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Posts Tagged ‘federal debt’
November 22nd, 2011 at 6:08 pm
The Supercommittee Fallout Begins
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I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for as long as anyone would listen that the Congressional Supercommittee was (a) a bad idea (b) doomed to failure and (c) destined to put the funding of America’s military forces in danger because of triggered cuts that could add up to more than a trillion dollars.

Now that’s all coming true and the lines are beginning to get drawn in the sand. From today’s coverage in Politico:

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) vowed to eliminate the automatic cuts, which would take effect in 2013, citing dire warnings from his panel’s analysts and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about the impact of an additional $500 billion reduction on the nation’s security.

“I will not be the armed services chairman who presides over crippling our military,” he said just before the supercommittee admitted defeat Monday afternoon…

President Barack Obama later said he would veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. “There will be no easy offramps on this one. We need to keep the pressure up to compromise, not turn off the pressure,” he said.

The president’s callousness is stunning. Fully funding the men and women of the United States military is not an “easy offramp” — it’s a strategic and moral necessity. An easy offramp would be proposing an increase in the debt ceiling without offering any spending cuts during a time of record national debt. An easy offramp would be allowing Congress to grope its way through the supercommittee process without any leadership from the White House. In short, an easy offramp would be everything President Obama has done to avoid any responsibility for reducing the national debt.

It’s time for the Congress to make a stand — and not just the Republicans. Many Democrats will understand that it’s both good policy and good election-year politics to keep the Pentagon from being gutted. And let’s hope they’re not just limited to Capitol Hill. Nothing would put the issue in starker terms than Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — a good man and one who has consistently opposed this reckless policy — standing in solidarity with a bipartisan congressional majority against the president. If he’s worthy of his job, that’s exactly what he’ll do.

April 29th, 2011 at 11:11 am
Podcast: The Debt Ceiling and Failure of Government “Stimulus”
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CFIF Vice President for Legal and Public Affairs Timothy Lee discusses the pending debate over the debt ceiling and how lawmakers need to better understand that wealth is created rather than “distributed.”

Listen to the interview here.

April 14th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Congressman Auctions the Federal Debt

Freshman Rep. Billy Long (R-MO), a professional auctioneer, displays an easy grasp of the soaring national debt in this speech from the House floor.

(Note: Go to the 3:30 mark for Long’s auctioning of the federal debt)

H/T: The Daily Caller

March 15th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Shared Sacrifice? When Budget Cutting, Equality is the Wrong Principle.
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Sanity in the debate over slashing the federal budget is coming from some odd places lately. Today, it’s courtesy of Politico’s Michael Kinsley, a liberal’s liberal if ever there was one. Writing in a terrific piece in the Los Angeles Times, Kinsley offers up some conservative wisdom in words better than any on the right have come up with:

Comparisons [of domestic spending programs proposed to be cut] with Pentagon spending are especially inappropriate, because defense spending is different. The payoffs from most types of government spending are incremental. You can decide how much you want the government to spend on, say, subsidizing symphony orchestras. There is no exact right answer: The more you spend, the more you get. More symphony orchestras are a good thing, but there are other good things you want the government to do, or of course you might want the government to stay out of it and lower your taxes instead.

But in the case of defense spending, notions like how much we can afford, or what it would be nice to have, are inappropriate. The value is not gradual or incremental. It is absolutely essential to spend whatever is necessary to keep our nation safe, and a total waste to spend a nickel more.

Another worthy use of federal money: having the passage above carved into the walls in the Democratic cloakrooms on Capitol Hill.

March 27th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Federal Debt to be 90% of GDP by 2020

So says the Congressional Budget Office:

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

Ready to buy gold?