Modern Democrat accounting: Borrow $164 million, pay back $1.25 billion.
Sadly, this is only one of several examples in California of school districts borrowing money that requires them to pay loan shark interest. No wonder cities in California are going bankrupt.
I lived through the 1980 election, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was struck at the time by the fact that next to no one among the political scientists who made a living out of studying presidential elections, communism in eastern Europe, and Sovietology saw any of these upheavals coming. Virtually all of them were caught flat-footed.
This is, in fact, what you would expect. They were all expert in the ordinary operations of a particular system, and within that framework they were pretty good at prognostication. But the apparent stability of the system had lured them into a species of false confidence – not unlike the false confidence that fairly often besets students of the stock market.
There were others, less expert in the particulars of these systems, who had a bit more distance and a bit more historical perspective and who saw it coming. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a prescient book entitled Can the Soviet Union Survive 1984? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn predicted communism’s imminent collapse, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan suspected that the Soviet Union would soon face a fatal crisis. They were aware that institutions and outlooks that are highly dysfunctional will eventually and unexpectedly dissolve.
In my opinion, none of the psephologists mentioned above has reflected on the degree to which the administrative entitlements state – envisaged by Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and expanded by their successors – has entered a crisis, and none of them is sensitive to the manner in which Barack Obama, in his audacity, has unmasked that state’s tyrannical propensities and its bankruptcy. In consequence, none of these psephologists has reflected adequately on the significance of the emergence of the Tea-Party Movement, on the meaning of Scott Brown’s election and the particular context within which he was elected, on the election of Chris Christie as Governor of New Jersey and of Bob McDonnell as Governor of Virginia, and on the political earthquake that took place in November, 2010. That earthquake, which gave the Republicans a strength at the state and local level that they have not enjoyed since 1928, is a harbinger of what we will see this November.
I agree. However, the author misses one point. There is no guarantee that the American public will vote rationally. Obama might still win. However, the big government welfare state that he and the left believe in is still bankrupt and about to fall apart, no matter what happens in November. The only real question is whether we will honestly face the disaster brewing before us and begin the process of fixing it now, or we will make believe it isn’t there and allow it to overwhelm us in its collapse.
Either way, the federal government is about to go bankrupt, and if we don’t do something about it that bankruptcy will take everything else down with it.
The day of reckoning looms: The actual debt of the U.S. federal government has now grown to $222 trillion.
This is the actual difference between what the federal government will collect in the future and the actual amount of future fiscal liabilities the government is responsible for. It is not the mere $16 trillion or so of immediate debt.
The day of reckoning looms: A new budget report released by the Obama Administration on Friday projects the federal debt to rise to $16.2 trillion by the end of the year and $25.4 trillion by 2022.
The Democrats in the Senate have passed their tax plan, extending the Bush tax rates for families making under $250,000 for one year while allowing the rates for families earning above $250,000 to expire.
The big Democratic claim has been that in order to balance the budget richer people have to pay more of their fair share. Okay, so now they’ve made their point by law. If I were the Republicans I’d accept it, since we all know that this tax increase on higher income taxpayers will do nothing to lower the deficit. We could raise the tax rate for anyone earning more than $250K to 100 percent and we would still have a gigantic yearly deficit.
What will the Democrats next claim when this tax increase fails? It won’t matter. The problem is spending, and the failure of this tax plan will further demonstrate that point. The federal government has to learn to live within its means.
The day of reckoning looms: Another California city, San Bernardino, has decided to declare bankruptcy.
The day of reckoning looms: A report released on Monday states that U.S. state and local governments have more than $2 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.
Worse, the report notes that this number is three times higher than the number reported by those same state and local governments.
We’ve only just begun: Stockton, California, has filed for bankruptcy, making it the largest bankruptcy of any U.S. city in history.
The day of reckoning looms: The Social Security Trust Fund will start losing value in 2013, not 2020 as claimed.
In 2010, Social Security’s Office of the Chief Actuary projected that this interest income would keep the trust fund growing in real value through 2020. The 2011 projections moved this date to 2018, and the recently released 2012 projections pushed the date to 2012, meaning that the trust fund will start declining in real value next year. After 2013, the trust fund is projected to decline by greater amounts each year until becoming exhausted in 2033.
The Senate has passed that pork-filled farm bill, with 16 Republicans and 46 Democrats voting for it.
The link above provides a list of Republican porkers.
Hopefully, this bill will die in the House.
Your tax dollars at work: The Obama administration spent $10 billion dollars to create 355 renewable energy jobs, according to testimony to Congress on Tuesday.
Thank you Obama. That’s $28.17 million spent per job created.
Progress: The House yesterday proposed a spending bill that would cut the EPA’s budget to $7 billion, 17% less than what it received in 2012.
Considering the federal debt, this is a reasonable cut, as a $7 billion budget would be comparable to the EPA’s budget numbers in the early 2000s, and would hardly cripple that agency.
On a more depressing note, the Senate is moving forward on a bi-partisan deal to pass a massive farm bill, loaded with pork that would spend almost a trillion dollars over the next decade.
Not good: The number of available job openings in April showed the biggest drop in nearly 4 years.
And you thought Obamacare was about healthcare: The IRS’s budget has grown by almost a billion dollars due to Obamacare.
The day of reckoning looms: The debt of the federal government is projected to be nearly twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2037, the Congressional Budget Office announced Tuesday.
This CBO report actually supposed to be encouraging, as it indicates that the day of doom has been pushed back a whopping two years! Yowza! Let’s pop the corks on the champagne bottles and start celebrating!
Sadly, the article also has this ridiculous quote:
CBO’s latest prediction is similar to its 2011 report despite the $2.1 trillion in budget cuts enacted in last August’s debt-ceiling deal between the White House and Congress.
Nothing was cut by that deal. All they did was trim the rate of growth. For any journalist to continue to participate in this fraud is sickening.
The day of reckoning looms. Two stories:
“If you’re anxious, you sit on your hands.”
“The bad jobs report is just a very small taste of the nightmare that is coming.”
The day of reckoning looms: The head of the World Bank yesterday warned that Europe is heading for an economic “danger zone” as bad as 2008.
Are people getting nervous? The number of searches on Google for the phrase “bank run” has just hit an all-time high.
The day of reckoning looms: Using the budget balancing rules Congress imposed on private companies, the annual federal deficit turns out to be five times greater than the official but fake numbers Congress normally publishes.
The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.
The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books.
