No connection between education spending and student outcomes!

SANTA FE, N.M. – For decades, it’s probably the most troublesome question facing education: Why are results for U.S. public school students so mediocre, despite the billions of taxpayer dollars spent?

Andrew Coulson thinks he’s got the answer: Because there is no discernible correlation between spending and outcomes.

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Who Shut Down the Government?

You may be surprised by the answer.

Have you ever questioned why Congress does not reduce spending and balance the budget?

The answer will shock you: they can’t!

New Report: Wasteful Government Spending in 2011

Dec 20 2011

Dr. Coburn Releases New Report on Wasteful Government Spending in 2011: "Wastebook 2011"

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) today released a new oversight report, “Wastebook 2011” that highlights over $6.5 billion in examples of some of the most egregious ways your taxpayer dollars were wasted. This report details 100 of the countless unnecessary, duplicative and low-priority projects spread throughout the federal government.

“Video games, robot dragons, Christmas trees, and magic museums. This is not a Christmas wish list, these are just some of the ways the federal government spent your tax dollars. Over the past 12 months, politicians argued, debated and lamented about how to reign in the federal government’s out of control spending. All the while, Washington was on a shopping binge, spending money we do not have on things we do not absolutely need. Instead of cutting wasteful spending, nearly $2.5 billion was added each day in 2011 to our national debt, which now exceeds $15 trillion,” Dr. Coburn said.

“Congress cannot even agree on a plan to pay for the costs of extending jobless benefits to the millions of Americans who are still out of work. Yet, thousands of millionaires are receiving unemployment benefits and billions of dollars of improper payments of unemployment insurance are being made to individuals with jobs and others who do not qualify. And remember those infamous bridges to nowhere in Alaska that became symbols of government waste years ago? The bridges were never built, yet the federal government still spent more than a million dollars just this year to pay for staff to promote one of the bridges.”

Examples of wasteful spending highlighted in “Wastebook 2011” include:

• $75,000 to promote awareness about the role Michigan plays in producing Christmas trees & poinsettias.
• $15.3 million for one of the infamous Bridges to Nowhere in Alaska.
• $113,227 for video game preservation center in New York.
• $550,000 for a documentary about how rock music contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• $48,700 for 2nd annual Hawaii Chocolate Festival, to promote Hawaii’s chocolate industry.
• $350,000 to support an International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy.
• $10 million for a remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistan.
• $35 million allocated for political party conventions in 2012.
• $765,828 to subsidize “pancakes for yuppies” in the nation’s capital.
• $764,825 to study how college students use mobile devices for social networking.

Read the full report: here

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Permalink: http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/6946d43b-bccf-4579-990e-15a763532b40.html

They must think we're idiots

Budget Deal Doesn't Cut Spending

Government Spending Affects Gross Domestic Product

We have tried spending a lot of money to jumpstart the economy, and it has failed. Now we need to cut spending and lift the uncertainty paralyzing economic activity. That approach will not just be more fiscally responsible. It will also empower individuals and entrepreneurs, and they are the only ones who can bring on a real recovery...

National Center for Policy Analysis

John Boehner: "He is, every day, looking more and more like the very thing the Tea Party rose up to oppose."

Say it ain't so...

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.

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.

Thomas Lifson At American Thinker Is Wrong On Boehner's Deal

Let's make a deal

EXCERPT: Who Won the Shutdown Showdown? It Wasn't Even Close...

Over the next decade the cuts are expected to save hundreds of billions of dollars.

The deal mandates a host of studies and audits of Obama administration policies. It also blocks additional funds for the IRS sought by the Obama administration and bans federal funding of abortion in Washington, D.C.

The history of offers on this bill goes something like this. Democrats first offered no cuts, then $4 billion, then $6.5 billion, then $33 billion, then settled at $38.5 billion.

Boehner made numerous adjustments to his offer in recent days too, but started at $32 billion, then with a Tea Party push went to $62 billion, then dropped to $40 billion, then $38.5 billion.

Democrats claimed they met Republicans halfway after the $10 billion in cuts that already passed this year were approved. They settled late Friday night at three and a half times more.

Boehner came in $8.5 billion higher than the halfway point between his high offer of $61 billion in cuts and the Democrats opening bid of zero cuts.

It was not a totally lopsided bargain. Dems have some silver linings. There were no votes on defunding the EPA or PBS and NPR. Democrats fought for and won a $2 billion cut from the Department of Defense, knocking the military appropriation for the rest of the year down to $513 billion.

But the GOP had to be able to see this as a win in the end, because it is puny compared to what they want to do next.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's 2012 budget resolution proposes cuts of $5 TRILLION in the next 10 yrs...

Mmmm, pie!

Mark Levin is livid...and with good reason!

Mark Levin is livid right now...top two GOP leaders voted "no" on spending cuts (Eric Cantor & Kevin McCarthy) along with 90 others...was a crucial vote and they "couldn't pull the trigger" ...

THE HILL

House rejects extra $22 billion in cuts that divided Republicans
By Russell Berman - 02/18/11 02:56 PM ET

The House rejected a measure cutting an additional $22 billion from the Republican spending bill, as conservatives ran into a wall of opposition from the GOP establishment over the depth of reductions to federal funding.

The amendment backed by the conservative Republican Study Committee failed, 147-281, but not before putting the GOP spending divide under a spotlight on the House floor. Authored by RSC chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the proposal would have dramatically reshaped an appropriations bill that already slashes federal spending by $61 billion over the next seven months.

More than half of the Republican conference backed the measure in opposition to two party chiefs, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who voted with every Democrat against it. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) did not vote, as is traditional for Speakers.

The party’s fourth-ranking member, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), supported the measure, as did dozens of Republican freshman. Yet there was division even among the first-term, Tea Party-backed lawmakers. Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), an elected freshman representative on the leadership team, opposed the bill, while Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), the freshman class president, supported it. . .

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Barack Obama must think that the ObamaMedia isn't going to call him out and the American people are too ignorant to know otherwise...

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
***Frederic Bastiat***

Neal Boortz: OBAMABUDGET BUST

DId you know: Obama's failed stimulus program cost more than the Iraq war

7 things to keep in mind:

* Obama's stimulus, passed in his first month in office, will cost more than the entire Iraq War -- more than $100 billion (15%) more.

* Just the first two years of Obama's stimulus cost more than the entire cost of the Iraq War under President Bush, or six years of that war.

* Iraq War spending accounted for just 3.2% of all federal spending while it lasted.

* Iraq War spending was not even one quarter of what we spent on Medicare in the same time frame.

* Iraq War spending was not even 15% of the total deficit spending in that time frame. The cumulative deficit, 2003-2010, would have been four-point-something trillion dollars with or without the Iraq War.

* The Iraq War accounts for less than 8% of the federal debt held by the public at the end of 2010 ($9.031 trillion).



* During Bush's Iraq years, 2003-2008, the federal government spent more on education that it did on the Iraq War. (State and local governments spent about ten times more.)

If at first you don't succeed, lie and lie again (and again)

Crapcare update: Study used in ObamaCare argument was misrepresented

Barack the Knife and Dickie the Moocher want an excuse to hike taxes, not cut spending

The two of them pushed spending over a trillion dollars a year higher in the past three years. If they wanted to cut spending, Democrats wouldn’t be passing massive expansions of federal government like ObamaCare and the upcoming cap-and-trade bill. Andy Stern wouldn’t be sitting on that panel to find ways to reduce the bureaucracies that pour dues into his union’s pockets, especially now that his pension and retirement count on boosting membership.

Now that Barack Obama is back in town, the line forms on the Left, babe — to get that taxpayer-funded gravy train rolling.

Read the whole thing

This report isn't bad news for the Democrats. It's Armageddon.

WSJ: Democrats are spending trillions at the worst possible moment, with a new poll showing public trust in government at a historic low of 22%...

We have one chance to save America

The Coming Deficit War
Dick Morris

We predict Republicans will takeover of both Houses of Congress. The question is: Once they achieve power, what will they do with it?

Clearly the dominant issue for the new Congress in 2011 will be how to bring down the deficit. Democrats will, of course favor tax increases, and Republicans will resist them. But drowning out the partisan rhetoric will be the editorial drumbeat from the economic and journalistic establishments that will call for compromise, splitting the difference between the two.

Here is where the Republicans' new congressional majorities must hold the line. Every single GOP member of the House and the Senate must make a firm commitment to oppose any and all tax increases. In the coming congressional and senatorial primaries, it is our duty as voters to support only those Republicans who sign the no-tax pledge of the Americans for Tax Reform.

When Obama took office, he had one paramount goal in mind: to increase the size of the federal government. Socialism is not an epithet or even an economic philosophy. Whether a nation is socialist or not is determined by a single, simple statistic: What percent of the economy (gross domestic product) goes to the public sector? When Obama took office, the U.S. public sector (federal, state and local) spent about 30 percent of GDP. Now it is 36 percent. If Obamacare lives to be fully implemented, it will pass 40 percent.

The United Kingdom has a public sector that accounts for about 40 percent of its economy. Germany is at about 48 percent. France is at 50 percent, and Sweden at 54 percent.

If Obama is allowed to let the public sector expand to 40 percent of our GDP, we will become a European socialist democracy, to our everlasting detriment. We will thereby inherit the sclerosis that afflicts Europe -- permanently high unemployment and low economic growth.

But after his swearing-in, President Obama couldn't say that he was going to raise taxes to move us toward socialism. So, instead, he raised spending to do it and borrowed the money to pay for it. Now, with interest rates set to rise (because the Fed is not printing money as fast as it was), our debt service burden will be so onerous that it will become obvious to everyone that the deficit Obama has created is unsupportable.

Now, we pay an average of 3.5 percent interest on our $12 trillion national debt. That works out to an annual debt service bill of about $400 billion. While large, it's not impossible. Defense spending, for comparison, is $550 billion, Social Security is $400 billion, Medicare is $300 billion, Medicaid about $200 billion.

But, when interest rates rise to 7-8 percent -- as they must now that the Treasury cannot just borrow newly printed money but must get real loans from real lenders to finance its deficit -- the burden will grow to close to $1 trillion, about a quarter of our budget. Put differently, the entire take of personal income taxes in the United States comes to about $900 billion. All of it will go to debt service.

The United States will become just like the subprime mortgage holders who borrowed at low teaser rates only to see their interest grow until they had to sign over their entire paychecks to the mortgage company.

Obama has been expecting this outcome all along. It is how he will achieve socialism in the United States. He will use the pressure his deficit creates to force higher taxes that will permanently expand the public sector.

Ronald Reagan increased the deficit to force liberals to stop spending. Obama has increased it to force conservatives to vote for higher taxes.

Once a spending increase is matched by a tax increase, it lasts forever. That is how Obama plans to move the government's share of the GDP permanently over 40 percent -- into socialist territory.

But the Republicans can and must stop him. By refusing to vote for a tax increase and cutting back Obama's crazy spending, slicing his stimulus package and ratcheting back federal Medicaid payments (by zero funding the increases built into Obamacare), Republicans can cut the deficit without higher taxes.

Indeed, the party should commit to lowering taxes by cutting capital gains levies to stimulate investment, jobs and revenues. The only tax that works economically is a tax cut!

Such a defiant stand, in the face of withering criticism from the media, economists and the Federal Reserve, can only be made by hardy souls. Indeed, such a stance by a Republican Congress will lead to exactly the same sort of government shutdown -- when Obama vetoes the budget -- as discredited the GOP in 1995-1996 and led to Clinton's re-election.

But history will not repeat itself. The Republicans will win this confrontation with the White House. Everybody in America knows that Obama has increased spending out of all proportion. Everyone knows that higher taxes would be devastating. And the Republicans must capitalize on these convictions so deeply held by the vast majority of voters to prevail in the coming deficit wars.

For now, our job as conservatives is to nominate only those Republicans who have taken the pledge not to raise taxes. Some may break their word. But we can be quite sure that those who do not give it in the first place will not hesitate to cooperate with the Democratic tax hikes that spell socialism for America.

========

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann are authors of the new book "2010: Take Back America -- A Battle Plan." To find out more about Dick Morris and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. Distributed By Creators.Com

Copyright 2010 Dick Morris And Eileen Mcgann

What "reconciliation" actually IS

For the Record:

"For those not versed in the arcane rules of the U.S. Senate, reconciliation is not what a divorced couple attempts when they visit Dr. Phil. It is a mechanism for avoiding filibusters on certain budgetary issues. If Democrats can find a way to apply it to health care reform, they could pass a bill with just 51 votes, negating the election of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and the loss of the 60-seat supermajority.

Reconciliation was established in 1974 to make it easier for Congress to adjust taxes and spending in order to 'reconcile' actual revenues and expenditures with a previously approved budget resolution. Thus, at the end of the year, if Congress found that it was running a budget deficit higher than previously projected, it could quickly raise taxes or cut spending to bring the budget back into line. Debate on such measures was abbreviated to just 20 hours (an eyeblink in Senate terms), and there could be no filibuster.

As Robert Byrd, (D-W.V.), one of the original authors of the reconciliation rule, explained, 'Reconciliation was intended to adjust revenue and spending levels in order to reduce deficits ... [I]t was not designed to ... restructure the entire health care system.' He warns that using reconciliation for health care would 'violate the intent and spirit of the budget process, and do serious injury to the Constitutional role of the Senate.'

In fact, in 1985, the Senate adopted the 'Byrd rule,' which prohibits the use of reconciliation for any 'extraneous issue' that does not directly change revenues or expenditures. Clearly, large portions of the health care bill, ranging from mandates to insurance regulation to establishing 'exchanges,' do not meet that requirement."

--Cato Institute senior fellow Michael D. Tanner

Received from PatriotPost.us

President Obama on Monday unveiled a new health care proposal that adds spending provisions and raises taxes without making any real concessions to Republicans ahead of this week's health care summit...

Obama HC Proposal Has More Spending, Higher Taxes Than Senate Bill

Thanks, Mr. President!

...one of every four dollars produced by the sweat of American private labor is now taxed and redistributed by 535 men and women in Congress

Mr. Obama's major contribution to deficits has been a record spending spree

The tragedy is that Mr. Obama's fiscal conversion is coming a year too late, assuming it is now real. If the President and his party really are serious, they can do more than promise a spending freeze after 2012. They can stop spending more now: Drop the health-care bill, cancel the unspent stimulus spending from last year, kill the $150 billion new stimulus that has already passed the House, and bar all repaid bailout cash from being re-spent. Everything else is marketing.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A14

Read the whole thing: The Obama Fisc