Hurricane Sandy relief funding turns into Porkfest 2012
Surprise surprise! Hurricane Sandy relief funding turns into Porkfest 2012.
Surprise surprise! Hurricane Sandy relief funding turns into Porkfest 2012.
Surprise surprise! Hurricane Sandy relief funding turns into Porkfest 2012.
Here we go again. Yesterday an aerospace organization, Aerospace Industries Association, released a sixteen page report [pdf] claiming that NASA will lose 20,500 jobs and NOAA 2,500 if the federal government goes over the “fiscal cliff” and sequestration happens.
Immediately, a slew of news articles xeroxed this report to pound home this point, noting the job loses for the specific cities of each newspaper and how disaster awaits the country if sequestration is allowed to take place and we go over that blessed “fiscal cliff”:
The trouble is, this is all hogwash and bad journalism.
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A new National Research Council report released yesterday says that NASA lacks focus nor can it complete the missions it has with the resources available.
» Read more
An evening pause: I think the trucks in this video are a perfect metaphor for the American public’s attitude towards the federal debt. So what there are yellow flashing warning signs! Charge on!
But no one … at this point seems to have grasped that [nothing will be solved] unless the avoidance of the fiscal cliff includes measures that radically cut the deficit and end the unspeakable fraud of 70 percent of the country’s $1 to $1.5 trillion federal deficit being covered by phony notes cyber-clicked into existence from the Treasury’s 100 percent subsidiary, the Federal Reserve. No test of psychological confidence will be passed by this charade, nor any test of Grade 3 arithmetic either. The administration swaddles itself in a few weeks of a record-breaking rise in economic-growth and tax-collection rates. But this is only three weeks, and applies to a built-in annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion on top of an accumulated national debt that took 232 years to get to $10 trillion in 2008 and made it to $16 trillion this year. (And there are still 5 million fewer people working in the U.S. than there were four years ago.) [emphasis mine]
This fake political term, “The fiscal cliff”, is an unmitigated lie, created by politicians to disguise their failure to actually deal with the debt. They are using it to avoid even cutting spending levels back to 2008 numbers, a reduction in spending that would hardly be noticed in the bloated, overweight, and increasingly oppressive federal bureaucracy.
Guess what: “It will be very costly.”
The day of reckoning looms: The overall debt from student loans now exceeds $1 trillion, with defaults skyrocketing. The solution from one Democratic Congressman: a $1 trillion bailout. More here.
“1,200 days and $5 trillion in new debt since Senate Democrats passed a budget.”
An annual budget is required by law. Harry Reid’s answer: “It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.” And what do the American people do? They reward the Democrats, providing proof positive that we are in very bad shape and heading for disaster.
Intellectual bankruptcy: 52 Nobel Peace Prize winners, artists, and activists have called for the boycott of Israel for its recent attacks in Gaza.
And where were these so-called intellectuals when Hamas was lobbing rockets into Israel? For them, I guess it is all right to kill Jews. And God forbid the Jews decide to defend themselves.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal government’s debt ceiling will be reached no later than the end of February, and possibly sooner.
The day of reckoning looms: The willingness of a small union to bankrupt Hostess will help do the same to many other companies.
And guess what? It is because of another ill-conceived federal law.
The day of reckoning looms: Don’t you dare call it default!
The day of reckoning looms: Our country’s road to bankruptcy, in one chart.
The day of reckoning looms: A new audit has found that the Federal Housing Administration has a deficit of $13.5 billion for the fiscal year ending in September.
Success! California now has the highest poverty rate in the nation.
California’s state legislature and governorship have both been held by the Democrats for years. Both have repeatedly raised taxes. Both have repeatedly failed to balance the state’s budget. And both have been and continue to be eager to increase government regulation on the state’s citizenry. What could go wrong?
Update: In related news, Los Angeles’ film and television industry has lost 16,100 jobs in past seven years, mostly due to businesses leaving the state.
Be careful what you wish for: Hostess Brands — already in bankruptcy — has decided to shut down because one of its unions refused to end a strike.
The closing will result in Hostess’ nearly 18,500 workers losing their jobs as the company shuts 33 bakeries and 565 distribution centers nationwide, as well as 570 outlet stores. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union represents around 5,000 Hostess employees. “We deeply regret the necessity of today’s decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike,” said CEO Gregory Rayburn in a statement.
So, because 5,000 union workers wanted more from a company that had nothing more to give, 18,500 lose their jobs, including those same union workers.
Sounds sensible, and right in line with most leftwing math.
What Americans apparently wanted: The Democratic senator seeking the chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee has refused to promise to write a budget next year.
This will be the fourth year in a row that the Democrats in the Senate have failed to write a budget. And note, they don’t need a single Republican vote to do it, since budget bills cannot be fillibusted.
As I like to say, the day of reckoning looms.
The day of reckoning looms: Harry Reid said Thursday that the Democrats intend to raise the debt limit another $2.4 trillion.
The new America: Wall Street stocks plummeted today for the second day in a row.
I wonder why. What happened two days ago that might have shaken the confidence of the business world?
Five big stories the media will ‘discover’ after the election.
It appears that Barack Obama has won another four years in office. Despite what many consider to be one of the weakest and most incompetent presidencies in history, the American people have decided to stick with this man. Even worse, the Democrats look like they will gain seats in the Senate, even though it was the Democratic majority in that Senate that has refused to pass a budget — as required by law — for the last three years. For that dereliction of duty, the American people have decided to reward them with more power.
Overall, it appears that the polls that favored Democrats in their sampling were actually capturing the tone of the country. The public wants big government and a restriction in freedom. 2010 was a fluke, not a trend. I was wrong.
We are stuck with Obamacare. We are stuck with trillion dollar deficits. We are stuck with bankruptcy. I have little hope now for the near future. It will probably take fifty years or more to fix the problems that the past four years and the next four years will create.
This is not even a conservative perspective. No policy can survive, even good leftwing policy, when the government is bankrupt. And with trillion dollar deficits the new normal, we are guaranteed that the government will go bankrupt. And it will take everything else down with it.
Even worse, this willingness of the American public and its intellectual class to ignore this reality, to make believe that trillion dollar deficits don’t matter, suggests an intellectual bankruptcy that is even more appalling. For you can’t fix a problem if you refuse to face it.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal government is expected to hit its debt ceiling before the end of the year.
The federal government is bankrupting the country, and it will take hard sacrifices to rein in that federal government. I fear that, regardless of how today’s election ends, neither party will be willing to propose those sacrifices, mostly because they will believe the voters are not willing either.
Ahmadinejad: “How long can a government with a $16 trillion foreign debt remain a world power?”
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Though even here, Ahmadinejad isn’t quite right, as the debt of the U.S. is not all foreign.
Your tax dollars at work: The federal government has spent $27 million teaching Moroccans how to make pottery.
The day of reckoning looms: The U.S. government’s credit rating has been downgraded again.
And we’ve only just begun!
The day of reckoning looms: The federal budget deficit has now exceeded one trillion dollars for the fourth year in a row.
The day of reckoning looms: The debt of the federal government officially exceeded $16 trillion on Tuesday.
The day of reckoning looms: The long term credit rating of the United States was lowered today by Standard and Poors.
The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics. More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.