I am sometimes more ashamed of my baby boomer generation than I can possibly express.
At least 80 House Republicans have signed a letter demanding that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) block any further funding of Obamacare.
This story illustrates two things. First, the House Republican leadership has been timid about using its power to block the implementation of Obamacare, even though the public clearly wants it blocked. Second, that about a third of the House Republican membership has already signed the letter, with more signatures expected, suggests that the bulk of the Republican Party is not as timid as their leadership. Moreover, I expect the November election to significantly strengthen this fiscally conservative trend.
Thus, it will not surprise me if we see some very radical budget cuts in the next Congress.
The day of reckoning looms: Another California city, San Bernardino, has decided to declare bankruptcy.
I say “Please!” and I say it loudly. Picking Ryan for number two would reverse Ronald Reagan’s biggest mistake, picking moderate George Bush Sr. as his VP. The result of that bad choice was 12 years of Bush rule in the late 1980s and in the 2000s, during which there was little effort to rein in the power or size of government. In fact, the Bushes did a lot to increase government’s power and size.
Picking Ryan as VP would place a competent fiscal conservative into the limelight and make such a person a leading contender for the Presidency in future years. It would also help demonstrate again that the 2010 election was a trend, not a fluke.
Job growth amounted to a disappointing 80,000, below analyst expectations of 90-100K, while the jobless rate remained the same at 8.2%:
Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, all of its depressing and trending downward.
While no President should be blamed entirely for the unemployment numbers, the policies of any President do have a direct influence on those numbers, and should bear some responsibility, especially in this era where we have ceded so much power to the federal government. Consider this graph (below the fold), which shows the “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” The steep upward swing, beginning in 2008, sadly corresponds too closely with the beginnings of the Obama administration. And it is with this administration that we have seen the worst deficits, the most regulation, and the biggest increase in the power of government in our lifetimes. It is thus no surprise the economy has crumbled.
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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.
Last week I received an email from the local Tucson tea party, asking if I would be willing to attend a demonstration today in response to last week’s Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. To quote the email,
We would like to stage two simultaneous protests against the train wreck they call ObamaCare, at two separate locations Monday July 2nd, 4:00pm-5:45pm. 75 people at both locations are needed to make the necessary impact. They say the Tea Party is dead. What say ye? We need your commitment.
Today those protests took place at two different prominent street corners in the Tucson area. At each location there were about fifty people lining the sidewalk and holding signs and American flags out to passing motorists. My wife Diane and I went to one of those protests. Here are my impressions:
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NASA today unveiled for the press the Orion capsule scheduled for the program’s first test flight in 2014.
Today’s unveiling was essentially a PR event designed to boost political support for the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion capsule program. And though we should definitely give kudos to Lockheed Martin for its progress on Orion, it is also important to note that the building of this capsule took 8 years and about $6.5 billion. And it won’t go into space for still another two years at best. Compare that to SpaceX’s Dragon, which took about four years from concept to launch, with a cost of about $1 billion.
It is this contrast that is worrying the political supporters of SLS and Orion. Consider for example this quote from the above article:
But the Orion schedule assumes steady funding by Congress, which is an open question given the current debate over federal budget deficits, taxes and a general push to reduce federal spending. “We have to be concerned about that because we are in an era of government spending where you have to do more with a limited amount,” Nelson said. “That, of course, is going to be one of the main things we’re going to have to look at in the future.” [emphasis mine]
Nelson has been a big backer of SLS from the moment Congress decided to force it down NASA’s throat. It is very clear from his comments above however that he recognizes the political difficulties that this very expensive program faces.
As I’ve said before, I expect SLS to die sometime in the next three years. Faced with a ungodly federal deficit, the next Congress is going to look for ways to save money and — assuming the commercial space companies like SpaceX continue to have success — Congress will see this program as one of those ways.
We’ve only just begun: Stockton, California, has filed for bankruptcy, making it the largest bankruptcy of any U.S. city in history.
What comes through in the Moody’s assessment [the credit-rating downgrade of 15 banks] and in any review of their returns on equity is that banks have lost significant ability to generate earnings to offset the inevitable losses. The lost earnings power is surely due in part to reduced leverage, which helps protects taxpayers.
But 2,300 pages of Dodd-Frank and countless other federal efforts to put sand in the financial gears are also taking their toll. The Obama tax and regulatory frenzy, of which Dodd-Frank is a part, weighs on economic growth. Those are our words, not Moody’s, but the rating agency does note that the abysmal economic environment is a drag on ratings for everyone.
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.
The empty bench of the Democratic Party.
In comparing the potential Presidential candidates from both the Democrat and Republican parties, this article leaves one with the impression that the future is definitely not with the Democratic Party. As admitted by its own membership, its leadership is old, it has very few candidates with national stature, and the depth of the party is shallower than a pond in Tucson in summer. Meanwhile, the Republicans have many young new faces that already have national standing.
Though the article likes to blame this situation on internal forces within the parties, I see it as the result of actual elections and the circumstances of the time. The Democrats have increasingly appeared bankrupt when it comes to dealing with today’s fundamental problems, especially the out-of-control spending of government at all levels. Meanwhile, Republican candidates, especially those associated with the tea party movement, have come forward with some fresh, reasonable, and thoughtful ideas for dealing with these problems.
Faced with such a choice, it is not surprising that the Republicans have a deep bench compared to the Democrats.
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.
Your tax dollars at work: Spending money on silliness at the NSF and NIH.
Coburn’s report identified a number of projects that will make most Americans—scientists and nonscientists alike—shake their heads. They include studies of: how to ride a bike; when dogs became man’s best friend; whether political views are genetically predetermined; whether parents choose trendy baby names; and when the best time is to buy a ticket to a sold-out sporting event. And it noted that “only politicians appear to benefit from other NSF studies, such as research on what motivates individuals to make political donations, how politicians can benefit from Internet town halls…and how politicians use the Internet.”
Read the whole thing, as it gives a scientist’s perspective of this waste, which is sometimes not as obvious as the examples above.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal government is on a pace to exceed its $16.394 trillion debt limit sooner than expected, by October, just before the election.
And you thought Obamacare was about healthcare: The IRS’s budget has grown by almost a billion dollars due to Obamacare.
