Category Archives: Cutting the Budget

Welfare, Corporate Payoffs and Pork.

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Today’s blog title would imply democrat policies. You’d be wrong. It refers to the GOP’s House Farm Bill championed by Speaker John Boehner and our own Vicky Hartzler.

Both the Senate democrats and House ‘Pubs have Farm Bills. The Senate rammed theirs past GOp opposition and brags they’ve cut the $1Trillion bill to $500Billion. The House GOP claims their version has cut more.

The crux is SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. What is SNAP? Food stamps. SNAP is 80% of the cost of the Farm Bill. The supporters of the House version brag they’ve cut the Food Stamp (SNAP) program as well. How much? Three percent. Three lousy percent.

The dems and ‘Pubs are wrangling over—not the actual farm and agricultural portions of the bill, small that they are. No, they’re fighting over SNAP! If SNAP is so critical, it should be removed from the Farm Bill and stand for itself.

Some have advocated a change, one that I can accept IF food stamps are really necessary, is to convert the entire program to block grants and let the states create their own version of food/welfare assistance. In blue states, the money would line democrat pols pocket. Oh well, the blue staters get the government they vote for.

For the moment, dems and ‘Pubs are apparently in a race to see who can waste more of our tax money.

Farm bill cuts judged both too much, not enough

By Tom Howell Jr. – The Washington Times, Monday, June 17, 2013

A year after they failed to pass a farm bill and suffered for it in several big congressional races, House Republicans think they’ve finally got the right balance to fund agricultural programs while weaning more Americans off food stamp benefits.

Speaker John A. Boehner has thrown his weight behind bringing this year’s bill to the chamber floor, and debate kicks off on Tuesday.

But House GOP leaders will have to bridge divides within the GOP, and may have to count on getting Democratic votes for passage. The Senate, led by Democrats, passed its own version last week.

Both the Senate and House bills would end direct payments to farmers in favor of more extensive crop insurance programs.

But the sheer size of spending contained in the bills — particularly on food stamps, which takes up 80 percent of the Senate’s five-year, $500 billion farm bill — could become a sticking point during the House debate.

“The bill should be rejected outright for its price tag and its expansion of the government’s outsized and outdated role in American agriculture,” Stephen Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Monday.

The Senate passed a farm bill last week that cuts the food-stamp program — now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — by about $400 million a year, or half a percent.

But the House version goes further, cutting SNAP benefits by $2 billion a year, or a little more than 3 percent, and making it more difficult for some people to qualify.

Now, isn’t that great. $1Trillion of waste and the dems brag they cut $400 million, or one-half of a percent while the ‘Pubs brag they’ve cut three percent.

Some GOP lawmakers say that’s still not enough, while House Democrats argue that low-income families cannot absorb the cuts. As of Monday, 134 of them had co-sponsored a resolution that asks members to reject any legislation that reduces food stamp benefits.

…

House Agriculture Chairman Frank D. Lucas, Oklahoma Republican, who shepherded the House bill through his committee in May, noted that “no other committee in Congress is voluntarily cutting money, in a bipartisan way.”

Rep. Collin C. Peterson, Minnesota Democrat and the ranking minority agriculture committee member, said “it is past time to get this bill done.”

But Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group, said Monday it will launch an advertising blitz in a bipartisan slate of 15 congressional districts, including Mr. Boehner‘s, that takes aim at the House bill. The group says the bill is bloated by food-stamp spending and that “well-connected corporations” will get the rest of the funds.

Last year, Mr. Boehner declined to bring a farm bill to the House floor to avoid a nasty intraparty fight ahead of the November elections, as farm state Republicans pushed for crop subsidies while other GOP conservatives demanded widespread cuts. — Washington Times.

The establishment ‘Pubs who support this welfare bill shouldn’t be concerned what their dem congressional friends think of the Food Stamp Welfare bill. No, they should be more concerned what their constituents think. The next congressional primary is only a year away. Pubbies, vote for this and I can guarantee you’ll have primary opposition next year. I’m already hearing increasing rumbles of discontent.
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Boehner’s Folly

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I titled this post, “Boehner’s Folly.”  I can’t publicly speak my real opinion on this monstrosity.  The only winners were the dems.  Let’s examine what they gained.

  1.  More spending.  They can now float loans for another $2.5 Trillion dollars.
  2.  The debt crisis has been postponed until 2012—after the 2012 elections that Obama wanted.  When the economy tanks further, he can blame Boehner, McConnell and the ‘Pubs for the 2nd recession. Many economist believe we’re already in that second recession and now the dems can rightly blame the ‘pubs.
  3. Likely more taxes when the Bush Tax Rate cuts expire.  Why will they expire?  We lost our leverage.  Now the bottom rate will increase by 50% from the current 10% to 15%.  The top rate will increase from 35% to 39%.  And, 50% of the country will still pay no taxes.
  4. No cut in the debt.  It will still increase by another $6Trillion dollars over 10 years to nearly $20Trillion. Any cuts were just a reduction of the rate of INCREASED spending.
  5. The US credit rating will still fall because of the continued wild spending and higher debt. Some international sources have already reduced our rating to A-.
  6. Any spending reductions will be heavily laid on the DoD and other security organizations.
  7. No Balanced Budget Amendment.  Oh, there may be a vote in the House.  It’ll end there. Reid will kill it in the Senate.  A previous version of the bill required a Balanced Budget Amendment.
(For more info on the bill, go here.)

This was the largest debt increase in the history of the country.  Every Representative who voted for this…uhmmm…(I can’t find a word that fits in polite company), should be replaced in the 2012 primaries.  None of them can be trusted.  That also applies for any ‘Pub in the Senate who vote for it as well.

I’m so disgusted with the establishment republicans in Washington that I just want to spit!

Follies from Jackass Bend on the Potomac

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I’ve been screening the headlines since Friday.  Obama set a deadline for raising the debt limit.  The House passed a bill to raise the debt limit.  It also contained a Constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget. That item is known as Cut, Cap and Balance.

The House and Senate dems screeched and declared it dead.  BO said that 80% of Americans want taxes increases.

Well the first may be true.  As long as the dems hold the majority of the Senate and toe the party line, the House bill will die.  The second however is another Obama lie. 

Editorial: No, Americans Don’t Want Higher Taxes

 Posted 07/15/2011 06:57 PM ET
Budget: Four of five Americans are “sold” on higher taxes to solve the deficit impasse, according to President Obama. Either he’s deceiving himself or he completely misunderstands how the public really feels.
The president on Thursday cited a recent Gallup poll that purportedly shows, in his words, “80% want higher taxes” as part of a deal to slash the deficit. “The American people are sold,” he said. “The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically.”
In fact, a quick look at the polling data referenced by the president shows this isn’t true. Not even close.
Gallup itself breaks it out: Those who say they want the deficit reduced “only/mostly with spending cuts” total 50% of those polled. Those who say they’d like it done “only/mostly with tax increases” total 11%. That’s not 80%.
Americans aren’t fools. Democrats just think they are. Whether its a $4 trillion “grand bargain” or a smaller $2.4 trillion cut in the expected $10 trillion in deficits over the next decade, if tax hikes are part of the deal it will sink the economy. Tax hikes are a nonstarter.
Americans see the explosion of $1 trillion-plus deficits stretching for decades to come, $107 trillion in unpaid bills for entitlements and a failed two-year Keynesian experiment that has pushed up federal spending by 25%. They know taxes didn’t do this — spending did.
That’s why Republicans should ignore Obama’s demand for tax hikes. In our own IBD/TIPP Poll, 60% of Americans said they’d be “less likely” to vote for someone who supports increasing the debt ceiling without “major spending cuts.” Heck, 58% said they either “somewhat” or “strongly” oppose raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling at all.
In our June poll, 74% of Americans opposed tax hikes as a way of getting out of our economic mess, while 80% also opposed more government spending.

I think BO is a pathological liar. He lies when there is no need. But, be that as it may, I’m not confident the ‘Pubs have the moral fortitude to stand firm.

There is no need to raise the debt limit.  As has been documented here, there is sufficient continuing income to service our debt, SS, Medicare, Veterans and the Military.

Other government spending, however, would be affected.  But, if the administration chooses wisely—more likely forced by Congress, there is a plethora of discretionary spending that can be blocked. 

The Heritage Foundation has a proposal to cut $343 Billion from the budget.  It’d be a good start.
 

Table 1: Spending Cuts for FY 2012
(in millions of dollars)
Agriculture
$15,000
 Replace farm subsidies with Farmer Savings Accounts and improved crop insurance.
$2,033
 Eliminate the Foreign Agriculture Service.
$1,500
 Merge all four agriculture outreach and research agencies and cut their budget in half.
$1,000
 Fund the Food Safety and Inspection Service with user fees.
Commerce
$500
 Eliminate business subsidies from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Community Development
$6,000
 Eliminate the Community Development Block Grant program.
$598
 Eliminate the Rural Utilities Service.
$523
 Eliminate the Economic Development Administration.
$480
 Eliminate NeighborWorks America (formerly the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation).
$200
 Consolidate the Rural Housing and Development Programs and convert them into block grants.
$73
 Eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission.
$48
 Eliminate the Denali Commission.
$31
 Eliminate the Minority Development Business Agency.
$8
 Eliminate the Delta Regional Authority.
Education
$8,000
 Return Pell Grants to their 2009 funding level of $24 billion, which is still double the 2007 level.
$2,000
 Trim Head Start by $2 billion and convert it into vouchers.
$2,000
 Scale back the Education Department bureaucracy.
$1,500
 Eliminate dozens of small and duplicative education grants.
$298
 Eliminate state grants for Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities.
Energy and the Environment
$6,500
 Reduce energy subsidies for commercialization and some research activities.
$600
 Block grant and devolve Environmental Protection Agency grant programs.
$200
 Restructure the Power Marketing Administrations to charge market-based rates.
$63
 Eliminate the Science to Achieve Results Program.
Government Reform
$44,000
 Halve federal program payment errors by 2012, especially by reducing Medicare errors and earned income tax credit errors.
Tighten oversight by spending $5 billion on new resources, such as updated computer systems, and then recover $49 billion in payment errors.
$20,000
 Rescind unobligated balances after 36 months.
$12,500
 Halve the $25 billion spent to maintain vacant federal properties.
$10,000
 Cut the federal employee travel budget to $4 billion (half of FY 2000 spending).
$3,000
 Freeze federal pay until it can be reformed.
$1,000
 Suspend acquisition of federal office space.
$600
 Trim the federal vehicle fleet by 20 percent (a reduction of 100,000 vehicles).
$300
 Cut the House and Senate budgets back to the 2008 level of $2.2 billion.
$215
 Eliminate the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.
$100
 Tighten controls on federal employee credit cards and cut down on delinquencies.
$70
 Require federal employees to fly coach on domestic flights.
Health Care
$6,200
 Reform Medigap.
$5,000
 Repeal Obamacare (larger savings in later years).
$3,700
 Require Medicare home health co-payments.
$673
 Eliminate the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant.
$414
 Eliminate Health Professions grants.
$327
 Eliminate Title X Family Planning.
$150
 Eliminate the National Health Service Corps.
$98
 Repeal Rural Health Outreach and Flexibility grants.
Homeland Security
$2,700
 Eliminate most homeland security grants to states and allow states to finance their own programs.
Income Security
$500
 Better enforce eligibility requirements for food stamps.
Interior
$1,500
 Open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to leasing.
(The savings are leasing revenues, which are classified as negative spending in the federal budget.)
$200
 Suspend federal land purchases.
International
$2,636
 Eliminate the Development Assistance Program.
$625
 Eliminate the State Department’s education and cultural exchange programs.
$321
 Eliminate the International Trade Administration’s trade promotion activities or charge the beneficiaries.
$183
 Eliminate the Democracy Fund.
$68
 Eliminate the International Trade Commission and transfer oversight of intellectual property rights to the Treasury Department.
$56
 Eliminate the Trade and Development Agency.
$29
 Eliminate the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
$19
 Eliminate the East–West Center.
$17
 Eliminate the United States Institute of Peace.
$2
 Eliminate the Japan–United States Friendship Commission.
Justice
$7,334
 Eliminate all Justice Department grants except those from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute of Justice,
thereby empowering states to finance their own justice programs.
$398
 Eliminate the Legal Services Corporation.
$32
 Eliminate the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service.
$30
 Eliminate the duplicative Office of National Drug Control Policy.
$26
 Reduce funding for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by 20 percent
because of its policy against race-neutral enforcement of the law.
$4
 Eliminate the State Justice Institute.
Labor
$4,300
 Eliminate failed federal job training programs.
$2,000
 Eliminate the ineffective Job Corps.
$576
 Eliminate the Senior Community Service Employment Program.
National Science Foundation
$1,700
 Reduce National Science Foundation funding to 2008 levels.
$86
 Eliminate National Science Foundation spending on elementary and secondary education.
Transportation
$45,000
 Devolve the federal highway program and most transit spending to the states.
$1,900
 Privatize Amtrak.
$1,009
 Eliminate grants to large and medium-sized hub airports.
$554
 Eliminate the Maritime Administration.
$125
 Eliminate the Essential Air Service Program.
Treasury
$26,646
 Eliminate the additional child refundable credit.
$103
 Eliminate the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
Veterans
$2,500
 Cap increases in Department of Veterans Affairs health care spending.
$1,930
 Reduce Veterans’ Disability Compensation to account for Social Security Disability Insurance payments.
Cross-Agency and Other
$60,000
 Repeal unspent stimulus spending.
$8,000
 Switch to using the “Superlative CPI” in funding calculations.
$6,000
 Repeal the Davis–Bacon Act.
$2,250
 Eliminate Federal Communications Commission funding for school Internet service.
$2,000
 Ban project labor agreements on all federally funded construction projects.
$1,000
 Eliminate the Small Business Administration, which unnecessarily intervenes in free markets.
$736
 Eliminate the National Community Service programs, such as AmeriCorps.
$253
 Eliminate the Institute of Museum Services and Library Services.
$140
 Eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities.
$133
 Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.
$61
 Eliminate Army Corps of Engineers funding for beach replenishment projects.
$10
 Eliminate the Commission of Fine Arts.
$8
 Eliminate the National Capital Planning Commission.
$5
 Eliminate the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
Total
$343,207 million

Like I said, it’s a good start…but it’s just the start.                   

Monday’s Moments

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Because of the big Blogger hiccup last week, I’ve a bit of a backlog of items I’d saved for posts. Today, I’ll cover a few of them while they’re still fresh.

***

Budgets. It’s that time of year again. The Feddies just skipped the whole thing. The dems spoke meanly to Boehner and he rolled over and got the House to pass a Continuing Resolution until next Fall. In return he got a measly $352Million in cuts. Cuts? No, not really. It turned out to be a reduction in the amount of increase.

Missouri, fortunately, has a Constitutional requirement for a balanced budget. One line item cut was to MODOT, slashing their budget by half. That’s OK. MODOT has been spending like a, well, like a democrat for years. In addition to cutting the budget, the MODOT hierarchy needs to go as well.

Kansas passed one too. It wasn’t as good as Missouri’s. In fact, it had more spending and some of the freshman ‘Pub legislators voted against it because of the few, if any, cuts in the budget.

Rep. John Rubin, a Republican from Shawnee said he promised constituents to cut state spending last fall.

“I’m a fiscal conservative. I campaigned very hard to get Topeka to control the growth of state government and rein in irresponsible state spending we’ve been engaged in particularly over the last 8 years,” Rubin said. “I encourage the governor to liberally use his line item vetoes on many of the items in this budget.” — Kansas Watchdog.Org

It’s strange how governments, from the local level up to the Feds, are unable to curtail spending. Large businesses don’t have this problem. Business must control costs and revenue in order to stay in existence. How? They use a zero-based budget.
Noun

  1. (management) A budget developed disregarding the expenses or costs of the prior year, requiring explicit justification for all expenditures. — Wiki

What this means is that each budget item—including salaries and benefits, must be justified each year. The entire cost must be justified, not just the amount of increase. Costs must be balanced against income. Business can’t arbitrarily increase their income by fiat, i.e., taxes. Business must provide goods or services that people want and unlike government, business can’t force people to buy your product—except for Obamacare.

When I was employed by Sprint, my department went through a budget exercise every year. We proposed projects, detailed costs (and we were later held to that cost limit), and we had to include the amount of project revenue the project would bring to the company or how much revenue would be retained by the project or how much revenue would be lost if we didn’t do the project. Even infrastructure improvements had to be justified.

That is not how government is run. Justification, for the most part isn’t considered and when it is, much of the supporting data is subjective rather than objective.

I’ve had people tell me it was impossible for government to be held to a zero-based budget because “government projects run longer than a year.” Well, so do business projects.

Business, constantly monitors costs. When I was managing a project, I had a cost/expense review with higher management every week. Not only did I have to account for every penny that was spent, I had to project future costs on a monthly (and sometimes weekly) basis through the end of the project. Heaven help me if an expense was booked in the wrong month.

There is absolutely no reason why government cannot be held to the same standard. There are a number of reasons why government would fight such a move. Primarily, it would expose the internal activities of the bureaucracy and entrenched managers. They would lose their autonomy and suddenly be directly answerable to our elected officials and to voters.

It’s time for a change. It’s time for an accounting and methodology change in government. It’s workable and it will control costs and streamline government.

***

Something wonderful happened last week. I doubt if you heard about from the MSM, FOX excepted. Some college students at LSU prevented a flag burning by some liberal radicals.

LSU protesters stop planned flag burning

Published: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 12:04 PM Updated: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 12:12 PM
A planned American flag burning at LSU ended before it started when about 1,000 LSU students and other protesters forced police to intervene.

LSU graduate student Benjamin Haas had originally planned to burn an American flag Wednesday to promote his First Amendment rights and to support an LSU student arrested last week for stealing and burning a flag.
When Haas finally arrived to a chaotic scene, he was surrounded by a large crowd yelling obscenities and chanting, “U-S-A” and “Go to hell hippie, go to hell.”
Water balloons and bottles were thrown at him and, before Haas could speak, horse-mounted police escorted him out for his own safety to a police car on Highland Road as the crowd followed and he was driven off.

Good on ya, LSU! There more at the website.

***



Some of us remember the Sixties when war protesters chanted “What if the military had to rely on bake sales for money?” Well, it seems the UK just found out what happens and you need a vital military asset—you borrow from the US.

Buddy, can you spare a spy plane?

We’re forced to BORROW one from U.S.

COST-CUTTING Britain has been forced to go cap in hand to borrow a US spy plane to protect our ships in Libya.

Top Brass had to ask for help after last year’s controversial decision to axe Nimrods left the UK with NO airborne maritime surveillance capability.
A US Navy P-3 Orion is now keeping watch over HMS Liverpool, mine hunter HMS Brocklesby and nuclear sub HMS Triumph. It has a US crew and is making regular sweeps off Mad Dog Gaddafi’s coast. It will provide information on potential threats to the three vessels.
A source said: “It’s all deeply embarrassing, but we can’t have our guys with no protection so we have to rely on others.”
The new Nimrods were scrapped in the Strategic Defence and Security Review. Ministers claimed the decision would save roughly £2billion but military figures blasted the move.
Nimrod…scrapped.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/3581998/UK-forced-to-borrow-spy-plane-from-US.html#ixzz1MWrmCr7B

The Brits had to barrow some P-3 Orions from the US Navy to watch over their ships.

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Monday’s Moments

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Because of the big Blogger hiccup last week, I’ve a bit of a backlog of items I’d saved for posts. Today, I’ll cover a few of them while they’re still fresh.

***

Budgets. It’s that time of year again. The Feddies just skipped the whole thing. The dems spoke meanly to Boehner and he rolled over and got the House to pass a Continuing Resolution until next Fall. In return he got a measly $352Million in cuts. Cuts? No, not really. It turned out to be a reduction in the amount of increase.

Missouri, fortunately, has a Constitutional requirement for a balanced budget. One line item cut was to MODOT, slashing their budget by half. That’s OK. MODOT has been spending like a, well, like a democrat for years. In addition to cutting the budget, the MODOT hierarchy needs to go as well.

Kansas passed one too. It wasn’t as good as Missouri’s. In fact, it had more spending and some of the freshman ‘Pub legislators voted against it because of the few, if any, cuts in the budget.

Rep. John Rubin, a Republican from Shawnee said he promised constituents to cut state spending last fall.

“I’m a fiscal conservative. I campaigned very hard to get Topeka to control the growth of state government and rein in irresponsible state spending we’ve been engaged in particularly over the last 8 years,” Rubin said. “I encourage the governor to liberally use his line item vetoes on many of the items in this budget.” — Kansas Watchdog.Org

It’s strange how governments, from the local level up to the Feds, are unable to curtail spending. Large businesses don’t have this problem. Business must control costs and revenue in order to stay in existence. How? They use a zero-based budget.
Noun

  1. (management) A budget developed disregarding the expenses or costs of the prior year, requiring explicit justification for all expenditures. — Wiki

What this means is that each budget item—including salaries and benefits, must be justified each year. The entire cost must be justified, not just the amount of increase. Costs must be balanced against income. Business can’t arbitrarily increase their income by fiat, i.e., taxes. Business must provide goods or services that people want and unlike government, business can’t force people to buy your product—except for Obamacare.

When I was employed by Sprint, my department went through a budget exercise every year. We proposed projects, detailed costs (and we were later held to that cost limit), and we had to include the amount of project revenue the project would bring to the company or how much revenue would be retained by the project or how much revenue would be lost if we didn’t do the project. Even infrastructure improvements had to be justified.

That is not how government is run. Justification, for the most part isn’t considered and when it is, much of the supporting data is subjective rather than objective.

I’ve had people tell me it was impossible for government to be held to a zero-based budget because “government projects run longer than a year.” Well, so do business projects.

Business, constantly monitors costs. When I was managing a project, I had a cost/expense review with higher management every week. Not only did I have to account for every penny that was spent, I had to project future costs on a monthly (and sometimes weekly) basis through the end of the project. Heaven help me if an expense was booked in the wrong month.

There is absolutely no reason why government cannot be held to the same standard. There are a number of reasons why government would fight such a move. Primarily, it would expose the internal activities of the bureaucracy and entrenched managers. They would lose their autonomy and suddenly be directly answerable to our elected officials and to voters.

It’s time for a change. It’s time for an accounting and methodology change in government. It’s workable and it will control costs and streamline government.

***

Something wonderful happened last week. I doubt if you heard about from the MSM, FOX excepted. Some college students at LSU prevented a flag burning by some liberal radicals.

LSU protesters stop planned flag burning

Published: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 12:04 PM Updated: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 12:12 PM
A planned American flag burning at LSU ended before it started when about 1,000 LSU students and other protesters forced police to intervene.

LSU graduate student Benjamin Haas had originally planned to burn an American flag Wednesday to promote his First Amendment rights and to support an LSU student arrested last week for stealing and burning a flag.
When Haas finally arrived to a chaotic scene, he was surrounded by a large crowd yelling obscenities and chanting, “U-S-A” and “Go to hell hippie, go to hell.”
Water balloons and bottles were thrown at him and, before Haas could speak, horse-mounted police escorted him out for his own safety to a police car on Highland Road as the crowd followed and he was driven off.

Good on ya, LSU! There more at the website.

***



Some of us remember the Sixties when war protesters chanted “What if the military had to rely on bake sales for money?” Well, it seems the UK just found out what happens and you need a vital military asset—you borrow from the US.

Buddy, can you spare a spy plane?

We’re forced to BORROW one from U.S.

COST-CUTTING Britain has been forced to go cap in hand to borrow a US spy plane to protect our ships in Libya.

Top Brass had to ask for help after last year’s controversial decision to axe Nimrods left the UK with NO airborne maritime surveillance capability.
A US Navy P-3 Orion is now keeping watch over HMS Liverpool, mine hunter HMS Brocklesby and nuclear sub HMS Triumph. It has a US crew and is making regular sweeps off Mad Dog Gaddafi’s coast. It will provide information on potential threats to the three vessels.
A source said: “It’s all deeply embarrassing, but we can’t have our guys with no protection so we have to rely on others.”
The new Nimrods were scrapped in the Strategic Defence and Security Review. Ministers claimed the decision would save roughly £2billion but military figures blasted the move.
Nimrod…scrapped.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/3581998/UK-forced-to-borrow-spy-plane-from-US.html#ixzz1MWrmCr7B

The Brits had to barrow some P-3 Orions from the US Navy to watch over their ships.

Repost: Would the world end if the US debt limit isn’t raised? No.

Posted on by
This was originally supposed to appear on Thursday, May 12th. Goggle/Blogger, in all their wonder, deleted it.  Fortunately, I found a copy.  Here it is as it was supposed to appear.

***

The default boogyman card is being played again.  The last time it was used was during the Continuing Resolution debate a month or so ago. RINO John Boehner swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.  The dems are playing it again to get the Debt Limit raised higher than the current $14.2 Trillion limit.

Austan Goolsbee, Chief Accountant of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, claims that the country would be in “instant default” if “we hit the debt limit.” 

Goolsbee Says Tying Debt Ceiling to Spending Is ‘Quite Insane’

May 11, 2011, 10:49 AM EDT

By John McCormick
May 11 (Bloomberg) — Linking efforts to reduce long-term federal deficits with a congressional vote to raise the government’s debt limit puts U.S. credit at risk, President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser told a Chicago audience.
“To tie this to the debt limit is, in my view, quite insane,” Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said today to the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and other business leaders.

Yes, I suppose to a lib, anything that would limit spending is insane.  The truth is that the government wouldn’t automatically default—unless Obama purposely did so.

You see, the US government still has an income. US Revenues for this current year are projected to be over $2.2Trillion.  The problem is the dems want to spend over $3.8Trillion.

The World Is Not Going to End in May
May 11, 2011 2:38 P.M.
By Kevin D. Williamson
Tags: Fiscal Armageddon

Have you heard about these nuts who think that the world is going to end in May?

Which is to say, Austan Goolsbee is full of it. He told the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce: “If we hit the debt ceiling, we default.”
No, we don’t.
Debt service accounts for about 7 percent of federal spending. Current revenues will more than cover that, regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised. We can pay our debts  — and our troops, too — out of present revenues. But if we fail to raise the debt ceiling, we’re going to have to economize on some other things: discretionary spending, for sure, but probably also Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But here’s the thing: Any meaningful budget-reform deal is going to have to address discretionary spending, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in the long term. There is no way around that. (Defense spending needs to be cut, too, but defense is a different thing from farm subsidies and NPR money: a core national priority. You don’t lump national defense in with national embarrassments such as the Small Business Administration or research grants for Obama’s magic unicorn-powered economy.)
Default? No.
In truth, the federal government expects to collect $2.2 trillion in revenue this year. The problem is that it wants to spend $3.8 trillion.
You can do a lot with $2.2 trillion. You can fund Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, debt service, unemployment, welfare, and national defense at their 2008 levels. My recollection of 2008 is that it was not exactly a time of Spartan fiscal discipline.
Funding the majority of the federal government at 2008 levels is not “default.” It’s not anything like default. It’s not in the same category of things, events, or concepts as default.
So, don’t buy what Austan Goolsbee is selling.
(Go here for the complete column.)
You’ll note in Willianson’s column, servicing the US debt is only 7% of Federal spending. Not servicing that debt is what would cause the government to default. Reaching the debt limit has nothing to do with forcing the government into default.  It’s how the remaining money is spent that determines whether the government defaults. There’s a lot that can be done with the existing revenue stream and still service that debt.  
Yes, there would have to be spending cuts.  That’s what has the libs all in a tizzy! If we revert to the 2008 budget (and if you have any memory of that time, you’ll remember that Bush wasn’t a miser and spent like a democrat,) we could reach that goal.
Will that happen?  It’s unlikely.  There are too many spineless RINOs, like Boehner, still in office.  They’ll roll-over and pass some taxes to get those “mean” MSM types of their backs. As long as they think it will be forgotten by election time, they think they can rollover without penalty.         

Am I being too pessimistic?  Perhaps. But when the ‘Pubs have control of the house and still elect a RINO like Boehner as Speaker of the House, the more I believe we need to make a full sweep and flush all the ‘Pubs out.
Perhaps it is time for a third party. It’s apparent the ‘Pubs aren’t listening.

Obama’s Counter to Paul Ryan’s Plan

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Yesterday, Obama held a news brief—it wasn’t a news conference—to present his plan on reducing the deficit and debt.  In essence it was, “spend more, tax more, cut nothing.”  Charles Krauthammer on Fox News had this to say.

I thought it was a disgrace. I thought I’ve rarely heard a speech by a president so shallow, so hyper-partisan, and so intellectually dishonest, outside the last couple of weeks of a presidential election where you are allowed to call your opponent anything short of a traitor. But we’re a year-and-a-half away from Election Day, and it was supposed to be a speech about policy. He didn’t even get to his own alternative until more than half-way through the speech, and when he did, he threw out these numbers suspended in midair with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers which mean absolutely nothing. The speech was really and was almost entirely an attack on the Ryan plan. And it was deeply dishonest. — NewsBusters, April 13, 2011.

When the totality of the speech was examined, it really held nothing new. Just “same old, same, old.”  Paul Ryan released a statement in The Weekly Standard that called the speech, “Excessively Partisan, Dramatically Inaccurate, and Hopelessly Inadequate.”  Ryan condensed Obama’s plan to the following…
  • Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.
  • Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.
  • Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
  • Calls for the appointment of another commission, after mostly omitting from his Fiscal Year 2012 Budget any of proposals submitted by the commission he appointed last year.
  • Non-specific framework fails to meet his Fiscal Commission’s own deficit-reduction goals. 
Taxes:
  • Proposes to raise taxes on the American people by more than $1 trillion, devastating our fragile economy and stifling job creation.
  • Endorsed the Fiscal Commission’s ideas on taxes, which specifically called for lower tax rates and a broader base, but then called for higher tax rates. Which is it?
  • Government health and retirement programs are growing at more than twice the speed of the economy. At the current rate of spending, revenue would have to rise “by more than 50 percent” just to keep debt at its current level, according to the Government Accountability Office. That means tax increases across-the-board, now and in the future.  
Medicare:
  • Instead of proposing structural reforms that would actually reduce health care costs, the President proposed across-the-board cuts to current seniors’ care.
  • Strictly limits the amount of health care seniors can receive within the existing structure of unsustainable government health care programs.
  • Gives more power to unelected bureaucrats in Washington to determine what treatments seniors should or shouldn’t get, against a backdrop of costs that continue to rise.
  • Conceded that the relentlessly rising cost of health care is the primary reason why the nation is threatened by debt, and implicitly conceded that his health care law failed to solve the problem.
  • Eviscerates the only competitive element anywhere in health-care entitlement programs – the competition amongst Part D prescription-drug plans – which allowed the drug benefit to come in 41 percent under budget.

Medicaid:

  • Acknowledges that the open-ended financing of Medicaid is a crippling financial burden to both states and the federal government, but explicitly rejected the only solution to this problem, which is to give states the freedom they need to design systems that work for the unique needs of their own populations.
Defense: 
  • Proposes more cuts on top of $78 billion in cuts included in his own defense budget, which he proposed just two months ago – all at a time when he continues to task the military with new missions.
  • Secretary Gates has said that the military needs 2 percent – 3 percent real growth just to keep executing the missions that DOD has already been assigned.
  • Secretary Gates described deficit reduction plans that let budget targets drive defense policy as “math, not strategy.”
As expected, Obama didn’t propose anything to help the country.  
Not. One. Single. Thing.
***
Remember that $38Bn, uhhh, $26Bn, no, it’s only $10Bn in cuts from the last CR that Boehner foisted on us?  Well guess what, the actual cut is much less than that.

Uh oh: The 2011 CR Deal Only Saves $352 Million, Says…the CBO

Yes, you read that headline right.  That’s $352 Million with an M (emphasis mine):

A new budget estimate released Wednesday shows that the spending bill negotiated between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner would produce less than 1 percent of the $38 billion in claimed savings by the end of this budget year.
The Congressional Budget Office estimate shows that compared with current spending rates the spending bill due for a House vote Thursday would pare just $352 million from the deficit through Sept. 30. About $8 billion in cuts to domestic programs and foreign aid are offset by nearly equal increases in defense spending.
The CBO study confirms that the measure trims $38 billion in new spending authority, but many of the cuts come in slow-spending accounts like water-and-sewer grants that don’t have an immediate deficit impact.
The budget deficit is projected at $1.6 trillion this year.


The ugly math, revealed:
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), total outlays for the original CR (which ran from October 1, 2010 through March 4, 2011) were $1.289483 trillion.
But when you compare that figure under the new CR, set to be voted on tomorrow in the House, the total outlays come in at $1.289131 trillion.
By that measure of comparison, the savings between what they spent in the first CR, which was law until March 4, and the new CR, which could prospectively become law later this week for the rest of the fiscal year, is only $352 million.

You can read the rest of the article here.