There has been plenty of confusion and misinformation about the national debt, the fiscal cliff, and new taxes on Americans thanks in part to the use of clever White House talking points and a complicit national media. Let’s clear up some of the current issues with facts and truth by looking at the numbers.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the latest fiscal cliff deal will add an additional $4 trillion to the national deficit. This is not a good way to begin 2013. What we do know is that the 150-page Obama-Biden-Reid ‘Tax And Spend’ increase passed the Senate and House with few details getting out to American taxpayers. Only ignorant and under-informed citizens still believe that there is any accountability in the Obama administration or that they’re attempting to govern with transparency.
With new Obamacare taxes already kicking in as of January 1, this is not a good sign. We constantly heard the president and his minions say that “taxes will not increase for the majority of Americans,” especially for those making less than $250,000 a year.
What we now know is the farcical fiscal deal doesn’t just hit the wealthy hard; taxes now increase for 77% of Americans because the temporary payroll tax cut was not extended, causing the Social Security tax to jump 2%, from 4.2 to 6.2 percent. We are now taking home anywhere from $50 to $189 less every month.
Already, many poor and middle-class folks have reacted in anger or shock, including some Democrats who believed it would not affect them. The average American family making $50,000 a year will be hit with around $1,000 due to tax increases.
How quickly we forget that in just one term, President Obama increased the national debt as much as all prior Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush combined.
Before continuing, let’s recall a 2008 quote from then-Senator Obama who blasted President Bush for adding $4 trillion to the national debt – even though most Democrats and Republicans agreed to the spending in the hopes of avoiding a crash of the U.S. banking system and economy:
The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents — number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child.
Hopefully, more open-minded Americans now see the hypocrisy of Obama claiming that the Bush administration’s spending was both “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.”
To raise taxes on people in all tax brackets (not just “the rich”) was a mind-boggling move in what many call a recession, but this is exactly what they enacted. Cuts were not considered, now was the national debt of $16.4 trillion; so the hard-working people in America lose.
Before we detail some of the pork, it needs to be pointed out that the bill seems to take direct aim at married couples, penalizing them with hundreds of dollars in what might as well be called fines. Heterosexual marriage is practically being discouraged against. Families are the backbone of the free market system and key to getting the economy growing again. We’re now seeing evidence that this administration has much more invested in growing government than the private sector.
Senators received the fiscal cliff bill at the last minute and voted on it without reading through the legislation. Who can forget the Obamacare bill being shoved through Congress (while Nancy Pelosi infamously said “You have to pass it to find out what’s in it.”)? What did Pelosi think of the fiscal cliff resolution? She said it was “a happy start to a new year.” The bill contains $25.1 billion in cuts, however; big government liberals are thrilled because the same bill also increases spending by $330 billion over ten years.
Basically, the deal contains $10 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts. Imagine trying to operate a family budget or small business using this method.
President Obama approved of the temporary band-aid as he continued his Hawaiian vacation on the taxpayer dime. He successfully piled America’s fiscal problems onto taxpayers, further showing he never cared about cutting spending. This is who half of American voters chose to reelect.
Also seeing major tax increases are those earning $400,000 and couples that make $450,000 – sounds like a marriage penalty to me – including capital gains and dividend taxes. Moreover, deductions are now limited for individuals making more than $250,000 ($300,000 for couples). It seems like the Left no longer only considers millionaires “rich.”
Our government is adding about $4 billion a day to the national debt while the new ‘spending money we don’t have’ deal provides generous tax breaks, perks, and pork to selected corporate friends. The list includes:
$12.1 billion for the wind-energy (green) sector, $430 million for Hollywood film producers, $222 million for rum distillers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, $331 million for railroad operators, $650 million tax break for manufacturers of energy-efficient appliances, and $59 million to algae growers for biofuel efforts.
Meanwhile, unemployment has barely budged, food stamps have massively increased, and U-6 Total unemployment remains at 14.4 percent.
If any good news can come from Republicans caving again, John Boehner told the Wall Street Journal he will never again negotiate with Obama behind closed doors because the president has shown his true red colors, and his actions don’t match his public statements.
At one point several weeks ago, the President said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’” Once he got over his shock, the House Speaker fired back, “‘But Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem.’
In keeping with the motto of not letting a good crisis go to waste, even the Senate wouldn’t even help hurricane Sandy victims without dealing themselves millions in new pork. Nearly a quarter of the $60-billion package goes somewhere else than directly to the victims or the infrastructure actually damaged by the hurricane. No surprises here. Both parties are at fault.
It seems our leaders in Washington keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results. It’s fiscal insanity. Democrats now say the fiscal cliff is just the tip of the taxing iceberg while Republicans say they’ve compromised enough. According to The Hill, the President’s party is pushing for another trillion in “new revenue” before the year is out. Revenue (government income) to them means taxing the people. Americans are taxed enough already. Have we now gone past the point of no return? How much more will the people take?
Photo credit: Jessie Owen (Creative Commons)
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Sequestering And Washington’s Fiscal Incompetence
As many of you may know, if the political class does not get its act together by March 1, 2013, automatic Federal government spending cuts will kick in that will reduce government spending by over a trillion dollars over the next ten years. This “sequestering” of budget dollars was agreed to by Congress and Obama in August of 2011 in the debt ceiling negotiations.
While this is a decent first step in reining in government spending, it is still pretty meager. Overall government spending will still increase in the baseline budget view, it will just increase at a somewhat lower rate. Annual spending deficits will continue to mount up, increasing our national debt and burdening future generations of Americans with that debt.
How anemic is this effort at reducing spending? Let’s do some simple math:
Despite this feeble attempt at expense reduction, many in the administration are choking on it. Retired Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claims our national defense would be endangered by a 2.2% reduction in spending. Secretary of State John Kerry asserted that we could not afford a meager 2.2% reduction in his budget since we needed to continue to butt into the lives of people in other countries around the world. President Obama has been spreading panic, claiming many vital government services would be slashed because of this meager 2.2% cut in spending.
Makes you wonder if these so-called leaders are 1) that out of touch with the real world, 2) want to protect their turf at any cost regardless of the impact on the fiscal integrity of the country, or 3) are just that fiscally incompetent that they do not know how to run an efficient operation and can only operate it by increasing their budget rather than decreasing their organization’s waste, redundancy, and incompetence.
To help these politicians understand why this 2.2% reduction is a very easily attainable goal, let’s point out via just a HANDFUL of examples of how wasteful, redundant and incompetent their organizations are today:
- Medicare and Medicaid lose over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
- Social Security loses over $100 billion a year to waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud.
- The IRS admits that it is so incompetent that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders.
- The U.S. Navy, one of Panetta’s former organizations, spent $300 million to build two Navy ships almost to completion before spending another $10 million to turn them both into scrap metal without ever using them.
- The State Department, John Kerry’s organization, recently spent $80 million to build a consulate building in northern Afghanistan that will never be used since the $80 million is not defensible from a terrorist attack and was built by bypassing the State Department’s own building guidelines relative to terrorists.
- The Transportation Safety Agency recently bought over $180 million worth of airport security equipment that it will never use, storing it in a warehouse in its original packaging.
- Employees in the General Services Administration threw themselves a Las Vegas bash at taxpayer expense, resulting in the dismissal and resignations of GSA employees and executives.
- The Obama administration recently made the inane, indefensible decision to give Egypt over one billion dollars worth of F-16 fighter planes and tanks, weapons that could eventually impact both Department of Defense and State Department operations in the future.
- And last but not least, consider some new findings relative to the President’s economic stimulus plan, as recently reported by the Independent Journal Review. Unfortunately, these types of expenses are no confined to the stimulus program, they happen every day in every Federal government department and entity.
These insults to the taxpayer occurred even though when President Obama signed the $831 billion stimulus into law in 2009, he stated that “tough choices smart investments” needed to be made. So ask yourself: if these are the “smart investments,” you can only wonder what the dumb expenses were:
Disgraceful wastes of money. Which gets us back to our central question: Are Kerry, Panetta, and Obama out of touch, protecting turf or just fiscally incompetent? Or possibly all of the above?