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

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Social Security Goes into the Red in 2010 not 2018

by Dick McDonald - Ownership Society Institute

In 2010 the Congressional Budget Office has projected a $92 billion surplus of payroll tax receipts over Social Security benefits paid. That figure includes $120 billion in “non-cash” receipts of fictional interest paid on fictional US Bonds – a bookkeeping trick like Enron used to cover up Congress’s theft of over $4 trillion of excess payroll tax receipts it has been appropriating from Social Security since the early 80’s. See here.

http://finance.yahoo.com/focus-retirement/article/108747/next-in-line-for-a-bailout-social-security?mod=fidelity-readytoretire

That means that by September, 2010 the US Government will need a $28 billion cash infusion just to meet its Social Security obligations. So much for the age-old denial that Social Security isn’t broke. That it has unfulfilled promises of over $14 trillion in future benefits in excess of projected receipts. Similarly Medicare is in the tank for $93 trillion. The jig is up and the Democrats and RINOs have no where to go on this issue.

The real benefit to be gleaned from this is that Americans will seriously try to solve this problem by any means other than raising taxes and/or cutting benefits. Believe me Americans will insist on it. The baby boomers will demand their full benefits as they come on stream in the next 15 years and the kids will resort to violence if they are unfairly taxed because it will take 2 kids to support one retiree

President Obama has challenged the Republicans to come up with some ideas to solve the dilemma and the best they came up so far is Paul Ryan’s proposal to raise the retirement age to 70 years (benefit cut of major import), cut the Medicare benefits (benefit cut of major import) and allow a small portion of a worker’s payroll taxes be invested in a personal investment retirement account (step in the right direction).

The real tragedy is that current benefits don’t begin to cover retirement costs and trying to save these entitlements is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. What Americans want and will insist on is a re do of the funding of retirement costs so that more than the solvency of the government entitlement programs is achieved. Bush limited his Social Security reform to solving the solvency issue – Ryan appears to have limited his approach to solvency as well. There should be no limitations placed on what Americans can do in solving this issue.

We at the Ownership Society Institute (OSI) recommend these entitlement programs be scrapped with the proviso that the government guarantee that all benefits under them will be honored and form the floor under which no future benefits can ever fall.

In place of these programs we institute personal investment accounts we like to call “USAs” – Universal Savings Accounts. That into these accounts the entire 15.3% of payroll taxes presently sent to Congress will be redirected and immediately invested in the stock market for the 40-year working life of every taxpayer. The details of OSI’s plan are outlined here. It is called the Rise Up America plan.

In addition to solving the solvency issue RUA does the following:

· Generate the biggest tax cut in history

· Reduce the size of government by half

· Alleviate poverty and economically emancipate lower class citizens

· Infuse enormous sums directly into the economy and accelerate growth

· Eliminate the need for government pensions and Medicare

· Pay off $110 trillion of unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities

· Give back to Americans the money that they earn

· Increase the economic opportunities of all Americans

· Avoids Bankruptcies of cities, counties and states from pension liabilities

· Makes everyone a shareholder and responsible for oversight

· Reduces crimes especially those triggered by poverty

There a hundreds of other benefits of privatizing the entitlements but let’s leave it to a simple example.

The average American household makes over $50,000 a year and pays more than $7,500 in payroll taxes. Under RUA those taxes are placed into a USA and immediately invested in the stock market for 40 years. The $300,000 (40 years times $7,500 a year) grows into a $4,004,000 nest egg because of the magic of compounding. Just the annual income off that nest egg will generate a $33,000 a month retirement check – more than enough to support an affluent lifestyle.

RUA uses the principle of small government and takes away from government the responsibility to fund entitlements. It relies on the words of Alfred Einstein as everyone should. “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.”

All those concerns about such a sea change in the way the government does what its citizens will want is explained at www.riseupamerica.us including how to simultaneously fund the transition, place $1.3 trillion into the stock market annually, pay benefits under the old programs and miraculously enough increase the value of the US dollar. See here.

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.

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Peter, Paul, and the Banana Republic Shuffle

Reform: What if there are too few millionaires to pay for a big expansion of tax-paid health care coverage? Congress may then adopt its tried-and-true Plan B, dumping the burden on lower levels of government.

Who do you believe?

Joe Biden:‘We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt’

...or...

Congressional Budget Office Director's blog:

The Long-Term Budget Outlook: Today I had the opportunity to testify before the Senate Budget Committee about CBO’s most recent analysis of the long-term budget outlook. Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run.

The last honest person in Washington?

Maybe there are some people left in Washington that actually care about their reputations. After months of listening to the Obama administration's nonsense about reducing the deficit by taking over healthcare, it's refreshing to hear someone actually testify during this debate that such ideas are ridiculous. Kudos for Mr. Elmendorf for calling it like he sees it.

CBO Director Says ObamaCare Will Boost Deficit

The CBO's latest warning on the long-term deficit is scarier than ever!

Read about The Debt Tsunami!

(Don't you just want to strangle every Democrat that you know? I do. Especially the ones who did "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" -- one, literally -- when I tried to explain who this Marxist scum runnning our country really is.)

White House finally admits the truth about their health care plans for us

Over and over again, Barack Obama has told us about his health care plans that if you like your current health care plan that you can keep it. But today, the White House admits that that is not the entire truth.

Ten Tax Facts for Tax Day Tea Parties

GATEWAY PUNDIT REPORTS:

#1. Under the Obama budget, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the national debt will double over the next five years; and it will triple over the next 10 years to $17.3 trillion.

#2. Under the Obama budget, CBO projects that the national debt will soar over the next 10 years from 40 percent of GDP today to a shocking 82.4 percent. (Ronald Reagan left office with the national debt at 42 percent of GDP).

#3. The president’s budget also states that total federal borrowing will grow by $2.7 trillion this year alone, an increase of 27 percent in one year!

#4. The budget President Obama proposes for this year increases federal spending by an incredible 34 percent over the previous year, with a total of $4 trillion in federal spending, the highest ever.

#5. The federal budget deficit (not the national debt) would reach $1.845 trillion this year, according to the CBO, the highest ever. That would be more than seven times Reagan’s largest budget deficit of $221 billion, which caused so much consternation among Reagan’s critics.

#6. The CBO estimates that this Obama budget deficit will total an astounding 13.1 percent of GDP, more than one-eighth of the entire U.S. economy, for the federal budget deficit alone! Under George Bush, the federal deficit for 2008 was 3.2 percent of GDP. The deficit for fiscal year 2007, in the last budget adopted when Congress was controlled by Republican majorities, was $162 billion, or 1.2 percent of GDP.

#7. The Obama budget also includes $1 trillion in tax increases on the upper 5 percent of income earners, mostly tax rate increases. But the top 5 percent of income earners already pays 60 percent of all income taxes.

#8. The Obama budget projects that revenues from the corporate income tax will more than double in 3 years, increasing, in fact, by more than 124 percent.

#9. Another $645 billion tax increase comes from President Obama’s anti-global warming cap and trade system, which is essentially an energy tax on the production and use of carbon energy, such as oil, natural gas, and coal.

#10. While the Obama administration claims to have cut $2 trillion from the budget over 10 years, fully $1.5 trillion of those “cuts” actually represents the troop drawdown in Iraq, which was already scheduled to occur under the Bush administration. Of the remaining $500 billion in budget “savings,” fully $311 billion is categorized as “interest savings” but is actually an additional tax increase on upper income earners.

Bush Deficit vs. Obama Deficit in Pictures

Obama is trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. Maybe he's studid, but we're not: seeing is believing!

George Will on Dems: Lawlessness, Situational Constitutionalism, Institutional Derangement

Jefferson warned that "great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." But Democrats, who trace their party's pedigree to Jefferson, are contemplating using "reconciliation" -- a legislative maneuver abused by both parties to severely truncate debate and limit the minority's right to resist -- to impose vast and controversial changes on the 17 percent of the economy that is health care. When the Congressional Budget Office announced that the president's budget underestimates by $2.3 trillion the likely deficits over the next decade, his budget director, Peter Orszag, said: All long-range budget forecasts are notoriously unreliable -- so rely on ours.

This is but a partial list of recent lawlessness, situational constitutionalism and institutional derangement. Such political malfeasance is pertinent to the financial meltdown as the administration, desperately seeking confidence, tries to stabilize the economy by vastly enlarging government's role in it.

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Obama: Hardly an innocent bystander

Mr. Obama keeps saying he has "inherited a trillion dollar deficit," which is true. But he's hardly an innocent bystander. CBO shows that the President is seeing that $1 trillion and raising it again and again, as far as the eye can see. In only two months, since the last CBO budget review in January, Democrats have passed laws that increase spending by $134 billion in the last six months of this fiscal year alone, and $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. And that's all before his 2010 budget proposals.

Obama Sticker Shock