Aug 02 2011
Business As Usual From Congress-Critters
This week’s display of massive heat with no real results in the debt limit debate is just another indication that the sickness in DC will not be exorcised any time soon.
The Tea Party and Libertarian members sent by voters in 2010 to fix DC were bedazzled and befuddled by the halls of power, they were overwhelmed by the old guard and their siren song of ‘get along’. Being a life long member of the DC area, having family and friends with political connections and positions, I know how DC pollutes the best intentioned newbies. The protectors of the Political Industrial Complex spun a tale about risk and hyped ramifications if the default came about, when in reality nothing more than hard decisions – long delayed – would have to be faced. DC would have had to prioritize its spending and show self control in order to fix the problem – that was worst we faced in we did not raise the debt ceiling.
Instead the DC elites kicked this problem down the road again. They pretended they did something when, in actuality, they did NOTHING!
Next year we will run a deficit of $1.5 trillion dollars. The Debt Ceiling comprise required to cover this additional debt contained only $22 billion in cuts. That represents a 1.46% cut in the deficit – which is nothing. It is round off error in the estimate of next year’s deficit. We added another $1.5 trillion debt for nothing in return.
And that stupid 12 person commission is another example of nothing wrapped up in a big, fat, pretend bow. All it does is gag the 2010 messengers voted in last year to stop this madness. We still face tax increases, massive additional debt and runaway spending. Nothing changed within DC – just another round of fantasy PR spouted out the back end of this dysfunctional city.
While DC elites may think they were able to bound and gag the Tea Party movement with this facade, they actually probably just made the movement that much larger, that much more determined and that much more capable of throwing more bums out in 2012. The frustration that comes from another round of epic fail in DC is just going to create more backlash against DC out in the rest of the country. Those crazy Tea Party terrorist on Main Street learned a bitter lesson this week. They need to completely overrun DC before they will have the power to fix it, before it consumes America as we know it.
Epic failures like we saw this week have consequences. DC’s credibility is completely gone now. No one will ever believe anyone in DC – because we now have proof positive words mean nothing. Tangible results are all that matter.
But, but,but the Liar In Chief, his Presstitutes and the OLD Guard Good Old Boys told us if we didn’t come together and give them trillions more to spend the stock market would crash, Moodys would downgrade us and life as we know it will cease ( that last gem by none other than Peelosi).
Well we passed it and the stock market crashed, Moodys downgraded us and life as we know it? Well, remains to be seen but it sure didn’t end for the DC big spenders who assure us Tea Partiers we are terrorists who don’t know jack.
It should be painfully obvious to any concerned that DC is full of a bunch of incompetent liars. Some are bent on destroying capitalism and others are too dumb to see that the others are well on their way to destroying capitalism by selling us all into unrepayable debt.
Obama got a 1.5 trillion dollar slush fund to be doled out to his leeches.
The lyin King ran his class warfare gig again by saying the most fortunate among us should pay more and in the same breath advocating a payroll deduction for others.
The man is bent on destroying this country.
He did the same with social security, lowering the employee contribution by 2% when anyone with a half a wit knows the system is going broke.
The only thing the liar has accomplished is to drive Mexicans back to Mexico where unemployment is 4% rather than his 17%.
We need a leader and soon. There is not one running yet. No-one to pick up the ball and the fight. Just wannabees hiding from the media afraid to take on the enemy.
Am I allowed to say enemy or is that encouraging violence?
So the dems will want tax the rich increases, the repubs want no cuts in the military. Obama goes for high taxes and it goes to the House and Senate for a vote and they can’t pass it and we are right back where we started. No raise in the debt ceiling and no compromise. That will be a good thing and it will happen before Thanksgiving.
I hate this kind of politics and it’s leader.
AJ, I agree with you, but the devil is in the details.
Or more properly, the actual authorization and appropriation bills. That’s where the real spending happens, not the top-level budget resolutions. The problem, of course, is that the Republicans are not likely to have the wits and willpower to pass what THEY want first…and pass ONLY what they want.
Sarah Palin: “Heck, If We Were Real Terrorists Obama Would Pal Around With Us”
I say elect this woman President. The best laugh of the day!
I love her guts.
It’s a bit of an amusing feeling, getting to play the moderate while AJ has gone full radical. Good on you for feeling the anger that real people are feeling!
I’m trying to examine why this deal doesn’t bother me so much, even though I know it is woefully inadequate from a financial point of view. I have been down on the finances of this country so long that I suppose I’ve made my peace with what’s coming. Even if the GOP had gotten everything they asked for, it would still have been woefully inadequate – no one on any side is prepared to face what the reckoning is truly going to cost. So we’ve got to have the crisis, and we’re going to have to default on most of our debts in some way or another. (inflation would be the easiest way to do it.)
The financial war is lost – it’s been lost since November of 2008, and nothing can be done about that now. All we can do is let the sad spectacle play itself out. But we *can* still win the political war, and we can at least destroy the democrats as we all fall together. If we do that, we at least can retain our constitution. So that’s all I’m hoping for anymore. (Think Gandalf and the Balrog)
And politically, this deal probably just lost Obama the presidency.
one other thing – America is deeply wounded, and is going to take at least a generation to get back to the standard of living we had until 2007. (if we ever get back to it) But I’m an optimist, I think we’ll survive.
Europe won’t.
I’ll tell you why it doesn’t bother me. It’s because it is still seen as the Democrats’ deal, not the Republicans. The Republican House was playing from a position of weakness. That they managed to get ANY concession is amazing. Had they attempted to dig their heels in, the Democrats would have found some way around the House or it would split the Republican party in the House.
The Democrats still own all this spending. The people still see the Democrats as being the party that is stealing the money of the middle class and people who aren’t even born yet.
This is simply more rope. The economy now has no choice but to worsen between now and the next election. This deal lays the foundation for much more significant changes if the Republicans take the Senate next year, which I believe they will. What happens in the White House will then not matter much. Having both houses of Congress will put the ball in the Republican court, the Congress will then call the shots and Obama will be playing defense which is a game at which he doesn’t seem to excel.
This is rope to hang the Democrats in the next election.
I see that it’s being reported by adk that 114K jobs have been created….
Does that give Obama a boost?
1) The number wasn’t that good.
2) The number isn’t very believable.
ADP report (employment) has been woefully off from the official Bureau of Labor results (coming on Friday) for some months now, economists debate why but no one really knows. One theory is due to the way they measure, ADP picks up big corporate employment trends, but misses what’s going on in small firms. Another theory of course, is that one of the two measurement methods is full of crap, but economists debate about which one. Of course the theory I’m partial to is that they’re both full of crap and no one really knows what’s happening or why. (That view meshes most closely with my observations of people in the real world)
But outside of that ivory tower navel gazing, taking the ADP report at face value still gives a disapointing result – due to natural population growth and movements in the work force, a healthy job market should be marked by a minimum of 200,000 new jobs per month as measured by the ADP. Anything less than that and unemployment is actually increasing.
Combined with the news that layoffs are beginning to spike again, it doesn’t bode well for the second half. Of course, as I keep trying to point out, the real game going on these days is in Europe – everything happening here is just a sideshow to what’s playing out there.
Gotterdammerung, indeed.
The stock market is not fooled by all the positive rhetoric about the debt deal. It is responding accordingly 11,700 and dropping! S&P below 1250.
More debt, more waste.
My employer just signed up for new health insurance because the last Company we used went out of business rather than comply with the insane rules being forced upon that industry.
Cost for 9 employees $106,000 per year. Six are families and three are individuals.
This is a high deductible plan and is coupled with an HSA account he will contribute $150.00 per month to for each employee with family to be able to pay the deductibles.
Same coverage we had last year would have cost $36,000 MORE this year.
These are the guys the Lyin King wants to tax more. These are the guys who create jobs but will not hire because as Obamacare is implemented their costs sky rocket, as new regulations are heaped upon them, costs sky rocket, and then on top of this, they are threatened with more taxes.
I am semi self employeed and can tell you for absolute certainity that when my costs go up the price I charge for my goods goes up also, I don’t make less of a mark up. When the contractors I use to install my products come to me saying they have to raise fees because of the price of gas, health insurance, or regulations force them to, I tell them do what they have to I will increase the price of my product accordingly.
Obama is strangling this economy, but he uses this class warfare rhetoric and the stupid sheeple do not see what increased taxes means, they only want their free stuff from those of us who pay for it.
WELL FOLKS WE ALL PAY FOR IT.
Some just get the money to do so in different ways.
Durable goods orders down. Manufacturing output down.
The Obama administration was whining before the debt deal that the market didn’t tank during the debt negotiations. The implication was that they expected, and needed, Wall Street to tank when the Republicans dug in their heels in order to add a sense of urgency. When the markets DIDN’T tank, they were confused. Now that they have passed the deal, the markets ARE tanking. This must have them doubly confused.
Dear Democrats, here’s the deal:
Americans are tired of having their pockets picked by government. The role of government is NOT to take the money of one class to give to another class. We want our government to live within its means. We don’t want to give our government an open-ended credit card to spend on anything it wants. We don’t want to create host and parasite classes and pit them against each other.
It is much easier to create a large poor class than it is a large wealthy class. Our system of government had created the largest middle class of any country on earth by staying out of micromanaging the economy. Every time in history that government has micromanaged things, it fails. It doesn’t work. The Chinese learned that lesson, the Russians learned that lesson, heck, Cuba is learning that lesson. Why can’t Washington learn that lesson?
I want the same two things Reagan wanted: 1. A balanced budget amendment. 2. A line-item veto.
The Democrats have blown it at all levels but particularly at the state and local levels. Do you think business leaders in Illinois aren’t looking at Wisconsin and Indiana and noticing the transformation in those states?
Dear news media:
Now can we please get some focus back on “Fast and Furious” and the war in Libya?
Of course do not forget the “secret tax” that the government and Federal Reserve can institute any time it wishes.
The policy of printing worthless money i.e. QE1, QE 2 are both tax hikes through the means of inflation. The government robs private citizens of their spending power through inflation, to offset its ill concieved fiscal policy.
So do not let anyone tell you Obama has not raised taxes already!
This is exactly what happens with the tick grows larger than the dog.
It is quaintly amusing to here someone who has never given a fair’s day work demand people pay their fair share.
Based on 2010 costs to run the Government of $4.472 trillion spread out among an estimated 311 million US residents, my fair share is $14,379 which is not an unreasonable amount to ask me to pay to live in what is still the greatest country in the world (in spite of those in government). I would even adopt one senior citizen or truly needy person and cover their bill.
Needless to say I have more than paid my fair share but would be happy to help in the effort to send out the bills to the rest of the people who have paid nothing.
Perhaps that bit of unwelcome news would wake folks up—-pay up in either cold hard cash or hard labor.
This is the best comment I have seen on the Debt limit deal to date (Not mine, sadly):
The RINOs won, along with the Beltway Democrats.
They both got the low-tax biz-as-usual world and they kept the Tea Party and the genuine left from actually fighting by making themselves necessary for either side.
And if neither side fights neither can win.
“When it’s between the mother and the baby, in a Catholic hospital they save the baby,
in a Protestant hospital they save the mother,
and in every hospital everywhere,
they save the doctor.”
Crosspatch,
State and local government workers lost 2.68% (400,000) of their paid positions since 2008 with $600 billion in Federal TARP money to the states through the last recession.
We are about to go into another recession with no TARP money.
This is the back story behind the Democrats demand for new taxes in the debt deal.
See Walter Russel Mead’s blog post & comments on that post here:
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/08/03/we-are-heading-for-a-fiscal-revolution/#comments
The collapse of state & local sales and income tax revenues in the next 15 months will put the public employee unions up on the state and local budget “lay off lamp posts” in time for the 2012 elections.
Bad economic effects from public employee cuts will slam predominantly blue voter state capitols, large urban school districts and public university towns that have weathered the past recessions in an already bad economy.
And the public employee regulators and administrators who stop new private sector job growth will still be hanging on like grim death.
The term of art here is “tipping point,” both in terms of turning a rescission into a depression and seeing a massive drop off in Democratic core area voting in 2012 and beyond.
Lawrence Summers thinks that 8.5% is the lowest possible unemployment will be in 2012 and that there is a 1 in three chance of a recession.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/moving-forward-after-the-debt-deal/2011/08/02/gIQAMWP7pI_story.html
On the current policy path, it would be surprising if growth were rapid enough to reduce unemployment even to 8.5 percent by the end of 2012. A substantial withdrawal of fiscal stimulus will occur when the payroll tax cuts expire at the end of the year. With growth at less than 1 percent in the first half of this year, the economy is effectively at a stall and facing the prospects of shocks from a European financial crisis that is decidedly not under control, spikes in oil prices and declines in business and household confidence. The indicators suggest that the economy has at least a 1-in-3 chance of falling back into recession if nothing new is done to raise demand and spur growth.
If he is saying that, the odds of a real recession in 2012 are damned near certain, with no TARO to bail out to save the jobs of blue state and city public employee unions.
Good links, Trent. Walter Russell Mead has been on an absolute roll for months; everything he puts out is a must-read these days. His latest, on why this crisis in Government is a crisis in the Progressive faith is a beauty. As he says, if people don’t believe in Big Government’s ability to do anything right, why would they ever vote for Democrats to do more of it?
Thinking about the states – I have come around and decided that the GOP should give in on one revenue raiser and let the dems get rid of the mortgage deduction. Oh yeah, it will only impact the “rich” and they’ll crow – but they don’t really understand what the effects. That move will *destroy* the highest price real estate markets, and they higher the prices are the more damage will be done.
Put into straight talk – California, New York, and Connecticuts finances will be absolutely destroyed, while most of the middle of the country won’t be that heavily affected.
Let’s do it. I’m past the need of doing anything good, I now just want to see my enemies suffer. All the big Dem states are ready to fall – as Nietzche said, anything ready to fall deserves to be pushed.
okay, so maybe my thoughts are a bit dark these days.
How can Obama have well over 2400 35,800 tickets tonight?