Tag Archives: Congressional Budget Office

Friday Blog Roundup 5-31-2013

teapartyphoenix

Rifle March On D.C. Cancelled

Holder May Rein In Prosecutors On Leaks

Did Daily Caller just call RNC chair the n-word?

John McCain wants to arm ‘them.’ So who’s ‘them’?

Poll: Voters Pick Hillary Over Paul, Bush For 2016

Mitt Romney Plans To Campaign For 2014 Candidates

Ted Cruz is turning out to be a very skillful demagogue

Mitch McConnell’s campaign ad tying Obama to Nixon over the IRS scandal

Cheerios Commercial Featuring Mixed Race Family Gets Racist Backlash (VIDEO)

Surprise! CBO report shows 50% of government tax expenditures go to top 20% of earners

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GOP: We’ve been lying all along

Oh my…is the Speaker of the House a bit upset with the tea-party faction of his caucus?

Salon

Boehner’s admission that we don’t really have a debt crisis reveals his party’s ulterior, program-cutting motives…

I never thought I’d write these words, but here goes: Thank you, John Boehner. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for finally admitting on national television that all the fiscal cliffs, sequestrations and budget battles you’ve created are, indeed, artificially fabricated by ideologues and self-interested politicians and not the result of some imminent crisis that’s out of our control.

America owes this debt of gratitude to Boehner after he finally came clean on yesterday’s edition of ABC’s “This Week” and admitted that “we do not have an immediate debt crisis.” (His admission was followed up by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who quickly echoed much the same sentiment on CBS’ “Face the Nation”).

In offering up such a stunningly honest admission, the GOP leader has put himself on record as agreeing with President Obama, who has previously acknowledged that demonstrable reality. But the big news here isn’t just about the politics of a Republican House speaker tacitly admitting they agree with a Democratic president. It is also about a bigger admission revealing the fact that the GOP’s fiscal alarmism is not merely some natural reaction to reality, but a calculated means to other ideological ends.

Before considering those ends, first remember that Boehner (like Obama) is correct on the facts.

As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, “Even if we do run deficits, federal debt as a share of GDP will be substantially less than it was at the end of World War II” and “it will also be substantially less than, say, debt in several European countries in the mid- to late 1990s.” It is also lower than the 80 percent of GDP level that many economists say starts to put countries in a precarious position. Additionally, citing Congressional Budget Office data, the Center for American Progress notes that the long-term debt outlook is only dire because the projections simply assume without question that “future Congresses will enact huge new deficit-increasing tax cuts and spending hikes.”

“The debt outlook is bad (but) we’re not looking at something inconceivable, impossible to deal with,” writes Krugman. “We’re looking at debt levels that a number of advanced countries, the US included, have had in the past, and dealt with.”

So yes, we should start dealing with the long-term debt in a pragmatic and sober way, but we shouldn’t pretend it is some sort of imminent crisis worthy of draconian austerity measures.

If we could somehow do that, then there would be plenty of gradual steps that could be taken right now — steps that deal with the debt in measured ways that do the least harm to the overall economy. Those include starting to phase out the Bush tax cuts, which show no correlation with job growth and yet are the single largest driver of annual deficits; starting to reduce defense and war spending, which, job-creation-wise, is one of the least effective ways for the government to spend money; starting to move the United States toward the least costly, more efficient, and more effective single-payer healthcare system that most industrialized countries have, and that lowers overhead for employers; and starting to spend more money on social programs that fight economic inequality, with the understanding that driving down such inequality tends to boost macroeconomic growth and consequently boost public revenues (this is the Reagan-esque idea of growing one’s way out of debt).

But, of course, we aren’t having a sober and measured discussion about such pragmatic solutions. Instead, the national conversation about the budget is dominated by debt demagogues with ulterior motives. Taking a page out of the shock doctrine playbook that says every crisis is an opportunity, these alarmists have sought to create the perception of an immediate crisis in order to quickly manufacture opportunities to legislate their otherwise politically impossible agenda items.

Continue here…

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What The GOP Doesn’t Want You To Know About The Deficit

The Huffington Post

1.   The Deficit Has Grown Mostly Because Of The Recession

The deficit has ballooned not because of specific spending measures, but because of the recessionThe deficit more than doubled between 2008 and 2009, as the economy was in free fall, since laid-off workers paid less in taxes and needed more benefits. The deficit then shrank in 2010 and 2011.

2.   The Stimulus Cost Much Less Than Bush’s Wars, Tax Cuts

Republicans frequently have blamed the $787 billion stimulus for the national debt, but, when all government spending is taken into account, the stimulus frankly wasn’t that big. In contrast, the U.S. will have spent nearly $4 trillion on wars in the Middle East by the time those conflicts end, according to a recent report by Brown University.  The Bush tax cuts have cost nearly $1.3 trillionover 10 years.

 3.   The Deficit Grew Under George W. Bush

When George W. Bush took office, the federal government was running a surplus of $86 billion. When he left, that had turned into a $642 billion deficit.

4.   The Deficit Is Shrinking

Last year’s federal budget deficit was 12 percent lower than in 2009, according to the Office of Management and Budget.The deficit is projected to shrink even more over the next several years.

5.   Investors Are Paying Us To Borrow Money

The interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is negative, according to the Treasury Department. Investors are even paying us for 30-year Treasury bonds, when adjusted for inflation.

 6.  Investors Are Not Running Away

Conservative commentators have been warning for years that investors will run away from Treasury bonds because of the national debt. So far it’s not happening. Interest rates on Treasury bonds continue to hover at historic lows.

7.  Health Care Reform Reduces The Deficit

Republicans have blasted the Affordable Care Act as “budget-busting.” But health care reform actually reduces the deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

8.  The U.S. Is Borrowing Less From China

The U.S. government is borrowing much less from foreign countries than before the recession, according to government data cited by Paul Krugman. That is because the U.S. private sector is financing our bigger deficits.

9.   We Spend A Lot On Defense

Defense spending constituted 20 percent of federal spending last year, or $718 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. This adds up to 41 percent of the world’s defense spending, according to Bloomberg TV anchor Adam Johnson. Mitt Romney has vowed to not cut defense spending if elected president.

10.   We Spend A Lot On Health Care

Health insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid, constituted 21 percent of federal spending last year. In contrast, education constituted 2 percent of federal spending. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have promised not to change Medicare for Americans age 55 and older.

11.   Republicans May Want Large Deficits For Now

The federal budget deficit ballooned under Ronald Reagan, and that may be just the way Republicans like it. Some Republican thinkers have proposed “starving the beast”: that is, cutting taxes in order to use larger deficits to justify spending cuts later. Since Republicans ultimately want lower taxes and a smaller government, what better way is there to cut spending than to make it look urgent and necessary?

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GOP Senator Gets Schooled On Obamacare: ‘You Lost The Election, Buddy’

Will they ever learn to accept defeat?

Think Progress

Political consultant Bob Schrum gave Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) a lesson in post-election politics on CNN Tuesday morning, when Schrum told the Senator to give up the dream of repealing Obamacare.

In the middle of a heated discussion about the fiscal showdown, CNN host Soledad O’Brien asked Johnson to give examples of what kind of spending cuts should be on the table. Johnson put the President’s signature health care reform law at the top of his list, saying that it costs more than people realize. “Not going to happen,” Schrum told Johnson, “You lost the election, buddy”:

JOHNSON: Let’s acknowledge that the primary driver of our debt and deficit is going to be health care costs. And we have a whole new entitlement — by the way, we’ve already got a trillion dollars of middle class, middle income tax increases cooked into the books under Obamacare. [...]

SCHRUM: This is fantasy land. It’s like saying Ronald Reagan invented the Apple iPad. Obamacare is not going to be on the table. [...]

JOHNSON: Zero to 610 is the vote total of the last three votes on [Obama's] last two budgets. Zero to 610. Do you think that’s a serious proposal? Here’s the bottom line: President Obama, show us a plan.

SCHRUM: He can’t show you a plan. He gave you a plan, and his plan is not to repeal Obamacare. Not going to happen. You lost the election, buddy.

Watch it:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) also proposed putting Obamacare cuts on the table. But if the goal of the fiscal showdown is to reduce the deficit, then Republicans seem to be taking the wrong approach: The Congressional Budget Office calculates that the health care law already reduces the deficit by billions of dollars in the next decade, and, in the decade after that, by more than $1 trillion.

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Social Security and its role in the nation’s debt

This information is vital when debating right-wingers who blame a large part of the deficit on Social Security…

The Washington Post Fact Checker

“Social Security has not added one penny to the deficit.”

— Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Nov. 27, 2012

In 2011, we evaluated a similar statement about Social Security and gave it a relatively rare rating — “true but false” — which seemed to please no one. Yet as the “fiscal cliff” negotiations have heated up, Democrats have once again been using this talking point to shield Social Security from the chopping block.

Durbin, to his credit, in a speech to the Center for American Progress this week, acknowledged that Social Security’s long-term financing is an important issue that cannot be deferred. He advocates creating a commission that would separately address how to ensure 75 years of solvency to the program.  So we don’t mean to pick on Durbin since plenty of Democrats in recent days have made similar comments.

But we remain troubled by the reemergence of this talking point, especially given the further decline in Social Security’s finances in the past year. We do not think this line is a slamdunk falsehood, as some believe, but it is certainly worth revisiting.

 

The Facts

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, which means that payments collected today are immediately used to pay benefits. Until recently, more payments were collected than were needed for benefits. So Social Security loaned the money to the U.S. government, which used it for other things, which in effect masked the overall size of the federal budget deficit.  In exchange, Social Security received interest-bearing Treasury securities, which now total more than $2.7 trillion.As we have repeatedly explained, the bonds held by Social Security are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. The bonds are a real asset to Social Security, but — here’s where it gets complicated — they also represent an obligation by the rest of the government. Like any entity that issues debt, such as a corporation, the government will have to make good on its obligations, generally by taking the money out of revenue, reducing expenses or issuing new debt.

So what is happening today? The Congressional Budget Office tracks the flow of money in and out of the Social Security fund, and below is a summary of the data for fiscal 2013. To keep things simple, we will include transfers made for the payroll tax holiday as part of “other income.”

Continue reading here…

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5 Facts You Should Commit To Memory Before Watching Tonight’s Debate

FYI…

Think Progress

Debates move quickly. The candidates toss out facts at breakneck speeds, trying to get across their entire plans in just 90 minutes. Tonight, Obama and Romney will square off in a debate that’s been billed as high-stakes — Obama will seek to regain the momentum, while Romney hopes to sustain his.

So as the candidates barrel through the details of their respective plans, here are some facts you should keep on hand:

1. The deficit is largely a product of tax cuts and wars.   The newest report out from the Congressional Budget Office shows that we have a still-large but slowing budget shortfall, with the deficit at $1.1 trillion for 2012. But the issues that are adding the most to our deficit aren’t health care costs or the stimulus; wars and tax cuts are responsible for that:

2. When US officials asked for more security in Libya, they wanted it in Tripoli, not Benghazi.  The attack on the United States embassy in Libya was a tragedy that has had a confusing aftermath. Republicans have claimed that employees at the Benghazi embassy asked for more security in the days before the attack, but actually it was the embassy in Tripoli, not Benghazi where the attack occurred, that sought longer hours for its security guards.

3. 72 million people would be uninsured under Romney’s health plan.   A recent study of Romney’s health care plan shows that it would increase health care premiums for most Americans, and would leave 72 million people uninsured. If the Affordable Care Act were repealed, 60 million Americans would remain uninsured. Under Obama’s plan, that number is expected to drop to 27.1 million:

4. If the DREAM Act were passed, it would add $329 billion to the economy by 2030.   President Obama has vowed the pass the DREAM Act — a bill that provides a pathway to citizenship for young, undocumented students and service members — while candidate Romney has said he’d veto it. According to a joint report by the Center for American Progress and the Partnership for a New American Economy, passing the DREAM Act “would add $329 billion to the U.S. economy and create 1.4 million new jobs by 2030.”

5. The “six studies” that Romney cites in defense of his tax plan are actually 3 blog posts, 2 right-wing reports and 1 op-ed.   The idea that a Romney administration could give a 20 percent tax cut to everyone, and then pay for it by eliminating loopholes and deductions for the wealthy has been strong refuted by the Tax Policy Center. Romney has cited six other “studies” that confirm his plan could work, but those are dubious: One is a report by the conservative Heritage foundation, one is a paper from a former Bush adviser, one is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and three are blog posts.

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Pawlenty suggests that Soledad O’Brien doesn’t understand English

Tim Pawlenty speaks to CNN’s Soledad O’Brien

The Raw Story

Romney surrogates going up against CNN host Soledad O’Brien clearly haven’t learned their lesson.

A day after former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu angrily told O’Brien to “put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead,” former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney’s national campaign co-chair, suggested that the CNN host didn’t understand English.

During an interview on Wednesday, O’Brien told Pawlenty that one of the presumptive Republican presidential candidate’s ads falsely claimed that President Barack Obama had cut $716 billion from Medicare — but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had determined that it was actually reduction in spending, not benefits.

“Isn’t that just patently untrue in that ad?” she asked the former Minnesota governor.

“No, that’s not correct, Soledad,” Pawlenty replied. “It is absolutely beyond factual dispute that [Obama] has cut $716 billion out of the money that was projected to be spent on Medicare over the next 10 years.”

“But, sir, it’s not a cut in Medicare, right?” O’Brien observed. “Let me just read from the CBO. It’s a ‘permanent reduction in the annual updates to Medicaid’s payment rates.’ It’s a cut in the spending — future spending. And it’s cut that actually goes to insurers, right? I mean, it’s not cuts to individuals.”

“No matter how you say this, it’s a cut to Medicare,” Pawlenty insisted. “You can’t even with a straight face, look your viewers in the eye and tell [them] that it’s not a cut to Medicare.”

“Well, I can’t look viewers in the eye from where I am,” O’Brien pointed out. “I’m saying the way the CBO puts it. … That is a savings.”

“Do you know what that is in English?” Pawlenty quipped.

“I speak English incredibly well, sir, as you know,” O’Brien shot back. “So, tell me what it is in English.”

“In plain speaking is this — and I just mean in compared to the mumbo jumbo in the bureaucracy in the CBO — what they’re saying is that Medicare was going to go up by X and now it’s going to go up by X minus $716 billion. There is no question that is a cut in where current law was before Obamacare was passed. There is no way you can present that in any other way.”

“Of you can call it a savings is actually the other way to present that,” O’Brien explained.

Although O’Brien is of Latino (and Irish and African American) descent, she actually only speaks English fluently.

On Monday, Sununu, who serves as the chairman of Romney’s national steering committee, had  lashed out at O’Brien after she tried to fact check his claims about vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s plan to cut Medicare.

“Soledad, stop this!” Sununu shouted. “All you’re doing is mimicking the stuff that comes out of the White House and gets repeated on the Democratic blog boards out there.”

“I’m telling you what Factcheck.com tells you, I’m telling you what the CBO tells you, I’m telling you what CNN’s independent analysis says,” the CNN host explained.

“Put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead when you do this!” the frustrated surrogate shot back.

“You know, let me tell you something,” O’Brien said. “There is independent analysis that details what this is about. … And name calling to me and somehow by you repeating a number of $716 billion, that you can make that stick when [you say] that figure is being ‘stolen’ from Medicare, that’s not true. You can’t just repeat it and make it true, sir.”

Watch this video from CNN Starting Point, broadcast Aug. 15, 2012…

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Romney’s Top 10 Lies of the Week

Top 10 Romney Lies

I just ran across this website.  It lists over 28 weeks of Romney lies.  I’ll be covering them from this point forward…

Liberal Perspectives

1. In an interview with Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto, Romney, said of his tax returns “We have of course released all of the financial statements that are required by law and then released two years of tax returns.”

In reality, he has only released his tax returns for one full year.

2. Also on Fox Business, Romney said his tax disclosures included “the same information” John Kerry released during his 2004 campaign.

In reality, that is completely false. During his presidential run eight years ago, Kerry released five years of tax returns, and during his Senate campaigns, made a habit of releasing several years  worth of tax documents as part of his commitment to disclosure.

3. In response to a question about the tax code, Romney argued, “For me … this campaign is about the middle class, and about the poor. It’s not about the rich. The rich are going to do fine, whoever is elected.”

First, Romney intends to give the wealthy a massive tax cut on top of their existing massive tax cut AND what about Romney’s now infamous quote of February that he’s “not concerned about the very poor.”

4. At a fundraiser in Montana, Romney told supporters, “The great majority of small business — 54% of American workers work in businesses taxed as individuals. So when the president wants to raise taxes on individuals as he’s proposed from 35% to 40%, he kills jobs. If your priority is crushing people, vote for him.”

Only about 3% of American small businesses would be affected by the higher rate, and there is no evidence to suggest Clinton-era top rates on the wealthy “kills jobs”.

5. In response to a reporter’s question about health care, Romney said, “You know, I’ve spoken about health care from the day we passed it in — in Massachusetts and people said, is this something that you’d apply at the federal level? And I said no.”

There are entirely too many news videos and articles out there demonstrating the opposite to hope to list them all.

6. At a town-hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado, Romney claimed Obama is “putting money into energy companies, solar and wind energy companies that end up making their products outside the United States.”

This is completely false.

7. Romney also claimed, “This president has increased the rate of new major regulations by about threefold over his predecessor.”

In reality, Obama approved fewer regulations in his first three years in office than Bush did in his first three years.

8. Romney went on to say he’s “going to get rid of ObamaCare” so the government won’t have to borrow more money.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act will save over $100 billion over the next decade, and over $1 trillion in the decade after that. So, Romney has it completely backwards as in reality – we would need to borrow more money if he does “get rid of Obamacare.”

9. He added that “dreams are being crushed when taxes go up and up and up on job creators.”

Taxes haven’t gone up; they’ve gone down. In fact, Americans’ federal tax burden has down and down and down, reaching a 30-year low after Obama cut taxes in 2009.

10. He also said “no, no, no” to the notion that he would “cut” Medicare.

Romney endorsed Paul Ryan’s House Republican Budget plan, which ends the Medicare program and replaces it with a private voucher scheme.

SPECIAL ONGOING BONUS LIE:  I did not have anything to do with Bain Capital after February 1999.

The only question now is whether he lied to the American people or to the American government through felonious SEC filings, etc. …more to come out this week……

For the complete list of lies this week see the Rachel Maddow Show’s ongoing series: Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity.

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Romney’s pants on fire (Again)

Eugene Robinson – Washington Post

There are those who tell the truth. There are those who distort the truth. And then there’s Mitt Romney.

Every political campaign exaggerates and dissembles. This practice may not be admirable — it’s surely one reason so many Americans are disenchanted with politics — but it’s something we’ve all come to expect. Candidates claim the right to make any boast or accusation as long as there’s a kernel of veracity in there somewhere.

Even by this lax standard, Romney too often fails. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lies. Quite a bit.

“Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history,” Romney claims on his campaign Web site. This is utterly false. The truth is that spending has slowed markedly under Obama.

An analysis published last week by MarketWatch, a financial news Web site owned by Dow Jones & Co., compared the yearly growth of federal spending under presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. Citing figures from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, MarketWatch concluded that “there has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.”

Quite the contrary: Spending has increased at a yearly rate of only 1.4 percent during Obama’s tenure, even if you include some stimulus spending (in the 2009 fiscal year) that technically should be attributed to President George W. Bush. This is by far the smallest — I repeat, smallest — increase in spending of any recent president. (The Washington Post’s Fact Checker concluded the spending increase figure should have been 3.3 percent.)

In Bush’s first term, by contrast, federal spending increased at an annual rate of 7.3 percent; in his second term, the annual rise averaged 8.1 percent. Reagan comes next, in terms of profligacy, followed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and finally Obama, the thriftiest of them all.

Continue reading here…

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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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