Growing more and more frustrated with Mitt Romney’s inability to articulate the conservative message while campaigning, the Great One delivers an example of what Romney should be saying as only Levin can.
Category Archives: Spending
Mark Steyn on Flukemania
The always insightful and hilarious Mark Steyn finally weighs in on the charade surrounding the 30 year old child, Sandra Fluke’s perfectly sensible demand that we pay for her contraception and that a Catholic institution should be forced to violate its religious principles in order to accommodate her. That president Obama and the Democrats gleefully used this useful idiot to advance their big government desires granting the plebes protection for their sexual romps while stealing liberty with the other hand is not really surprising.
Bread and Circus. And Condoms.
Fantastic artwork from iMaksim. Click on the image to embiggen it.
All of us are born with the unalienable right to life, liberty, and a lifetime supply of premium ribbed silky-smooth ultrasensitive spermicidal lubricant condoms. No taxation without rubberization, as the Minutemen said. The shot heard round the world, and all that.
He’ll be filling in for Rush on Monday, so if you don’t want to go read the whole thing, I’m sure a portion of it will be covered then.
Aside from the sheer ridiculousness of the phoney congressional hearing, and aside from the moral implications, and aside from a government imposing tyrannical dictates on the people, the issue Steyn focuses on is whether this debtor nation can afford to do what Obama and the Democrats want to do.
Should we borrow money from China to pay for Sandra Fluke’s rampant promiscuity?
Paul Ryan exposes Geithner/Obama Budget fail, or “We don’t have a definitive solution… We just don’t like yours”
House finance committee chairman Paul Ryan grilled Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on the failure of the proposed budget to work towards solving our long-term debt crisis. Instead of dealing head-on with a $99.4 trillion dollar liability, the Geithner/Obama budget does nothing to avert the looming debt crisis. Geithner’s answer is that his budget stabilizes our current insanely high debt for a few years but does not fix it. Ryan is right, it is all about confidence and trajectory and this budget will not bode well with credit rating agencies or those who might invest in U.S. debt and will result in default.
Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury have a responsibility to fix problems, this administration and this budget are an epic fail when it concerns future financial liabilities. As Ryan said, “Our Government is making promises to Americans that it has no way of accounting for them!
What we’re up against. It ain’t pretty.
Bill Whittle does the math on the upcoming election in his latest Firewall called ‘The Vote Pump’. You won’t like the answer because you already know it. Whittle just shows you the picture in a new and refreshing way.
Declaration Entertainment link.
Go Big or Go Bust
The so-called “Super Committee”, charged with first agreeing on and then proposing deficit reductions of at least $1.5 trillion in a matter of a few weeks, is being lobbied to Go Big by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an offshoot of the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank. The gist of their argument is that the American fiscal situation and pending debt crisis is the most predictable disaster in history. They also believe solving this problem will require a minimum of $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years. Furthermore they believe that the “Super Committee” has a unique opportunity to go big by taking advantage of the work already done by the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction committee and adopting their proposal.
Given the short time frame the committee has been given to agree on a resolution and the magnitude of the pending crisis I think this is the right course. David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell and Simpson-Bowles member, put it this way,“We all know this will get resolved and it will get resolved in one of two ways. One, is we can do it now thoughtfully and proactively the way grownups do things. The other way is to wait until it gets to a point the bond market decides they don’t trust you anymore.” The latter will result in an escalation of interest rates not only for government borrowing but mortgages, vehicle loans and credit cards which will create a huge drag on the economy.
Obama chews congress and raises money at the same time.
Press secretary Jay Carney stated today that despite scolding Congress for not working hard enough on a deficit deal, President Obama won’t be canceling two fundraisers in Philadelphia, Carney said. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he said in defense.
In the back yard of a Philadelphia cable executive, President Obama was showing off to donors who coughed up $10,000 each to rub shoulders with the fundraiser in chief. Mark Knoller of CBS News was in attendance and tweeting throughout the event. The president, who spent a good part of yesterdays press conference calling out congress for not doing their job took the opportunity to continue to insult the legislative branch as Knoller tweeted;
Obama is as smug and condescending as ever but I wonder if he realizes that Republican freshman Senator Ron Johnson as already worked out the deficit issue and it is the president, Senator Reid and the Democrats who lack the political will.
Frustrated Freshman Legislators bring common sense to the floor
Today freshman Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson ran out of patience with a Senate that is in his words, “Is fiddling while America is going bankrupt.” Fed up after only six months in Washington, the fiscally conservative Republican threatened to tie up the Senate and delay all business. Johnson is upset that the Senate has not passed a budget in two years and the fact that the Democratic leadership has no intension bringing a budget proposal to the floor. Speaking from the floor this afternoon Johnson let plans be known; “I will begin to object, I will withhold consent.
A single Senator can hold up any business by objecting and withholding consent. Objections can be overcome by 60-vote supermajority, but a senator intent on making a point can obstruct all business and in effect shut down the senate by requiring all business to undergo the burdensome cloture process.
After withholding consent and preventing Senator Jeff Sessions from speaking and threatening to object to Harry Reid’s effort to schedule votes later in the week, Johnson relented in exchange for ten minutes on the floor to express his disgust.
Meanwhile, over in the house last week freshman Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania launched a tirade after a Democrat Representative criticized the Ryan budget. Mr. Kelly had heard enough!
Senator Johnson and Congressman Kelly are prime examples of what this country needs and if we had more like them serving in congress over the last few decades, we would not be in the shape we are. These two men ran for elected office to try to save their country, to go to Washington to make the difficult decisions that will give their children and their children’s children the same opportunities they had.
These men did not have to serve, Ron Johnson started and built a very successful business in Wisconsin and Mike Kelly owns and runs a very successful automobile dealership in Butler, Pennsylvania. I thank these citizen legislators for their efforts and I call on all americans to support them, our future depends on it!
The idiotic statement of the day
When it comes to the debt ceiling, I’ll be the first to admit I am not sure what to think. There are many highly respected economic experts on both sides of the aisle with differing opinions about the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling by August 2nd. Some caution that it will cause a global panic while others maintain that we can still utilize the $200 Billion in monthly revenue to service our debt and essential spending while the congress works on bringing our budget back into balance.
So when I heard that Representative Jim Himes was going to be on C-Span to discuss the debt ceiling, I made sure to tune in. You see not only is Jim a Democrat congressman from Connecticut, he also is a Harvard graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University who after his studies he worked his way up to Vice President at Goldman Sachs. With these credentials I expected some brilliant insight into the intricacies of the federal budget but what I got was “the idiotic statement of the day“.
After Himes stated that spending cuts were necessary if we are to avoid financial collapse a C-Span viewer tweeted in questioning why we need to raise the debt ceiling if we are going to make spending cuts. His answer defies belief.
That’s right, the Democrats are so insistent on raising the debt ceiling that this Oxford trained financial wizard just said that even if the federal government cut all of the spending we would still have to raise the ceiling. Now I am not an economist but I do know that we take in about $2.6 Trillion a year in revenue and the interest payments on our debt amount to around $250 Billion a year. This would still leave us with well over $2 Trillion to spend before we had to increase the debt ceiling.
