Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That's a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. . .READ MORE
Too many on the Right seem to be missing the entire point. This 1/2 of 1/3 nonsense is just a DC talking point and nothing more. The House is specifically empowered as the only branch of government responsible for spending. Boehner is Speaker because the Republicans control it, not the Democrats.Thomas Lifson At American Thinker Is Wrong On Boehner's Deal
What Boehner has done to make it appear as though he has accomplished more than he has, is to pick up the ball precisely where it was left when the Democrats controlled the House, as well as the rest of government, prior to November 2010. Even worse, there is and was no budget. They never passed one. Consequently, Boehner's professed cuts are being measured against a myth that doesn't and never has existed.
Rather than engage debate from a conservative Republican, fiscally responsible position, he has engaged it entirely on Democrat terms based upon a hypothetical budget that never existed, because it was never even submitted, let alone passed.
What that means is, the only thing Boehner will ever be successful in delivering is the very thing Republicans have been criticized about for years - Democrat-lite. Were he serious about getting spending in line and reducing government, he wouldn't be waging these battles on mythical battlefields that don't exist; he would allow his progress to be measured from a fiscally responsible position.
The reason why elites in Washington would look to a VAT before increasing income taxes (and, believe me, higher income taxes are coming) is because not enough of the population even pays income taxes to make it worthwhile for the government to use the income tax structure to balance the budget... the government can extract the most amount of your wealth from a national sales tax.Obama’s National Sales Tax
Thousands of people filled Fountain Square this afternoon for the Cincinnati Tea Party, a grassroots-effort designed to show their disapproval for bailouts and the massive federal stimulus plan. People wore Revolution-era costumes and raised anti-bailout signs with messages like "Give us Liberty, not debt" and "No more bailouts." ...PowerLine reports
The rally at Fountain Square was one of dozens staged across the country.
The miraculous marketing machine that carried a junior senator into the White House is now at work trying to convince Americans that writing fat checks from an empty Treasury represents a giant step toward fiscal responsibility.Read the whole thing
President Barack Obama has sent Congress a $3.6 trillion federal spending plan that outlines his administration's priorities.
It starts out $1.75 trillion in the red, the largest deficit by any measure in the nation's history. But because he's Barack Obama and everything he does must be chiseled in stone and handed down from the mountaintop, he's proclaimed this first budget as ringing in a "New Era of Responsibility."
Call it the Audacity of Hype. The president, casting himself as the somber task master of a frivolous people, is demanding sacrifice of every American. But there's little sacrifice in his budget.
By Clive CrookRead the whole thing
Published: March 8 2009 18:18 | Last updated: March 8 2009 18:18
On this page last week I argued that Barack Obama’s first budget showed him to be more of a left-leaning liberal than I and many others – sceptics and admirers alike – had previously supposed. People I respect have accused me of going off the deep end about this, or of neglecting Mr Obama’s tactical finesse, or both.
A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.IMPORTANT: READ THE WHOLE THING!
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN
It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents -- John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance -- President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.
Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.
Obama to Unveil an Ambitious Budget PlanRead the whole thing
By Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 21, 2009; 3:00 PM
President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on business and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.
In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation's economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that Obama hopes to enact later this year.
While not defending the increase of the federal debt under President Bush, it's curious to see Clinton's record promoted as having generated a surplus. It never happened. There was never a surplus and the facts support that position. In fact, far from a $360 billion reduction in the national debt in FY1998-FY2000, there was an increase of $281 billion.And then, if you can stomach THE RED PILL:
Verifying this is as simple as accessing the U.S. Treasury (see note about this link below) website where the national debt is updated daily and a history of the debt since January 1993 can be obtained.
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Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
