A Red Ink Trainwreck

Cato's Dan Mitchell has the rare ability to translate arcane policy into plain English. His latest video tackles how the Pelosi health care bill will bust the budget.

Hattip: Powerline

Search Is On for Best Cost-Cutting Ideas

The Obama Administration is trying a new approach to cutting costs, asking federal employees for their ideas.

Confronted with a staggering federal deficit, the White House is inviting employees across the federal sector to submit suggestions on how to cut waste and make government more efficient. A Web site, http://www.saveaward.gov, has been established to receive the ideas.

There is no monetary award for the winning entry. The winner will, however, present the suggestion in person to President Obama. Moreover, the idea will be immortalized by its inclusion in the fiscal 2011 budget.

Governor Craig Benson tried a similar approach in New Hampshire, but offered employees a cut of the savings their ideas produced. It will be interesting to see if non-financial incentives work well in generating cost-cutting ideas from the federal bureaucracy.

Krugman meets Math like Bug meets Windshield

Stop the fight.

Paging Dr. Evil- Obama ups deficit by $2 trillion

Word leaked out with the trash last Friday, but today the Obama Administration had officially increased its projected deficit for the next ten years.

The federal government faces exploding deficits and mounting debt over the next decade, White House officials predicted Tuesday in a fiscal assessment far bleaker than what the Obama administration had estimated just a few months ago.

Figures released by the White House budget office foresee a cumulative $9 trillion deficit from 2010-2019, $2 trillion more than the administration estimated in May. Moreover, the figures show the public debt doubling by 2019 and reaching three-quarters the size of the entire national economy.

These numbers don't sound real anymore:

$9,000,000,000,000

We're running out of digits to describe the staggering debt being accumulated by the Obama Administration.

The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to approximately $9 trillion from $7.108 trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday.

The higher deficit figure, based on updated economic data, brings the White House budget office into line with outside estimates and gives further fuel to President Barack Obama's opponents, who say his spending plans are too expensive in light of budget shortfalls. (Emphasis added)

In other words, the Obama budget is just as bad as its critics have claimed all along.

What Obama needs is a lesson in fiscal discipline

Foster's take a shovel to the President's fiscal policies:

The federal government's primary purpose these days is to shovel money out the door no matter the eventual consequences.

The nation is in recession and government has a duty to encourage and do what it can to stimulate economic recovery. But it has to be done responsibly.

What we are seeing today are repeated calls for wider shovels. Toss more paper money into the economy. Write bigger and bigger checks as if the bills will never come due. (more)

Economic Recovery...Until They Tax & Spend Us to Death

I could write a detail, cogent, and scathing essay fisking Timothy Geithner's new-found budget discipline, or I could link to Stephen Green.

Cal Thomas- Knee deep in red ink- and getting deeper

Cal Thomas looks at America's fiscal situation in his latest column in the Nashua Telegraph:

Obama and his economic team predicted that if Congress failed to pass their "stimulus package," the unemployment rate, at 7.2 percent in the weeks before the president took office, would rise above 8 percent this year and peak at 9 percent in 2010. If Congress passed the stimulus, they said, unemployment would not be as high.

Last week, the Federal Reserve raised its unemployment forecast to a "higher than expected" 10.1 percent and forecast it to remain high through 2011. (more)

Congress's Cure for Spending Hangover: Hair of the Dog

Stephen Green, the world famous VodkaPundit, recaps the Sunday chat shows, and offers a new explanation for Congress's recent spending binge.

The Washington Spending Machine

The New York Post reports on a dubious milestone; the highest level of government spending ever.

The legislators are on pace to burn through a record $4 trillion in fiscal year 2009 -- approximately $1 trillion more than 2008's history-making expenditure, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Data published by the White House show federal spending has inched upward annually since 1965.

But no other year comes close to matching 2009's $3.997 trillion gusher -- a spending binge that's helped put Congress on track for a record $1.8 trillion deficit. (more)

I'll have the ham and cheese

The Drudge Report has attracted the attention of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack:

The Recovery Act funds referenced in press reports allowed states to purchase ham, cheese and dairy products for these food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries that provide assistance to people who otherwise do not have access to food. This program will help reduce hunger of those hardest hit by the current economic recession.

The references to "2 pound frozen ham sliced" are to the sizes of the packaging. Press reports suggesting that the Recovery Act spent $1.191 million to buy "2 pounds of ham" are wrong. In fact, the contract in question purchased 760,000 pounds of ham for $1.191m, at a cost of approximately $1.50 per pound. In terms of the dairy purchase referenced, USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA) purchased 837,936 pounds of mozzarella cheese and 4,039,200 pounds of processed cheese. (more)

Congress thrives on recession

Tough times for us; boom times for Congress.

While businesses across the country are cutting back, members of the House saw their own office budgets increase by an average of 7 percent between 2008 and 2009.

House officials say the increase is because of — not in spite of — the nation’s economic woes.

“The demands on member offices have increased dramatically during our nation’s current financial crisis, and staff have been called on to work harder and smarter to ensure that we are meeting those growing needs,” Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.), chairman of the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement provided to POLITICO.

When the economy's good, they increase spending because we can afford it. When the ecnomy'd bad, they increase spending because people need more services or the economy needs stimulating.

More startling charts from the Wall Street Journal

Why should we be worried about inflation? Arthur Laffner looks at the money supply in the Wall Street Journal.

And here's a look at government spending as a share of the national economy:
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$23 billion in savings

House Republicans have responded to President Obama's calls for specifics on the budget with a list of $23 billion in cuts over the next five years, according to an Associated Press report at Yahoo News:

In April, Cantor praised Obama for instructing Cabinet secretaries to produce $100 million worth of commonsense cuts this year. Obama's cuts were met with a lot of derision for being merely a drop in the bucket as the government faces extraordinarily large deficits, and Cantor said the president could do a lot better. Obama told him to come up with suggestions.

The result is a list of 37 specific program cuts that would save taxpayers more than $23 billion over the next five years and more than $5 billion in the first year alone.

Some of the GOP cuts haven't been estimated by federal scorekeepers and the party has padded its own estimate by assuming $317 billion over the next five years from limiting non-defense agency budgets to inflation-adjusted levels that Obama is sure to reject.

The President's call to save $100 million while spending trillions was ridiculous. The Republican alternative, which would save about $5 billion next year, is less so, but hardly a serious attack on out of control federal spending. Both parties need to get serious about attacking the real deficit drivers in the federal budget and have the courage to turn down pork for their districts in exchange for supporting bloated deficit spending.

$23 billion is better than a sharp stick in the eye, but it hardly establishes the House Republican Caucus as the voice of fiscal discipline. In reality, it marks them merely as somewhat less wasteful than their Democratic colleagues.

Jeanne Shaheen: A federal budget to get our economic house in order

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen pens a column in this morning's Union Leader claiming that the Obama Administation's proposed budget increases spending in the short term, but controls deficits long term:

Fiscal discipline is the New Hampshire way, but for far too long it hasn't been the Washington way.

Over the past eight years, politicians in Washington turned a record budget surplus into a record deficit. Federal spending doubled, and our national debt soared to more than $10 trillion. This fiscal recklessness helped fuel the current economic crisis. And now, at the very moment when there is finally the political will in Washington to tackle the debt, we have to spend money to stimulate the economy.

It's the right thing to do in the short term. But in the longer term, we need to get back on the path to a balanced budget. The budget resolution recently passed by Congress addresses both our short-term and long-term economic needs.

There is no credible way to claim that this proposed budget cuts the deficit, short-term, long-term, or ever: