Thanks to the Washington Examiner for publishing this piece by me in yesterday’s paper. You can read it below:
Trying to fill the federal government’s gigantic budget hole with a 5.6 percent surtax on the tiny number of people with incomes greater than $1 million, as President Barack Obama proposes, is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a spoonful of dirt. It’s a gesture, a charade, a joke. It’s just not serious.
Spending, not revenue, is the problem. Did you believe the federal government was too small 10 years ago? I’ll bet not.
Today the federal government is twice as large, in spending terms, as it was then: $1.8 trillion budget in 2001 and approximately $3.7 trillion this year. The national debt–the total amount of federal government debt outstanding — has grown from $5.7 trillion 10 years ago to $14.8 trillion (and growing) now.
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The Green Scissors coalition held a press conference this morning at the Hotel Monaco in Chicago to announce the release of their new report, “Green Scissors 2011.” Heartland Institute Vice President Eli Lehrer was among those who spoke at the presser — which you can hear on the player at the end of this post.
Green Scissors is designed to be a road map of spending changes allowing Congress to save up to $380 billion over five years by curbing wasteful spending that harms the environment. The Green Scissors coalition is a diverse group of public policy organizations including progressive environmental group Friends of the Earth, deficit hawk Taxpayers for Common Sense, consumer watchdog Public Citizen and free-market think tank The Heartland Institute.
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If doing the same thing and expecting different results really does indicate insanity, then President Obama must be insane.
I listened to his talk earlier today and heard a lot of what we’ve heard from him many times before: more government spending on “infrastructure” (has he already forgotten that even he could find almost no “shovel-ready” projects?), more unemployment benefits, more class warfare, etc.
While he talked, the stock market dropped. The more he talked, the more it dropped and kept dropping after he finished. Final damage tally: Dow average down more than 630 points today. He’ll probably blame the Tea Party and corporate jets.
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The talking point of the weekend from the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats was that Standard & Poor’s reduction of the U.S. government’s credit rating from sterling AAA to less-shiny AA-plus was the fault of the Tea Party movement and the freshmen they put into the House and Senate last year. As of Sunday night, if you googled (in quotes) “Tea Party Downgrade,” you got 11,000 hits. That number is sure to skyrocket in the coming weeks , but the argument (if you want to call it one) is absurd.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) trotted out the line on Meet the Press Sunday morning:
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Heartland friend Alan Caruba is quick to react to the news tonight that S&P has downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time in our history. A quick excerpt of his piece over at The Freedom Pub:
When a nation’s debt equals its entire annual gross domestic product, it is bankrupt. It can still produce goods and services, but it will likely encounter fewer customers worldwide as they too are drawn deeper into their own debt crises.
When it must borrow billions daily just to meet its obligations to other nations and individuals who have purchased its treasury notes, it is has reached a point of “moral hazard” that threatens the wealth of every single citizen.
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Congressional leaders and the White House on Sunday appeared to come to an agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling. The deal comes with some $2 trillion in promised budget cuts and no tax hikes — but has come under criticism from conservatives in Congress, the Tea Party caucus and liberals. The deal could come up for a vote Monday.
The following statements from fellows of The Heartland Institute may be used for attribution. For further comments, or to book any of these people on your program, contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org or 312/377-4000 or 312/731-9364.
“The Boehner-Reid plan, at best, will result in a further increase in the national debt of $7 trillion. It cuts only $6 billion for next year out of a budget that will spend literally over 600 times that, so it’s no wonder it has been widely criticized by fiscal conservatives.
“These budget debates make no sense because of ‘baseline budgeting,’ which builds in trillions in automatic increases in the budget, and then calls any reduction in that runaway increase a draconian cut in spending. The first step on the road to fiscal sanity would involve repealing baseline budgeting so discussions about the federal budget would sound more like discussions about the family budget.”
Peter Ferrara
Senior Fellow for Entitlement and Budget Policy
The Heartland Institute
pferrara@heartland.org
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The other night in a debate on Chicago’s PBS station, the host threw in the face of Heartland’s Steve Stanek a chart promoted by big-spending liberals — such as The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein — that is supposed to be proof that President Obama’s spending is nothing compared to that of his predecessor.
Steve, well-prepared for the query (see his story at Budget & Tax News), would not be a victim of an ambush. He reached into his brain for the perfect description of the chart, calling it “mendacious.”
So … let’s look at that infamous liberal talking point of a chart and compare it to reality.
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See that space between Newt's hands? Once upon a time, you could see him holding his presidential hopes in there.
I awoke late on Sunday — late in the morning, that is. So I only found out via my Twitter feed that Newt Gingrich not only screwed his presidential hopes, but handed the opponents of Paul Ryan’s sensible budget plan all the fodder they need to gain the upper hand in an already difficult debate.
I believe my Twitter response went something like this:
Dammit, Newt! (expletive, expletive … an expletive my mother would slap me for … some safe-for-work words … some expletives for which I have to go to confession.)
Thankfully, I deleted that Twitter response before I sent it. Only now, two days later, can I write about what Newt said without using expletives — but it takes more self-control than when I see the box of doughnuts that shows up at Heartland’s offices sometimes on Thursdays.
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Heartland friend Bruce McQuain over at the libertarian site Q&O hipped me to this post on the seminal military blog Blackfive. It examines the real cost of the new F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jet. (Heartland Managing Editor Steve Stanek of Budget & Tax News, call your office!)
Blackfive notes that the cost of the F-35 — up to $110 million a shot; a projected contract for 2,443 of those bad boys can bring the total to $269 billion — has been vastly inflated in the media. The real cost of each fighter, writes Blackfive, is about half that — because there is a big difference between Total Ownership Cost (TOC) and Unit Recurring Flyaway Cost (URF). Confused? Don’t be. Blackfive explains it with a clever analogy:
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Thanks to the Washington Examiner for publishing this piece by me in yesterday’s paper. You can read it below:
