Solyndra or ending high speed rail boondoggles; and putting slashing veterans benefits ahead of cancelling the DOD’s “green” projects – show a cynical disregard for taxpayers and reveal the deep hypocrisy of the president’s purported compassion.

Copyright 2005-2019

Four more years

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The president’s insistence on taxing “the rich” is populist tripe, because he presents an argument that a relatively tiny amount of taxation revenue will make a serious contribution toward solving our deficit and indebtedness problems, while he simultaneously promotes more government spending.

His ideological refusal to stop incurring debt makes a mockery of his argument for any tax increase whatsoever: He’s just going to spend it. His plan appeals to the economically ignorant; from Nobel Prize winning “economists” such as Paul Krugman, through welfare scammers, to the truly destitute – for many of whom Barack Obama already bears personal responsibility.

His ideology is cynical, cruel, elitist and dangerous.

Let us look at just two results of the enervating Federal Government spending he promotes:

[T]he amount spent on federal welfare programs last year was enough to mail a $60,000 check to every one of the 17 million households living beneath the poverty line. And that doesn’t include spending by state and local governments.

If a single Federal agency just wrote checks to those who merely express need, we’d use the money more efficiently. Maybe we’d even see an eventual revival of shame, for those who lied about their need. They’re currently brazen enough to brag about it. Even though we couldn’t completely trust all the claimants, I’ll bet half of them wouldn’t need assistance by 2014.

We have entrenched bureaucracies who resist the idea that individuals under their care can ever become self sufficient. It isn’t about their clients, it’s about their own salaries. Not their fault. We created the system rules.

And here’s a simple, clear example of what government spending does to the market: Editorial: Federal flood insurance subsidizes risks

…Get appraisals for their homes, write them a check, knock the homes down and just let it go back to its natural state,” said Steven Sweeney, a Democrat and president of the New Jersey Senate.

Good luck with that. A huge federal apparatus and powerful special interests are intent on doing just the opposite. The best illustration of this misguided policy is the National Flood Insurance Program, created in 1968 to provide insurance to homeowners on coasts and near rivers who had trouble getting private coverage.

It’s why people are still willing to build houses in high risk locations. They get a discount on disaster.

We will not be seen to have been doing these people any favors when we can no longer supply the welfare, or market distorting subsidies. Stein’s law applies: “That which cannot continue will stop.” A catastrophic stop, the kind our leaders are arranging, will damage the poor most. We will eventually run out of the money we are stealing from our great-grandchildren.

All this brings me to a point about morality. It isn’t simply immoral for government to lie to people about the economy, it is evil.

Governments aren’t just inefficient at spending, they lie about it. Fiat currency is just governments’ way of lying about the value of money and imposing the hidden tax of inflation on every citizen. That hurts the poor most, too.

We’ve seen this movie several times before. It never ends well.

Copyright 2005-2019

Iceberg ahead, Sir! Steady as she goes, Helmsman.

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Nancy Pelosi is being coy about her support for the Government bailout of the Government. Congressional Liberals are whinging about ‘Satan Sandwiches.’ The statist street is suggesting Obama has betrayed them – again. The Vice President called the tea party “terrorists.” “Hostage takers,” is the Progressive phrase of the day. If the hard left doesn’t like it, it must be good, right? After all, the Wall Street Journal is calling the debt deal a ‘big win’ for the tea party, though continuing to criticize those who were elected for keeping their campaign promises.

It’s a set up. All this angst is to reinforce the idea that the tea party philosophy is rigid and unreasonable. It is not rigid, it is principled. It is not the least unreasonable. Still, in the next round we’re going to hear, “You terrorist cretins refused to compromise last time, and THIS TIME you’re not getting your way.”

Here’s the terrible thing those moronic Hobbits wrought:

  • $9 trillion Baseline increase over ten years
  • $0.917 trillion spending reduction…
  • For a $8.083 trillion Baseline increase over ten years

  • Add to that a $1.5 trillion Budget Act Super Committee tax increase, (my prediction) and you get… a $9.583 baseline spending increase over ten years.

And that’s if future Congresses don’t go back on the promises of the current pirates, and the largest tax increase in American history is enacted by letting the Bush tax cuts expire.

Oh, and we get to have a fantasy vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment in the Senate.

Status quo on the debt trajectory. Size and scope of government unchanged. Summary: We avoid a liquidity crisis by increasing the ongoing solvency crisis.

Here are two examples of what the debt ceiling deal means will continue.

Graphs courtesy Zero Hedge.

You decide if that represents an immediate, existential threat to the United States.

Copyright 2005-2019

If the tea party are Hobbits, John McCain is Boromir

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Nominations for Grima Wormtongue are open.

John McCain quoted the Wall Street Journal the other day to the effect that tea party aspirations for an end to fiscal insanity resemble a J. R. R. Tolkien fantasy.

…[T]he tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

Yesterday, the Journal found it expedient to explain the obvious:

These columns drew much notice after John McCain quoted our July 27 “tea party hobbits” line on the Senate floor. Senator (sic) Sharron Angle responded that “it is the hobbits who are the heroes and save the land.” Well, okay, but our point was that there’s no such thing as a hobbit.

Serious debt reduction achieved in a bi-partisan kumbaya outbreak is a fantasy. It’s right up there with belief in the Tooth Fairy and the Social Security ‘Trust’ fund. And it will forever be a fantasy, absent some major shake-up. The Journal’s core assumption is that not raising the debt limit is the worst thing that could happen. Perhaps not.

As to fantasy, the same could reasonably have been said, and was, of the Declaration of Independence. The difference between the Revolution and the debt ceiling question is the immediacy and level of perceived risk.

If you do not think resolution of the Federal spending question involves an imminent, existential threat to the Republic, why would you think Hobbits are imaginary?

If you assume we will return to fiscal sanity at some later date – savings and investments intact, ‘social compact’ reformed – because the GOP will fix it all when they take the Senate and Presidency in the next election: You may be indulging in a fantasy. As Senator McCain has demonstrated, we wouldn’t even be having the debate if we hadn’t elected the Hobbits.

If you assume the Democrats will seriously address spending, or even co-operate in so doing, you are beyond fantasy.

The WSJ‘s analogy could be extended. The Hobbits didn’t want to take on Sauron, they were forced to. They got little aid and no little betrayal from a corrupt establishment. They won, despite terrific odds which would only have become worse had they decided the problem could wait for an election in Mordor.

Copyright 2005-2019