Category Archives: Government Spending

May 23, 2012 · 6:15 PM

Obama spending binge never happened!

Apparently, when it comes to spending,  President Obama is our most frugal president since the Reagan administration.   However, Mitt Romney and Fox News are saying just the opposite.

Remember this:

Lies!

Market Watch

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.

• In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.

• In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.

• In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.

• Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion.

Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.

 

Since then, spending growth has been relatively flat.

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion

The big surge in federal spending happened in fiscal 2009, before Obama took of to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%.

There has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.

Why do people think Obama has spent like a drunken sailor? It’s in part because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal budget.

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August 29, 2011 · 6:58 PM

Perry seals travel and expense records until after November election

Daily Kos

Rick Perry is currently embroiled in a legal battle to block the public from viewing his travel and expense records, but The Washington Post notes that everything from July of this year forward will remain under seal until after the November 2012 election:

In the meantime, during a special session that ended July 1, the Texas Legislature, at Perry’s urging, added language to a school finance bill that will seal the governor’s travel records for 18 months — until after the 2012 presidential election. The measure would cover the records going forward, not those in the past, which have been the subject of the court fight.One Republican legislator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the governor as “extremely concerned” about keeping his records sealed, and said Perry was actively lobbying key legislators to get it passed in the waning days of the special session. The legislator said Perry’s wife, Anita, also was pressing legislators on the issue.

That’s probably the first time Rick Perry has every given a damn about a school funding bill, but given that his travel and expense records probably include more examples of things like this …

…the governor’s critics contend that it has as much to do with politics as safety — especially after the embarrassment for Perry when taxpayers learned that they had been paying for scuba gear and golf cart rentals for officers who accompanied Perry and his wife to the Bahamas in 2004.

… and this …

In 2009, Perry traveled to Israel where he was given the “Defender of Jerusalem” award. According to a local television report, he and his wife flew first class at more than $5,000 per ticket, paid for by an energy company financier. Four security detail officers also went on the five-day trip at a cost of more than $70,000 to taxpayers. The expenses included $17,000 for rooms at the King David Hotel, nearly $13,000 for food and more than 350 hours in overtime pay.

… you can understand why he’d want to keep them out of the public eye. On the other hand, it’s hard to understand why the tea partiers who are his biggest fans don’t seem to give a damn about his use of public resources for private gain.

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April 8, 2011 · 1:47 AM

Republicans Threatening Shutdown Over Planned Parenthood

This is not about the budget for Republicans.  This is all about ideology!

Huffington Post

The United States government is on the verge of shutting down over a dispute about subsidized pap smears, according to sources familiar with the budget negotiations.

The White House and Senate Democrats have publicly capitulated to ever-increasing Republican demands for spending cuts, but negotiations over the budget for the remainder of the fiscal year have shifted their focus from money to so-called riders — provisions that restrict the federal government from spending money on certain projects or entities.

Riders are used by members of Congress to make social policy without going through the regular congressional committee process, or they are used to benefit business interests by specifically blocking the government from spending money to write or enforce certain regulations.

At a late-night White House meeting between the president and key congressional leaders, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made clear that his conference would not approve funding for the government if any money were allowed to flow to Planned Parenthood through legislation known as Title X. “This comes down to women’s health issues related to Title X,” a person in the meeting told HuffPost.

The negotiations are dominated by men: All of the principal negotiators in both parties are male, as are most of the senior staff involved. (House Democrats, led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), have largely been left out of key talks.)

House Republicans have been insisting the roadblock to cutting a new budget deal is not just the culture-war riders attached to the spending plan, but a source familiar with a top-level White House meeting earlier Thursday said most of the discussion in fact was about the riders.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and President Barack Obama met at 1 p.m., and while the discussion started with the numbers, a senior Democratic aide said it soon turned to non-budgetary provisions like defunding Planned Parenthood, Environmental Protection Agency rules — and then some.

Continued after the fold…

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March 31, 2011 · 7:20 AM

HuffPo: Floridians Are Maybe Starting To Understand Their Governor Is A Grifter

Another case of  of buyers’ remorse?

Jason Linkins – Huffington Post

Despite his being best known as a cartoon villain fraudster who bilked Medicare and incurred a record-setting fine from authorities, Florida Governor Rick Scott outspent and outgunned his primary opponent Bill McCollum and then slipped past Democratic challenger Alex Sink in the 2010 GOP wave.

And now, after three months in office, he’s become the very face of buyer’s remorse:

A PPP poll of registered voters released today shows that in a hypothetical re-do of last year’s gubernatorial election, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) would lose to Democrat Alex Sink by a nearly 20-point margin, 56%-37%. Scott won a squeaker of an election last year, edging out Sink by about one point.

Eye-popping as those figures are on their own, they get even starker when you start making comparisons. In this regard, Scott’s numbers vastly outpace the “do-over” figures of some of the sexier “buyer’s remorse” governors that have garnered most of the media’s attention for their battles with public sector employees and the like. (Though Scott did participate in similar exploits, such as cutting teacher pay to fund corporate giveaways and gutting benefits for the unemployed.)

A big part of Scott’s unpopularity stems from policy decisions that have managed to cheese off lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. His decision to scotch the SunRail commuter train rail project earned him the emnity of both Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Representative John Mica (R-Fla.), who had put years of sweat equity into the project. Closer to home, Scott felt the same bipartisan heat from state Senators.

Beyond the kerfuffle over high-speed rail, Scott’s planned spending reductions in education aren’t flying even with lawmakers in his own party, who see them as inhibitors to job growth.

Aside from engendering a heaping share of bipartisan ill will, Florida’s governor has revealed himself to be the person we warned you he was: the exemplar of a serial fraudster. The end result has molded Scott, in a very short time, into one of the most politically isolated governors in America.

For future reference, here are some ways that you can tell if your state’s governor is some sort of appalling grifter.   Continue reading…

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January 4, 2011 · 5:24 AM

The Debt Ceiling Issue

Debt Ceiling 101

Question: What is the debt ceiling?

Answer: The debt ceiling is a statutory limit on the amount of U.S federal debt held by the public and the government’s own accounts. The debt ceiling became law with the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, which helped finance the United States’ entry into World War I.

Question:  What happens if The Congress votes not to raise the debt ceiling?

On This Week with Christiane Amanpour, Jake Tapper interviews Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee about the upcoming vote on the National Debt ceiling, and wonders what will happen if the new Republican Extremists successfully keep it from being approved.

Analysis:

There has been a lot of talk about “The Debt Ceiling” lately.  The Tea Party influenced GOP in congress want to place a limit on the out of control debt spending by capping the “debt ceiling”. 

Most Dems (and some Republicans of a more moderate stripe) want to follow the status quo and continue to raise the debt ceiling as borrowing expands.  The GOP want to cap the ceiling.

Of course, Washington being what it is, some GOP members wouldn’t mind voting in favor of raising the debt ceiling as long as Congress produces serious limitations on future spending.  That would mean Medicare and Social Security cuts will have to be in the offing.

Yes, that’s right!  They are playing their little blackmail game yet again, using Social Security and Medicare as the perineal sacrificial lambs in order to agree to raise the debt ceiling.  

Now, in all honesty, I do see a need for cutting the debt but the experts all agree that doing so would be catastrophic to the American economy as well as global economies.  Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy is not a problem for the GOP/Tea Party.  However, cutting entitlement programs to our country’s most vulnerable segment, senior citizens is in my opinion heartless.  There’s got to be a better way.

There are some serious GOP pundits like George Will and some Fox News pundits who totally disagree with capping the debt ceiling.

It’ll be interesting to see how this “game of chicken” plays out.

Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC’s The Last Word does a better job of explaining the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling than I ever could:

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November 17, 2010 · 8:07 PM

The Anti-Spending Politicians Who Rake In Farm Subsidies

This is typical of all politicians.  It’s really not a partisan issue, in my opinion…

Huffington Post

Many Republicans who swept rural Democrats from office are now confronting the reality of a promise to reduce spending: Should it cover the farm subsidies that have brought money and jobs to their districts – and directly benefited some GOP lawmakers or their families?

At least 13 Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee lost on Nov. 2, and most of then helped steer generous farm support back home. Many of their replacements avoided the issue of farm payments during the campaign as they focused on broader themes of lowering federal spending and changing Washington.

They’ll have to face it soon enough. Congress is expected to begin work on the next five-year farm bill before the 2012 election.

“They are here to represent their districts, and if their district is clearly a strong agricultural district that uses the programs in the farm bill, it may be something where they have to break with what they campaigned on,” says Chandler Goule, a lobbyist for the National Farmers Union.

For some deficit-cutting Republicans, it’s a question that’s close to home.

Consider Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, who courted tea party support and dethroned the chairman of the House Armed Service Committee, Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton.

Continue reading…

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October 25, 2010 · 2:09 PM

Eight False Things the Public “Knows” Prior to Election Day

Truthout

There are a number of things the public “knows” as we head into the election that are just false. If people elect leaders based on false information, the things those leaders do in office will not be what the public expects or needs.

Here are eight of the biggest myths that are out there:

1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.

2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.

3) President Obama bailed out the banks.
Reality: While many people conflate the “stimulus” with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be “non-reviewable by any court or any agency.”) The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.

4) The stimulus didn’t work.
Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.

5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.
Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.
Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.

7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is “going broke,” people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.
Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.

8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.
Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on “welfare” and “foreign aid” when that is only a small part of the government’s budget.

This stuff really matters.

If the public votes in a new Congress because a majority of voters think this one tripled the deficit, and as a result the new people follow the policies that actually tripled the deficit, the country could go broke.

If the public votes in a new Congress that rejects the idea of helping to create demand in the economy because they think it didn’t work, then the new Congress could do things that cause a depression.

If the public votes in a new Congress because they think the health care reform will increase the deficit when it is actually projected to reduce the deficit, then the new Congress could repeal health care reform and thereby make the deficit worse. And on it goes.

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