President Obama’s $3.69 trillion budget will raise taxes on all Americans by $1.4 trillion over the next decade, and will permanently elevate federal spending to nearly 23 percent of the entire economy by 2019—a level reached only three times since the end of World War II.
• The President’s budget dumps a staggering $9.3 trillion in new debt—$68,000 per household—into the laps of America's children and grandchildren. This is more debt than has been accumulated by all previous Presidents in American history from George Washington to George W. Bush—combined.
• President Obama ordered his cabinet to identify and shave a collective $100 MILLION in administrative costs from their budgets after proposing 40,000 times that in his budget and spending bills.
• The President’s budget proposes a $646 billion cap-and-trade tax that energy companies would immediately pass on to all consumers, including those earning less than $250,000.
Impact on Foreign Policy
• The President approved a cut of 15 percent of the Pentagon’s budget for missile defense and abandoning deploying defenses in Western Europe.
• Both President Obama and the Secretary of Homeland Security have been reticent to discuss the threat of terrorism, and Administration officials have issued a plethora of ambivalent and contradictory statements on homeland security and counterterrorism policies.
• The President declared that “50 years” of US policy had not worked as justification for reversing long-standing U.S. policies to isolate the Cuban dictatorship.
• President Obama’s Justice Department released documents on terrorist interrogation tactics used by the CIA after 9/11, yet refused to declassify and release additional material that describes the full scope and context of the program, including the effectiveness of the CIA interrogations.
Impact on Domestic Policy
• The President took over General Motors by firing the CEO.
• President Obama put the breaks on cheaper energy by delaying the opportunity to expand domestic supply through offshore drilling.
• The Obama Administration took the first official step towards federal regulation of carbon dioxide (the gas we exhale) by having the Environmental Protection Agency declare carbon dioxide dangerous to human health and the environment.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
The new foundation: based on DEBT
The boast that he had "identified $2 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade." It takes audacity to repeat this after it had been so widely exposed as transparently phony. Most of this $2 trillion is conjured up by refraining from spending $180 billion a year for 10 more years of surges in Iraq. Why not make the "deficit reductions" $10 trillion — the extra $8 trillion coming from refraining from repeating the $787 billion stimulus package annually through 2019?
The Puzzler: He further boasted of his frugality by saying that his budget would reduce domestic discretionary spending as share of GDP to the lowest level ever recorded. Amazing. Squeezing discretionary domestic spending at a time of hugely expanding budgets is merely the baleful residue of out-of-control entitlements and debt service, which will increase astronomically under Obama. To claim these as achievements in fiscal responsibility is testament not to Obama's frugality but to his brazenness.
The Non Sequitur: "To make sure such a crisis [as we have today] never happens again," Obama proposes his radical health care, energy and education reforms, the central pillars of his social democratic agenda. But Obama's own words contradict this assertion. Notes The Washington Post: "But as his admirable summation of recent history made clear, these pursuits have little to do with the economic crisis, and they are not the key to economic recovery." Obama rarely fails to repeat this false connection. A crisis — and the public's resulting pliability to liberal social engineering — is a terrible thing to waste.
The Swindle: The Obama administration is spending money like none other in peacetime history. Obama knows this is fiscally unsustainable. He has let it be known that he intends to cure the imbalance with entitlement reform. An excellent strategy. If it takes throwing nearly $1 trillion of "porky" stimulus spending to make a democratic Congress amenable to real entitlement reform, then fine. Reforming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would save tens of trillions of dollars, and make the current money-from-helicopters spending almost trivial by comparison.
In the New Foundation speech, Obama correctly identifies the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid as the key fiscal problem. But then he claims that Medicaid and Medicare reform is the same as his health-care reform.
Here's the problem. The heart of Obama's health-care reform is universality. Covering more people costs more money. That is why Obama's budget sets aside an extra $634 billion in health-care spending, a down payment on an estimated additional spending of $1 trillion. How does the administration curtail the Medicare and Medicaid entitlement by adding yet another (now universal) health-care entitlement that its own estimate acknowledges increases costs by about $1 trillion?
Which is why in his March 24 news conference, Obama could not explain how the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling. The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.
This is the DEBT on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.
The Puzzler: He further boasted of his frugality by saying that his budget would reduce domestic discretionary spending as share of GDP to the lowest level ever recorded. Amazing. Squeezing discretionary domestic spending at a time of hugely expanding budgets is merely the baleful residue of out-of-control entitlements and debt service, which will increase astronomically under Obama. To claim these as achievements in fiscal responsibility is testament not to Obama's frugality but to his brazenness.
The Non Sequitur: "To make sure such a crisis [as we have today] never happens again," Obama proposes his radical health care, energy and education reforms, the central pillars of his social democratic agenda. But Obama's own words contradict this assertion. Notes The Washington Post: "But as his admirable summation of recent history made clear, these pursuits have little to do with the economic crisis, and they are not the key to economic recovery." Obama rarely fails to repeat this false connection. A crisis — and the public's resulting pliability to liberal social engineering — is a terrible thing to waste.
The Swindle: The Obama administration is spending money like none other in peacetime history. Obama knows this is fiscally unsustainable. He has let it be known that he intends to cure the imbalance with entitlement reform. An excellent strategy. If it takes throwing nearly $1 trillion of "porky" stimulus spending to make a democratic Congress amenable to real entitlement reform, then fine. Reforming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would save tens of trillions of dollars, and make the current money-from-helicopters spending almost trivial by comparison.
In the New Foundation speech, Obama correctly identifies the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid as the key fiscal problem. But then he claims that Medicaid and Medicare reform is the same as his health-care reform.
Here's the problem. The heart of Obama's health-care reform is universality. Covering more people costs more money. That is why Obama's budget sets aside an extra $634 billion in health-care spending, a down payment on an estimated additional spending of $1 trillion. How does the administration curtail the Medicare and Medicaid entitlement by adding yet another (now universal) health-care entitlement that its own estimate acknowledges increases costs by about $1 trillion?
Which is why in his March 24 news conference, Obama could not explain how the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling. The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.
This is the DEBT on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.
"200 years to build a nation, one election to destroy it,"
BY Jay Ambrose
Over at lowbrow MSNBC, the jokes about tea parties have been lewd and crude. Some other commentators think such protests are just stupid. And the federal government has been worrying about right-wing extremists.
On one overriding theme: the government's Obama-directed spending binge.
This wasn't a Republican deal, even though How do you suppose they felt when the speaker said, look, Republicans helped get us in this mess – they spent like crazy when it was their turn? The tea party was mostly a grassroots, Internet-coordinated occurrence like some 730 others that took place across the country.
Nor was this an act of mob imbecility, even if Obama insists that economists of all ideological persuasions agree that spending is the only available means of getting us out of the recession. In fact, dozens of economists, including Nobel Prize winners, say differently – that lowering spending would serve us better and that the government should at least not spend crazily.
To me, it is encouraging that at least some Americans care enough about a mindless tumble into jeopardy to make themselves heard. This whole tea party phenomenon – patterned after the 1773 Boston tea party – is at least one signal to Washington that some get it that this spending spree coming on top of an already huge debt could be economically devastating, and that there's a plan for unprecedented levels of spending on new and expanded programs even when the recession ends.
Unlike liberal pundits, these Americans also understand that Obama has already increased tobacco taxes mostly affecting low-income Americans, that his carbon tax plans would hit everyone and that government at all levels is grabbing increasingly outrageous percentages of income from society's most productive members to the detriment of all of us.
Ah, but such understandings can make you suspicious in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, which devised a mostly speculative, bias-ridden report about the potential of "right-wing" violence from returning war veterans and different conservative groups, demonstrating, if anything, a rather disconcerting left-wing extremism.
And such understandings make you game for dirty, ridiculing jokes over at MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and others seem to be intent on seeing just how obnoxiously vulgar they can become. If the value of a cause can be measured by the loutishness of its enemies, the tea party cause must be great indeed.
Over at lowbrow MSNBC, the jokes about tea parties have been lewd and crude. Some other commentators think such protests are just stupid. And the federal government has been worrying about right-wing extremists.
On one overriding theme: the government's Obama-directed spending binge.
This wasn't a Republican deal, even though How do you suppose they felt when the speaker said, look, Republicans helped get us in this mess – they spent like crazy when it was their turn? The tea party was mostly a grassroots, Internet-coordinated occurrence like some 730 others that took place across the country.
Nor was this an act of mob imbecility, even if Obama insists that economists of all ideological persuasions agree that spending is the only available means of getting us out of the recession. In fact, dozens of economists, including Nobel Prize winners, say differently – that lowering spending would serve us better and that the government should at least not spend crazily.
To me, it is encouraging that at least some Americans care enough about a mindless tumble into jeopardy to make themselves heard. This whole tea party phenomenon – patterned after the 1773 Boston tea party – is at least one signal to Washington that some get it that this spending spree coming on top of an already huge debt could be economically devastating, and that there's a plan for unprecedented levels of spending on new and expanded programs even when the recession ends.
Unlike liberal pundits, these Americans also understand that Obama has already increased tobacco taxes mostly affecting low-income Americans, that his carbon tax plans would hit everyone and that government at all levels is grabbing increasingly outrageous percentages of income from society's most productive members to the detriment of all of us.
Ah, but such understandings can make you suspicious in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, which devised a mostly speculative, bias-ridden report about the potential of "right-wing" violence from returning war veterans and different conservative groups, demonstrating, if anything, a rather disconcerting left-wing extremism.
And such understandings make you game for dirty, ridiculing jokes over at MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and others seem to be intent on seeing just how obnoxiously vulgar they can become. If the value of a cause can be measured by the loutishness of its enemies, the tea party cause must be great indeed.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
“All systems are capitalist. It's just a matter of who owns and controls the capital -- ancient king, dictator, or private individual. We should properly be looking at the contrast between a free market system where individuals have the right to live like kings if they have the ability to earn that right and government control of the market system such as we find today in socialist nations.”
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Socialize America: Step One Nationalize the financial system
Nationalize the financial system gives the government control of all businesses and corporations which require credit and capital borrowing to survive. Because the financial companies control the economy, being under government control will essentially socialize the American economy and the corporations which rely on it.
Companies like Wells Fargo were forced fed government money in October by Paulson and then New York Federal reserve Chair Tim Geithner gathered the nations largest banks into a room and insisted they take the tax payers money by selling preferred stock to the government under the lie that if they turned down the money the companies which needed the money would be stigmatized.
The First step in the socializing of the American Finance Machine. When this process is complete every company in the US which needs to borrow capital will have to curry favor with some federal agency or politician. Hence a larger government and government influence in the private life of corporations and citizens.
What is the difference in the Bush Administrations approach to the bailout funds and the radical thinking of this administration? Both believed in spending but, the reformers or previous administration, regarded the spending as an instrument of recovery and the means to improve the condition of the people. The radicals or present administration, regard the spending as a substitute for recovery and as a means of altering the balance of a socialized policy.
Companies like Wells Fargo were forced fed government money in October by Paulson and then New York Federal reserve Chair Tim Geithner gathered the nations largest banks into a room and insisted they take the tax payers money by selling preferred stock to the government under the lie that if they turned down the money the companies which needed the money would be stigmatized.
The First step in the socializing of the American Finance Machine. When this process is complete every company in the US which needs to borrow capital will have to curry favor with some federal agency or politician. Hence a larger government and government influence in the private life of corporations and citizens.
What is the difference in the Bush Administrations approach to the bailout funds and the radical thinking of this administration? Both believed in spending but, the reformers or previous administration, regarded the spending as an instrument of recovery and the means to improve the condition of the people. The radicals or present administration, regard the spending as a substitute for recovery and as a means of altering the balance of a socialized policy.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Why Socialized Medicine will not work
Why Socialized Medicine will not work. BY Carter Clews Carter is the Executive Editor of ALG News
The primary reason medical costs are high is that subsidies are out of control.
The price patients pay for medical treatment does not reflect the actual cost of the procedure. Built into each bill is a substantial surcharge to help pay for the hospital’s overhead—which is sent through the ceiling because so many patients already fail to pay their own way.
Since there’s a limit to how much hospitals can add onto the cost of any given procedure, even the padded payments fail to cover the free riders’ exorbitant bills. And who makes up the difference? You guessed it: the American taxpayer. In fact, by some estimates, taxpayers are already paying some 85 percent of unpaid hospital bills.
For those who remain skeptical of the cost of subsidized—i.e., socialized—medicine, a quick glance at the average emergency room is in order. Public law now demands that emergency room treatment be administered regardless of whether the recipients can pay all—or, in fact, any—of the bill. The result of such misguided utopian altruism is that many “underprivileged” Americans now consider the ER their family doctor.
And who foots the bill for such outrageous abuse? Take a look in the nearest mirror.
So, now comes Barack Obama and his querulous gaggle of cloying quacks to tell us that the way to reduce medical costs is to increase subsidization—the facts of the matter (and the burgeoning deficit) notwithstanding. And when no one is any longer able to afford either subsidization or the true costs of actual treatments (on the rare occasions when they will still be available), well, there go the actuarial charts and in walks the Grim Reaper.
Actually, of course, the way to reduce medical costs is to end subsidization altogether. Does this mean that some people will not be able to go to the emergency room for a band aid or a bottle of aspirin? Probably. In fact, it may even mean that some people will not be able to charge others (as in, you) to cover the costs of their catastrophic illnesses.
But for most people, it will mean that America’s health care system will continue to be the best this side of Shangri-La. And it will also mean that, though nobody lives forever, those who are willing to work hard and pay their own way will have a fighting chance to top the charts. As fortunate as that may be.
The primary reason medical costs are high is that subsidies are out of control.
The price patients pay for medical treatment does not reflect the actual cost of the procedure. Built into each bill is a substantial surcharge to help pay for the hospital’s overhead—which is sent through the ceiling because so many patients already fail to pay their own way.
Since there’s a limit to how much hospitals can add onto the cost of any given procedure, even the padded payments fail to cover the free riders’ exorbitant bills. And who makes up the difference? You guessed it: the American taxpayer. In fact, by some estimates, taxpayers are already paying some 85 percent of unpaid hospital bills.
For those who remain skeptical of the cost of subsidized—i.e., socialized—medicine, a quick glance at the average emergency room is in order. Public law now demands that emergency room treatment be administered regardless of whether the recipients can pay all—or, in fact, any—of the bill. The result of such misguided utopian altruism is that many “underprivileged” Americans now consider the ER their family doctor.
And who foots the bill for such outrageous abuse? Take a look in the nearest mirror.
So, now comes Barack Obama and his querulous gaggle of cloying quacks to tell us that the way to reduce medical costs is to increase subsidization—the facts of the matter (and the burgeoning deficit) notwithstanding. And when no one is any longer able to afford either subsidization or the true costs of actual treatments (on the rare occasions when they will still be available), well, there go the actuarial charts and in walks the Grim Reaper.
Actually, of course, the way to reduce medical costs is to end subsidization altogether. Does this mean that some people will not be able to go to the emergency room for a band aid or a bottle of aspirin? Probably. In fact, it may even mean that some people will not be able to charge others (as in, you) to cover the costs of their catastrophic illnesses.
But for most people, it will mean that America’s health care system will continue to be the best this side of Shangri-La. And it will also mean that, though nobody lives forever, those who are willing to work hard and pay their own way will have a fighting chance to top the charts. As fortunate as that may be.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Last night Congress, whom maintains a 30% approval rating with the American people, passed a bill not supported by most of the people in the United States. $3.6 Trillion dollars in spending set forth to mostly entitlement programs and not toward the growth and prosperity of this country and it's citizens.
Again congress and the President have shown thier agenda is more important than what the citizens of our great nation desire.
We must stop this movement now. No matter your party affiliation, if you believe in what the United States is intended to stand for, if you believe in the principles of what our forefathers built this country on, stand up and stop this government from taking our country down a road we will not be able to return from.
We as a people are still in charge, but as Pelosi, Reed, Frank and OBAMA continue to take our Liberty away, tax our families to support an entitlement society, we will not have a voice much longer.
Join the cause, Unite to Keep the United States a country of, by and for the people, not of the government.
Remind Congress and OBAMA they work for us not the other way around.
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