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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rock_nj who wrote (187684)	3/6/2010 1:23:56 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361944

Obama Spending Plan Underestimates Deficits, Budget Office Says By Brian Faler March 6 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s budget proposal would create bigger deficits than advertised every year of the next decade, with the shortfalls totaling $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The nonpartisan agency said yesterday the deficit will remain above 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product for the foreseeable future while the publicly held debt will zoom to $20.3 trillion, amounting to 90 percent of GDP by 2020. By then, interest payments on the debt will have quadrupled to more than $900 billion annually, the report said. Deficits between 2011 and 2020 would total $9.76 trillion, the CBO said. Economists generally consider deficits topping 3 percent of GDP to be unsustainable because that means government debt is growing faster than the ability to pay back the money. “The news today from CBO is clear: The president’s budget will continue to lead our nation into a fiscal catastrophe -- an ever worse one than the president’s own numbers suggest,” Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, said yesterday. White House Office of Management and Budget spokesman Kenneth Baer said the report “highlights how sensitive and uncertain budget projections are.” Baer also said, “What is certain is that the irresponsibility of the past put the country on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory.” Independent View The CBO report is designed to give Congress an independent assessment of the administration’s budget request. The difference between the two outlooks is largely attributable to varying economic assumptions that affect projections of how quickly tax revenues will pour into the Treasury. Revenues will be about $2 trillion less than the administration projects, while spending will be lower by about $600 billion, according to the CBO report. The administration projected last month the deficit would shrink to as low as 3.6 percent of GDP, with the 10-year shortfall totaling $8.5 trillion. It foresees the debt growing to 77 percent of GDP in 2020. The deficit for the 2010 fiscal year has been projected to be $1.6 trillion, a record. Obama last month established an 18- member bipartisan panel to suggest to Congress steps that would reduce the shortfalls. To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Faler in Washington at bfaler@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: March 6, 2010 00:00 EST

To: Rock_nj who wrote (187684)	3/6/2010 1:41:24 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361944

Kucinich Forces Congress to Debate Afghanistan by Robert Naiman / Published on Friday, March 5, 2010 by CommonDreams.org On Thursday, Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced H. Con Res. 248, a privileged resolution with 16 original cosponsors that will require the House of Representatives to debate whether to continue the war in Afghanistan. Debate on the resolution is expected early next week. Original cosponsors of the Kucinich resolution include John Conyers, Ron Paul, José Serrano, Bob Filner, Lynn Woolsey, Walter Jones, Danny Davis, Barbara Lee, Michael Capuano, Raúl Grijalva, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Johnson, Yvette Clarke, Eric Massa, Alan Grayson, and Chellie Pingree. The Pentagon doesn't want Congress to debate Afghanistan. The Pentagon wants Congress to fork over $33 billion more to pay for the current military escalation, no questions asked, no restrictions imposed for a withdrawal timetable or an exit strategy. Ideally, from the point of view of the Pentagon, Congress would fork over that money right away, before the coming Kandahar offensive that the $33 billion is supposed to pay for, because you can expect a lot of bad news out of Afghanistan in the form of deaths of American soldiers and Afghan civilians once the Kandahar offensive starts, and it would sure be awkward if all that bad news reached Washington while the $33 billion was hanging fire. So it's a great thing that Rep. Kucinich and his 16 allies are forcing Congress to debate the issue, and it would be even better if more Members of Congress would be urged by their constituents to support Kucinich's resolution. That would be a signal to the House leadership that continuation of the open-ended war and occupation is controversial in the House, and the House leadership should not try to ram through $33 billion more for the war on a fast-track without ample opportunity for debate and amendment. Every day the Afghanistan war continues is another day on which the United States Government plays Russian Roulette with the lives of American soldiers and Afghan civilians. The British Government has more urgency than the U.S. government about ending the war - and is more supportive than the U.S. of a political solution to end the conflict - because in Britain there is greater public outcry. If there were greater public and Congressional outcry in the U.S., we could be more like Britain, and get our government on board the train to a political solution, instead of prolonging the war indefinitely. The first step towards bringing our troops home is for Members of Congress to hear from their constituents. *Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy commondreams.org

To: Rock_nj who wrote (187684)	3/6/2010 2:09:55 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361944

Now is Not the Time for Austerity counterpunch.org The Debt is Not the Threat By MARK WEISBROT February 26, 2010 Various political demagogues and Wall Street interests have mounted a campaign to convince Americans that despite persistent massive unemployment for the foreseeable future, more than 15 million people underwater on their home mortgages and two unnecessary wars, what we really should be worried about is America’s national debt. It doesn’t help that most of the media pretends not to understand the basic economics, accounting or arithmetic of the issue. Let’s start with the economics: The Obama Administration forecasts unemployment of 10.0, 9.2 and 8.2 percent, respectively, for 2010-2012. The rate does not fall to the 5.2 percent rate it considers full employment until 2018. The difference between 10 percent unemployment and 5.2 percent is more than 7 million people without jobs. And that doesn’t count the increase in millions of people involuntarily working part time, or millions who leave the labor force because they can’t find work. This is unacceptable in any civilized society; but even more outrageous in the world’s richest country. It means millions of ruined lives and permanent scars that will persist for years and possibly decades - in the form of increased poverty, lower educational levels, mental illness, suicide, crime and other social ills. This means that our government’s stimulus package was too small, which fits with the data: In 2009, taking into account the spending cuts and tax increases of state and local governments, it was less than one percent of GDP. That is why the stimulus is estimated as having saved about 1.6 to 2 million jobs, whereas we are down about 8.5 million jobs since the recession began. Bottom line: We need more stimulus, not less; this is not the time to be worrying about deficits or national debt. It is clear that there is no short-term problem with running large deficits in a weak economy: Investors are buying up even long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at remarkably low real interest rates. Clearly the markets do not perceive that our government is heading into risky territory with its debt. Interest payments on the debt are currently just 1.4 percent of GDP. For the long term, as the CBO has emphasized, the vast majority of the deficit and debt problem is just rapidly rising health care costs. Of course, we could be like other developed countries and have universal health care, and pay about half of what we are now paying per person. That is the average for the other high-income countries. This would take care of our long-term federal debt problems. Another significant contributor to our long-term debt is the military. On an annual basis, we spent 5.0 percent of GDP on just the Defense Department budget last year. Before 9/11, the CBO had projected just 2.4 percent for 2009. The difference is more than twice the long-term shortfall in our Social Security system, and it is based on an understatement of military spending. Maybe we need to focus on protecting our airports from already existing terrorists rather than recruiting more by occupying foreign countries. Maybe we don’t need hundreds of military bases all over the world. But thanks to the power of what President Eisenhower famously named the “military industrial complex,” President Obama has exempted the military from any spending freeze. Thanks to the two most powerful lobbies in Congress - insurance and pharmaceutical - getting health care costs under control is still a distant dream. And then there’s the people who make the nation’s major economic decisions and actually brought us this mess – Goldman Sachs and their Wall Street friends: They want to put Social Security on the chopping block to pay for their crimes (and bonuses). *Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

To: Rock_nj who wrote (187684)	3/6/2010 3:50:02 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361944

Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-Winning Economist, Says Federal Reserve System 'Corrupt' huffingtonpost.com One of the world's leading economists said Wednesday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it's "corrupt." Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank, said that if a country had applied for World Bank aid during his tenure, with a financial regulatory system similar to the Federal Reserve's -- in which regional Feds are partly governed by the very banks they're supposed to police -- it would have raised alarms. "If we had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure," Stiglitz said during a conference on financial reform in New York. "It's time for us to reflect on our own structure today, and to say there are parts that can be improved." Stiglitz made the remarks at a conference held by the Roosevelt Institute. He and other speakers, including Harvard Law Professor and federal bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren and legendary investor George Soros, had bold ideas about reforming the nation's financial system. After the conference, Stiglitz said that his remarks on the Fed were "maybe a little hyperbole," but then again made the case that if another country had presented a plan to reform its financial system, and included a regulatory regime that copied the makeup of the Federal Reserve system, "it would have been a big signal that something is wrong." To Stiglitz, the core issue is that regional Fed banks, such as the New York Fed, have clear conflicts of interest -- a result of the banks being partly governed by a board of directors that includes officers of the very banks they're supposed to be overseeing. The New York Fed, which was led by current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner during the time leading Wall Street firms like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, AIG, and Goldman Sachs were given hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, presently has on its board of directors Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase. He's been there for three years. He replaced former Citigroup chairman Sanford "Sandy" Weill. "So, these are the guys who appointed the guy who bailed them out," Stiglitz said. "Is that a conflict of interest?" he asked rhetorically. "They would say, 'no conflict of interest, we were just doing our job,'" he answered. "But you have to look at the conflicts of interest." A message left for a New York Fed spokeswoman after regular business hours was not returned. "The reason you talk about governance is because in a democracy you want people to have confidence," Stiglitz said. "This is a structure that will undermine confidence in a democracy."