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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (50109)	4/4/2012 11:54:07 PM
From: greatplains_guy	2 Recommendations Respond to of 71588

Obama’s America By Yuval Levin April 3, 2012 5:15 P.M. On February 16, at a hearing of the House Budget Committee, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was asked by committee chairman Paul Ryan to describe the administration’s plans for addressing the mounting risk of a debt crisis. His reply was: “We’re not coming before you today to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.” Today’s presidential speech to the annual Associated Press Luncheon was basically just a long, dishonest way of saying the same astonishingly irresponsible thing. In essence, the president argued that our country’s future depends on allowing our government to grow uncontrollably, and that any attempt to restrain its growth and to keep the size of government in relation to the economy where it was during the fifty years preceding his election would be heartless and irresponsible. Keeping that growth in check—not reversing it, mind you, but allowing the government to grow only about as quickly as the economy does—would, we are told, subject our nation to unimaginable horrors. If all of Ryan’s cuts in the growth of spending were “applied evenly,” the president argued, then: The year after next, nearly 10 million college students would see their financial aid cut by an average of more than $1,000 each. There would be 1,600 fewer medical grants, research grants for things like Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS. There would be 4,000 fewer scientific research grants, eliminating support for 48,000 researchers, students, and teachers. Investments in clean energy technologies that are helping us reduce our dependence on foreign oil would be cut by nearly a fifth. If this budget becomes law and the cuts were applied evenly, starting in 2014, over 200,000 children would lose their chance to get an early education in the Head Start program. Two million mothers and young children would be cut from a program that gives them access to healthy food. There would be 4,500 fewer federal grants at the Department of Justice and the FBI to combat violent crime, financial crime, and help secure our borders. Hundreds of national parks would be forced to close for part or all of the year. We wouldn’t have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food that we eat. Cuts to the FAA would likely result in more flight cancellations, delays, and the complete elimination of air traffic control services in parts of the country. Over time, our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn’t be able to afford to launch new satellites. And that means governors and mayors would have to wait longer to order evacuations in the event of a hurricane. What the president is referring to, of course, are not cuts from today’s levels—let alone yesterday’s levels—in all of these programs, but cuts from the projected growth that would occur if the government were allowed to continue ballooning. Instead of doing all these wonderful things, the Republicans want to reduce taxes, Obama argues. They want to let people keep more of what they earn, and we all know that those people will only waste that money rather than use it to support clean energy technologies and accurate weather reports. Every millionaire would get to keep $150,000 more of his money, the president claimed, and such people would no doubt use that money to pollute the air and undermine medical progress (because millionaires never support environmental and medical causes). Just think of how much more effectively the government could use that money: Let’s just step back for a second and look at what $150,000 pays for: A year’s worth of prescription drug coverage for a senior citizen. Plus a new school computer lab. Plus a year of medical care for a returning veteran. Plus a medical research grant for a chronic disease. Plus a year’s salary for a firefighter or police officer. Plus a tax credit to make a year of college more affordable. Plus a year’s worth of financial aid. One hundred fifty thousand dollars could pay for all of these things combined — investments in education and research that are essential to economic growth that benefits all of us. For $150,000, that would be going to each millionaire and billionaire in this country. This budget says we’d be better off as a country if that’s how we spend it. There is of course lots about all this that is simply dishonest and false. The Ryan budget doesn’t call for across the board cuts. And that budget calls for the Ways and Means Committee to propose a revenue-neutral tax reform that would lower rates while eliminating loopholes—so it wouldn’t deny the government revenue it now has but would seek ways to obtain it that are more conducive to growth (and of course those loopholes benefit the wealthy above all). But the dishonesty is not the most extraordinary thing about this speech. The most extraordinary thing is the basic vision of American life it lays out: The president talks as though the liberal welfare state were not crumbling all around him, as though his budget does not abide (indeed, prescribe) an unprecedented explosion of debt that will crush American prosperity in the coming decades, as though all the money earned by all Americans were simply a pot for the government to spend as it wishes and allowing people to keep more of their earnings were just one way to spend it. He speaks as though the problem—our unsustainable entitlement state—were the solution, and as though the solution—a budget that restrains the growth of spending, modernizes and reforms our collapsing entitlement and welfare programs to avert their collapse, and charts a path toward economic growth—were the problem. In this upside-down, inside-out world, Barack Obama accuses Paul Ryan of putting the future of America’s younger generation in danger and inviting American decline. A psychologist might call this projection. The president’s political advisors probably call it all they’ve got. Let us hope that voters will know what to call it this fall: reckless denial and cynical dishonesty from a failed president with nothing left to offer. Or, if we are lucky, perhaps the last straw. nationalreview.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (50109)	4/29/2012 4:20:26 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

$38,976,000 can't buy a budget from Senate Dems by Joel Gehrke Commentary Staff Writer Senate Democrats have avoided passing a budget for three straight years as of today. What's more, Democratic senators are surprisingly open in admitting they won't pass one this year, either, in order to avoid an embarrassing vote before this fall's election. "This is the wrong time to vote in committee; this is the wrong time to vote on the floor," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D. said on April 18th. "I don’t think we will be prepared to vote before the election." In a sense, it was indeed the wrong time. Senate Democrats had already missed the legal deadline for submitting a budget resolution (April 15th) as they had in the two previous years. "For three years, in the midst of fiscal crisis, the party running the Senate refused to even attempt to produce their financial plan in willful and knowing defiance of the law," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said in a statement on this three-year anniversary of the last Senate budget. He added that "neither [Obama] nor his Senate majority has any business asking the American people to send one more dime in new taxes to this dysfunctional government." Democrats have offered a variety of excuses for the lack of the budget. White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew, for instance, blamed Republicans for the lack of a Senate budget. "You can't pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes, and you can't get 60 votes without bipartisan support," he said on CNN in February. "So unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed." Lew was either badly misinformed or lying. The Senate can pass a budget with a simple majority -- at most 51 votes -- and the Democrats control 53 seats in the Senate. As a former White House budget director, Lew should have known that Harry Reid could pass a budget without a single Republican vote in support. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., tried to make the same argument about the lack of a budget -- "when you start hammering 60 votes on to everything, our majority is a majority of name only," he told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough -- but Scarborough, a former congressman, stopped him in his tracks. When Scarborough observed that they don't need 60 votes, Durbin answered "I can't argue the point." That was in December of 2011. Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., argues that last year's debt limit deal counts as a budget because it sets a cap on how much Congress can spend. Of course, setting caps on spending is a far cry from telling the American people how much money the government plans to spend, and on what. Reid's claim is undermined by the fact that Senate Democrats are still talking about passing a budget -- but only after the election. Sen. Kent Conrad. D-N.D. and Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., have both predicted that a budget will be taken up during the lame duck session, which takes place after the election but before the new elected officials take office. (Incidentally, they would then have to pass a budget and have a showdown over automatic tax increases and doomsday defense spending cuts scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2013.) Every now and then, a Senate Democrat explains that the majority won't pass a budget because they're afraid of being voted out of office if the American people know just how much they plan to spend. As Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., speculated last year, "they don't want to risk the next election" by passing a budget. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., confirmed Manchin's theory with his comments about this being the "wrong time to vote." Nelson, a former governor of Nebraska, explained to The Washington Examiner this week that Senate Democrats don't want to take "difficult votes" on the budget before the election. Nelson said they would work to pass a budget during the lame-duck session, which he predicted will be a "dizzyduck" due to all the legislation they will have to pass. Senate Democrats controlled 59 seats in the 2009-2010 Congress (leaving aside, for the moment, the several months when Democrats had a supermajority). Fifty-eight made $174,000 annually, while Reid made $193,000 annually. They collectively drew a cool $20,570,000 in taxpayer money. The Democrats lost six Senate seats in the 2010 elections because they accumulated more debt than the first 100 Congresses combined, but they didn't change their approach to budgeting. The 53-seat Democratic majority, along with the two independents who caucus with them, will collectively have been paid another $18,482,000 over 2011 and 2012. For all of that money -- $38,976,000 since 2009 -- the taxpayers are rewarded with a Democratic majority so desperate to keep their jobs that they won't even do them. campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (50109)	4/29/2012 4:20:30 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Democrats shy from budget so they can bash GOP April 28, 2012 -- 8:00 PM Three years ago today, the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a budget. It has not done so since. A lot has happened since then. On April 29, 2009, Sarah Palin was still governor of Alaska. Chris Christie was a long-shot candidate for governor of New Jersey. Charlie Sheen was just another famous actor. Quarterback Andrew Luck, the first pick in this week's NFL draft, had yet to play in a single college football game. Never before has the Senate gone three years in a row without passing a budget. Since 1974, when Congress adopted the modern budget process, there have been several years when House and Senate negotiators did not agree on an identical budget that passed both houses. But according to the Congressional Research Service, there was only one year prior to the Obama era when the Senate did not pass any budget -- that was 2002, when the majority Democratic Senate did not approve a budget for fiscal 2003. If the Democrats had built up a track record as responsible stewards of the national balance sheet, perhaps they could justify living without a budget. But the nation's deficit has exceeded a trillion dollars in each of the last three years, and federal spending topped $10 trillion over that time period. According to trustees reports released this past Monday, the nation's long-term debt from just two programs -- Medicare and Social Security -- has now reached a staggering $63.3 trillion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has argued it's unnecessary to pass a budget this year because it would be nonbinding anyway, and spending levels for fiscal 2012 and 2013 were set by last summer's deal to raise the debt ceiling. But this is a poor excuse. Even when control of government is divided and a final resolution is impossible, a budget is a way for a party to lay out a vision for the future of the country. Like it or not, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has presented, and the House has passed, a plan that outlines how Republicans think they can put the nation on a sustainable fiscal course. Senate Democrats have excoriated the Ryan plan and its reforms to Medicare and Medicaid, but they haven't offered a competing vision that achieves the same goals through their preferred means. This should come as no surprise. Any attempt to tackle the nation's mounting debt without touching social programs will require massive tax increases -- not just on Warren Buffett, but on all Americans -- that Democrats would prefer not to advertise. Such policies would depress the economy and trigger a backlash from middle-class voters. And so rather than release a budget that would open them up to criticism during an election year, Democrats have opted to shirk their duties so they can have a freer hand to attack Republicans. This is what three solid years of political cynicism looks like. http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2012/04/examiner-editorial-democrats-shy-budget-so-they-can-bash-gop/543861