First, President Obama moves to gut our Federal defense establishment, including among other moves reducing the size of our Army to 1940 levels.
Now he wants to gut our state militias, in particular the States’ Army National Guards, also—and reduce thereby their ability to deal with internal matters ranging from disorder to disaster recovery. And, oh by the way, severely restrict the States’ ability to reinforce that drastically curtailed Federal defense capacity.
Hmm….
The Congressional Budget Office had some remarks last Thursday.
More than four and a half years after the end of the recession, employment has risen sluggishly—much more slowly than it grew, on average, during the four previous recoveries that lasted more than one year. At the same time, the unemployment rate has fallen only partway back to its prerecession level…and a significant part of that improvement is attributable to a decline in labor force participation that has occurred as an unusually large number of people have stopped looking for work…. Moreover, the rate of long-term unemployment—the percentage of the labor force that has been out of work for more than 26 consecutive weeks—remains extraordinarily high.
And
CBO estimates that GDP was 7½% smaller than potential (maximum sustainable) GDP at the end of the recession; by the end of 2013, less than one-half of that gap had been closed. With output growing so slowly, payrolls have increased slowly as well—and the slack in the labor market that can be seen in the elevated unemployment rate and in part of the reduction in the rate of labor force participation mirrors the gap between actual and potential GDP.
And [emphasis in the original]
Employment at the end of 2013 was about 6 million jobs short of where it would be if the unemployment rate had returned to its prerecession level and if the participation rate had risen to the level it would have attained without the current cyclical weakness. Those factors account roughly equally for the shortfall.
Any questions about the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s economic policies?
Here are a couple of types of spending increases that will appear in upcoming Federal budgets:
[A] CBO report finds that mandatory spending, which includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, is projected to rise $85 billion, or 4%….
And
Interest on the debt is worse. It is projected to increase 14% per year, almost quadrupling in dollar terms between 2014 and 2024.
DoD Secretary Chuck Hagel’s proposed budget cuts Defense spending by $75 billion over the next two years.
The “mandatory” spending problem could be cured over those same two years, with a proper reform package.
From $416 billion in interest payments in 2013, that 14% increase for 2014 comes to $58 billion; for 2015, the first year of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal (which includes that “mandatory” spending and Hagel’s cuts in the Defense budget), that interest payment increase comes to $65 billion.
Our debt debacle, with its required interest payments, will take considerably longer than two years to redress, and that puts a premium on getting started now on the necessary spending cuts. This is made even more difficult, though, by the enormous size of our debt coupled with the national survival need to preserve our military capacity.
But the Democrats won’t allow entitlement reform in any direction except expansion—and more spending. And they refuse to take our debt seriously, demanding ever more (non-defense) spending, and not just for the “mandatory” stuff. Go figure.
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.
Isn’t this part of what the 10th Amendment is about, guys?
Maybe some States finally are figuring that out.
Governors…have a blunt message for Congress and the White House: They’re moving ahead on job-creation, infrastructure and other matters in the face of federal inaction.
Democratic and Republican governors gathering for National Governors Association meetings say they’ve been forced to fill a vacuum created by the partisan battles in Washington that have blocked agreement on a long-term fiscal plan.
“We’re not waiting. It would really be great for them to solve the mess here, but in the meantime we’re going to do what we can,” said Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican.
It’s not their mess to solve, albeit they’ve certainly been actively enthusiastic contributors to it. Your States’ citizens are your responsibility. The voters elected you to deal with the problems not to foist them off on relay them to the Federal government.
And this:
“There’s no long-term infrastructure plan coming out of DC—none,” said North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican.
Mr McCrory last year pushed through legislation changing the way North Carolina spends scarce transportation dollars. Under the plan, projects that boost the economy, such as highways that link urban centers and relieve congestion, get priority.
In an interview Friday, Mr McCrory said the measure was partially a response to the failure of federal lawmakers to rework transportation funding.
You guys shouldn’t need one Federal action first; you should be acting on your own initiative. When that happens, you get McCrory’s outcome: you finally stop feeding your addiction to Federal dollars, you start getting more efficiency and better prioritization, and you stop spending OPM willy nilly.
And this:
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said the “cycle of partisanship and dysfunction” in Washington could ultimately benefit state and local governments by forcing them to rethink how they relate to the federal government.
Well, NSS. Welcome to the world of independence and responsibility.
States’ rights come with States’ responsibilities. Where you guys been?