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United States News Title: Try and have a Merry Christamas while that asshole Obama is bankrupting the Country Obama Has Everything Covered Except Our Future Christmas has arrived with tax cuts for the rich and more handouts for the unemployed. That is President Barack Obama’s economic plan, and it is not a new one. I’ve been writing about Washington for more than 25 years and the Federal government reminds me of an alcoholic friend who used to say: “Don’t worry; I am going to quit drinking… tomorrow.” Obama, like so many Presidents before him, pledges he won’t mortgage our children’s future. Yet he and the rest of Washington do exactly that, month after month, year after year. Federal debt could reach $20 trillion in five years. It is hard to know where the breaking point is, but it is out there somewhere and we are headed straight for it. Fears over the deficit have been going on for a long time. I dug out one of my dad’s newsletters from December 1982 where he declared, “Deficit spending cannot continue indefinitely.” If he were alive today he would be shocked to see the extent to which Federal deficits have climbed. But just because we haven’t killed our economy off yet doesn’t mean that we won’t. That doesn’t seem to bother Obama, who has been acting like “Bad Santa” on a bender. Lots of Christmas Cheer for Big Banks Wall Street’s big banks used government bailouts to post their best two years in investment banking and trading ever. Bloomberg reports heady times for the Big Five — Goldman Sacks, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Together they took in $135 billion from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and borrowed billions more from the Federal Reserve’s emergency-lending facilities in late 2008 and early 2009. All that came after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Since then, the banks have benefited from record low interest rates and the Federal Reserve’s purchases of bonds. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most of these banks,” said Charles Geisst, a Wall Street historian and finance professor at Manhattan College in Riverdale, N. Y. Last year, the Big Five generated $127.8 billion in revenue just for debt and equity underwriting and from trading stocks and bonds. They will post almost that much revenue again this year just for those services. What is incredible is that even after being saved by the Federal government — in other words us — we don’t know how fat their piggy banks have gotten because they don’t have to report all revenue streams. Such accounting doesn’t seem important to Washington. This would explain Obama’s tax cut deal. It is a massive compromise that extends unemployment benefits to the so-called 99ers for 13 months in exchange for a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. Of course the rich like it. As ABC’s David Kerley on World News pointed out: “Extending all the cuts means that someone making $10 million a year will keep $450,000 of their income that would have gone to Uncle Sam… Keeping taxes at this level over the next 10 years could add nearly $4 trillion to the national debt.” So what is another few trillion dollars here or there? Not much, says the Left, who continue to cry about the unemployment problem; the one that their President was going to fix. The new Obama deal passed its first hurdle in the U.S. Senate last week. It should make the unemployed happy as well. After all, last year’s gift certificate benefits are running out, “and at the worst possible time,” declare Democrats. After all, Christmas is here! I have news for the liberals; I too have been laid off a couple times in my life and I can tell you, neither one came at a “good time.” It’s A Wonderful Deficit Some Democrats seem to think that Washington has been tighter with money than Old Man Potter in the face of a bank run. That simply isn’t true. In fact, just a few weeks ago the Federal Reserve pumped an additional $600 billion dollars to buy U.S. Treasuries. That’s money that is not even counted on the government’s official ledger. As for Federal government funds, an astonishing amount has been and is going to continue to be spent; a fact that brings peril to the United States. Meanwhile Obama has thrown his deficit-reduction commission under the bus after it failed to win political support. "Yields are up… because we got $1 trillion in deficit spending with no signs of fiscal discipline on the horizon," said Julia Coronado, economist at BNP Paribas in New York. "It feels to global investors like the U.S. is becoming Argentina." The country is facing the prospects of higher interest rates dictated by bond buyers and not by the Federal Reserve. That would put the U.S. into a much worse recession And then there is the dollar itself. Last week we learned that the Federal budget deficit rose to more than $150 billion last month, the largest November imbalance ever. The Treasury Department says the November budget deficit was 25 percent higher than the $120 billion deficit in November 2009. That leaves the total Federal deficit approaching $14 trillion. I hate to give away my age, but I was doing research back when the deficit hit $1 trillion. A lot of people back then didn’t think the U.S. economy could withstand such deficits. They were wrong. However, at some point deficits do matter. The best explanation for why comes from the Dec. 13 Christian Science Monitor: “Every business person, and anyone who has ever managed a checkbook [sic], knows you can’t survive by borrowing 40 cents of every dollar you spend. Yet this is what our federal government is doing — with no real improvement projected even after the economy recovers. “Tax cuts, trillion-dollar wars, deep recession, and the spending binge of the past 10 years have boosted our national debt to $13.8 trillion, over 90 percent of our total national output (GDP). This is two and a half times what it was 10 short years ago. Underfunded [sic] Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement benefits add another staggering $50 trillion to what the nation is obligated to borrow. That equates to about $200,000 in debt for every man, woman, and child in our country. “The country is broke and our lenders are about to run out of patience. As it has already done with Greece and Ireland, the international financial community can at any time begin ‘voting with its feet,’ abandoning our debt for safer investments like commodities, land, or foreign securities. Doing so would cause the dollar to collapse and interest rates to surge. This would trigger renewed recession and a sharp decline in living standards since there is virtually nothing we Americans drive, wear, or work with that doesn’t have substantial foreign labor or material content.” Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package! What’s driving Obama’s unprecedented massive deficits? Spending!!. Riedl details: President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add another $1 trillion. President Bush began a string of expensive financial bailouts. President Obama is accelerating that course. President Bush created a Medicare drug entitlement that will cost an estimated $800 billion in its first decade. President Obama has proposed a $634 billion down payment on a new government health care fund. President Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation. President Obama would double it. President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. President Obama has already increased this spending by 20 percent. President Bush tilted the income tax burden more toward upper-income taxpayers. President Obama would continue that trend. President Bush presided over a $2.5 trillion increase in the public debt through 2008. Setting aside 2009 (for which Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for an additional $2.6 trillion in public debt), President Obama’s budget would add $4.9 trillion in public debt from the beginning of 2010 through 2016. Overall, President Obama’s budget would add twice as much debt as President Bush over the same number of years.
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#1. To: no gnu taxes (#0)
What’s driving Obama’s unprecedented massive deficits? Spending!!. Riedl details: President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add another $1 trillion. President Bush began a string of expensive financial bailouts. President Obama is accelerating that course. President Bush created a Medicare drug entitlement that will cost an estimated $800 billion in its first decade. President Obama has proposed a $634 billion down payment on a new government health care fund. President Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation. President Obama would double it. President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. President Obama has already increased this spending by 20 percent. President Bush tilted the income tax burden more toward upper-income taxpayers. President Obama would continue that trend. so you think Obama ought to have reversed Bush's policies? Seriously? Are you not the same "no gnu taxes" who posts article after article heaping praise on Bush?
#2. To: go65 (#1)
The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage.
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