More of that hope and change thing. I’m really tired of it. Gas prices are especially hard on folks like myself. I drive one hour to work. 60 miles. That shit adds up pretty damn quick when it comes to putting gas in my car. The argument that drilling now won’t do anything for 10 years was said 10 years ago. What the hell are we waiting for? The Eco-Nazis need to be reigned in and muzzled. That shitty agenda of theirs has created more problems than it has solved.
Marking the similarities between President Barack Obama’s time in office and former president Jimmy Carter’s is nothing new. But as of Monday, Obama has hit one more Carter benchmark – both saw gas prices double in their first term of office. [See Where Gas Prices are Spiking the Most]
In fact, while just barely, Obama has seen an even higher gas price increase than Carter dealt with under his administration.
President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.
The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama approved in 2010 as the GOP trustee for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the health-care law, which calls for an expensive expansion of coverage for the uninsured beginning in 2014, will nonetheless reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.
The 2010 law does generate both savings and revenue. But much of that money will flow into the Medicare hospitalization trust fund — and, under law, the money must be used to pay years of additional benefits to those who are already insured. That means those savings would not be available to pay for expanding coverage for the uninsured.
“Does the health-care act worsen the deficit? The answer, I think, is clearly that it does,” Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, said in an interview. “If one asserts that this law extends the solvency of Medicare, then one is affirming that this law adds to the deficit. Because the expansion of the Medicare trust fund and the creation of the new subsidies together create more spending than existed under prior law.”
So, how’d that stimulus work out for you? Not so well eh? No surprises here.Doing nothing, and letting some companies fail that should have failed would have been a better deal.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner keeps resorting to a familiar excuse for the slow recovery — the financial crisis. “Recoveries that follow financial crises are slower and more protracted, as Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have famously written. They are slower,” he told the Economic Club of New York last month.
It is an argument President Barack Obama has relied on repeatedly during his presidency. For example, in April 2011, Obama lamented: “[The economy] is not growing quite as fast as we would like, because after a financial crisis, typically there’s a bigger drag on the economy for a longer period of time.”
Thirty-three months since the “recovery” started in June 2009, the unemployment rate has yet to fall below 8.3 percent, far exceeding the previous post-World War II record of 13 months. Worse, most of the drop in recent months has occurred because people have given up looking for work and are thus no longer classified as unemployed. Today, there are 12.8 million unemployed and 43 percent have been out of a job for more than six months, almost twice as high as Americans have ever faced in the past.
But “financial crises” aren’t a valid explanation for the slow recovery.
It’s been several weeks since the release of the fiscal 2013 defense budget, and heads are certainly still spinning in the Pentagon: Ground Mobile Radio (GMR) gone, Global Hawk Block 30 gone and the Army’s medium-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance program, the Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (EMARSS), also gone. There’s blood on the floor in the chief-of-staff/commandant offices at the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines. Yet there’s still plenty of good news for all, with the funding flow to improve network operations still very much in evidence.
Here are some of the winners and losers at each of the services:
Army: The Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) continues to be the “cornerstone tactical communications system” for the service. Funding in fiscal 2013 is $900 million, and totals $6.1 billion from fiscal 2013 through fiscal 2017. Fiscal 2013 funding is earmarked for the purchase of net-centric warfare IP modems and low-rate initial production quantities to support test activities.
There also is funding for something we’ve been writing a lot about in Defense Systems: the modification of Stryker vehicles to incorporate command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems to facilitate mission command-on-the-move.
The Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan went down to a crushing defeat in the House late Wednesday night in a vote that damages the one bipartisan proposal that just a few months ago had seemed like a possible solution to the country’s debt woes.
The 382-38 defeat, with just 16 Republicans and 22 Democrats voting for it, marks a bad end to what began nearly two years ago, when President Obama tapped former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, a Democrat, and former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Republican, to lead a deficit-reduction committee.
Their report has popped up in every deficit discussion since then, but had never gotten a vote in either chamber until this week, when opponents prevailed.
“This doesn’t go big. This doesn’t tackle the problem. This doesn’t do the big things,” said Rep. Paul D. Ryan, Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the Budget Committee. “You can never get the debt under control if you don’t deal with our health care entitlement programs.”
The debate came as the House worked its way through its fiscal year 2013 budget plan, which Mr. Ryan wrote.
The Bowles-Simpson plan was offered as an alternative on the chamber floor.
Minutes earlier, the House also defeated Mr. Obama’s own budget, submitted last month, on a 414-0 vote arranged by Republicans to embarrass the president and officially shelve his plan.
Does this really surprise anyone? Not me. And if he’s reelected, then what? You liberal shit bags can’t keep covering up the SCOAMF’s screw ups. Some moron in the comments earlier said it was racist to point out the SCOAMF’s declining poll numbers.
CBS News The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama’s three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.
The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.
The latest posting from the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department shows the National Debt now stands at $15.566 trillion. It was $10.626 trillion on President Bush’s last day in office, which coincided with President Obama’s first day.
The National Debt also now exceeds 100% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, the total value of goods and services.
Mr. Obama has been quick to blame his predecessor for the soaring Debt, saying Mr. Bush paid for two wars and a Medicare prescription drug program with borrowed funds.
The federal budget sent to Congress last month by Mr. Obama, projects the National Debt will continue to rise as far as the eye can see. The budget shows the Debt hitting $16.3 trillion in 2012, $17.5 trillion in 2013 and $25.9 trillion in 2022.
Federal budget records show the National Debt once topped 121% of GDP at the end of World War II. The Debt that year, 1946, was, by today’s standards, a mere $270 billion dollars.
Mr. Obama doesn’t mention the National Debt much, though he does want to be seen trying to reduce the annual budget deficit, though it’s topped a trillion dollars for four years now.
President Obama’s national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.
Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.” When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.
Some 10,215 new federal regulations from the Obama administration are costing consumers, businesses and the economy overall $46 billion annually, more than five times the regulatory price tag of former President Bush in his first three years in office. Worse: just implementing those regulations had a one-time additional cost of $11 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis provided to Washington Secrets.
Ironically, Bush instituted more regulations, 10,674, but they cost just $8.1 billion annually, said the Heritage report, titled “Red Tape Rising: Obama and Regulation at the Three Year Mark.” It will be released Tuesday.
The analysis backs ups complaints from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups that the president’s regulations are stalling the economy and employment growth. It also calls into question Obama’s promise to put the breaks on new regulations and his State of the Union bragging about issuing less red tape than Bush.
The fact is, said Heritage’s review, hundreds more costly regulations are coming, especially those targeting energy companies and Wall Street. They threaten “to further weaken an anemic economy and job creation,” said Heritage’s James Gattuso and Diane Katz.
Gas prices are having an affect. I don’t see gas prices dropping to the levels that they were when the SCOAMF took office, so this is in play for the general election. His illegal use of the military in Libya, his blatant disregard for the Constitution, among numerous other issues, will likely sink him in the general. Most folks aren’t paying attention to what they should pay attention to in regards to Obama, but the gas prices are not something that he can hide. It’s out there every day, day in, day out, and people need to put gas in their cars, and it hurts, more and more. He will pay for that one.
Disapproval of President Obama’s handling of the economy is heading higher — alongside gasoline prices — as a record number of Americans now give the president “strongly” negative reviews on the 2012 presidential campaign’s most important issue, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Increasingly pessimistic views of Obama’s performance on the economy — and on the federal budget deficit — come despite a steadily brightening employment picture and other signs of economic improvement, and they highlight the political sensitivity of rising gas prices.
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