Social progress?

The old employer sponsored system forced people to stay in jobs they didn’t like because they needed the health insurance coverage. The new Obamacare system will force people to stay out of jobs they do want because they need to maximize their subsidies. And this is social progress?

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CBO: by 2016, we're screwed.

That’s not “perhaps”, not “odds-on”, but with certainty.

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Holy Sh*t: Prepare for a NEW American Revolution!

CNBC via Doug Ross:

Based on CBO projections, if interest rates just rise to their 20-year average, we will have an untenable, unacceptable interest rate bill whose beneficiaries are China, Japan, and others who own our bonds.

And if Americans find out that the lion's share of their income tax payments are going to service the debt, prepare for a new American revolution.

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Money, honey

Latest lie.

Oh, yawn: another day, another lie.

Life in Liberaland.

2 myths about "the rich"

CNBC:

The presidential election has given us two myths about the rich. First, that their incomes, and income inequality, are at all-time highs. Second, that the wealthy pay less in taxes than ever, and lower taxes than the rest of us.

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office, however, suggests that both may be false.

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CBO: Stimulus hurts economy in the long run

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday downgraded its estimate of the benefits of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, saying it may have sustained as few as 700,000 jobs at its peak last year and that over the long run it will actually be a net drag on the economy.

CBO said that while the Recovery Act boosted the economy in the short run, the extra debt that the stimulus piled up “crowds out” private investment and “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.”

The analysis confirms what CBO predicted before the stimulus passed in February 2009, though the top-end decline of two tenths of a percent is actually deeper than the agency predicted back then.

All told, the stimulus did boost jobs and the economy in the short run, according to CBO’s models. At the peak of spending from July through September 2010 it sustained anywhere from 700,000 to 3.6 million, which lowered the unemployment rate by between four-tenths of a percent to 2 percent.

The Obama administration had promised 3.5 million jobs would be produced at the peak of spending.

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CBO Director Says Obamacare Would Reduce Employment by 800,000 Workers

So Obama lied again...and the Left never seems to care...

Testifying today before the House Budget Committee, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf confirmed that Obamacare is expected to reduce the number of jobs in the labor market by an estimated 800,000. Here are excerpts from the exchange:

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200 Top Economists Urge Congress to Repeal Job Destroying Obamacare Bill

GatewayPundit:

200 top economists, including two former directors of the CBO, sent a letter to lawmakers urging them to repeal Obamacare. The said the democrat’s bill is a job killer destroyer...

The letter includes the signatures of Douglas Holtz-Eakin and June O’Neil, both former directors of the Congressional Budget Office; Arthur Laffer, the first chief economist for the Office of Management and Budget, Brian Wesbury, former chief economist of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress; and William Niskanan, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors and chairman emeritus of the libertarian CATO Institute.

Read the whole thing

CBO's bad news today

6/30/10:

...Specifically, Elmendorf noted that spending on major mandatory health care programs such as Medicare is on track to double by 2035, up to 10% of GDP from 5% today. That increase is the equivalent of $700 billion this year in additional spending, Elmendorf said.

Add in the less dramatic increase in Social Security spending, and the cost to federal coffers of mandatory entitlement programs will reach 16% of GDP by 2035. That's not very far below what the government has spent on all federal programs and activities on average over the past 40 years...

And later in the article:

The only way to bring the federal budget into better balance would be to sharply reduce U.S. spending, drastically increase taxes to rates never before seen in the United States or some less dramatic combination of the two, Elmendorf said.

Read the whole thing

U.S. debt reaches level at which economic growth begins to slow

Bad news (Glenn Beck is right):

The level of U.S. debt has reached a point at which economic growth traditionally begins to slow, a bipartisan fiscal commission making recommendations to the White House and Congress was told Wednesday.

The gross U.S. debt is approaching a level equivalent to 90 percent of the country's gross domestic product, the level at which growth has historically declined, said Carmen Reinhart, a University of Maryland economist.

Notice the reference to "rising healthcare costs" (get the feeling you were jobbed by the Democrats?):

Gross debt, unlike the public debt measure used by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other economic forecasters, includes the money the government owes to all entities it supports, such as mortgage firms Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Reinhart said. The CBO expects public debt to grow from 63 percent this year to 90 percent in 2020, largely because of rising healthcare costs.

Do you think Congressional Democrats are going to heed this warning?

Reinhart cautioned policymakers against seeing the strengthening of the dollar as a sign that investors can wait for the United States to show how it will deal with the debt.

"I am concerned about complacency," she said. "I am concerned that because the dollar has renewed its role as a reserve currency, we may wait too long."

Read the whole thing

But, wait! Obama told Republican Senators yesterday that his nationalized health care plan would reduce the debt....

CBO says ObamaCare will cost $115 billion more than thought!!!

Don't you just love getting jobbed? Of all the slime dripping from ObamaCare, from the de facto bribes to the procedural shenanigans to the Democrats’ insane demagoguery of townhall protesters, the gaming of the CBO numbers is what bothers me most...

Obama's Health Care Promises Already Busted

The ink was barely dry on President Obama's signature before the RAND Corporation released a report concluding that not only would the hard-won health care package fail to curb premium increases, but the bill would drive premiums up as much as 17 percent for young people.

And then there's this:

...the Congressional Budget Office now says that as many as 10 million workers will lose their current insurance under the bill. Some of those will have to buy new insurance through the government-run exchanges. Millions more will be thrown onto Medicaid.

In addition, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies reports that half of seniors enrolled in the Medicare Advantage program will lose their coverage under that program and be forced back into traditional Medicare.

And this:

...the government's chief actuary released his report on the bill recently, showing that the bill will actually increase health care spending by $311 billion over the next 10 years.

At the same time, the actuary warns that promised future spending cuts, particularly those for Medicare, are unlikely to occur.

And, finally:

Now the most recent report from the Congressional Budget Office warns that nearly 4 million Americans, nearly three-quarters of them middle-class workers, will be hit with fines for failing to meet the government's mandate. Those penalties will average nearly $1,000 per person in 2016.

All this, and the health care "reform" law is merely a month old.

Perhaps this is why nearly 56 percent of American voters now favor repealing the bill.

Read the whole thing

What a mess this inexperienced narcissistic amateur has left us!

CBO report: Debt will rise to 90% of GDP

I doubt that anyone (outside of the slobbering Democrats who adore this monster) could not avoid thinking that Obama is purposely destroying this country that he grew up hating so much...although, I suppose, that it could simply be a matter of monumental incompetence, aided and abbetted by his party cohorts (but everyone claims he soooo intelligent...)

President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

Read more if you can stomach it

President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday...

Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said. Interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same period.

National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says...

First, nobody reads the damn bills...now, the CBO won't be scoring Obama's new plan!

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Ho Ho Ho: White House predicting a decade of budget shortfalls

"The estimate for the current fiscal year is significantly higher than the $1.35 trillion figure forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week...." ...but the President was so...hmmmm...sure of himself in his State of the Union...WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal, a congressional source told Reuters on Sunday...

Does this sound like Enron to anyone???

White House shenanigans--playing all of us for fools!

Obama's Latest Health Care Lie

There are actually multiple lies and deceptions...

The CBO, as Peter Suderman documented in his foundational Reason feature on the organization, does not "report," it "projects," in highly speculative fashion, what a proposed piece of legislation may cost. What's more, as Suderman detailed in a more recent piece that every American should read before listening to a word the president says, the CBO is bound in its "scoring" to take at face value what every living politician–Obama included–knows to be a stinking lie. That is, Congress' promises to make hundreds of billions of dollars worth of unspecified future spending "cuts."

Sarah Palin confirms "death panels" in Reid health care bill

Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

“It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

This health care bill is one of the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives. We’re talking about putting one-seventh of our economy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talking about something as intimate to our personal well-being as medical care.

Read the whole thing

Uh Oh: Budget chief contradicts Obama on Medicare costs

“Congress’ chief budget officer is contradicting President Barack Obama’s oft-stated claim that seniors wouldn’t see their Medicare benefits cut under a health care overhaul. The head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, told senators Tuesday that seniors in Medicare’s managed care plans would see reduced benefits under a bill in the Finance Committee.”

OOPS!