Category Archives: Debt

The Price Of ‘Certainty’

Debt, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government, Military, Republicans

Sec. 401. of the ‘‘Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013’’ (on page 2 of 77 pages) stipulates the obvious “Increase in contributions to Federal Employees’ Retirement System for new employees.” Well of course.

Conversely, Sec. 403. of the same impenetrable document stipulates an “Annual adjustment of retired pay and retainer pay amounts for retired members of the Armed Forces under age 62.” Judging by the apoplexy among members of the military, the verbiage means cuts to the warfare arm of the welfare-warfare state.

New York Time:

Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, all Republicans, will bring military families to the Senate on Tuesday to protest the cuts. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, complained of “a real hit to military retirements,” and said the measure did not do enough to reduce the deficit.

Those gullible enough to serve Uncle Sam without questioning whether going abroad in search of monsters to slay is indeed tantamount to defending “American Freedoms”—should wisen up. Of course your pay will be cut first. To your masters, your life is also forfeit.

And:

Under the budget deal, spending on defense and nondefense programs would rise from the $967 billion slated for this fiscal year to $1.012 trillion, mitigating the impact of across-the-board spending cuts and allowing congressional lawmakers to draft detailed spending plans for the first time in several years. Spending in fiscal 2015, which begins Oct. 1, would rise from $995 billion to $1.014 trillion. Though total spending would rise $63 billion over 10 years, the measure would trim the deficit slightly.

Here’s Judge Andrew Napolitano’s take on the agreement struck between Rep. Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Committee chair, Democrat Patty Murray (here they are on Meet the Presstitutes):

The speaker has demonstrated a poverty of leadership,” Napolitano said. “He did get 332 votes because he got the Democrats to vote with him and he lost the Republicans who retain the value of small government. This doesn’t decrease the deficit, it adds to it. It doesn’t decrease the debt, it adds to it.”
“This is an absolute fraud. They’re afraid of reality. They have no sense, the Republican establishment,” he continued. “They have no sense of small government values that they were elected to put into law.”
“Wow, tell us how you feel,” co-panelist Juan Williams joked.
“There is no distinction between John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi on this,” the judge asserted.

Millennials Deserve What They Get. But Are Boomers Ready For What They’ll Dish Out?

America, Debt, Elections, Family, Healthcare, Pop-Culture, Welfare

My Millennial readers are the best and the brightest. They’ll probably agree that, for the most, theirs is “a generation of idle trophy kids” (a Jennifer-Graham coinage).

Still, America worships youth, no matter how dumb. (The economically nascent Chinese do the exact opposite: revere experience.) To enhance his cool quotient, every Boommer and Gen Xer on TV has been belaboring the theme of generational theft. The country’s national debt amounts to stealing from “our children.” Obamacare sticks it to the kids.

Boohoo.

In this vein, you’ve watched John Stossel “taking toys from babies” to instantiate the burden on da babies of $280 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities.

Avik Roy at Forbes beats on breast: “Why Aren’t Millennials Marching In The Street Over Obamacare?” Roy wants to know. After all, people his age have declared war on the “generation born between 1977 and 1995.”

… by design, this law can work if and only if enough young people are willing to pay premiums far higher than are actuarially fair in order to subsidize workers my age who on average earn far more than the young workers who are subsidizing them. Even if one takes into account that Millennials in the long run eventually will become old themselves and benefit from these subsidies, Obamacare still is an extraordinarily bad deal that effectively would force today’s 18-year olds to pay 18 percent more for their medical care over a lifetime than if each generation paid its own way. Such an age-related tax is unconscionable. Imagine if sales taxes or income taxes included a surcharge for everyone who happened to be a twenty-something. If this idea sounds preposterous, welcome to Obamacare.

Highly productive, wealthy, well-employed, slightly older sorts, who’ve worked hard for what they have, are hard at work generating contempt for their kind.

Lord knows that Millenials—Ms. Graham calls them the “new American idle”—will rise to the occasion. They will dish out contempt and much more. Ask and they’ll oblige.

I sincerely hope the contempt they’ve ginned up for themselves sits well with Boomers and Gen Xers. Since Millenials are big on Obama—and thus deserve everything they get, from more debt to ZerO. Care—I’m sure they’ll also grow into the idea of rationing care for their elders (death panels).

Politically, Millennials were among Barack Obama’s strongest supporters in 2008, backing him for president by more than a two-to-one ratio (66% to 32%)

Be careful what you wish for, stupid. There is no need to teach your precious progeny still more disrespect for their elders.

The Word Slavery Doesn’t ‘Belong’ To Blacks

Debt, English, Political Correctness, Race, Sarah Palin

Now a Fox-News hire, the boring, liberal mediacrat Howard Kurtz had a go at MSNBC’s Martin Bashir. Barking-mad Bashir, an English import, swore at Sarah Palin on air.

Kurtz is as inspiring as the rest of the banal bobbing heads on the network. He uses a fancy, French word like “denouement,” but can’t conjugate a good old English verb: “lie,” as in “lie down.”

“You might think a mayor might lay low for awhile after admitting to smoking crack … blah blah,” wrote Kurtz of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Conjugate the verb “to lie,” dammit! It’s “lie low,” not “lay low,” stupid!

Repeat after me, Howard: “I am lying low. I lay low yesterday. I had once lain low after making another grammatical faux pas. And, for the same reason, I will lie low in the future.”

Still worse was Kurtz’ pathetic condemnation of Palin for “likening government borrowing to the awful legacy of buying and selling African-Americans”:

Now the issue on which [Bashir] went after the former Alaska governor and Fox News contributor is fair game. Palin had spoken in Iowa of borrowing from China to pay for the national debt, saying: “This isn’t racist. But it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due.”

Palin used a perfectly good noun—slavery—to denote the bondage that trillions in government debt imposes on citizens.

Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the idea that certain eternally aggrieved groups can stake out exclusive linguistic rights to words in our language.

The Goldberg Variation*

Conservatism, Debt, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Republicans

This response, written by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, arrived in my email In-Box. This is the first time I’ve received a mass mailing from Mr. Goldberg. It would appear that Jonah Goldberg was somewhat exercised about the reactions to his expected flippancy about the tea party’s “quixotic debt-ceiling showdown.”

Although he harps on the responses aimed at him on Twitter, those are not worth a straw. Pat Buchanan’s veiled allusion to Mr. Goldberg’s ilk, on the other hand, is likely a different matter. In “The ‘We Can’t Win’ Wimps Caucus,” Pat writes the following:

“We told you you would lose!” wail the beltway bundlers of the Republican establishment.

“We told you you would lose!” moan neoconservative columnists from their privileged perches on the op-ed pages of the beltway press.

“Look at what Ted Cruz and these tea-party people did to us,” wails the GOP establishment. “Look what has happened to our brand.” And 2014 was looking wonderful.

What a basket of wimps.

My column, of course, mentions names:

Media conservatives and liberals were agreed. The Republican brand, as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg put it, had been damaged by the debt-ceiling standoff.

Chuckie Krauthammer, another phony conservative, concurred. After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer scolded “the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown.

Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer

Read “What If The Media Were Moral?” on Economic Policy Journal, the preeminent libertarian website.

*****

* “The Goldberg Variations”: “‘The Goldberg Variations’ is the last of a series of [sublime] keyboard music Bach published under the title of Clavierübung …”