Category Archives: Debt

UPDATED: Fiscal Cliff Cadenza* Simplified (‘Cuts’ In Spending-Rate Increases)

Conflict, Debt, Democrats, Economy, Law, Republicans

Cuts to designated increases in federal spending: that’s all the “spending cuts” or “budget sequestration” portion of the fiscal cliff cadenza amount to.

These cuts were mandated by a law, The Budget Control Act of 2011, enacted by our miserable legislators. They now refuse to abide by this meager law.

The media, lying simpletons that they are, are framing the government-cutting component of the fiscal free-fall as a catastrophe.

Whoever believes that cuts to the rate of government growth would be catastrophic should fry.

For good measure, the same mind-fucking media are using phrases such as “Congressional stubbornness” as proxies for Republican recalcitrance.

The next component in the fiscal-cliff equation, or The Budget Control Act of 2011, are tax hikes. The Bush tax cuts will sunset, as will the temporary payroll tax cuts and certain tax breaks for businesses. Also to take effect are taxes tied to President Obama’s health-care behemoth.

As I understand it, in addition to their refusal to consider any cuts in spending rates, Democrats are insisting on replacing the tax raising provisions of the law with tax hikes on The Rich.

The mindless masses (and the pea brains of Hollywood), however, are already against Congress, which, for all its timidity also stands accused, preemptively, of failing to raise “the national borrowing limit.”

What are the Democrats doing? Put in Charlie Sheen speak, they are “Winning.”

* Cadenza: South African informal for a fit or convulsion

UPDATE (12/29/012): ‘Cuts’ In Spending-Rate Increases.

Finally, Republicans and a couple of Democrats and their anointed experts are framing all budget proposals out there as they should: “cuts to designated increases in spending.”

Via Bret Baier:

With the government spending roughly $10 billion a day, the cuts that are being proposed wouldn’t even cover the interest on the debt.
Spending is not projected to go down. At best, the rate of growth in spending would slow.
“The word ‘cut’ is what government statisticians and budget officials call it — but in fact it’s just really a slowing of growth, and sometimes the growth is still quite high even after it’s slowed down,” said John Taylor, a Stanford University economist.
“They assume that if this year we spend 5 percent, next year we’re gonna spend 8 percent, and the year after that we’re gonna spend 10 percent. And they say ‘well I’ll tell you what, why don’t we cut a percentage point off each one of those rates of growth?’ … Well, that’s not a cut.”
Former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh noted that “no family, no business, no philanthropy” would operate that way.
“I think there are some passages in Alice in Wonderland that must have dealt with this, because in Washington less of an increase is considered a cut, even though it’s more money…”

UPDATED: DOD Is Killing Us (& On So-Called Cuts To Killer Spending/ers)

Debt, Economy, Military, Republicans, War

When the need to slash the military is raised, Republicans typically counter that their beloved Department of Defense is a small-ticket item. Blame Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

He who admits half the truth is still a wholesale liar. The DOD is a budgetary killer.

Via Fox News’ Bret Baier:

Each day during the month of November, the government brought in a little more than $5 billion of revenue. That’s a lot of money – but the U.S. government spent in that time more than $11 billion a day. The difference is roughly $6 billion.
Of that $11 billion, the top items were as follows: The Department of Health and Human Services, which goes through roughly $3 billion a day; Social Security, which shells out roughly $2.5 billion a day; the Department of Defense, which runs a $1.8 billion daily tab; and interest on the debt, which eats up $854 million every day.

MORE.

UPDATE (19/12/012): Finally, Republicans, and a couple of Democrats and their anointed experts, are framing all budget proposals out there as they should—and as these worse-than-useless efforts are habitually framed by libertarians (led by Ron Paul): “cuts to designated increases in spending.”

Bret Baier (archived here) has been tackling the structure of the debt:

At last check, it was approaching $16.4 trillion. Just four years ago, it was $10.6 trillion.
The skyrocketing number is, to say the least, reason for concern for every American.
Here’s why:
As of today, every household in the United States owes about $140,000 of this debt.
The country is borrowing roughly $6 billion every day, and $239 million every hour. Put another way, that’s $4 million every minute.
The country runs up so much debt for a fairly basic reason — it spends far more than it takes in. This year, for every dollar in revenue the federal government brought in, it spent two dollars and six cents. That shortfall over the course of the year adds up to the annual deficit. The national debt — or total accumulated debt — is the sum of all annual deficits, minus any surpluses. …

The Dear Leader Lunges For More Powers, Republicans Roll Over

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Constitution, Debt, Democrats, Economy, Republicans, Taxation

The Republican’s “counter bid” in the farce known as the fiscal cliff entails a proposed $800bn in new taxes, derived from closing “special-interest loopholes and deductions,” as well as an alleged (no doubt token) reduction in rates for all. The treachery was to be expected.

Obama, for his part, is showing the Republicans the middle finger, insisting on $1.6 trillion in new taxes, against a delayed promise of a measly “$400 billion in spending cuts to come later. Obama also demanded $50 billion in new stimulus.”

AND, the Dear Leader took the opportunity to grab new powers. Obama is demanding “executive authorization to override the debt ceiling at any time and by any amount he desires.” This, surely, is a formality. If he runs short of money, Dear Leader will turn to The Ben Bernanke to make The Money. (See “Quantitative Easing Explained.”)

Ralph Nader thinks the Killer Drone is even worse than Genghis Bush.

The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy

Debt, Economy, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Taxation

Here’s an excerpt from “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy,” the current WND column. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down the page to sign-up for it.

“Since the chicken-little metaphor is hackneyed, let us use the alleged lunacy of the lemming as a metaphor for the prattle that rises from the cattle that is America’s intelligentsia, in general, and on the fiscal cliff, in particular. ‘Alleged lunacy’ because the idea that the adorable fury critter plunges periodically to its death, en masse, is a figment of another intellectual powerhouse: the think tank known as the Walt Disney Company.

From the late-night talk show hosts and their guests to the daytime cable news comedians and their hangers-on: All are discussing the country’s impending and ‘horrifying’ collective tumble down the thing called the ‘fiscal cliff.’

As the fiscal-cliff chant goes, the country is headed for an economic precipice due to a bundle of laws that will take effect at the bewitching hour of midnight, Dec. 31, 2012. Only a compromise between our factioned overlords in D.C., who enacted the law in the first place, will avert mass suicide.

Let us unpack this linguistic construct.

At least some of the noisy nomenclature refers to a package of spending cuts, ‘deep, automatic cuts,’ by Barron’s telling, bundled in the Budget Control Act of 2011.

‘The federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012,’ estimates financier Peter Schiff. I’m inclined to think of this ‘budget sequestration’ Wikipedia describes as ‘broad and shallow’ as nothing more than cuts to designated increases in spending.

However you slice it, why, pray tell, is this a bad thing?” …

Read “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy” on WND. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down to sign-up for it.

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