Fraud?

Mr. Dennis L. Young of Victoria, wrote a letter to our editor titled “ Federal government is defrauding America.”He claims that Congress and the executive branch has perpetrated the biggest fraud in the history of the world. That’s an awful large task considering all the failed governments throughout the history of the world.

According to Dictionary.Com, fraud consists of “deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.” It is my opinion that politics as usual doesn’t ordinarily lead to fraud.

I never had to wonder why we haven’t had a Federal budget for four years because I’ve kept up with the partisan food fights that leave no room to compromise.

There’s no question that by law Congress is required to produce a budget every year which goes through 12 calendar months that begins and ends on September 30. Technically, a budget is just an “omnibus spending bill” where thousands of printed pages show where the allocated money is supposed to go. That requirement can be met with “Continuing Resolutions” to keep the government going because there’s no penalty when Congress fails to produce a budget. In between, Congress needs to pass the debt ceiling which tells our creditors that we will meet our obligations. There are checks and balances throughout the complex process.

The fact Mr. Young can quote figures that we supposedly gave to the executive branch only prove that everything was above board; transparency works. How ironic, Mr. Young was not outraged when two wars and seven trillion dollar Medicare drug bill were passed without going through the regular budget process.

Mr. Young failed to mention the private sector fraud of Wall Street and the predatory subprime mortgage lenders that took eight trillion dollars out of our economy. That action led to layoffs, bankruptcies, and hardships for people all over the world.

The stimulus package was not large enough considering that eight trillion dollars of capital was removed and Congress only approved close to one trillion dollars to prop up the private sector. The stimulus package kept a floor on the amount of suffering people had to endure by supplying state's money to retain teachers, firefighters, and policemen and maintain the social programs.

On March 23, 2013, the Senate passed their budget, but I don’t know why it was not sent to be reconciled with the budget that the House of Representatives passed. It doesn’t have the 60 votes, but budget matters do not need the 60 votes. I’m not all that worried about a budget being passed because a grand bargain can supersede a normal budget process. For example, if a man and his wife can agree on what major expenditures take priority, then the home budget is much simpler to balance.

Our economy is steadily recovering, despite the strain put on it with the sequester cuts. The U.S. economy added 169,000 jobs in August, and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.3%. Our export deficit is holding us back because other countries are doing much worse than we are. They are exporting their goods at a much cheaper price in order to survive.

For the record, using the executive branch rather than President Obama as perpetrators of fraud did not fool me one bit. Republicans need to take a couple of extra strength Tylenols every four hours and chill out. Regardless of the baseless claims,the want to secede from the union or suddenly becoming pacifists,President Obama will serve out the rest of his term and ACA will still be the law of the land.

It’s Still A Message War

I'm no longer looking for a compromise coming from the Sunday talk shows or from tomorrow night's State of the Union address(SOTU); I'm just looking for the rephrasing of the same-old  message.  The Republicans want to cut spending, and the Democrats want to include revenue with every budget deal.

The big topic Sunday was the upcoming $85 billion in across –the- board sequestered cuts. The Tea Party freshmen are delighted because they think it’s the only to get the massive cuts they want. They only need to look at the U.K. to see what will happen if you make drastic cuts during a financial downturn. The U. K. is entering a triple- dip recession.

The president suggested the sequester cuts as a measure to make Congress hammer out a budget deal thinking that the massive cuts would never be a reality. Key Republicans supported the Budget Control Act and the consequences of doing nothing since then leaves us with the sequester cuts.
This morning Joe Scarborough said that Eric Cantor’s “[The president] just got his tax hike on the wealthy. And you can't in this town every three months raise taxes. Again, every time, that's his response" is a reasonable approach and democrats ought to get behind it or else the moderates will align themselves with the GOP. That’s ridiculous  because for one,it’s the first time in 20 years that the GOP has voted to raise taxes and they think it’s a one time thing. The president ran on a balance approach for every  budget deal and the American people agreed with him.

Republicans like to say that we have a spending problem not a revenue problem.I’m not going to say that the government doesn’t spend too much because it obviously does;I’m saying now that we are in this predicament; we need to take a balanced approach, so we don’t hurt our weak economy. After all we are mostly borrowing from ourselves, and interest rates are really low right now.

Joe Scarborough had a problem with Nancy Pelosi saying that we don’t have a spending problem. She keeps saying that we a have a jobs and growth problem. It’s all about the messaging because we know that we need to make some cuts but cutting tax loopholes to oil companies means we won’t have to make drastic gashes to nutrition programs for poor children.   Joe Scarborough was very angry  because Pelosi is not in favor of raising the eligibility  age for Medicare and Social Security. Joe doesn’t buy the Democrat approach of waiting to see how much Obamacare does to bring down the cost of healthcare before making unnecessary moves that might not be needed. The full implementation of Obamacare will take place next year.Social Security does not increase the deficit and it will only take a few steps to make it solvent for another 75 years.

Senator Lindsey Graham  has an obsession with hanging the administration for the failure of our Benghazi response that led to the death of four Americans. He’s insisting on more details like the timeline of events and the president’s curiosity throughout the seven-hour  event. He’s threatening to hold up the nominations of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary and John Brennan to head up the CIA until he satisfied.  Last time the GOP tried this, Hillary Clinton made them look like fools.  Representative  Tom Cotton, Bill Kristol and Lindsey Graham are trying to say the president was derelict in his duty in handling the Benghazi tragedy, Chris Wallace kept opening the door for Rep. Cotton and Bill Kristol to say the president is not fit to be the commander- in- chief.

I understand that in tomorrow’s SOTU address the president will not hold out another olive branch to republicans but instead challenge them to come to table as an opposition party not as a hostage taking party. Immediately after the SOTU,Senator Marco Rubio will give the GOP’s response and for those interested, Rand Paul will deliver the Tea Party response.

It was quite an eventful week end

There's so much to write about such as the GOP drawing line- in- the sand and challenging the president to lead but only on their terms. They seem to think that revenues are off the table now and its time for austerity measures. Mitch McConnell said that Congress does not have time to tackle gun control because we have to reduce spending. We have a couple of republican senators suggesting that we have to consider shutting down at least half the government if necessary. How short sighted is that? A shut down of government just to say we are not going to pay the bills that we incurred and it will downgrade our credit rating, increase our interest rate and destabilize the world economy. I rarely agree with Newt Gingrich, but yesterday he was right when he said that the GOP needed to increase the debt ceiling without any fanfare because they have two more bites at the apple coming up in their continuing resolution and the sequester cuts. Sure the republicans want the president to lead because that way they don't have to make any hard decisions. They can set back and use  the president's words against him in the 2014 midterm elections.

The deficit and the debt are serious problems, and I will use the illustration from yesterday's Meet the Press as proof. We have this family making $24,000 but owes $38.00 leaving them with a $14,000 deficit which they put on their already overextended $164,000 balance. The recent fiscal cliff paid $385 toward that bill. If it's a family budget, we are talking about, and then I don't think we would make serious cuts to our basic grocery bill, start canceling our children's doctor visits or quit paying for grandma's meds. In the absence of government support, `many of our nation's poor children could not afford basic health care and nutrition, let alone education to acquire the skills necessary to improve their condition. Right now, it would make more sense to get rid of farm subsidies because this is just a big payout to millionaire farmers, for the most part. In 2011 and 2012 farmers income went from $133 to $135 billion. We could also stop subsidizing the drug companies with noncompetitive contracts. We should allow our hospitals, clinics, and taxpayers to purchase cheaper foreign drugs or least allow our government to buy in bulk and pass the savings on the taxpayers. There's more than one way to approach the deficit and the debt. I don't think you can reduce the deficit and create jobs at same time, and that's what's missing from the conversation. The current republicans remind me of our old anonymous posters who abused their privilege in our local forum. They were allowed a comeback but only if they used their real names. The banned posters did that, but then they went on a rampage insisting that everyone use their real names.

I still get a good chuckle when I hear Senator Lindsey Graham say that the president's nominee for secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, is out of the main steam. Hello Mr. Graham, is anyone home? It's clear and simple; republicans have been angry at Chuck Hagel since January 2007, when the republican senator denounced the war in Iraq. It was about that time that I started admiring to Chuck Hagel. It doesn't help his cause that he endorsed John Kerry and probably voted for President Obama twice. I think the president is lining up his ducks for a smooth transition out of Afghanistan. Today, it was announced that John Brennan is the president's choice to head the CIA. Lindsey Graham said that the president was poking a finger in the eyes of republicans with his nomination of Chuck Hagel but the president is very comfortable with those three picks to carry out his agenda of a peaceful resolution first, the withdraw in Afghanistan and scaling back the bloated defense budget. Chuck Hagel has two purple hearts and still suffers from wounds he acquired in Vietnam. The generals' and the neo conservatives will not be able to look Hagel in the eye and convince him that we need to stay in Afghanistan  for 20 more years.

The other issue is an attitude of winning at all cost. It pained me to watch the Washington Redskin quarterback being allowed to play a very violent game at less than 50% of his capability because of his injured ankle. Robert Griffin III sustained an ankle injury several weeks ago and was withheld one game for that injury, yet in the big game, the coach Mike Shanahan chose to listen to a rookie who said he was hurting but not injured. The Redskins have one of the best team doctors who did not clear him to play. The coach has been around for several years, and he knows a 22-year-old always thinks he's ready to go. I hope RGIII completely recovers (even thou I don't like the Redskins) because it would be terrible to end a promising career when responsible people should know better.

It’s about time

I could hardly believe that I actually heard republican Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland saying that the Libyan war costs might be as much as one billion dollars. Finally, the speaker of the house John Boehner asked "What's the Libya war cost?" It's better late than never republicans, even thou it's because the president is a democrat; but it’s time to look at defense spending that needs to be cut. All along, republican members of the house and senate have said that we must cut entitlements but very few went along with defense cuts and to this day, none of them are talking about tax revenues.

We don't have to make radically changes, like going back to the gold standard, taking steps on becoming an isolationist nation, stripping the right to petition the government from the constitution, or cut spending so drastically that it chokes our recovery. Those proposals don't have a chance of passing, so it's a waste of time discussing them. If you were to take congress aside and inject them all with sodium pentothal; they would all tell you that we need to cut the entitlements, defense spending, discretionary spending, and impose some tax increases for alternative energies. They would also tell you that we can't keep voting on continuing resolutions just to keep the government going. We're got to put the nonsense aside, like NPR, abortion, Planned Parenthood, and the repeal of Health Care and settle on cutting and spending to what it was in 2008 for this fiscal year. It's going to be difficult to come up with a 2012 budget so close to the election, but it doesn't have to be hard. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (NCFRR) has already come out with a plan that will cut $3.9 trillion from the deficit through 2020. It has a lot of bipartisan support and is based on a principle of shared sacrifice.

Last night conservative columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks, tried and failed to defend the fact that General Electric did not pay any income tax on $5 billion of profit. It's indefensible or as Lawrence O'Donnell said “they have 975 tax lawyers and accountants, producing such a long and complicated tax return that the understaffed IRS could never mount an effective investigation." This is coming from a pundit who works for a company that is owned in part by General Electric. The NCFRR committee's plan would eliminate all their tax loopholes, cut corporate rates, and still generate tax revenues from a company like General Electric. We still need a progressive tax reform that eliminates all deductions but insures that it doesn't hurt the working poor. A flat tax will not do that.

The proposals to cut education funding are very unpopular. Pennsylvania’s former governor Rendell said he saw a poll where 98% of Pennsylvanians were against cutting funds for education. Texas's Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said Friday that spending on public education can be maintained and even increased in the next two-year budget. He said, we could sell some state land, reduce spending elsewhere, and probably raise some fees.

There you have it, bipartisan cuts to the entitlements, defense, and discretionary spending; maintain funding for education and enact most of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reforms recommendations. After that we need to come up with an energy policy.

Government shutdown?

I suspect when the republicans get through using every trick in the book to weaken Roe v Wade and the Hyde amendment; they will submit some serious budget plans.  I expected them to  submit  proposals on the high end and strictly partisan but the ones I've heard will lead to a government shutdown.  We have not seen the level of cuts they're proposing since World War II.  Senator Harry Reid said "in many cases these proposals may mean taking workers off the assembly line or taking teaches out the classrooms or police officers off our streets." He went onto say "after all, you can lose a lot of weight by cutting off your arms and legs," he added.  "But no doctor would recommend it ."Not to be outdone, Iowa Congressman Steve King said he would not vote for the legislation until it completely defunded health care reform.

For the past two years, the Republican Party has been screaming about high deficits, spending and debt.  You would think that they would have a plan to put in place immediately upon taking office. In their last campaign, they promised to cut $100 billion from the budget.  They knew they didn't have a basis for that number, but it sounded good. After some serious arm twisting by the tea party, their proposals is to cut $100 billion in the next seven months, mostly in items that will damage our frail recovery. The house republicans want to make cuts in job training, environmental protection, disease control  and crime prevention.  The republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Harold Rogers, warned that the full cut will require laying off the FBI agents and air traffic controllers.
 
Speaker the house, John Boehner, will appear on Meet the Press, but I suspect it will turn out like they always do. David Gregory will ask him a question. He'll give the canned answer. David will try again to no avail.  I'll be watching just to see how far they are apart from the president's budget, which the White House will unveil Monday.

We do need spending cuts, but we also need tax increases because our country not only needs to get to get its house in order; we also need to grow.  This is not a time to privatize Social Security or Medicare.  If Senator Rand Paul thinks that Social Security can be fixed by raising the age limit and means testing, then that's the bipartisan route, we should take.  Senator Harry Reid  said that Social Security was fine for now(40 years), so there we have it ,views from very different sides of the aisle.  Now, if you think the house of representatives is taking an ax to the budget; Rand Paul takes a 50 caliber machine gun to the budget.  He is proposing a $500 billion cut.  The freshman senator has a lot to learn about economics' and Washington.
 
Federal and state budgets are different because most states have to balance their budgets but the Federal government doesn't, but early in March, I believe we will have a showdown between those that know the seriousness of that action and the tea party faction which remain in solidarity by not increasing the debt ceiling. At CPAC today, the tea party may have found their presidential candidate in the former governor of Minnesota ,Tim Pawlenty. He said " We should not...We should not raise the debt ceiling." Pawlenty used to be a moderate Republican but he has really change.

President Obama will hear from the democrats about his 2.5 billion cut to LIHEAP, a home heating fuel assistance for low income people.  Today republican senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts joined the democrats saying". “With Massachusetts residents getting pounded by brutal winter storms, cutting…funding is a nonstarter for me.”

I understand it is customary to sway voters with some outrageous proposals like the one Governor Rick Perry proposed but he is serious.  The good governor " urged Texas colleges and universities to create a bachelor's degree program that cost less than $10,000 including textbooks. Of course, he didn't say how these schools could or should do this..

http://tinyurl.com/49ppwwp