Chuck Woolery on Budget Cuts

Raising the Debt Ceiling?

US Debt Clock

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Students Refuse to Sign Pledge to Pay National Debt

Paul Ryan: Our Generation's Defining Moment

Secretary of Treasury admits his budget is “unsustainable”

What Big Government Can Do

by John Hayward

On Monday morning, President Obama dropped the bloated corpse of a bizarre, $3.73 trillion budget on the steps of Capitol Hill. It is a remarkable document, in that it extends the wildly irresponsible spending and Big Government devotion of Obama’s first two years almost without hesitation, despite the historic pounding his party took in the 2010 midterm elections.

This dead-on-arrival budget, in combination with the results of the Obama spending binge to date, has but one use: it shows us what Big Government can do.

Government, for example, is indispensable in the creation of high unemployment.

Big Government is also vital in the creation of shortages.

Government is the mother of entitlement.

And, of course, only government can produce crippling levels of debt.

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Obama Budget Contains 15 Hidden Tax Hikes

by Mattie Corrao

With the release of his FY 2012 budget today, the President is attempting to brand reckless spending and higher taxes as fiscal reform. In reality, this is the same foolhardy budgeting we’ve seen over the past two years of the Obama Administration, with one difference: more spending.

Record overspending – the President’s budget calls for a record level of overspending, after the unprecedented growth of the previous two years. The plan calls for spending to reach $3.8 trillion this year, mounting 25.3 percent of GDP, the highest share since World War II. This pales in comparison to the ten-year outlook; the budget calls for $8.7 trillion in new spending, projecting outlays of $46 trillion over the next decade.

Digging the hole deeper - While CBO recently estimated the FY 2011 budget deficit would reach $1.5 trillion, President Obama’s budget overspends at the highest rate that country has ever witnessed, creating a $1.65 trillion deficit for FY 2011. The President has falsely alleged the budget will “reduce” the deficit by $1.1 trillion, neglecting to mention that this is less than one tenth of the overspending his budget requires in the next decade.

Increases taxes to fuel higher spending – Instead of cutting spending, the President is increasing taxes to grow government. The budget hikes taxes by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years while spending almost ten times that in the same period.

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Final Tab for Pelosi’s Speakership: $5.34 Trillion in New Debt

Final Tab for Pelosi’s Speakership: $5.34 Trillion

in New Debt — or $3.66 Billion Per Day…

by Terence P. Jeffrey

In the 1,461 days that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) served as speaker of the House, the national debt increased by a total of $5.343 trillion ($5,343,452,800,321.37) or $3.66 billion per day ($3.657,394,113.84), according to official debt numbers published by the U.S. Treasury.

Pelosi was the 52nd speaker of the House. During her tenure, she amassed more debt than the first 49 speakers combined.

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Rand Paul, MD speaks to doctors about healthcare reform

Democrats out-pork Republicans by a 50-to-1 margin

by Byron York

Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.

It's not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act. In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether -- while Democrats roll on.

In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.

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Consumerism Is Keynesianism

by Steven Horwitz

One of the most pernicious and widespread economic fallacies is the belief that consumption is the key to a healthy economy. We hear this idea all the time in the popular press and casual conversation, particularly during economic downturns. People say things like, “Well, if folks would just start buying things again, the economy would pick up” or “If we could only get more money in the hands of consumers, we’d get out of this recession.” This belief in the power of consumption is also what has guided much of economic policy in the last couple of years, with its endless stream of stimulus packages.

This belief is an inheritance of misguided Keynesian thinking. Production, not consumption, is the source of wealth. If we want a healthy economy, we need to create the conditions under which producers can get on with the process of creating wealth for others to consume, and under which households and firms can engage in the saving necessary to finance that production.

Historically it was Keynesianism that brought the emphasis on consumption into economics.  Before the Keynesian revolution the standard belief among economists was that production was the source of demand and that encouraging saving and production was the way to generate economic growth.  This was more or less the correct understanding of Say’s Law of Markets.

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Higher Taxes Won't Reduce the Deficit

by Stephen Moore
and Richard Vedder

The draft recommendations of the president's commission on deficit reduction call for closing popular tax deductions, higher gas taxes and other revenue raisers to drive tax collections up to 21% of GDP from the historical norm of about 18.5%. Another plan, proposed last week by commission member and former Congressional Budget Office director Alice Rivlin, would impose a 6.5% national sales tax on consumers.

The claim here, echoed by endless purveyors of conventional wisdom in Washington, is that these added revenues—potentially a half-trillion dollars a year—will be used to reduce the $8 trillion to $10 trillion deficits in the coming decade. If history is any guide, however, that won't happen. Instead, Congress will simply spend the money.

In the late 1980s, one of us, Richard Vedder, and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University co-authored a often-cited research paper for the congressional Joint Economic Committee (known as the $1.58 study) that found that every new dollar of new taxes led to more than one dollar of new spending by Congress. Subsequent revisions of the study over the next decade found similar results.

We've updated the research. Using standard statistical analyses that introduce variables to control for business-cycle fluctuations, wars and inflation, we found that over the entire post World War II era through 2009 each dollar of new tax revenue was associated with $1.17 of new spending. Politicians spend the money as fast as it comes in—and a little bit more.

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Why Do Great Nations Fail?

The Deficit Is a Symptom, Spending Is the Disease

 by Michael D. Tanner
 

Sometime in the next week or so, the U.S. national debt will exceed $13.4 trillion.

To put that in perspective: If you earned $1 every second, it would take you 425,000 years to earn enough money to pay off that debt. And it's not likely to get much better any time soon. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the United States will run up more than $1 trillion in debt next year as well, and for years to come. And with entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare facing more than $100 trillion in future unfunded liabilities, we may look back on this level of debt as representing the "good old days."

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