The Congressional Budget Office has released its latest report and it contains this rather distressing fact: the federal government is now borrowing 46 cents of every dollar spent in fiscal year 2013. I have long been a critic of the fiscal policies of both parties, but it is astonishing that the American people have not thrown out the whole lot of these people — Democratic and Republican. We look like an utter ship of fools as politicians allow the country to drift toward an unprecedented financial collapse. In the meantime, the Administration is borrowing this money to simply give Israel a $100 million building complex and pour billions into corrupted governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. China of course continues to hold much of our debt and is going on a buying spree in the U.S.
The government chalked up a $172 billion deficit in November alone — part of a $300 billion deficit for the first two months of the fiscal year. While both sides talk about the need to reduce spending, they have been spending like drunken sailors for years. For those of us who are skeptical about the use of tax increases in this economy, it is unnerving to think of giving more money to these same players. We need new revenue because of their horrible record over the last eight years. We must need however a third party to break the monopoly of power in this country — a monopoly that has left the entire country captive to these self-perpetuating parties.
It is clear that neither party wants to make hard choices and continue to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars to curry favor with different groups as with the $100 million gift of a building. There is also no serious accountability for the waste of billions under Bush and Obama as “stimulus” funds. I agree with the need to raise taxes but I have little faith in the Obama Administration or Congress in using such money responsibly. You do not get to a point of borrowing virtually half of every dollar spent without a complete lack of leadership and responsibility. Even if this figure falls, the point is that Congress still makes hundred million dollar gifts to wealth countries without a sound of objection or concern. Yes, all countries borrow money but we have a massive debt and continues to grow — an politicians who pledge to be more responsible in the future. The need for revenue is likely to change but not the need for responsibility in Washington.
Source: Washington Times
Well I would be curious, as a self reporting exercise . . .
Who here believes themselves to be politically libertarian?
I will start off –
I gary t, am a libertarian.
A true Libertarian would have voted for (N)either major candidate. The faulty “N” struck again. 🙂
mike spindell:
puzzling isnt a libertarian? that is news to me. how do you figure that?
I havent seen anywhere puzzling has been anti-abortion or any other rights limiting ideas.
romney and ryan would have been less destructive to individual rights than obama has been, is and will be. i thought romney had a chance based on the polls, gary johnson had no chance of winning.
the choice seemed pretty simple.
“the choice seemed pretty simple.”
Bron,
You confirm my point. Left Wingers Gene and Tony wouldn’t vote for either major candidate because they were sticking to their principles and among those are personal liberty. You on the other hand voted for Romney who is openly anti-choice, anti-gay and pro-religious encroachment in government and has a record of all of these positions. A true Libertarian would have voted for either major candidate. You showed that if it’s a choice between civil liberties and your pocketbook, you’ll go with the money any time, ergo you may be conservative, but you ain’t no libertarian. As for puzzling he/she can answer for them-self.
It was an easy choice for me for whom to vote for, Gary Johnson.
I did not have to hold my nose while doing it, I agree with almost everything he does on the fundamentals.
I might add that I am the token libertarian here, in fact an official in the NY Libertarian Party, as well as a libertarian political theorist.
Anyone who votes for the pocketbook over libertarian principles is not a principled libertarian; of course it depends on how he runs his life too, but it is not a good sign if he votes against his principles.
Neither Romney or Obama are in any sense libertarians, they both disgust me, although I have to say Obama disgusts me less than Romney.
The GOP deserved to lose when they dumped Ron Paul, a candidate who obviously was far more popular generally than Romney. Paul pulled in thousands at rallies regularly, while Romney was lucky to get a hundred.
The Republican powers that be, truly would have preferred Obama to win over Paul winning, that should give lefties here pause. Paul would have been more left where it counts, than Obama ever was or would be.
Paul’s mildest of defects, his pro-life stance, is a small price to pay for almost everything else he was miles higher than any other politician.
Even his pro-life stance did not supersede his belief in the constitution, and he would have left that up to the states.
He is truly something you never see, an honest politician who sticks to his principles.
Gary T,
I didn’t mention you but from your prior comments it goes without saying that you are yruly a libertarian. We do have a few others here that also are, but we also have some pretenders who think the identification gives the cache’.
Get Puzzled.
puzzling for president!
Mike Spindell:
puzzling isnt Right he/she is Libertarian. Big difference.
“puzzling isnt Right he/she is Libertarian. Big difference.”
Bron,
Much smaller difference then you are capable of understanding given you political pre-judgment. Example number one Ron Paul, libertarian hero. Paul also supports “Right to Life” legislation and other religious based initiatives. He also has a preference for Ayn Rand. For “Libertarian” to have any logical meaning it has to be in favor of people’s right to individually make their most important life decisions, a position with which I strongly agree. Too often though “libertarians”
define important life decisions solely in terms of money. Since Republicans, which are generally a socially regressive party are on the surface for a “laissez faire” monetary policy they gain many so-called “libertarian” votes, despite the fact that those they vote for are against basic individual freedoms in religion, sexuality and freedom of thought. Therein lies the “libertarian” affinity for the Right.
To differentiate just from the evidence of this blog, might we infer you voted for Romney and Ryan, whose social policy is to restrict individual liberty? At the same time at least two who prominently write here and can be considered of the Left, Gene and Tony, adamantly refused to vote for Obama strictly on his policies that violate our Constitutional liberties. Therein lies the difference between those pretending to espouse freedom under the guise of being libertarian, but are really voting solely their pocketbook. As juxtaposed with people whose human rights principles, who refuse to compromise themselves.
On the other hand, there are libertarians I do respect because of their adherence to principles of individual liberty and consistency in their economic approaches. These people came out and voted for the Libertarian Party in the last election and so stood by their principles.
Swarthmore Mom:
Romney was wrong, puzzling wasnt. Had Romney picked Rubio, he might be president now.
Puzzling was wrong when he said the Romney would pick Rubio for VP. 😉
@puzzling: Does that not say that government is too large, and just perhaps we are borrowing too much?
No, it doesn’t say that at all, and no, the problem is not truly massive. Most people with mortgages and car loans and credit cards have more debt than they have actual assets, but they are not about to go under, because they have fifty years to pay off their mortgage, AND they get to live in the house in the meantime. They get to use their car to generate a higher income (by being able to work more than two miles from home). They get to use their credit cards to make life tolerable. They may owe student loans, but get to earn more immediately because of their education.
Our assets have nothing to do with our debt. Even the level of debt is one step removed from what matters, which is the same thing as what matters for all that debt held by a household: What the payments are relative to their income. For us, here in the USA, our national debt payments are about 3.1% of our national income; a level most middle class Americans would LOVE to have.
“For us, here in the USA, our national debt payments are about 3.1% of our national income; a level most middle class Americans would LOVE to have.”
Tony C.,
I must beg you to stop confusing certain people with reality, a state which is so painful to them.
puzzling:
do you ever get tired of being right?
“puzzling:
do you ever get tired of being right?
Bron,
Just a spelling correction: “puzzling do you ever get tired of being Right?” 🙂
I’m hoping that the reader might begin to understand the scale of the debt that we have. Silly me. If the government seized all the stock for all the publicly traded companies on the stock market and magically liquidated it tomorrow, we could barely pay off our debt and deficits for the next few years. Does that not say that government is too large, and just perhaps we are borrowing too much?
People talk about taxing the rich, taxing corporations, etc etc on and on. Yet you could literally SEIZE ALL of the equity assets of the rich – never mind taxing them – and it still wouldn’t be enough to pay for our government! The problem is truly massive and yet people think that fiddling on the margins with tax rates is going to solve it. It’s not.
More Kristof bashing just because, you know, we’re still free to:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/11/kristof-wont-even-acknowledge-that-the-poor-can-feel-love/
And by the way, speaking of that Kristof column where, among other things he casts a jaded eye at young women “selling bodies”, as he spits out, to feed an addiction, I wonder if he might actually be capable of carrying on an intelligent conversation on the constellation of factors relating to poverty, addiction, generational incest, lack of economic opportunity and the rest. Or if 30 seconds of degrading female humans is all he’s got on the subject?
DonS,
Some of the ultra wealthy and some of our politicians consider certain folks in our society throwaway people. Some children is this country never catch a break. It is way more difficult for them to make something out of their lives than it is for kids who have every advantage. I often wonder where someone like Donald Trump would be today if he hadn’t inherited a ton of money from his tycoon father.
rafflaw,
That was an article by Charlie Pierce. I love reading his Esquire blog–and his sense of humor. He’s a frequent guest on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!
Thanks Elaine. I worked 35 years in several jobs, in the foothills of Appalachia, all directly or related to the socio-economic group that Clinton and others threw under the bus. It makes me angry whenever I think about it. Certainly stokes the internecine warfare among the 99% which the 1% revel in; get’s a bit of the heat off their backs, docha know.
Mike S.,
Those fact thingees just get in the way of the Right’s wild claims.
Elaine,
Great Kristoff article. Sad reality.
Bron & DonS,
The Voices Missing From The Safety Net Debate
By Charles P. Pierce
12/10/12
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nicholas-kristoff-social-security-fraud-121012
Something there is about the Supplemental Security Income Program of the Social Security Administration that seems to drive putative liberals to embrace their inner DeMint. Years ago, when Bill Clinton was in the White House and Newt Gingrich was running things in the House, and chucking people off their benefits for phantasmagorical reasons was still all the rage, SSI got devastated by a combination of political opportunism, social Darwinism, and really horrible journalism starring (among other people) Bob Woodward. This was the whole “Crazy Checks” business by which parents were telling their kids to act up in school so that the family could suck up all that sweet government money from the hardworking rest of us. The program got leveled by the 1996 welfare-reform act, and I wrote at length about the effect of the periodic Beltway frenzies on the lives of one little boy, and one very poor family, in New Albany, Mississippi. This is just a little bit of how these things work themselves out on the rest of us.
If the backlash began anywhere, it was in 1993, in Northeastern Arkansas. A state legislator named Pat Flanagin noticed that one of the poorer clients to whom he sold insurance seemed to have a great deal of money in the bank. “First,” Flanagin later told Forbes MediaCritic, “I thought she was a prostitute or selling drugs.” Later, Flanagin said, he discovered that her money was coming from the SSI program. To Flanagin, anyway, the woman’s children didn’t seem disabled in any way. He suspected that the program had somehow gone haywire, but he couldn’t get any of his colleagues in the state legislature interested. Instead, Flanagin passed along his suspicions to Jerry Dean, a reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Flanagin maintained that a great number of healthy children were receiving SSI benefits and that some mothers were coaching their children to act up in school so that they’d somehow qualify as disturbed. The reporter added a helpful tag to the story. He called the payments “crazy checks.” As the primary documentary source for its claims, the newspaper cited a study of the SSI program done that year at Arkansas State University in which, of 111 educators and guidance counselors in northeast Arkansas, only 9 percent believed the program was being administered correctly. In reality, this “study” was simply a classroom exercise, an extensive homework assignment given by a professor named John Slate, who watched, amazed, as his students’ work took on a life and purpose of its own. Over the next two years, as the SSI program came under assault, Slate’s study would be cited by news organizations from ABC News to The Boston Globe to The Wall Street Journal. “We had no hard data, just perceptions, and those from a small portion of a small state,” says Slate, who works today at the University of Texas at El Paso. “Once the politicians got a hold of it, they used it in ways for which it was never intended, and not one of them called me. It’s made me more distrustful than ever of politicians.”
Comes now Nick Kristof in The New York Times with the latest true story of waste, fraud, and abuse in the SSI system, this one from West Virginia.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a$698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way – and those checks continue until the child turns 18. “The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire. Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments. Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households. Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month. “One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school,” notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a Cornell University economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. “If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.”
Oh, dear god, have I seen this movie before. You have the heartbroken local bureaucrat without any specific examples, just “many people.” You have the statistics-free analysis of programs, and you have the pet “scholar” from the American Enterprise Institute who, in a stunning coincidence, writes a book concluding pretty much the same thing about social-welfare programs that everyone else at AEI believes. Indeed, his work reinforces the ideas that the AEI was set up in the first place to promote. (Burkhauser, you will note, has made a career out of suggesting an increased work ethic on people who are not him.) And, of course, there is the anguished liberal conscience of the Times columnist. What’s missing, of course, are any of the actual people who allegedly are getting fat on disability payments. This is what I learned in Mississippi.
The possibility of a transplant brought the Riddles back to Memphis even more often. “They tested Marcus a lot,” says Sammie Riddle. “Once, he had some problems that set him back, and you could see that, maybe, they were thinking, ‘Why waste a heart on this one?’ Then he came back, and they put him right back there at the top of the list.” On May 27, 1997, the Riddles got another letter from the Social Security Administration. “Earlier,” the letter began, “we told you we were reviewing MARCUS T. STEPHENS’s case to see if he is disabled under the new definition of disability for children. After reviewing all the information carefully, we have decided that he no longer qualifies for Supplemental Security Income (SSI).” At the time the letter was mailed, Marcus was almost totally bedridden. In addition, in its files, the Social Security office had Dr. Chase’s notification that Marcus was waiting for a heart transplant. Brenda Smithers had put it there more than a month before. Clearly, the review was no review at all. “Under the new definition of disability for children,” read the first sentence of the fourth paragraph of the letter, “he is no longer disabled as of 05/22/1997.” The Riddles were tired and confused, and there was a sentence in the letter that frightened them. It concerned their right of appeal: “If you lose the appeal,” it said, “you might have to pay back some or all of this money.” “We took the letter at face value,” Sammie explains. “We thought that if we appealed it and we lost, we’d be liable for a whole lot of money. If the letter’d been a little clearer, we’d have known what to do.” The Riddles did not appeal. The checks stopped.
As long as the liberal conscience is salved, though, all is right with the world.
Over and over again we get some of the same people, making the same unproven assertions, that mainly devolve on blaming everyone but the small percentage of people who control most of the money and most of everything else.
Commenters like Elaine, Tony C., SwM, AP, Shano and Bettykath have suppled evidence and argument which persuasively documents the theft of American treasure by this small amount of Plutocrats. Yes the people who have already made up their minds ignore the evidence and seek out guidance on succor from
fools like Von Mises and Rand. The truth is that given the opportunity all of these commenters would be just like Donald Trump and Mitt Romney. They admire wealth and power and loathe all those without it, sometimes even themselves for not measuring up to their heroes.
@Bron: it is well documented that women have children to get extra income,
No it isn’t, or only in your own twisted mind or from your own biased sources that just make stuff up.
There are already positive rewards for escaping welfare, we call it “not living in poverty and misery and desperation.”
If you really think those on welfare are happy to be living where they do and as they are, then you will have to explain why you do not do the same as them. Believing they are fundamentally different than you, without any rationally plausible explanation for why that should be so, is just irrational bigotry.
The people on welfare are there because there is no acceptable alternative, or because nobody will hire them; due to race, age, and/or lack of education. Especially when there is high unemployment, employers tend to hire younger, healthier, more educated workers from middle class backgrounds. Statistically, they tend to hire whiter workers as well. These are just the unfair facts of life, and welfare is a government program that does what it should; help alleviate some of the more brutal consequences of the unfairness of life; like starvation and homelessness.
@puzzling: The total valuation of all companies on the stock market
What does that have to do with anything at all?
We have a workforce of 180 million or so. Buying our corporations would not mean anything, if we work for the corporations they still have to pay us, they still have to obey the laws of this country, and we would still have an income. Those corporations still have to pay taxes, and so do the citizens that work for them.
If they want to shut them down, that is also fine, something else will spring up to serve whatever market void that creates. This has nothing to do with assets already created, our government is funded by the ongoing productivity of 180 million citizen workers.