Category Archives: jobs

More Obama Sequester in Action

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A few of items.

Congressman Ted Poe (R, TX) is wondering about sequester cuts to tuition aid for our military veterans while we continue to send education aid to Pakistan.  The Marines, for instance, had spent $47 million tuition aid in 2012, while nearly $13 million went to Pakistan for “higher education.”  And then, post-sequester, the Obama administration committed another $37 million to the Pakistan program.

Hmm….

And there’s this example of Obama cynicism.  Recall that the US Department of Agriculture would be forced to “furlough” a significant portion of its meat inspectors, among other personnel.  In the meantime, though, and again post-sequester, the Obama administration

continues to pursue a “partnership” with the Mexican government to “raise awareness” about food stamps among immigrants from that country.

In complete disregard for current immigration law that says immigrants can’t come in unless they are, or can reasonably be expected to be, self-supporting.

And this:

School officials on Native American reservations across Minnesota are forced into making cuts to their current budgets in anticipation of sequester cuts.  These  are programs that had been making progress, improving high school graduation rates by the small, but concrete, 3% per year.

But in post-sequester DC, a six-figure income position was created for a former aide to Congressman Charles Rangel (D, NY) with the important title of Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans.

Apparently some uses for post-sequester money are more important than others.  Especially when there’s political gain to be had.

Never His Fault

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Once again, President Barack Obama is scuttling away from his responsibility.  This time, he’s throwing his Secret Service under the bus.

You’re all aware that Obama cancelled for the duration all White House tours by the public, and that he did it because of Evil Republicans and their Satanic Sequester.  After the hoo-raw over his cancellation and the sheer pettiness of it, he’s started crawfishing.

He now is insisting “that the Secret Service was behind the…suspension of White House tours.”  When he passed on this little tidbit to the Republican caucus with whom he was meeting, the response he got was a round of “ahaaaaas.”

Obama, in response, told the lawmakers: “Hold on guys, we just talked about respect.”

Sorry, Ace.  You get respect the same way any American does: through actual deeds.  You certainly don’t get it because you think you’re special.

The Secret Service works for Obama; he doesn’t work for them.  They may have made their recommendation, they may have told him their “decision.”  But it was his—overriding—decision to accept their position.  He could have overruled them; it was entirely his choice not to.

This is just cowardice.

Magical Thinking

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Well, that didn’t take long.  President Barack Obama already has failed his test.

The Progressives’ idea of a budget is out of the Senate Budget Committee, now, and on the Senate floor, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) will do his best to thrust it home with as little debate allowed as he can achieve.  Here’s the summary table (and scroll down a bit to this table; sorry you have to crane your neck); the whole thing can be viewed, in piecemeal form, on the Senate’s site:

Notice that.  Aside from continuing to gut Defense, overall spending continues apace, President Barack ObamaSenator Patty Murray (D, WA), the Budget Committee’s Chair, demands even more taxes from working Americans than he got in January, and our national debt explodes.

The Democrats want, with an absolutely straight face, to increase spending every year–$3.6 trillion in FY 2014, $4.05 trillion in FY 2016, and so on to $5.7 trillion in FY 2023, a 62% increase over the current level for FY 2013.

Reading the fine print in one of those piecemeal parts at the Senate site, we see that the Progressives want to create a(nother) $100 billion program aimed at generating new jobs, again by funding infrastructure work.  Of course, we know Obama already tried this, repeatedly, throughout his first term.  As he’s already confessed, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” and as those earlier programs demonstrated, the jobs aren’t there at any time in his government programs.  This is magical thinking.

And it turns out Murray lied about those taxes, too, cynically understating them at “only” an additional $975 billion.  The Weekly Standard has this table, provided by a staffer for the Senate Budget Committee’s (Murray’s committee) minority membership:

Murray cynically understated Obama’s tax demands by fully one-third.  These $1.5 trillion in new taxes, combined with the $600 billion in new taxes Obama got at the start of the year, adds up to $2.1 trillion in new taxes being demanded in just these two and a half months.

Progressives just can’t stand to not raise taxes.  Their addiction to OPM is palpable.

And that debt.  The Progressives fully intend to explode it to $24 trillion by 2023, with annual interest payments running nearly to $800 billion.  This also assumes the market would be willing to buy such risky debt at those rates.  But then Obama denies, ostrich-like, that there’s any urgency to our debt fiasco.  This is more magical thinking.

All of this is predicated, too, on Obama’s/Murray’s pipedream of a GDP annual growth rate over the next 10 years of 4.2%-6.6% each year—rates we’ve never sustained in any 10 year period in our history.  With all of this taxing and spending taking money out of the private economy—the economy in which Americans actually live, work, and die—positing such rates is…wrong.

Matched with the $975 billion in claimed spending cuts, this isn’t even the balance about which he’s been yammering.  This is more…magical thinking.

This proposal is a disaster waiting to happen.

Obama’s Other Face

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President Barack Obama is giving the appearance of wanting a bipartisan, compromise deal on our budget, deficit, and debt.  Is this real, this time, or just another version of the idle chit-chat and outright lies he’s passed off for the last five years?

The Wall Street Journal offers some metrics for assessing his behavior this time around.

  • Will he drop his demand for a tax increase outside of tax reform?  This has no chance of passing, and his continued insistence will poison the chance of any budget deal.  On tax reform he has willing GOP partners in Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp and Ohio Senator Rob Portman, but the formula has to be lower rates in exchange for fewer loopholes.  Any additional revenue will have to come from the faster economic growth that will follow.
  • Will he agree to a flexible, generous guest-worker program on immigration?  The AFL-CIO wants a restrictive program with a political body determining when there is a labor shortage and how many visas can be granted in specific industries.  Anything close to the AFL-CIO plan won’t stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming to the US for work, but it ought to kill reform in Congress.
  • Will he put more than token entitlement reforms on the table?  As we wrote last week (“Obama’s Not So Grand Offer,” March 8), the President’s Medicare proposals don’t begin to solve the health-care spending problem.  Short of Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan, the only chance for reform worth the name is “comprehensive cost-sharing” that forces individuals to confront at least some of the costs of their own care.

These sound like a pretty good test to me.  It looks, from the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal, like he’s failed the test.

Sessions on Progressive Obstructionism

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Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) in his closing remarks preparatory to casting his vote on the Jack Lew confirmation last Wednesday, had this to say on a related matter.

I would also like to place this [confirmation vote] in a wider context.

Today is the 1,400th day since Senate Democrats passed a budget.  Why has this gone on so long?  Because they decided it would be better to offer no solution, no plan to help struggling Americans, and instead to tear down anyone who dared to offer a plan to solve our nation’s economic problems.

This is the heart of the problem here in Washington right now.  We have one political party that sees the budget debate as exercise in political warfare, not problem-solving.

At the center of this strategy is the White House.

In his campaign for re-election, President Obama repeatedly said that he had a plan to “pay down our debt.”  He even ran a campaign ad saying: “I believe the only way to create an economy built to last, is to strengthen the middle class—asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way.  So we can afford to invest in education, manufacturing, and home-grown American energy, for good middle class jobs.”

But this is all totally false.

Again, this was the strategy: offer a plan that does nothing to alter our dangerous debt course while pretending the opposite.

Then, once you’ve done that, attack anyone who dares to reduce the size of the bureaucracy.  Attack anyone who suggests Washington is too powerful.  Attack, attack, attack—while never offering anything to help Americans who are struggling every day.

After the White House budget was submitted in 2011, President Obama spoke at George Washington University and, with Congressman Paul Ryan sitting in front of him, and said:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives….  It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years….  But the way this plan achieves [that goal] would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history….  This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.  And who are those 50 million Americans?  Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid.  Many are poor children.  Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome….  These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

Majority Leader Reid said of one Republican reform effort that it was “a mean-spirited bill that would cut the heart out of the recovery that we have in America today….  It goes after little children, poor little boys and girls….  We want them to learn to read.”

This is how the White House and Senate Democrat leaders approach the budget debate.  It’s the same strategy with the sequester.  And Republicans, candidly, have not done enough to stand up to these egregious slanders.  Voting against Jack Lew would be a vote against these dishonest tactics. Misrepresentation of fact.

The painful truth is, the White House strategy has been largely successful up until now.  President Obama and his Senate Majority have blocked fiscal reform and continued our path to fiscal disaster.

It is time that we pointed out that the establishment they are shielding from cuts—the big-government apparatus they are defending—is hurting people every day.  Their policies, their endless support of the bureaucracy, has created poverty and joblessness and dependency.  In cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago—governed almost exclusively by Democrats at every level—good, hardworking people are hurt every day by the policies of the Left.

  • In the city of Baltimore, one in three children live in poverty.  One in three Baltimore residents are on food stamps.
  • In Chicago, there were roughly 500 homicides in 2012.  Fifty-one percent of the city’s children live in a single-parent family.
  • In Detroit, almost one in three households had not a single person working at any time in the last 12 months.  The city’s violent crime rate is among the worst in the country.  More than half of all Detroit children live in poverty.

This should not happen.  These are the consequences of leftist policies.  We are fighting to create jobs, to create rising wages, to create opportunity, to help more people earn a good living and care for themselves financially.  We are trying to lift people out of poverty, to strengthen family and community.  And we are trying to protect the good and decent people of this country from a debt crisis.

What he said.