Not good: The House GOP has apparently abandoned its pledge to force agency-by-agency budgeting.
Want more evidence that government spending is out of control? In one California city lifeguards earn $100K to $200K per year. They also retire with 90 percent of their salary, after only 30 years of work at as early as the age of 50.
No surprise here: The White House takes a dim view of Boehner’s speech yesterday.
So my question here is there: Who is more serious about controlling spending, Obama and the Democrats or the Republicans in the House? Though it is very easy to find lots of reasons to criticize the various Republican proposals, at the moment they are the only proposals that are willing, even on a tiny level, to consider entitlement reform.
I like the sound of this: “Without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt-limit increase.”
Also this: “We should be talking about cuts of trillions, not just billions. They should be actual cuts and program reforms, not broad deficit or debt targets that punt the tough questions to the future.”
And this: “And to those who contend that the economy is too weak to take on the challenge of entitlement reform — I would simply say, you’ve got it backwards. The truth is that making fundamental reforms to these programs would be good for the economy — and good for the next generation.”
According to a new Rasmussen poll, the Ryan Plan is losing support nationally.
If this is so, we are really in trouble, especially since there presently is no other realistic option on the table.
More reasons to repeal it: ObamaCare’s subsidies will not keep up with costs.
A precursor for 2012? Canada’s Conservatives scored a massive election win yesterday.
Gee, you’d think he would have noticed this a long time ago: The Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke went on record today to warn that the US deficit “is not sustainable.”
Astronomers are considering the merger two space missions to create a new optical/ultraviolet space telescope. The mission would be designed to do both deep cosmology and exoplanet observations.
The two communities would both like to see a 4–8-metre telescope in space that would cost in excess of $5 billion. “Our interests are basically aligned,” says [Jim Kasting, a planetary scientist at Pennsylvania State University]. Such a mission would compete for top billing in the next decadal survey of astronomy by the US National Academy of Sciences, due in 2020.
This story is big news, as it indicates two things. First, the 2010 Decadal Survey, released in August 2010, is almost certainly a bust. The budget problems at NASA as well as a general lack of enthusiasm among astronomers and the public for its recommendations mean that the big space missions it proposed will almost certainly not be built.
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Out of funds, SETI has suspended operations while it looks for new investors.
Eric Berger at the Houston Chronicle asks: Will fewer humans in space lead to more robot explorers?
In a word, no. In the past fifty years, every time the budget of the manned space program has been cut, the unmanned program shrank as well. And every time the budget of manned space grew, so did the budget for unmanned missions.
This is hopeful news: More Democrats are threatening to hold up the debt ceiling vote unless there are more spending cuts.
Funding for the final shuttle flight this summer is now assured.
Time is running out: Federal borrowing is on a pace to reach the debt limit in less than a week.
The investigation of doctors who issued fake sick notes to union protesters in Wisconsin goes forward.
Time is truly running out: The federal government’s cash handouts to all households now exceed what those households pay in tax.
Sounds crazy, but it’s true: The budget chaos at NASA has caused the ESA to halt work on its own Mars orbiter and rover.
More on the incredibly shrinking Orion program.
It ain’t gonna fly, and if I’m wrong and it does, it will accomplish little in the process — except spend a lot of pork money we no longer can afford.
Our government at work: Red superhero capes for the unemployed!
NASA has awarded the next set of commercial crew development agreements, giving contracts worth from $22 to $92 million to four companies, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, and Boeing. More here and here.
The amounts that NASA is giving these companies is minuscule, compared the monies spent on the program-formerly-called-Constellation. Yet I bet they all get their rockets/capsules launched and in operation, supplying cargos and crews to low Earth orbit, before NASA even test fires its heavy-lift rocket.
Surprise! NASA administrator Charles Bolden told lawmakers on Monday that with the new budget the Orion capsule had to be scaled back somehow.
Watch over the next few years as Orion and the new heavy-lift vehicle (the program-formerly-called-Constellation) slowly evaporate, even as both cost us billions in money we no longer can afford.
The pigs win: Funding for the IPCC restored to budget in 2011 budget deal.
No deal. Key quote:
If Democrats are not going to do even minor surgery on Medicare and Medicaid and Republicans are not going to raise taxes, there is no hope of big budget deal to cut a deficit now running at 11 percent of gross domestic product.
And that raises another question. How long can the Federal Reserve continue financing these deficits? China, choking on U.S. debt, is reportedly beginning to divest itself of U.S. bonds. Japan will need to sell U.S. bonds to get hard currency to repair the damage from the earthquake and tsunami. And the Fed is about to end its QE2 monthly purchases of $100 billion in U.S. bonds. Where is the Fed going to borrow the $125 billion a month to finance this year’s deficit of $1.65 trillion, and another of comparable size in 2012? Bill Gross’ Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, has sold all his U.S. bonds and begun to short U.S. debt. Pimco is betting that the value of U.S. Treasury bonds will begin to fall.
We may be about to enter a maelstrom.
With substantial numbers of Republicans and Democrats voting against, the House today nonetheless approved last week’s budget deal for the 2011 fiscal year by a vote of 260-167.
Next important deadline: on May 16 or so the federal government should reach its debt limit.
A revolt on the right over budget deal?
“There is a gut feeling in some quarters today that the Boehner-Obama deal could be in bigger trouble than anybody realizes.”
Because it is often claimed that we can solve our federal budget problems by closing loopholes and increasing taxes on the wealthy, I thought I’d share this video from Bill Whittle, dramatizing this Iowahawk essay.
We can argue all day about whether we should increase taxes on the wealthy, but that is not going to solve our debt problem. Even if we confiscated every penny of profit from every person or corporation earning more than million dollars a year, we would still not make the slightest dent in the federal deficit.
Our federal government is simply spending money it doesn’t have. We need to cut spending, and cut spending drastically, in order to gain some control over this problem.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to me the American people or Congress are yet willing to face this fact.
The pig squeals at NOAA: The agency’s administrator told Congress yesterday that the 2011 budget deal will cause great harm to weather monitoring.
Note that NOAA is getting $4.5 billion in the 2011 budget, $700 million more than the weather agency got in 2008.
Only in Washington is a budget increase of almost 20 percent in three years called a draconian cut.
The telescope that ate astronomy: More budget problems for the James Webb Space Telescope, with its launch likely delayed again until 2018.
