Posted by Tina
America is hurt and bleeding with people out of work, losing equity and savings and seeing little hope for the future. Turning our economy around, paying down our massive debt, and getting Americans working again have now become a monumental task. More
spending will not help, it will only add to the pain and place enormous burdens on future generations. Picking and choosing when it comes to tax cuts is a political, rather than economic, solution. It will not give us the big boost we desperately need. There is a better way; first, we should stop the bleeding.
This morning Republican John Boehner was on Good Morning America to share a couple of proposals for economic relief. The Republicans will call on the House to act on these ideas in the next few weeks:
1. Pass a bill that cuts non-security related government spending for the next year back to FY 2008 levels – before all of the bailouts, government takeovers, and ‘stimulus’ spending sprees began. The legislation House Republicans are proposing would provide the fiscal discipline economists say is needed to promote private-sector job creation and prevent a lame-duck Congress from writing another bloated omnibus spending bill after the November elections. Exceptions should be made for programs affecting seniors, veterans, and national security.
2. Enact a two-year freeze on all current tax rates to stop job-killing tax hikes on families and small businesses. This would help ease the uncertainty employers and entrepreneurs are facing so they can get back to creating jobs.
These two proposals would put a halt to excessive spending increases and unleash the American people to become a wealth building, job creating machine. This in turn will result in revenues to government that should be used to bring down our debt. While this is happening our representatives need to quit playing politics and begin to look in earnest for ways to downsize government.
America is is a country filled with individuals who chart the course for their own lives in freedom. America is not cold heartless unaccountable government. It’s time to stop spending, stop the bleeding and restore power to the individual.
Non-security spending?
That’s codespeak for EVERYTHING the pentagon asks for!
The biggest waste in our budget is on defense spending.
NOT that I am a dove. It’s just that so much of it is wasted!
In 1972 a cruise missile cost one million dollars.
A four-function calculator cost 399 dollars.
Today a four-function calculator is a dollar and a cruise missile is about five million dollars.
That is what you call GRAFT.
From the Democrat handbook which only has one page:
Page One, Line one says, “In the event of a problem spend money on it.”
Line two says, “In the event that the problem persists, spend more money on it.”
Line three says, “If it is really, really serious and the problem is growing larger…spend more and keep spending until it goes away.”
The end.
Quentin I share your disgust at government waste including waste in defense spending.
There are all kinds of ways to waste money. Spending $5000 for a toilet seat that is normally valued at $30 is the obvious example of waste. Money spent on well-meaning programs that fail to produce the desired effect is the kind of waste that is never counted and continues year after year simply because that’s the way it was set up. A bloated bureaucracy with a thousand employees, when six hundred could manage the work, is still another and this too continues, or grows, year after year. We won’t even go into the pork diollars that are spent every year.
But here’s another thought. Defense spending is Constitutional and, considering current realities in the world, it’s not too difficult to support spending that would create a strong military. Still, the DoD is, as far as I know, the only department that has recently announced budget cuts and a commitment to fiscal discipline that includes cutting 2800 civilian and military personel.
President Obama and the Democrat leadership in Congress, on the other hand, seem not to share this compunction about spending. Indeed they believe government spending to be a virtue. I saw four examples of pork and pay back just today:
$1 million has been set aside for a California Academy of Sciences study of exotic ants. (If they’re army ants, maybe Gates could conscript them into service as replacements for the outgoing personnel.)
$500,000 to replace the windows at the Mt. St. Helens visitors center. (Other than the fact the visitors center is closed and has no plans to reopen, I say go for it.)
$300,000 to study the use of yoga to reduce hot flashes for women in menopause.
$308 million for a clean energy hydrogen power plant to be built in California. In and of itself, the plan sounds plausible until you know the identity of the government’s partner in the project. That would be BP.
And speaking of energy another example in the news today is enough to make you tear your hair out. According to the WSJ America is going to lend Brazil $2 Billion for offshore oil exploration with an option to increase the amount in future. The loans will go to Petrobras, one of the biggest companies in the Americas.
But the story doesn’t end there. Your favorite, Glenn Beck – FOX News, also reported that China already has contracts to purchase all of the oil in this field. The clincher to the report is that George Soros is the largest holder of Petrobras stock.
Is this a company that needs US support? Is this part of some crazy deal with China due to the massive paper they hold for our debt?
All of this brings me to one conclusion. Smaller government with fewer departments and programs would make keeping an eye on this kind of deal making and spending would certainly be easier. Simplified law would also make it neasier to nkeep from being robbed for excessive spending by any department and for any item from toilet paper to cruise missiles.
If I can add one more item to the US support of Petrobras is the shutting down of all off-shore oil rigs and the oil companies moving their rigs to Brazil and other locations. It may not be a grant or a tax, but it’s a HUGE cost to the gulf coast economy from lost jobs created by our gov’t.
There is also an unbelievable grant I’d like to add. I can’t find the post to verify the exact amount so let’s say around $500k going to invent a computer to make us laugh. Turning on the Comedy Club channel or buying a ticket to hear a comedian doesn’t seem logical to our gov’t if we want a laugh. Makes me want to cry.
I share Quentin’s concerns about government waste, fraud and abuse. We have a dangerously bloated bureaucracy that has brought us to the depths of socialism.
When government gets this big it is nearly impossible to supervise. This is why we here at PS are always talking about scaling back government. It’s dangerously large and it can get grossly out of control at this size.
As voters we can only focus on a few big issues or bills before us, but meanwhile hundreds, possibly thousands of lesser ones slip by and their cumulative damage is budget busting.
This is why I think the bureacrats in Washington seem to be constantly working against the majority of Americans and even against our national interests, instead they are focused on partisan and self interests because it’s so easy to get away with it.
Surely by now you folks know that as an elected representative, the opportunities to turn a quick buck, to gain a corrupt advantage in some way are endless in Washington. Very few of our elected have the character to serve for more than a few terms without doing something completely off track and scandalous.
“… losing equity and savings …l”
The plight of the wealthy in the current economic debacle. My heart bleeds … truly, it does.
Libby you are somethin else. Your “bleeding heart” just cannot be bothered for young hard working middle class people who worked and scraped to buy a home only to find themselves now underwater with all of their equity lost. The so called stimulus has done zip for many of these who have been out of work for a couple of years. And let us not forget that one of the big contributing factors to the losses they have suffered is that bleeding heart of yours that supports legislators who write laws forcing banks to make bad loans to people that can’t afford them!
The WSJ reported last January that personal bankruptcy filings hit 1.41 million last year, up 32% from 2008 (National Bankruptcy Research Center) and bankruptcy attorneys from across the country said at that time that there was no sign that the bankruptcy business was slowing.
Another source, Elizabeth Warren of the Harvard Law School reports the following stats: Average age is 38, 44% are couples, 30% are women filers, 26% men, Two out of three have lost their jobs, half experienced serious health problems.
These are not the “rich” you love to hate Libby. These are middle class Americans who were just trying to build a future for thmselves and their children. And now thanks in part to stupidity and bleeding hearts (Marxism) their hard work and investment is smashed to bits.