Tag Archives: spending

RINO Surrender?

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Fox News reported over the weekend that Senator Bob Corker (R, TN) now is saying Republicans

should cave to President Barack Obama on [tax rate increases] in order to not only resolve the current crisis but move on and start negotiating spending cuts, which could result in more significant deficit reduction.

Never mind that excessive spending—and runaway entitlements—are part of the current crisis.  Furthermore, with Obama getting his tax increases, there’ll be no spending cuts and no entitlement reform.  Corker knows full well that Democrat promises of spending cuts tomorrow in return for tax rate increases today are worthless.  And he’s begging for surrender anyway.

Corker said this to rationalize his surrender recommendation:

The focus then shifts to entitlements, and maybe that puts us in a place where we actually can do something that really saves this nation[.]

This is…naïve.  If the Republicans surrender on the tax rate increases, why should President Obama believe they won’t surrender on the debt ceiling, on spending cuts, on entitlement reform?  Why should any of the rest of us?

Corker wants to surrender.  That’s his right.  But let him do so as a private citizen.  This RINO needs to be replaced at the next election.  Republican acquiescence with Progressives’ demands over the last 80 years are how we got into this mess in the first place.  And the magnitude of the destructiveness of their demands has been especially manifest these last four years.  Our nation can’t afford any more of those policies.

Negotiating?

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The Progressives in our Federal government insist, with a straight face, that the Republicans have put forward no concrete proposals in the present budget…negotiations.  They carefully ignore the fact that the Republicans already have put forward three concrete proposals: two House-passed budgets (for 2011 and 2012, which contained explicit spending, taxing, and entitlement reform steps), and the proposal on which they campaigned last fall.

Oh, wait—the Progressives studiously ignored those, too—in the Senate, where they refused even to permit debate on the budgets and ever since, with their pretense that the spending, tax, and entitlement reforms of the campaign don’t exist.

The Progressives’ current position?  As The Wall Street Journal reports,

[M]any Democrats have ruled out any changes to Social Security during the current fiscal talks.

And

A senior administration official said the White House would make no new offers until Republicans changed their opposition to raising top tax rates.

Throughout this entire shabby charade, President Barack Obama has been accusing the Republicans of holding middle-class America hostage against their refusal to agree to tax rate hikes on his hated Americans.  Yet the Republicans and Progressives already agree on making permanent current tax rates on 98% of Americans.  It’s Obama who is threatening to blow up our economy on his ego trip of demanding 100% of a tax deal for which he already has 98%.

It’s Obama who’s threatening to blow up our economy by refusing to discuss spending cuts and entitlement reform at all—after agreeing that they should be on the table shortly after the election.

It’s Obama who’s threatening to blow up our economy with his insult of demanding sole debt ceiling authority in utter disregard of the Constitutional role of Congress—and not the President—in setting spending.

Update: Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) and a number fellow members of the Republican leadership made a counterproposal Tuesday that included much of Obama’s precious tax revenue increases–not as rate increases–to the tune of $800 billion, and $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.  Obama blew this off within the hour.  So much for negotiating.

Ex-Senator Rick Santorum, last night on Greta van Susteren’s On the Record,  said that Obama’s fallback–his Plan A–of Sequestration and tax rate increases across the board makes him entirely willing to take our economy over the cliff: Obama gets his tax rate increases, and he gets the Progressives’ decades-long fought-for cut in defense spending, a $500 billion reduction.  Obama sees this as a heads, I win; tails, you lose situation.

I think Santorum is right.

Federal Control(s)

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This is how the central government gets its subordinate states ensnared in the Federal power trap.  Much has been written already on the entrapment of the states in the Medicaid, education, and so on honeypots, with the Feds having gotten the states dependent on Federal monies for those programs, and then using that addiction to control the states’ behavior vis-à-vis those programs—and other useful state considerations—lest those funds have something happen to them (albeit descriptions have not been this blunt).

Here’s an explicit example, this time aimed at New Orleans and through this city the state of Louisiana.

Engineers consider it a Rolls Royce of flood protection—comparable to systems in seaside European cities such as St. Petersburg, Venice, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.  Whether the infrastructure can hold is less in question than whether New Orleans can be trusted with the keys.

The Army Corps estimates it will take $38 million a year to pay for upkeep, maintenance and operational costs after it’s turned over to local officials.

Local flood-control chief Robert Turner said he has questions about where that money will come from.  At current funding levels, the region will run out of money to properly operate the high-powered system within a decade unless a new revenue source is found.

“That’s been the eternal problem with flood-protection systems,” said Thomas Wolff, an engineer at Michigan State University.  “You build something very good and then give it to local interests who are not as well-funded.”

However, the Feds will blame the locals for the failure:

Congressional investigations found the old Orleans Levee Board more interested in managing a casino license and two marinas than looking after levees.  Though the Army Corps of Engineers had responsibility for annual levee inspections, the local levee boards were responsible for maintenance.  Still, the boards spent millions of dollars on a fountain and overpasses rather than on levee protection.

Never mind that the locals have a local economy that needs looking after, else there’s nothing for a (Cadillac) Federal program to…protect.

As Richard Fernandez notes in his post,

The problem with free stuff is that someone has to pay for it.

And when the Federal government sighs and says, “OK, we’ll pay,” it then also exerts control over the program being centrally funded and over the entity “benefiting” from that program.  And so the entity and its citizens also “pay for it,” with their freedom of action.

So much for federalism.

Tax “Negotiation”

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Here’s another example of the Progressive view of negotiations.

In public statements, [Treasury Secretary Timothy, who has joined the negotiations] Geithner has suggested he will hold the line on the core White House demand to raise tax rates on wealthier Americans.  If “people look at this and look at it carefully, they’ll come to the judgment we reached,” he said at a Wall Street Journal conference earlier this month, adding that this meant “higher rates” and limits on tax deductions.

Because, of course, they’re right; anyone with any sense will agree with them, so that question is closed.

This is consistent with the new Obama position of being willing to discuss only tax raises, with spending cuts and entitlement reform completely off the table.  Progressives will talk about them later.  They promise.

Unfunded Liabilities

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We’ve already seen counties and cities brought low and into bankruptcy by their blithe accumulation of future liabilities that they have no hope of honoring.  Jefferson County, AL, comes to mind, from a bond sale they had every reason to believe, a priori, that they could not honor in the future.

So does Stockton, CA’s bankruptcy, flowing from a public union pension and insurance program that they, also, must have known in advance that they could not support in future.

These are well understood, and the data that would have predicted these failures easily available to any who cared enough to look—and to face the impending problem squarely.

What of our nation’s debts, though?  Chris Cox and Bill Archer describe in a recent Wall Street Journal the hidden—and unfunded—liabilities at the Federal level that make our public national debt of $16 trillion look minor.

These hidden, but too real liabilities—debts—include

the unfunded liability of Medicare, $42.8 trillion

the unfunded liability of Social Security, $20.5 trillion

the unfunded liability of federal employees’ future retirement benefits, $23.5 trillion

But these data are carefully hidden from public scrutiny.  Federal Treasury “balance sheets” don’t include things like the debt represented by those Medicare, Social Security, and retirement unfunded liabilities.  No, the data are carefully squirreled away in the individual social welfare accounts.  You have to know where to look and what to look for—knowledge that heavily trained and experienced folks like Cox and Archer have, but which our politicians know the average American constituent lacks.

This is a time bomb that demands out entitlement programs be brought to heel, our entitlement mentality as a nation to be curbed.  Else we’ll go the way of Stockton.  And for a nation, that won’t be pretty.  Think of Greece today.  Think of Weimar Germany of the last century.