Feeling the pinch: A Florida university has shuttered its manned submersible research program after forty years of operation due to lack of funds.
NASA pushes for funds to save the James Webb Space Telescope.
The day of reckoning looms: Social Security disability on the verge of insolvency.
One man’s response to Obama’s demand that taxes on the rich be raised.
I deeply resent that President Obama has decided that I don’t need all the money I’ve not paid in taxes over the years, or that I should leave less for my children and grandchildren and give more to him to spend as he thinks fit.
and
Governments have an obligation to spend our tax money on programs that work. They fail at this fundamental task. Do we really need dozens of retraining programs with no measure of performance or results? Do we really need to spend money on solar panels, windmills and battery-operated cars when we have ample energy supplies in this country? Do we really need all the regulations that put an estimated $2 trillion burden on our economy by raising the price of things we buy? Do we really need subsidies for domestic sugar farmers and ethanol producers?
Read the whole thing.
By the spring of 2010, private sector job growth turned positive. In April job growth increased to 230,000 net private-sector jobs. The economy appeared on track for a normal recovery from an awful recession. The administration began confidently predicting a “Recovery Summer.” But Recovery Summer fizzled instead of sizzled. In May private sector job growth dropped sharply to less than 50,000 net jobs. Thereafter, monthly improvement in private job growth averaged just 6,500 jobs.
What else happened in the spring of 2010? Despite obstacles that many believed would kill the bill, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. Within two months, the trend in job growth dropped sharply. Monthly job creation had been on pace to top out in the hundreds of thousands. Post-Affordable Care Act, it has barely kept pace with population growth. [emphasis mine]
and
The health-care measure raises business costs and makes planning for the future more difficult. It should be expected to slow hiring.
Federal Reserve officials report that the law has had exactly this effect. Dennis Lockhart, president of the Atlanta Fed, reports that “prominent among these (factors businesses explain are impeding hiring) is the lack of clarity about the cost implications of the recent health care legislation. We’ve frequently heard strong comments to the effect of ‘my company won’t hire a single additional worker until we know what health insurance costs are going to be.'” Surveys bear out these warnings. In a recent poll one-third of small business owners identified the healthcare bill as one of their top two obstacles to hiring. [emphasis mine]
Two-thirds of the country’s CEOs plan to freeze or downsize their workforce over the next year, according to a new survey.
“As I approach my 44th year in business, the last 20 as CEO, I can never remember a time when I felt so disenfranchised from our leadership in Washington. They seem determined to continue their ongoing anti-business attitude and to frustrate small and mid-sized businesses by uncertainty on taxes, government regulations, and simply too many bureaucratic restrictions. We desperately need a change in Washington.”
I guarantee that much of this reluctance to hire stems from uncertainty and fear of Obamacare and the regulations it brings.
Repeal it! The Obama administration has issued more waivers to Obamacare.
Barack and Michelle Obama took separate government planes to their vacation on Martha’s Vineyard,
This is just one clear example of why I have no faith in Obama’s sincerity when he claims he wants to rein in spending. To him, tax dollars and the government they fund are his little playthings, to do with as he likes.
The chart of the day, from John Merlune at Investor’s Business Daily:
Merlune’s article outlines in frightening detail how there has been a job boom in only one place during the Obama administration, the government regulatory industry.
Regulatory agencies have seen their combined budgets grow a healthy 16% since 2008, topping $54 billion, according to the annual “Regulator’s Budget,” compiled by George Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis. That’s at a time when the overall economy grew a paltry 5%.
Meanwhile, employment at these agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office to more than 281,000, while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6%.
Revenge and the abuse of power: The Obama Justice Department has begun an investigation of Standard & Poor.
From a Tea party activist: “The left is going to have to compromise and cut some domestic welfare spending, and the right is going to have to compromise and cut some military spending.”
A new poll shows that the congressional special election to replace Anthony Weiner in the traditionally Democratic district in Queens/Brooklyn, New York is surprisingly competitive.
The poll found [Democrat] Weprin, a state assemblyman, leading [Republican] Turner, a retired broadcasting executive, 48 percent to 42 percent in the race for the Democratic-friendly Queens and Brooklyn-area seat.
Two thoughts: First, this poll fits with another that shows for the first time a majority of adults don’t want their own Congressman reelected. If so, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Democrat appears so weak in Brooklyn/Queens, a place I lived for most of my life and a place I found to be so knee-jerk Democrat that you couldn’t admit to being Republican without risking being blacklisted from all things.
Second, despite the mess the federal government is in as well as the disgraceful scandal that caused the previously elected Democratic Congressman to resign, it is also not surprising that 48 percent of the population still wants to vote Democrat in this district. This is my biggest fear: the continuing unwillingness of too many Americans to honestly face our government’s budget problems.
» Read more
There’s no doubt that we’re in for a high level of personal nastiness and invective. This election is not going to be about some minor adjustment to spending, or some trifling adjustment of tax rates, or some nibbling at the edges of the regulatory state. What is at stake in the 2012 election is the continuation of a world-view; a political philosophy that sees ever-larger government as the cure to whatever ails us. This next election is the first big battle for the survival of that worldview as the majority view of the political class, or the survival of the insurgent TEA party idea that government has become to large, too intrusive, and too expensive, so therefore must be radically reduced. There is little room to compromise between these two visions of government. Indeed, in most ways, they are worldviews that are mutually exclusive. Over the next decade or so, we are going to learn which of these two views will prevail, and if the US, as presently composed, will remain a united polity.
Wisconsin Republicans have held off the Democrats in the first round of recall elections.
With the recently passed debt ceiling deal, there are going to be a lot of news reports talking about how that deal is going to force cuts and reductions in government spending. Everyone one of these stories will be a lie.
Take for example this story today in Nature, discussing the fate of science research under the deal. Here is how they describe what will happen if the Congressional “super-committee” cannot come up with an agreement and across-the-board “cuts” are triggered:
“Then there will be extraordinary pain,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “And it will get worse in 2014.”
The two-stage structure of the debt deal explains both the short-term reprieve and the long-term worry. The first set of agreed cuts, totalling US$917 billion, will be spread over 10 years, but two factors mitigate their effect. First, reductions to defence spending will account for a significant share of the cuts — meaning that other US agencies won’t bear the entire burden. Second, the cuts are heavily loaded forward onto the 2014 fiscal year and beyond, in an apparent effort to shelter the current fragile economy. Only minimal cuts will be implemented in fiscal years 2012 and 2013.
The trouble with this is that it is simply not true. There will be no cuts at all, under any condition, according the debt deal.
» Read more
Finding out what’s in it: Federal payments required by Obamacare actually understate the cost by as much as $50 billion, according to a new study.
In May a congressional committee set the accounting rules that determine who will qualify for federal health care subsidies under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. When the committee handed down the rules to the Congressional Budget Office, its formula excluded the health care costs of millions of workers’ spouses and children. The result was a final estimate for 2010 that hides those costs.
Get ready for another battle in Congress: The U.S. Treasury added another $20 billion in debt last night, putting it just $160 billion below the newly passed debt ceiling.
The total US treasury balance (subject to the ceiling) is $14.54 trillion (and $14.58 trillion for total), an increase of $20 billion overnight, the Treasury will hit its latest ceiling no later than the end of September. . . . The debt ceiling now is $14.694 trillion: a number which Tim Geithner will hit in about a month.
According to the bill that raised the debt ceiling, the ceiling is only raised in stages. The next stage of $500 billion requires Obama to request it and Congress to okay it.
An excellent summary of the consequences of a lower credit rating for the U.S. government.
There is a lot of anger at the moment in the US over the embarrassment of the downgrade, as well as shock. I’m most amused by the shock, to tell the truth. S&P didn’t say anything yesterday that was not common knowledge and common sense. If you had to rate a potential investment that had an income of, say, $22,000 a year but had costs of $37,000 per year, a standing debt of $143,000, and contracted future debt that exceeded $1 million, would you give that investment a gold-plated AAA rating and buy their bonds at the lowest interest rate possible, or at all? Of course not, but that’s exactly the fiscal situation of the US, at a 100,000,000:1 scale.
Maybe this is why NASA has been stalling about releasing its plans: The Congressionally-designed moon rocket, what I call the program-formerly-called-Constellation, is estimated to cost $38 billion to complete.
The Dow today dived below 12,000, a nine-month low.
The report above tries to look past the just signed debt agreement, but I wonder if maybe it was the debt deal itself that worried investors, since the deal really did little to gain control of the federal government’s out-of-control spending.
Leftwing civility: Joe Biden accused the tea party Republicans today of “acting like terrorists” in the negotiations over the debt limit.
And why? Because they simply refused to back down to those who want to spend us into oblivion.
Then there’s this quote from Mike Doyle (D-Pennsylvania): “We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”
Impossible to spend any money? What kind of fantasy world does this idiot live in? The federal budget has doubled in the past ten years. Meanwhile, this debt ceiling bill does nothing to reduce the size of government. On the contrary, the so-called reductions in the deficit merely slow the growth of government. Under the agreed plan, in each of the next ten years the federal government’s budget will still grow, and it will do so at a rate far exceeding inflation in an dying economy choked by regulation and government interference.
How is it even possible to deal with this problem if you have to deal with people like this, who are so divorced from reality and consider anyone who disagrees with them the worst sort of monster? Sadly, it is impossible. Until we see a wholesale change in government, with most of these idiots thrown from office, we will see no change in how our government is operated.
Guess what happened to that Obama recovery?
There never was one. And this graph from the article says it all. The Obama recession stands out as the worst by far.
Reactions to the debt deal: almost all unhappy.
The outlines of a possible debt ceiling deal have been leaked to the press. No tax increases, and a lot of promised cuts, some real but many that are probably likely not to happen.
If true, this deal will represent a victory for the Republicans, despite what appear to be the weak nature of the cuts. And John Podhoretz explains why in a very cogent column today, using the Cold War as an analogy.
Everyone on the Right agrees that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path that must be altered. The difference comes down to the acceptance of political realities. Just as the United States could not effect rollback in the late 1940s (or any time thereafter), so too the Right and the Republican Party cannot effect a revolutionary change of course on July 31, 2011 with the Senate and the White House in liberal Democratic hands. The strategy, like containment, must have a longer time horizon, though it has the same goal: Ending the entitlement state before it swallows up the rest of the country.
The votes are not there: Senate Republicans have rejected Reid’s debt limit plan. Also, it looks like the House Republicans are going to reject it also.
Update: the House has rejected Reid’s plan. More here.
