The White House and their false claims of deficit busting, in one handy picture.

Short version: use this image against would-be Democratic deficit busters.

fixed deficit

Longer version: the White House is trying to have its own facts, again. At issue is their recent attempt to brag that the deficit for 2014 has been reduced to a ‘mere’ 2.8% of GDP. As Twitchy ably notes/rebutted in response, that would be great, except for two minor little problems:

  • The debt is still spiraling out of control; and
  • As the Washington Times put it, back in October: “The deficit has indeed declined, but from the $1.4 trillion peak achieved in Mr. Obama’s stimulus-fueled first year in office. He can hardly celebrate cutting in half what he first tripled.*”

Continue reading The White House and their false claims of deficit busting, in one handy picture.

Eric Cantor on deficit: progress, and no tax hikes.

Allow me to summarize for my readers this Hill article (“Cantor to Democrats: See, cutting spending’s not that hard”) on some hopeful (repeat: hopeful) signs of deficit reduction on the horizon:

Eric Cantor: …See, cutting spending’s not that hard*. And there’s not going to be any tax hikes.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: …OK, now that you’ve getting spending cuts, we want our Holy Grail, too. Raise taxes!

To which let me add:

Moe Lane: Not a chance on this world, or any other.

Continue reading Eric Cantor on deficit: progress, and no tax hikes.

Cantor, Kyl, and NO OTHER REPUBLICANS to deficit panel.

The AP doesn’t really explain the significance of the fact that the GOP is sending just House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl to the President’s much-ballyhooed deficit reduction panel, so let me do it.

When the President set up this thing in the first place, he told the four party leaders in Congress – Speaker Boehner (R) and Minority Leader Pelosi (D) in the House; Majority Leader Reid (D) and Minority Leader McConnell (R) in the Senate – to each send four Congressmen to it, for a total of sixteen.  That effectively translates to “President Obama’s deficit reduction panel was intended to be ineffectual:” you generally cannot get sixteen people to agree on anything.  While Congressional Democrats theoretically were taking this panel more seriously [by only sending two apiece] – well.  The Senate Democratic picks are Inouye and Baucus, which as the NYT notes are both hostile to the idea of deficit talks.  Pelosi picked Van Hollen and Clyburn, which are described as obedient mouthpieces for the former Speaker (who herself hates the idea of deficit reduction) by that noted right-wing shill The Huffington Post.  So that’s the Democratic side.

Continue reading Cantor, Kyl, and NO OTHER REPUBLICANS to deficit panel.

President to embrace fiscal sanity Real Soon Now.

Not Right Now: Real Soon Now (via AoSHQ).  Apparently the plan is to wait until after the current wave of spending, then convince the Democratic party to stop spending taxpayer money that does not, in point of fact, quite exist.  Except for funding a new jobs bill, which somehow isn’t expected to ‘count.’

But can he do it, after… oh, let Bryon York get this one:

I asked whether Obama, after presiding over the stimulus, the bailouts, the big Democratic budget, the House cap-and-trade vote, health care reform, and finally, a tripling of the already-high federal deficit, could plausibly position himself as a spending hawk. “Their principle failure is that they have allowed themselves to be defined as government interventioners and huge spenders,” the strategist told me. “If he becomes the great expander of government and the great increaser of spending, he’s going to get destroyed in 2012.”

Actually, the principal failure is that they are government interventionists and huge spenders – and have revealed this blatantly enough that independent voters have noticed. In other words, it’s not ‘If he becomes;’ it’s ‘he has become.’  That’s the primary reason why his economic marks are so poor Right Now – and why waiting for Real Soon Now is contraindicated.

Contraindicated.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The Washington Post discovers fiscal responsibility.

The Washington Post, alas, gets this editorial wrong in the very first sentence:

NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news — especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: considering the amount of time that the Right’s bloggers, pundits, and legislators have spent explaining why the Democrats in Congress needed to institute a Stop spending money we don’t have, you idiots policy, well.  We do live here, too, so our liking is hardly unalloyed – but we did say that this wasn’t going to work*.  Moving on:

And so the Obama administration did not exactly rush to publish yesterday’s required mid-session update to its federal budget estimates of last February. Still, once the numbers finally emerged in the dog days of August, they retained the power to stun: Instead of a cumulative $7.1 trillion deficit over the next decade, the White House now projects a $9 trillion deficit. These figures imply average annual budget deficits greater than 4 percent of gross domestic product through fiscal 2019, a rate of debt accumulation faster than projected GDP growth. This is not a sustainable fiscal path.

Continue reading The Washington Post discovers fiscal responsibility.

Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, & Wyoming.

Those being the four states that are not running a deficit right now. The relative sizes of the rest can be seen via this handy visual tool:


Via @MelissaTweets

I’d make more commentary on this, except that I can sum it up as stop spending money you don’t have, you idiots. And that is one of those binary things: people either already get that, or they don’t. Either way, there’s not much point for follow-up material. I will note, though, that the ‘top’ five deficit-ridden states (who make up 52% of the total deficit, interestingly enough) have one thing in common: their state legislatures are all dominated by Democratic politicians*.

Yes. Shocking.

Moe Lane

*With the sort-of exception of New York’s; their State Assembly is run by Democrats, and their Senate is currently being run by nobody at all

Crossposted to RedState.

President Obama courageously cuts 0.5% of budget*.

In that special not-really-doing-that-at-all way that government is so good at, of course.

(Via Drudge) 17 billion. Off of a 3.4 trillion dollar budget.
How quaint.

May 7 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama is seeking $81 billion more in spending on domestic initiatives in his record $3.55 trillion budget plan while calling on Congress to trim $17 billion worth of programs, including tax breaks for the oil and gas industries.

[snip]

Unlike past years, the administration won’t release until May 11 its “analytical perspectives” or “historic tables” that help explain its spending decisions and put them in context. Obama repeated his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term in 2012.

I know that this is going to sound like a radical notion, Mr. President: but maybe if you stopped letting your fellow-Democrats swill at the trough…

wapoobamabudget1
(Heritage)

…you’d stop seeing this graphic that keeps mocking your pose of being for fiscal responsibility?

Just a thought.

Moe Lane

*Number taken from AoSHQ.

Crossposted to RedState.

‘The Trillion Dollar Fix.’

I hope you meant that as a drug reference, Megan.

R.S McCain summarizes Megan McArdle’s post about our current economic strategy in three words: “It won’t work.” Which is a fair assessment, both in what Megan’s analysis and in her conclusions. Personally, I would have preferred it if Stacy could have been able to summarize both with one word, though: “Oops.”  Not to be a broken record about this, but I didn’t need Megan to tell me that we enjoy, ah, suboptimal economic oversight. I already knew. Or that the current administration seems to default to style over substance. I already knew that, too. Or even that we are going to have to raise taxes on the lower and middle class to pay for all of this. A lot of us knew this already.

But apparently, we just weren’t trendy enough to satisfy a sufficiently large portion of the electorate.  To those of them reading this and smirking, at this point: real quick.  You know that tax cut that some of you college kids received?  Yeah, the $13 dollars a week thing that didn’t even register with most people.  Anyway, turns out that the IRS messed up:

— A single college student with a part-time job making $10,000 would get a $400 boost in pay. However, if that student is claimed as a dependent on a parent’s tax return, she doesn’t qualify for the credit and would have to repay it when she files next year.

Continue reading ‘The Trillion Dollar Fix.’

Rasmussen: Majority of country worries government will do too much.

I would quibble with the results here: it implies that the notion that we’ve already done too much already to fix the economy isn’t a legitimate answer. Still, this report will not be welcome news for the administration:

52% Worry Government Will Do Too Much to Fix Economy

[snip]

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 52% of the nation’s Likely Voters now worry that the government will do too much. That’s up from 50% a month ago and 43% in mid-February. It’s the highest level of concern measured since Barack Obama was elected president.

The number who worry that the government will do too little has fallen sharply to 31%. That’s down nine points from 40% a month ago and 12 points from 43% two months ago.

…which is only fitting. When the economy went into a tailspin last fall, the current administration presented itself as the best choice to repair our financial problems. When they were elected, the expectation was that they would actually engage in activities that would repair our financial problems, and in a nonpartisan, inclusive manner. Instead, we got: Never Waste A Crisis. I Won. The Democratic Party’s Pork Wish List. It’s Not Our Fault. Tax Hikes On The Lower Class*. The Great Expanding Budget Deficit. Let’s Repeat That Last One AgainOne More Time, So That It Sinks In. Continue reading Rasmussen: Majority of country worries government will do too much.