Tag Archives: spending

Federal Transfer Payments to States

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Federal transfer payments to state and local governments totaled some $444 billion in 2013; these included payments of $282 billion for Medicaid, $3.4 billion for LIHEAP, $80 billion for SNAP, and some $78 billion for other transfers to the states.

The payments often are synergistic, not at all fixed, too.  For instance, LIHEAP payments are used by the states to magnify SNAP payments, since SNAP contains an energy allowance, a “standard utility allowance.”

Governor Dannel Malloy [D] last week announced that Connecticut would “expend $1.4 million in available federal energy assistance funding” to raise minimum LIHEAP payments for 50,000 beneficiaries, or about a quarter of its food-stamp rolls.  The increase…will “preserve approximately $66.6 million” a year in food-stamp benefits.  So Connecticut will leverage $1 in additional federal LIHEAP funds to reap $48 more from Washington for food stamps.

Mr Malloy’s neighbor Andrew Cuomo jumped for the free lunch the next day by declaring that New York would “dedicate approximately $6 million in additional federal” heating assistance to maintain $457 million in food-stamp payments.

Of course, this is done with taxpayer money, so the money transferred to, say Connecticut, comes in part from nearly bankrupt California, in part from bankrupt Illinois, in part from nearly bankrupt New York, etc.

It would help if the synergies were done away with.  It would help even more, and more permanently if the transfers were done away with, and the States required to see to their own responsibilities without freeloading off other States’ citizens.

Defense Cut “Drivers”

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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.

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.