Tag Archives: spending

Chained CPI, Taxes, and Spending

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In years past, Obama had offered to trim cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other benefit programs—known as chained CPI.  Not anymore.

The Obama administration also has taken to making this claim:

Social Security has not contributed one penny to the deficit.

This, of course, is mendaciously false—it’s government spending, and the government is spending more than it takes in.  The only thing is the bookkeeping fiction that it’s off-budget, and so (so the claim goes) that deficit spending doesn’t exist.  But this meme depends on a carefully distorted definition of the official “deficit”—that of being only an on-the-books deficit, and not including the off-the-books spending that is Social Security (and Medicare).

But, maybe Obama would reconsider.

“The president was willing to step forward and put on the table a concrete proposal.  Unfortunately Republicans refused to even consider the possibility of raising some revenue by closing some loopholes that benefit only the wealthy and well connected,” [White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh] Earnest said.  Officials said Thursday that those potential reductions in spending, included in last year’s Obama budget, had been designed to initiate negotiations with Republicans over how to reduce future deficits and the nation’s debt.  But Republicans never accepted Obama’s calls for higher tax revenue to go along with the cuts.

Never mind that the only legitimate uses of closing loopholes are two: to reduce tax rates, and to pay down the national debt.

Beyond that, government doesn’t need more tax revenue; although it would get more, even at lower tax rates, if it got out of the way of the economy and let that grow.  Government needs to cut pending to below collected tax revenue, and it needs to use the increased revenue from loophole closing (all loopholes, including, say, tax credits for “green” energy boondoggles, not just those convenient to Democrats) to reduce tax rates even further—and then keep that tighter lid on spending.

[Obama’s latest budget proposal] says deficits as a share of the economy will be below 2% after 2025.

In other words, Obama continues to ignore our out of control national debt, since those deficits can only continue to add to the debt.

Look! Shiny!

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President Barack Obama was in California at the end of last week, touting “executive actions” (no need of an impudent Congress, he) for spending money to “help” the state fight its drought problem.  Among his promised expenditures were $100 million in assistance for livestock producers, $60 million in food-bank funding for families affected by the drought, and $15 million for areas nationwide most severely harmed by dry conditions.  Don’t worry about how all of this will be paid for: Obama just got a new checkbook from Congress, of course he still has money in the bank.

Then he segued to our climate “problem.”  Shiny!

He repeated his call for $1 billion (that new checkbook, again) for “climate resilience,” supported by his Assistant for Science and Technology, John Holdren, who averred

Weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change.

(We need an Assistant to the President to say something any first grader understands?)

You bet climate and changing climate influences weather—that’s what climate change does—it alters the conditions within which weather occurs.  And the sun is, indeed, warming over its lifetime, and within that, it’s presently undergoing a quiescent period, as measured by its current sunspot cycle, of historic proportions—rather like its quiescent period prior to and during the Little Ice Age.

But, shiny!

Obama has made climate change a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, tapping the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions from power plants….

Obama recently launched the creation of “climate hubs” to study how volatile weather conditions are affecting the agriculture industry.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Obama would pledge the “federal government will do all that it can” to help farmers and livestock producers and that he would act “rather than wait for congressional action.”

Never mind climate “models” that can’t simultaneously predict the past and the present, we should believe them anyway.  Never mind cherry-picked tree ring data, falsified NASA historical data, substitution of data from an Australian coastal station for a failed station 700 miles away in the Australian interior.  Never mind atmospheric CO2 data that demonstrate that increased levels follow global warming rather than precede it, thus confirming the increasing health of the planet from burgeoning life.

Look at all of that, anyway, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain talking about Obamacare, failed jobs and economic policies, a stagnant “recovery,” or failed foreign policies that have us feared by our friends and held in contempt by our enemies.

It’s shiny….

A Tiny Step

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But sufficient for the moment.  Recall this in the next Congress, though, and address it more firmly then.

What is this?  It’s the food stamp compromise just reached between the Democrat-controlled Senate and the people’s House of Representatives.  The compromise keeps food stamp benefits for most Americans while cutting them overall by $800 million per year—a 1% cut.

That’s a step in the right direction, albeit chump change, but serious revamping isn’t possible so long as the Democrats control the Senate.  First things, first, and that means here, as with most items to come up this year, Republicans and Conservatives have to stay focused—and they have to develop a unified message with concrete solutions beyond just saying “No” to the Democrats (“No” is the Progressives’ knee-jerk answer to real reform) on which to focus—on the failures of President Barack Obama and the Reid/Schumer/Durbin Senate and on Republican/Conservative solutions to those failures.

With that, they can increase their hold on the House and gain control of the Senate and thereby start, in the next Congress, making real progress toward redressing the damage done by the Progressive policies of the last five (six, by this fall) years.  Building on that, they can also win the White House in 2016 and then truly start repairing the damage done.

Bipartisanship, Compromise, and the Conservative Movement

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The Conservative movement, and the Republican Party generally, need to cut out the internecine sniping and concentrate on the real problem: the destruction being done by current—and over the last 80 years—Progressive policies.  Herewith, some advice, even though it’s unasked for.

You need to study the Progressive movement and the mechanism they’ve used for making the gains they’ve made up to the Obama administration, and the naked power grab in which the Obama administration is engaged.  Until Obama, they made their gains by sticking to their core principles and accepting smaller changes than they wanted—to keep you coming along, while they made those smaller, but positive, gains in their direction.

You of the Conservative movement, similarly, need to stick to your core principles, but you must be willing to take incremental steps, and to accept gradualism in moving things back to the right, back to limited government.  This, of course, means you have to become better communicators, too, getting out into the neighborhoods of your and your Democrat neighbors’ constituents and into their newspapers and televisions.  In this era of a news “medium” that’s generally hostile to Conservative principles, you also have to learn to bypass this medium as well as use it: that’s what the social media are for.  The NLMSM can’t manipulate those.

In last five years, the Progressives have gotten their way with a my way or the highway, all or nothing, tactic because they’ve had the votes to force it in the first part of that period, and in the last three years, they’ve still had the luxury of no coherent, united opposition, even when they didn’t have the votes in one branch of Congress.  Get over yourselves.

These last several years, with the euphoria of the 2010 election outcome and the bitterness of the 2012 outcome having clouded your judgment, you’ve been trying for yourselves the Progressive all or nothing tactic.  How’s that been working out for you?  You demanded no tax increase at all in the fall of 2012 Fiscal Cliff fiasco, even scotching Boehner’s Plan B before either getting a vote in the Senate (putting each Democrat, individually, on record as rejecting a small increase in favor of a big one) or forcing Reid, Schumer, and Durbin onto the record as being too afraid of the issue even to permit a vote.  Your result was an even bigger tax increase—on $400k or more income—than you could have gotten away with.  This is not progress at all; you lost ground.

You demanded to entirely defund Obamacare in one fell swoop, even at expense of shutting down government.  That felt good, surely, but it was very damaging politically, hurting your and Party chances in the Senate elections in 2014.  And the concrete result here was another spending increase.  Again, you lost ground.

Now you’re demanding a total rewrite of the tax code all in one fell swoop, ignoring the lessons of the Obamacare law, which rewrote the health industry in one fell swoop—and is a failed law, as much because it overreached in one step as because of the goals of Obamacare.  You’ll get a similar lack of success from a whole hog effort on the tax code.

No.  You must move for compromise, for bipartisan solutions—if other party has a role in the solution, it’ll be a more stable foundation from which to move the question further in your direction on the next go-round.  Notice that: it’s possible to compromise while maintaining your core principles, while accepting smaller moves in your preferred direction than you want.  It’s what the Progressives have been doing for four generations.  Are they really that much smarter than you?

Furthermore, you must recognize that the work is never done, there’s always more for the next year, more for the next session.  Even were you to get, for instance, the tax code completely revamped all in one bill, it still would need improvement.  But working from a stable outcome generated this year makes working toward next year’s progress easier.

Thus: move incrementally, accept a smaller tax cut, for instance, or smaller spending cut, this year, while holding out for those cuts (and no accounting gimmicks, either: real cuts this year, not phantom reductions in growth rates in the out years), so you can work for further cuts in the other, or both, next year.

You must stop, for now, the arguments over raising the debt ceiling.  You don’t have the votes in the Senate to win this one today, and the Progressives in the Senate don’t care about the threat of default.  They know you’ll get the blame for it in today’s news climate.  Besides, and more importantly (gradually) cutting spending to less than tax revenues (while also cutting tax rates and—gradually—rationalizing the tax code) will lead to eliminated deficits for the current year, which will eliminate borrowing in the next year, which will make the debt ceiling irrelevant.

You Conservatives today are acting like Obama Progressives with your all or nothing, right damn now, positions, and that’s a losing proposition while you don’t have the votes, and it’s a losing proposition even were you to get the votes—look at the animus generated by the Progressives’ all or nothing, their way or the highway Obamacare.

To Conservatives, then: by all means, force a vote—in the Senate, too, or force Reid, Schumer, Durbin, et al., on the record as too fearful of a vote—on a debt ceiling raise paired with commensurate spending cuts, but then let the debt ceiling raise go through.  Don’t let that argument become a distraction from Obama’s failed Obamacare, his failed economic policies, his failure to promote job creation, his denigration of the private sector.  Stay focused and win the Senate while increasing your hold on the House in 2014, and do the same (while increasing your hold on the Senate) while winning the White House, too, in 2016.

Accept, separately, smaller spending cuts, a lesser tax reform than you want.  On those items’ passage, come back the next year, the next session, again and again, with more, building on the little steps—they’ll take you to the full cuts and the full reform.

With the victories in 2014 and 2016 (and in the later election cycles), you can begin serious repair of the Progressives’ damage.

To Republicans: listen to the Conservatives, incorporate their ideas.  They’re sound—and they won’t give ground as easily as you’ve done these last 80 years.  Your own performance has only been to allow the drift to the left, as the Democrats and their Progressives have executed incrementalism better than you’ve resisted it.

To RINOs: shut up.  Whacko bird-ism just makes you indistinguishable from Progressives.  You have no credibility.

To Conservatives and Republicans: develop a unified message that both of you can push.  And get out and push it.

Farm Subsidies and False Premises

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Negotiators [on a proposed milk price support bill] are…working out how farm subsidies should be restructured in the absence of a traditional subsidy called direct payments, which are paid to farmer regardless of crop price or crop yield.  Both chambers’ bills would eliminate this $5 billion annual subsidy in response to critics who say it pays farmers not to farm.  But they have argued over how to replace those payments, with major farm groups squabbling over whether subsidies should kick in based on crop prices or farmer revenue, and how to count the acreage on which the subsidies are based.

Unfortunately for our pocketbooks, those negotiators are operating from a false premise: that the subsidies need to be revised in any way.  The only ones who benefit from these subsidies in any large way are the large agribusinesses and the “farm state” politicians supported by them.  Mom and pop farms?  Not so much.  On top of that, though, us food eaters are materially harmed by the subsidies through the artificially inflated prices we have to pay for food that those subsidies create.  And the poor among us are harmed the most by those inflated prices.  Additionally, us taxpayers are harmed a second—and third—time by having to pay for those subsidies that are driving our prices up and by having to pay for the food stamps that are used to mitigate for the poor those artificially inflated prices.

No.  The subsidies need to be done away with: “replace” them altogether through a bill that eliminates all of the farm subsidies, which ding us for $25 billion annually.  That seed then lets the much larger $80 billion/yr food stamp program to be drastically reduced, if not eliminated altogether, since most of those remaining who truly need help would generally be within the resources of their local communities and states.