What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[unregistered]

 

[bra_man69]

What's one-millionth of the success of a paper boy?

I have more money than you, lady f is a liar, and you're not really worth responding to, because you're a gossiping little beta male, like your pal veteman.

Does that answer your questions?

You can believe what you want you don't know my wealth.
Funny dick your responding to me:
Not gossiping asking you a question looks like it's true what vett said
Wait you going say he lies to?

 

[richard_daily]

You can believe what you want you don't know my wealth.
Funny dick your responding to me:
Not gossiping asking you a question looks like it's true what vett said
Wait you going say he lies to?

veteman lies every day...

 

[TexasWife25]

Please, no nitwittery, thanks.

FYI, the Ryan budget got 228 Republican votes, Omama's budget didn't one single Democrat vote in either house. So , it isn't the same thing, is it?

ok Vette, you've clearly already decided that Obamas budget was sooo bad that not even the most die hard liberal would support it. There couldn't possible be any other reason.

 

[mercury14]

Please, no nitwittery, thanks.

FYI, the Ryan budget got 228 Republican votes, Omama's budget didn't one single Democrat vote in either house. So , it isn't the same thing, is it?

It's the exact same thing. When the very first word of the very first page of the Ryan plan was written it was known by all to have no chance of passing.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

ok Vette, you've clearly already decided that Obamas budget was sooo bad that not even the most die hard liberal would support it. There couldn't possible be any other reason.

It got 415 no votes and zero yes votes...

Even Claire McCaskell is running a NOBama campaign.


And she was his poster girl in 2008.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

President Johnson invoked this principle of individually earned benefits in 1965 when he signed Medicare into law. (The new legislation amended the Social Security Act.) Through Medicare, he said, “every citizen will be able, in his productive years when he is earning, to insure himself against the ravages of illness in his old age.” He was to do so the same way workers were already paying for their old-age, survivor, and disability benefits — by contributing “through the Social Security program a small amount each payday for hospital-insurance protection.”

An American who warns an elected official to keep the government’s hands off a social-insurance program doesn’t misunderstand our welfare state but has grasped its central argument exactly as it has been presented. Social insurance, we have been told (and told and told), is a mechanism through which we insure ourselves against financial vulnerabilities. The benefits are ours because we paid for them in advance. They vary because the amount we paid for them varies. Having “contributed” our taxes, we insist on receiving our benefits, since we were assured that the former are just like insurance premiums, and the latter just like insurance settlements.

The “infantile denial” expressed by the woman who wrote to President Obama is nothing more than the demand for “the honest fulfillment of a contract between the citizen and the state.” Having discharged her contractual duties as the people who wrote the contract explained them, she resents the possibility that the government might, to her detriment, unilaterally revise its contractual obligations. Appelbaum and Gebeloff summarize the attitude of the Medicare recipients they interviewed: “They paid what they were told; they want to collect what they were promised.”

But the fulfillment of our social-insurance contracts has become a grave problem because the myth of social insurance cannot be reconciled with the reality, political and fiscal, of social welfare. The Times cites an Urban Institute study showing that the value of social-insurance benefits is typically a multiple of the value of social-insurance taxes. In one example, a woman born in 1965 earns a midrange salary during her working years and deposits her (and her employers’) Medicare withholding taxes into an account that compounds annually at the inflation rate plus 2 percent interest. That account would be worth $87,000 by the time she retired in 2030 at age 65. “But on average,” Appelbaum and Gebeloff report, “the government will then spend $275,000 on her medical care.”

Our welfare state is a system at war with itself. It offers us, in our capacity as beneficiaries of its programs, a terrific deal. Not only do we receive the material benefit of enormous windfalls on our “investments,” ones that entail no participation in any kind of capital formation and, therefore, never expose us to any risk of capital destruction. We also receive the moral benefit of strenuous reassurances, delivered over many decades, that our windfalls are not really windfalls because we’re merely getting back what we’ve paid for. And so we have no reason to think of ourselves as recipients of charity or dependents on welfare. We’re entitled to every last dollar of our benefits. They come to us as a matter of right.

What the welfare state offers us in our capacity as taxpayers supporting its programs, however, is a terrible deal. We are the ones who’ll have to cover the difference — $188,000 in the Urban Institute’s example — between what each American actually did pay in social-insurance taxes and the much larger amount he’s been told again and again he’s entitled to get “back.”

In the eight decades since the dawn of the New Deal, liberal politicians and intellectuals have tirelessly urged their countrymen to disregard all the evidence and common sense telling them to worry about this fiscal disparity. The most notorious example was the prediction of the economist Paul Samuelson in 1967 that our social-insurance programs could go on and on, paying each beneficiary far more than he had ever contributed, because of our “growing population” with “more youths than old folks,” and because “the national product is growing at a compound interest rate and can be expected to do so for as far ahead as the eye cannot see.”

Twenty-nine years later, altered economic and demographic prospects found even Paul Krugman conceding that Social Security was built to look like “an ordinary retirement plan,” where “what you get out depends on what you put in.” It has, in reality, “turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in.” The trends Samuelson thought eternal having proven transient, “the Ponzi game will soon be over.”

More recently, liberals have encouraged the belief that the high costs of Obamacare, the most dramatic expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society, will be offset by that law’s mechanisms for incorporating remarkable new efficiencies into our health-care system. Newly constituted groups of experts, in bodies including the Independent Payment Advisory Board and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, will, we are assured, discover ways to significantly reduce the long-term growth rate of health-care spending and preserve or enhance the quality of health care while never even considering any recommendation to “ration health care, increase Medicare premiums or cost-sharing, cut Medicare benefits, or restrict eligibility.”

One might reasonably suppose that if our federal health programs, the most important of which are nearly 50 years old, do indeed offer billions of dollars in potential savings that won’t have the slightest adverse impact on the quality of the health care we receive, this low-hanging fruit would have been harvested by now. Not only has it not been picked, however — it can’t even be named. Obamacare’s defenders exhort us to place the highest hopes in the discovery, just over the horizon, of marvelous new health-care efficiencies, but decline to provide examples of these painless improvements.

Moreover, Obamacare’s savings are more likely to be spent twice than realized even once. As Steven Rattner, a former adviser to the Obama Treasury Department, was honest enough to admit in a New York Times op-ed, the government is counting expected savings on Medicare against both the new benefits established by Obamacare and the old revenue shortfalls that were already baked into the Medicare cake.

The thread connecting all such efforts to banish fears about paying the bills we’re running up is the belief that we should be unapologetically militant about defending and enlarging our claims for benefits from the welfare state but serenely complacent about meeting our financial obligations to it. Something — economic growth, a permanently ample supply of young people, experts’ brilliant discoveries about getting more social-welfare bang from taxes that only rich people and big corporations will have to worry about — something will cover the gap between the welfare state’s debts to us and our debts to it. It is indisputable at this late date that liberals have been much more attentive to the political foundation of the welfare state than to its financial one. When hard choices or hard truths about the financial requirements of the welfare state would have compromised their efforts to gain and keep support for its programs, liberals have reliably done and said what is necessary to make social-welfare programs popular rather than what is necessary to make them solvent. These efforts have made the politics of curtailing the welfare state extremely challenging — just like the politics of adequately funding it.

The most direct way to ensure that the welfare state grows more popular as it grows more financially precarious is to extend its benefits to more and more people. Paul Starr, a Princeton sociologist and a co-founder of The American Prospect, explained the rationale in 1991. Liberalism’s domestic-policy objective “should be, above all, to eliminate poverty and maintain a minimum floor of decency to enable individuals to carry out their own life plans.” Though conservatives would interpret and apply the principle differently, it is consonant with Ronald Reagan’s insistence in 1980 that it is “essential” to maintain the “strength of the safety net beneath those in society who need help.” For Starr, however, it is urgent to broaden that agenda in order to fulfill it. Garnering and keeping the political support required to maintain a minimum floor of decency is part of liberalism’s “overall task of constructing democratic majorities. And that imperative will often mean support for programs that provide universal benefits to all groups, including the middle class as well as the poor.” This idea had occurred to the architects and supporters of the welfare state before 1991, of course. It is not by happenstance that, according to the Times’s summary of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, the percentage of federal safety-net outlays directed to Americans in the bottom quintile of income distribution “declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007.”

The political calculation to make more and more people eligible for more and more government benefits reinforces the administrative logic that constantly works to expand social programs. It will always be the case that households with an income one dollar too large for them to apply for a particular program will be barely distinguishable from the slightly less affluent families who do qualify. The logical response of the gatekeeping bureaucracy is to move the cutoff point to include those who just missed the last iteration. The families one dollar above the new cutoff point will, inevitably, be included after subsequent revisions.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/299463/magic-accounting-william-voegeli

 

[IrezumiKiss]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/299463/magic-accounting-william-voegeli

BOOKS NOT BLOGS

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17mrtwwkzawzrgif/original.gif

nnnghh...mnghhefff...greeeffghhhfffuh....

 

[busybody..]

NIGGER is here first thing in the AM to bullshit!

 

[IrezumiKiss]

^^^ (to the racist shitstain above me)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-F1X5OEkhsJ0/Tdv1E_63OrI/AAAAAAAACQA/h5Mfk-gdb8w/s1600/Little+Jewish+boys.jpg

WILL SOMEBODY THINK OF THE FUCKING CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

BOOKS NOT BLOGS

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17mrtwwkzawzrgif/original.gif

nnnghh...mnghhefff...greeeffghhhfffuh....

The same thing was said in:

The Limits of State Action, von Humboldt
Sophisms of the Protectionists, Bastiat
The Road to Serfdom, Hayek
Interventionism, von Mises
Political Economy, Say

But I don't as much refer to them knowing that the people I speak to here don't read books.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

… an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, rigid, far-seeing and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that.
Thus, taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

"We know that the number of government jobs has been increasing steadily, and that the number of applicants is increasing still more rapidly than the number of jobs. … Is this scourge about to come to an end? How can we believe it, when we see that public opinion itself wants to have everything done by that fictitious being, the state, which signifies a collection of salaried bureaucrats? … Very soon there will be two or three of these bureaucrats around every Frenchman, one to prevent him from working too much, another to give him an education, a third to furnish him credit, a fourth to interfere with his business transactions, etc., etc. Where will we be led by the illusion that impels us to believe that the state is a person who has an inexhaustible fortune independent of ours?
Frédéric Bastiat

"The more communal enterprise extends, the more attention is drawn to the bad business results of nationalized and municipalized undertakings. It is impossible to miss the cause of the difficulty: a child could see where something was lacking. So that it cannot be said that this problem has not been tackled. But the way in which it has been tackled has been deplorably inadequate. Its organic connection with the essential nature of socialist enterprise has been regarded as merely a question of better selection of persons. It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry."
Ludwig Heinrich Elder von Mises

We have already seen that the close interdependence of all economic phenomena makes it difficult to stop planning just where we wish and that, once the free working of the market is impeded beyond a certain degree, the planner will be forced to extend his control until they become all-comprehensive. These economic considerations, which explain why it is impossible to stop deliberate control just where we would wish, are strongly reinforced by certain social or political tendencies whose strength makes itself increasingly felt as planning extends.

Once it becomes increasingly true, and is generally recognized, that the position of the individual is determined not by impersonal forces, not as a result of the competitive efforts of many, but by the deliberate decision of authority; the attitude of the people towards their position in the social order necessarily changes. There will always exist inequalities which appear just to those who suffer, disappointments which will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortune which those hit have not deserved. But when these things occur in a society which is consciously directed, they way in which people will react will be very different from what it is when they are nobody's conscious choice.
From Who, Whom?
FA Hayek, Road to Serfdom, Chapter eight p. 137

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Ah, predictably, the Socialist Economic mentality...

Double down on failure.

U.S. Federal Reserve policymakers kept the door open to a fresh round of monetary stimulus, citing downside risks to a moderately expanding economy, according to minutes for the central bank's April meeting.

Several members of the Fed's policy-setting committee "indicated that additional monetary policy accommodation could be necessary if the economic recovery lost momentum or the downside risks to the forecast became great enough," minutes from the April 24-25 meeting said.

Minutes from the Fed's March meeting had said "a couple" members thought more stimulus might be needed.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/...r-open-to-more-stimulus-easing/#ixzz1v7btbF2a

THIS TIME, it will work...

That's why Greece and Italy want out of the Euro, so they kin git to sum inflatin'!!!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

For Izzy

Republicans may bridle at these insults, or we may laugh. But we are chumps when we don't take insults seriously. Slander provides the Democrats with a huge electoral advantage. Many centrist voters, though not radical or loony themselves, have come to believe these libels against Republicans as commonsense, evident truths. Since they can't possibly see themselves as one of those Awful Republicans, they won't abandon Obama no matter how miserable they are with Obama's performance. The economy, a nuclear Iran, rising gas prices -- it doesn't matter. It would be tantamount to selling their vote to a party of greedy, women-hating, violent, racist people. Who are also stupid.

When I discuss politics with moderate Democrats who are unhappy, even very unhappy, with Obama, I also hear how they will never vote Republican. So I ask what is most important to them about voting Democrat. The answer is often moral: their desire to take care of the needy and homeless, the belief that "I am my brother's keeper." In the last few weeks, I got a number of phone calls from Democrat friends who don't follow the news closely -- one was agitated over the Republican War on Women; the other was upset by the Trayvon Martin shooting. Democrat libel works. Republicans don't have misguided policies to help people that won't work; we have evil intentions. We're against everyone but the rich, and most of us are too stupid to know it.

These unhappy Democrat voters are not well-informed and don't have the motivation to change. They rely on network TV, the New York Times, NPR, their spouses and friends whom they trust and respect. Part of their self-esteem and identity as good people is based on their superiority to Republicans. They belong to the party of the kind, the intelligent, the enlightened -- why would they look into the arguments of the opposing side, the rich, the religious nuts, racists and rednecks? That's not their group.

They are not deciding on the merits of our competing visions of America. They don't necessarily want a Big Brother nanny-state government, but they don't want to abandon the poor and elderly. They don't necessarily want race-based affirmative action laws, but they don't want to be racist. They're concerned about the budget deficit, but they trust Democrat assurances that we can spend our way out of debt, if only the Republicans weren't the party of the rich. They're not necessarily against lower taxes or school choice or Social Security reform -- but they never hear our side of those arguments....

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012...racist_redneck_republicans.html#ixzz1v7dawpvl


http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/assets/Bill%20Maher.jpg

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Ah, predictably, the Socialist Economic mentality...

Double down on failure.


Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/...r-open-to-more-stimulus-easing/#ixzz1v7btbF2a

THIS TIME, it will work...

That's why Greece and Italy want out of the Euro, so they kin git to sum inflatin'!!!

Doom! DOOM!

Meanwhile in the RealWorld™..


WASHINGTON — Like a mantra, officials from both the Bush and Obama administrations have trumpeted how the government’s sweeping interventions to prop up the economy since 2008 helped avert a second Depression.

Now, two leading economists wielding complex quantitative models say that assertion can be empirically proved.

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation.

The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years.

“While the effectiveness of any individual element certainly can be debated, there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective,” they write.
[...]

“When all is said and done, the financial and fiscal policies will have cost taxpayers a substantial sum, but not nearly as much as most had feared and not nearly as much as if policy makers had not acted at all,” they write.



More reality here.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

That's a version of their reality.

Unless of course you wish to dive into that good fallacy that "all economists..."

After all, Zandi missed the housing bubble and may be missing the education bubble.

Of course, the only thing we know is what was done, government intervention, we can never know or correctly ascertain that which would of come about had we let the markets actually correct themselves instead of perpetually trying to accelerate the future into the present. So go ahead and keep posting model-based reports that "prove" government intervention actually works; it's the sort of thing the Socialists are doing in Greece, Italy, France and Spain with glee and to the cheering of Krugman and Obama's calls for some "ME-TOOism" even as some here are dedicated to proving that he is not a Socialist.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Eventually, all this "stimulus" has to be paid for...

California's economy, with a Gross State Product of about $1.9 trillion, is more than six times the size of Greece's. At $90 billion, the state's budget (excluding the few hundred billion dollars of federal money distributed there) is only sixty percent of the size of Greece's national budget. But, California's budget deficit, estimated at $16 billion for the current fiscal year unless substantial changes are made, represents a stunning 17.5 percent shortfall and a huge miss from January predictions of a $9.2 billion deficit. Greece is now anticipating a deficit under 7 percent of GDP, but even allowing for typical politician optimism, the Greek deficit problem is arguably small compared to California's.

While both places are full of union members and socialists (pardon my redundancy) focused on preventing cuts in government spending, California does have one advantage: it is not full of people who make a full-time job of tax evasion as is the case in Greece. According to a fascinating article on the subject, "the gap between what Greek taxpayers owed last year and what they paid was about a third of total tax revenue, roughly the size of the country's budget deficit."

California Governor Jerry Brown is proposing certain spending cuts (including cuts to higher education and to programs for the poor) and tax increases (a massive income tax rate hike -- from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent on those earning over $250,000 -- and a 0.25 cent increase in the state's sales tax.) Even so, his budget calls for a more than 5 percent increase in state spending, including a 16 percent increase to public school spending, over the prior fiscal year, giving a new meaning to "austerity" and emphasizing the power of teachers unions over Democrats.

California, like Greece, and most western nations' governments, has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. One example: The state has one eighth of the nation's population but one third of its welfare recipients -- in part because, according to Business Week, "it is one of the few states that continue to provide welfare checks for children once their parents are no longer eligible."

Brown is taking the tax hike part of his plan directly to voters, using the typical Democrat threat of cuts to public education if the hikes are not passed. It's time to call his bluff, at least if California wants to stop hemorrhaging people, jobs, and talent.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, demographer Joel Kotkin discussed "The Great California Exodus": "Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving…. [M]ost of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45." (California's population has grown in the past twenty years, but the growth is due entirely to the arrival of immigrants and the birth of children.)

One reason for the mass departure of the Golden State's American-born adults who are entering the prime of their working (and tax-paying) ages is the state's cap-and-trade law and other regulations that raise energy prices: Electricity prices in California are about 50 percent higher than the national average, although nine states have even higher prices. This, along with bubblicious real estate prices, made California the most expensive of the 48 contiguous United States in a 2011 CNBC cost-of-living analysis. Only one of the contiguous 48, New York, has a higher cost of doing business, and no state in the nation ranks worse than California in "business friendliness."

But perhaps the key factor in California's dwindling population of productive citizens is taxes: The current top state income tax bracket is the second highest in the nation (behind Hawaii, which is somewhat harder to move away from), and Brown wants to give it the dubious honor of taking the lead in that category.

What's arguably worse is that California's tax rates brutalize the middle class: Individuals making between $37,005 and $46,766 pay an 8 percent state income tax. Only six states and the District of Columbia have a maximum tax rate higher than 8 percent, but that is the burden on someone making only $40,000 in California -- a place where $40,000 doesn't go very far towards ordinary costs of living.

And from $46,766 to $1,000,000 of income, the California state tax rate is 9.3 percent.

Only two states, Hawaii and Oregon, have tax rates higher than that paid by someone earning $50,000 in California: Oregon's 9.9 percent rate kicks in at $125,000 of income and in Hawaii a 10 percent rate starts at 175,000 of income with an 11 percent success penalty (no, it's not officially called that) above $300,000.

California doesn't just soak the rich; is an equal-opportunity pillager. And this is why it is losing the productive part of its population at a stunning pace. Yet Jerry Brown seems not to recognize that his prescribed medicine is the very poison decimating his state.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/05/17/our-very-own-greece

It's not magic. It's either inflation of taxes and you won't get your money back by taxing the rich.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Just a little more on the Economics of Interventionism:

At 11 percent, California has the third highest unemployment rate in the nation, behind only Nevada (12 percent) and Rhode Island (11.1 percent). The budget is a mess, and Governor Brown is proposing to address the problem with a method -- raising taxes -- that has already been tried and failed (unlike in New Jersey, where Republican Governor Chris Christie has balanced its budget without raising taxes). As the Wall Street Journal noted, California's tax receipts are more than 20 percent below prior projections while "state tax collections were up nationally by 8.9% last year…and this year revenues are up by double digits in many states." It's no wonder the Navajo Nation has a higher bond rating than the once-great state of California.

So JPMorgan makes a $2 billion mistake -- less than 7 percent of their 2011 earnings -- with their own money, and senators are calling for hearings. The California's governor's office raised its 2012 budget deficit projections -- namely their overspending of public money -- almost 50 percent, from $9.2 billion to $16 billion, an error of almost eight percent of the state's total budget, in four months, yet those same members of Congress remain as silent as a Trappist monk.

The California budget mess is playing out in the news today. It will be a difficult fight for economic rationality in a state that has largely accepted, to quote Arthur Brooks, European-style "learned helplessness" instead of the historically American goal of "earned success."

That's a book you might actually want to read...

Then try "Human Action."

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

There's a coming fiscal cliff at the end of the year. The expiration of the Bush tax cuts coupled with the across-the-board spending cuts from last summer's debt ceiling deal and another hit to the debt ceiling mean that on January 1, 2013, the United States will undergo severe measure of austerity if legislators don't act.

Democrats are already accusing Republicans of brinkmanship. Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that the Republicans are engaging in obstruction by proposing that a debt ceiling increase be tied to deficit reduction. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, however, knows that it's the Democrats who need a warning about political gamesmanship.

Taxes will increase by an estimated $5 trillion over the next decade if Congress does not extend expiring law by Dec. 31. The nation also faces an automatic $1.2 trillion spending cut and the expiration of the payroll tax holiday and benefits for the unemployed.
Bernanke warned Democrats at a lunch meeting that the combined effect would have severely damaging consequences for the recovering economy.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2012/05/16/bernanke_warns_democrats_on_budget_brinksmanship

 

[JohnnySavage]

The Constitution mandates that he submit a budget. It doesn't mean that congress has to pass it or even take it up. Dems didn't vote for it because there's no reason to. Politically they're far better off not voting for deficit spending and instead letting the Republicans continue to float the shameful Ryan plan which just puts bulls-eyes on their backs.

It's all just political games. The Ryan budget is part of the same game in case you want to engage in a little political self-reflection.

Link?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

It's not often that I agree with Ann, but she is getting to part of the problem as to why under Obama and the Democrats, this economy is now the new norm...

Sacrificial Scams
By Ann Coulter
5/16/2012

The real class warfare in this country isn't rich vs. poor, it's government employees vs. we, the taxpayers, who pay their salaries.
Working for the government is supposed to be a trade-off: You can't be fired and don't have to exert yourself, but you will receive smaller remuneration than in the private sector, where layoffs are common (especially in the Obama economy!). Instead, government jobs are safe, secure, pressure-free -- and now, amazingly lucrative!

Whether it's in Wisconsin, Illinois, California or the nation's capital, today's public sector workers expect to do little or no work (I'm not counting partying in Las Vegas as "work"), and then be lavishly compensated. Often, the only heavy lifting they do all week is picking up their paychecks.

When government employees mobbed the state capitol in Wisconsin last year, the upside was: They got to bully people. The downside: Voters finally found out what these public servants were being paid.

Their compensation included not only straight salary, but also lavish overtime benefits, pensions, health care plans, sick days and vacation time (most of which they spent protesting).

The unions thought they could fight back against Gov. Scott Walker's tiny rollbacks without anyone finding out the details. Most people saw what public employees were getting and assumed it was a misprint.

Two years ago, seven bus drivers in Madison, Wis., made more than $100,000 a year.

A few years before that, we found out that the city manager of little Bell, Calif. -- per capita annual income $24,800 -- was making $787,637, or including benefits: $1.5 million a year. The chief of police was getting $457,000 a year -- $770,046 counting benefits -- making him the first chief of police to commit highway robbery on the job. The assistant city manager was taking home $376,288 per year, for a total compensation package of $845,960.

All were Democrats, the party of Big Government.

Speaking of which -- whatever happened to that investigation Gov. Jerry Brown was launching into these thieving public servants drawing million-dollar pensions from California taxpayers? The Bell scandal broke during the California gubernatorial race between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown, who was then state attorney general. Brown vowed a no-holds-barred inquiry.

Anyone seen his report yet?

Jerry Brown will demand to see Obama's birth certificate before he will call for a rollback of these undeserved, million-dollar government pensions.

Less than 20 percent of private sector employees get pensions. Most people save their own money for retirement -- for example, through 401(k)s. By contrast, government employees expect to be paid by us for the rest of their lives.

Former representative and amateur home pornographer Anthony Weiner was a member of Congress until he resigned last June in order to spend more time with his hard drive. He will probably end up collecting about a million dollars from his 80 percent taxpayer-funded government pension.

These are the "1 percent" deserving of the public's wrath: We're paying their salaries. We weren't taxed to pay Mitt Romney's salary at Bain Capital. We aren't taxed to pay the salaries of Jamie Dimon or Alex Rodriguez. Anthony Weiner? Him, we pay for.

Government employees expect to live like something out of the czar's court -- and then have us admire them as if they're Rosa Parks.

At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Barack and Michelle Obama both paid heartfelt tributes to themselves for passing up money-grubbing private sector jobs to work in "public service."

In her speech, Michelle boasted that she had "tried to give back to this country."

"... That's why I left a job at a law firm for a career in public service, working to empower young people to volunteer in their communities."

She was hired by the University of Chicago Hospital as soon as her husband became a state senator. When he was elected to the U.S. Senate, her salary nearly tripled, from $121,910 to $316,962 -- and the junior senator from Illinois returned the favor by sending taxpayer dollars the hospital's way.

By Obama's second year in the U.S. Senate, in 2006, Michelle Obama's compensation from "public service" was approximately $375,000 a year -- more than triple the average salary for a lawyer in the United States with 20 years' experience.

(America to the Obamas: "You two have sacrificed enough. Please retire and kick back a little!")

Vice President Joe Biden, long touted as the poorest U.S. senator, took home $248,459 in household income in 2006, including his public school teacher wife's salary, also paid by taxpayers. In 2007, these working poor made $319,853. This puts the couple nearly into the top 1 percent of all earners in the U.S., where the median household income was $48,201 in 2006 and $50,233 in 2007.

A career in "public service" pays well.

http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2012/05/16/sacrificial_scams/page/full/

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Link?

Interesting point...

 

[JohnnySavage]

Interesting point...

I blame Harding.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I blame Harding.

Well, sir, you will have to make the case for me since my animus is more aimed at Mr. Jackson...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Obama Stratagem!

The newly elected French Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is warning Germany that Mediterranean ideas of "growth," not Germanic "austerity," should be the new European creed. No surprise there -- reckless debtors often blame their own past imprudence on greedy creditors, especially if the latter are supposed to be guilt-ridden over causing two world wars.

All over Europe, the gospel is that tight-fisted Germans are at the root of the European Union meltdown: They worked too hard, saved too much, bought too little and borrowed not at all. All that may be true, in theory. But, in fact, faulting thrift and industry is a prescription for incurring anger and guaranteeing backlash -- especially in the case of the Germans, who are now asked to provide even more capital to help other European economies to recover.

There is one general rule about the history of the modern state of Germany since its inception in 1871: Anytime Germany has been both unified and isolated, armed conflict has inevitably followed.

Victor Davis Hanson
Townhall.com