Congressional leaders are sitting down with Dementia Joe to talk about how to spend your money. If you have been following along, you know that starting this Friday, the US Government may partially shut down. Congress has not yet agreed on a new funding deal (as I write this) for the federal government for the rest of 2024.
Articles tagged as
Debt Ceiling
There’s Only One Way To Tame The Runaway Federal Debt
Balancing the budget is like getting to heaven—most folks know what to do to get there. It’s just that they don’t want to do it. That’s probably unfair to the faithfully upright who actually walk the walk, but the analogy is a perfect fit for Washington politicians who put the federal budget over the family budget.
Republicans Fiscally Irresponsible Act
The political and financial class breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. The bill suspends the debt ceiling for two years, thus avoiding the establishment’s nightmare of a government default on its debt. Rather, it allows the government to continue adding trillions of dollars of debt that will … Read more
To Raise or Not to Raise the Debt Ceiling
Let’s see if we can break down the debt ceiling issue. So once upon a time, well, back in 1917, America bought the Virgin Islands for about $25 million in gold, Babe Ruth, at 22, was pitching for Boston, and the United States entered WWI. There were also some significant changes going on in D.C.
Congress Ignores Real Debt Ceiling Drama
Last week the House passed legislation increasing the debt ceiling. The bill was supported by all but four Republicans. For some Republicans, this was the first time they had ever voted for a debt ceiling increase.
Republicans Must Not Fold On Debt Ceiling
We are approaching the deadline for our debt ceiling. This deadline is a moving date. Janet Yellen estimates the checkbook balance will be red on or about June 1. Experts and Yellen is not in that group, think June 8 is more realistic.
Like a Boomerang, The Exasperation Keeps Coming Back – Federal Govt Debt Ceiling Games
This is a freakingly great concept! If you can’t spend for everything, try PRIORITIZING the spending.
Congress kicks the can again, but is about to run out of road
By Ross Connolly Congress was set to face a moment of reckoning in September. After years of reckless spending, the government would once again come up against the debt ceiling, meaning the country could no longer borrow to pay for out-of-control expenditures. This could have been a moment to begin getting serious about our mushrooming … Read more
Barry Needs Some Walking Around Money…
Let’s say your brother in law, Barry, comes to you for a loan. He needs a little extra money for this big idea he’s got brewing. All he needs is $4500.00 dollars.
New Hampshire Exceptional, Yet Again.
Stopping the spending and the out of control growth was and is exactly what you need and want from your US congress, but cannot yet achieve with a Democrat Senate and a Democrat President. And you will never get it as long as the left controls any those parts of your Federal government.
Would You Suck Twice as Hard for Half as Much?
I appreciate it when democrats give you the rope with which to hang their half baked ideas. Take Mark Fernald for example. Mr. Fernald is a sometime New Hampshire Democrat candidate for this or that, and prominent member of the left wing Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC). He recently (sorry, frequently) forwards partisan, left wing economic spin, to justify his pet obsession with rising taxes and class warfare.
This most recent email to the arm chair central planners in his fan base is just another in a string of left wing editorials that attempts to contrast democrat spending against that of our previous president. It is typical Fernald; an oranges to rotten apples comparison that uses incomplete data, wild assumptions (about Obama’s future affect in every case), misleading graphs, cherry picked data, and resulting percentages that stretch the fabric of reality so thin that you could easily pass into the alternate dimension in which Democrats and faeries dance widderershins around the deficit mound, as money appears out of nowhere to pay for whatever theirr tiny, narrow, Marxist minds can imagine.
This particualr faerie story centers around three graphs from the Government Printing Office (GPO). Not the fed, the treasury, or even some fruit-loop left wing think tank, but the GPO. The GPO prints stuff, and answers to the Executive branch. So right out of the toy-box we have to question these partisan stills, presented as they are in a partisan manner, bearing guestimated facts and assumptions, with no basis in reality any greater than anything that has ever escaped Mr. Obama’s teleprompter; you do recall all the Obama the non-partisan, deficit cutting, cost reducing, globe saving, health care giving, unifying, auto company saving, mortgage rescuing, goodness? How about the transparent lobbyist-less, open to ideas, new tone, we need to work together Obama? No? You probably remember the we won, closed door, partisan, hate those bankers, Tea Partiers are terrorists, intimidation tactics, don’t interrupt my vacation, Arrest Ron Paul supporters, dozens of lobbyists, shadow cabinet, Attack Arizona, hunt down my enemies, anti-free speech, black panthers can scare away voters, give guns to Mexican drug lords, nohting is my fault Obama with the double action golf-club grip? Well his printing office is the source. Are we surprised it tries to make him look good?
So what can we glean that goes beyond the objective of showing your Republican friends that they are wrong about Obama? How about using facts to show that those Republicans are actually right?
Bernanke’s Bender
(Note:This arrived in my mail box unattributed, but I have discovered that it is from The Onion. I have edited any questionable language by replacing letters with asterisks. This image is not associated with the article at The Onion.) SEWARD, NE—Claiming he wasn’t afraid to let everyone in attendance know about "the real mess we’re in," Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reportedly got drunk Tuesday and told everyone at Elwood’s Corner Tavern about how absolutely f****d the U.S. economy actually is.
Bernanke, who sources confirmed was "totally sloshed," arrived at the drinking establishment at approximately 5:30 p.m., ensconced himself upon a bar stool, and consumed several bottles of Miller High Life and a half-dozen shots of whiskey while loudly proclaiming to any patron who would listen that the economic outlook was "pretty goddamned awful if you want the God’s honest truth."
"Look, they don’t want anyone except for the Washington, D.C. bigwigs to know how bad shit really is," said Bernanke, slurring his words as he spoke. "Mounting debt exacerbated—and not relieved—by unchecked consumption, spiraling interest rates, and the grim realities of an inevitable worldwide energy crisis are projected to leave our entire economy in the sh****r for, like, a generation, man, I’m telling you."
The Empty Podium
The Pawlenty Campaign has just rolled out an ad worth watching.
Zing! No Leadership In The White House
Small Business CEO asks why she has to take all the risk?
We’re supposed to be overjoyed over this debt agreement…..because?
Let me see if I have this straight:
Congress just voted to add $3 trillion to the debt within a year so that Congress and Obama can spend even more money we don’t have later, and we’re supposed to be happy over that the pandering politicians (who are backslapping each other in having shown great courage to enable themselves to spend even more) can just keep doing what they’ve been doing for decades?
That is, they spend other peoples money, often resulting in much duplication, waste, and fraud, and then they campaign that they will stop the duplication, waste, and fraud? All the while knowing what their real purpose is to merely get re-elected to do it all over again?
It’s like they’ve locked themselves into a party bus, blackened all the windows (including the front windshield), and in their self-assured incompetence, continue hurtling to the precipice, and still want us to love them as it is our kids and grandkids that are strapped to the roof that will have to pay for it all?
And trust me, they will pay, in one fashion or another.
And I am supposed to be overjoyed that:
Once again, these charlatans have voted to not carry out the job we have elected them to do – which was READ THE FREAKING BILL!
Once again, we are hearing echoes "We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it" – and thanks to the slovenly way that they refused to take the time to do it right (was stalling the process until it was way too late a feature, a bug, or a deliberate act of public stupidity)? They must be freaking great magicians or the living embodiment of The Midas Touch (you know, everything they touch turns into a rusty muffler?) because what seems to be there at the end of the vote is transmogrified into something different. That’s because they refused to do the public hearings, the markups, the debates, the re-writes to get it right. Instead, we get slap-dash and NOW, like Obamacare, like Dodd-Frank, and these other thousand page bills, the really terrifying and liberty destroying parts come out into public. Unlike Barnabas Collins, they just keep going seeking more and more victims.
And we’re supposed to turn a blind eye that:
Guinta and Bass must be replaced. We’ll now see how good Ayotte is….
This from today’s Union Leader (article has since been pulled from UL site): House votes to raise debt ceiling; 3 of 4 NH lawmakers support plan By MARK HAYWARDNew Hampshire Union Leader Published Aug 2, 2011 at 3:00 am (Updated Aug 1, 2011) ShareThis The U.S. House voted to raise the country’s debt limit by $2.1 … Read more
Guest post by Peter Bearse: The Debt Limit
THE DEBT LIMIT: A VOTE TO SEPARATE THE SHEEP FROM THE GOATS
Now we know, at last. The vote to exorcise the media-Halloween specter of “economic Armeggedon” or “Global Meltdown” has been cast. All the hue and cry ended in a whimper. Except for cries of default by “Tea Party” Republicans — default of courage.
The acid test vote on the federal debt limit indicates just how far we’ve got to go — those of us who spoke about and supported “real change in the way Washington does “We the People”s business.” The Republican veto-proof majority did well to approve a “Cut, Cap and Balance” [CC&B] approach to the issue. Only nine Republicans, including Michelle Bachmann, defected — because they thought the CC&B cuts didn’t go far enough! Even with this, backed by support of CC&B by nearly 3/4 of Americans polled, the U.S. Senate voted down the initiative with a thud.1 House leadership, however, didn’t have the “stones…testicular fortitude” to then draw a line in the sand and say to the Senate and its President: “Enough is enough; this is our position; DEAL WITH IT!”
Thus, as of Friday, “We the People” were confronted with yet another bill and another House vote. The Boehner bill that finally passed was “Dead on Arrival” in the Senate, to become the subject of a backroom deal cut by the Senate President [still smarting from a Tea Party that had the temerity to challenge his senile eminence in 2010], the U.S. President [Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief] and the Speaker of the House [prime sponsor of the boner bill]. So we could look forward to another piece of major legislation cooked up through “secretive deals, gimmicks and tax increases.”
Opportunities — for the Tea Party to change the GOP or take it over — all these were highlighted by the tiring debate, fear mongering and “political posturing” over the debt limit. The ultimate possibility, as advocated by several TP-associated Members of Congress (MoCs) led by Rep. Ron Paul, would have been to refuse to vote to increase the debt limit. This would have provided the kind of real barrier to increased federal spending and debt that most people voted for in 2010.
Obama’s Debt Limit Plan = No Results
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Must See Rubio On The Debt Ceiling
Marco Rubio on The US Senate and the Debt Ceiling Debate
Why You Should Run Screaming From A Balanced Budget Amendment
I’ve never understood the Republican-conservative, Libertarian, Right-Wing-in General, love affair with the idea of a balanced budget amendment. And it is not just my fear of letting the same modern Americans who think doing away with the electoral college is a good idea have a whack at the US Constitution. It’s actually much simpler than that. A balance has two sides, and all things being equal, the side paying will get screwed.
And yes, I understand that almost every state has to balance it’s budget. Even New Hampshire–despite what former governor (and dopey US Senator) Jeanne Shaheen thinks–must do this by law. But this is no guarantee that a government will not spend more than it takes in. The same government that decides what it spends will decide what it takes in. And unless you are a Granite Stater with a severe case of ADD, or just a very short memory, you may recall that balancing the budget need not have a single thing to do with austerity, control, or concern for the people who pay for government. It merely requires you to find revenues to equal your spending.
For a quick review of how bad that scenario is, lets grab Simon and Mr. Peabody and jump into our way-back machine to the halcyon days after the 2006 elections when Democrats had complete control of the New Hampshire government for four years. " Balanced Budget" meant 100’s of new taxes and fees, many of them forced through at the last possible minute. There were taxes that were enacted without a single hearing (in violation of other portions of New Hampshire law). Land would be sold to raise revenue without anyone knowing what land or who might buy it, for how much, or if we could even sell it. There was one time money, imagined cost shifting, raiding of dedicated funds, transfers from future years, and all manner of dark accounting magic used to create the illusion of a ‘balanced’ budget," perched in a Rube Goldbergian maze, upon a pedestal, in a pentagram, guarded by straw men arranging goat entrails, scrying into alternate fiscal dimensions to hold off the demons of structural deficits yet to be. To put a finer point on it, revenues were imagined to cover desired spending, without the revenue every actually being there to begin with, and when it failed to appear, someone had to pay for it to balance the budget. That or cut programs and spending. Typically, it is not the latter.
So having witnessed this abuse in one of the most politically active states, under some of the most withering scrutiny, with the benefit of the third largest representative body in the world, makes me wonder why anyone who lived through it would even suggest that things would be just ducky if we let distant, professional legislators, have a whack at it along the shores of the Potomac?
Sounds scary. But could it get worse? Of course it could.