Assorted thoughts and musings....and hippies

I will be having a busy weekend...again.  I will be going to the scouting base to instruct scouts on the functions of a .22 rifle or a shotgun this weekend.  I don't mind...for I am teaching the next generation of shooters so the sport doesn't die out like the liberals want it to.  Speaking of liberals, I had gone with my friends to lunch today, something I normally don't do because of finding a parking spot upon returning to work, and it isn't cheap..spending $8.00 for lunch is pricey to me.  But it was a special occasion, one of my co workers was transferring to a back shop.  Now at work, many people have nicknames...well his is "Chimp, chimp"  because he has a monkey on his back...literally

He would carry this monkey on his back during breaks,    hence the name.  But I digress,  We went to a popular BBQ spot near the airport and where I work at, and the food was good and fast...and while sitting with my co-workers I saw this sign:

  the cool thing about having smart phones.....is the camera...and it is a pretty good camera.  I immediately took the picture, I have blogged about hippies in the past.  I still have the cartoon that my Dad had in the early 70's that talked about the hippy lifestyle.  they would protest the "stinking establishment" but get many benefits from the same people that they disparage.

                      This is what the average mindset of the average liberal...they look at the government as "free money" and have no idea or don't care where the money comes from..they figure it comes the "Stinking rich" people that the government has liberated some of their ill gotten assets.   So they picket and mooch and yet take all the goodies.

 

  I have a serious problem with this, we have a huge underclass that depend on the government for sustenance, and they vote accordingly and the politicians act to keep their jobs and perks as " the ruling class."  Now we are having a debate to raise the debt limit...again because the government doesn't have the spine to make the hard calls for the future of the country.

     The government has a spending problem...it can't stop spending money.Instead of cutting spending ..they want to raise the debt limit.  It is like a family of 4 owing $15,000 in credit card debt, instead of cutting the spending to service the debt...they want to raise the credit card limit instead.   This is fiscal foolishness.  they are postponing the day of reckoning and the pain will be worse.

50th Anniversary on the war on poverty..........

I am a student of history and I tend to remember certain dates,   I remember in my history books(before revisionist history really took on roots) 50 years ago when President Johnson pushed through his "Great Society" program to eradicate poverty in America.   If I recall, it was during this time that they put social security trust fund into the general budget to hide the cost of these programs and the Vietnam war that were going at the same time.  Back then there was a surplus in the "trust fund" and they needed it to cover the cost of government.  Now the Social Security fund that I and many others have paid into is full of government I.O.U's and I believe that the money taken by force from me will not be available for me when I retire.  That is why people from my generation(the smart ones anyway) have been funding our retirement through our 401K and other vehicles.  If SS is there, it will be means tested so that people that have other income will not be able to draw from the money that was supposed to be set aside because they will have to restrict access to keep the program afloat.
     What has me and others concerned now is that I have heard rumblings that the government is looking at ways to get at the money in the retirement accounts of Americans to "shore" up social security. "Because it isn't fair that all Americans havn't planned for their retirement and the fortunate few have."   This mindset is prevalent on the liberal websites and think tanks.  I and others like me skimped and saved and denied ourselves the latest and the greatest so we can live ok when we retire
now the "gimmecrats" are talking about taking MY money to put it into the ponzi scheme known as social security so others who didn't bother preparing can benefit?

  You don't believe it can happen.,...Look at Cyprus and Greece, the government went into bank accounts of private citizens and took money without permission of the owners, they decided by imperial fiat to just take it.  Where is the rule of Law?   Oh Wait this is the President that likes to thumb his nose at the rule of law and do whatever he wants.  Remember the GM bailouts....Everybody got hosed on that deal including the tax payers except the UAW which backed President Obama.  The Obamacare mandates, the president arbitrarily delays certain aspects of the law for political reasons even though by law, he can't do it.  And nobody will call him on it because he controls the media and the mob.

Here is the LINK that inspired the rant

The DEMOCRAT'S War on Poverty cost us TWENTY TRILLION DOLLARS, that is, a 20, followed by TWELVE ZEROS! And as usual, it is an epic failure and even more Liberal is the fact that they keep throwing OUR MONEY at it, to no avail!

EXCERPT:  "Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of impoverished people in the U.S. has declined only slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama. Aides said Mr. Obama doesn’t plan to commemorate the anniversary Wednesday of Johnson’s speech in 1964, which gave rise to Medicaid, Head Start and a broad range of other federal anti-poverty programs. The president’s only public event Tuesday was a plea for Congress to approve extended benefits for the long-term unemployed, another reminder of the persistent economic troubles during Mr. Obama’s five years in office.

“What I think the American people are really looking for in 2014 is just a little bit of stability,” Mr. Obama said. Although the president often rails against income inequality in America, his policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when he took office."

Stability? Really? We've had five YEARS of this incompetence and the only thing that he has down is run this nation into the ground!

Let us remember that when LBJ signed all of these giveaway he made a comment "With a stroke of the pen, I guarantee the blacks voting democrats for the next 50 years."  I have heard 50 to 200 years bandied about. 
What do we have to show for it? We still have poverty. It’s gotten worse not better. And our poor live better than middle class people in other countries. They have TVs and smart phones. And look at the crime. Look at the feral blacks playing the Knockout Game. Look at the rise of the illegitimacy rate for both black and white mothers. It’s worse among black women where it’s over 70% but it has risen among white women as well. Get yourself knocked up and you can go on welfare. And you can keep irresponsibly having babies and we will pay you for it. 

     Economist Thomas Sowell argues that the Great Society programs only contributed to the destruction of African American families, saying "the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life."

EXCERPT:  "President Obama’s anti-poverty efforts “are basically to give more people more free stuff,” said Robert Rector, a specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative Heritage Foundation."

 EVERYTHING the Democrats DO is to give people more freebies and make them slaves to the state and dependent on voting democrat to keep the largesse coming and the democratic party in power using the ballot.  Only their LOW IQ and dumbed down education keeps them from seeing it.

How's that Hopey/Changey working for you America? "Poverty level under Obama breaks 50-year record?" Now THAT is CHANGE you can BELIEVE IN!

Edmund Burke was right. Our Founders were right. George Orwell was right. Ayn Rand was right. McCarthy was right. Ronald Reagan was right. Joe Wilson was right. Anyone ELSE see a pattern here?

We're 17 TRILLION in debt with 150 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities and morons like Krugman, Goolsby, and Obama, to name a few, think we can STILL spend our way out of debt

Dammm, I hate being right....

  Well I was riding around doing errands and I was listening to the news today and I hear "Dear Leader" say that any negotiations with the GOP will have to have no stipulations, he wants to have a clean slate budget passed and he also want the debt ceiling raised BEFORE he is willing to talk to the GOP.   Damm, I hate being right, I figured the intransigence was due to the debt ceiling, so the FEDGOV can borrow more money to keep the bennies flowing to the looter class so they can expand it and stay in power.  I talked about it last Friday.  Even the lamestream media is starting to notice the strident tones coming from the White House,  and the total unwillingness of the president to want to talk to congress, he is acting imperial and they are starting to notice that.  Not enough cracks are in the facade to break the total support they have for him.     The affordable care act has started off to a rough start, and many people that actually are trying to use the exchange are discovering that the system is crashing due to many incompatibility issues and plugins that it is using.  I have heard guestimates of 6 months to fix all the problems. 

      That isn't all, they are finding out that all the information that they are entering is freely available to all facets of the government, that there is no expectation of privacy and there have had sites hacked and peoples personal information stolen.   Also people have started getting their adjusted insurance in the mail the new insurance that is in compliance with Obunglercare:   Here is an excerpt:
    

Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.
Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.

They voted for Obungler and Obunglercare and now they are getting just what they deserve. Ain't Schadenfreude a bitch

Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.

The Messiah said that if people like their policies and their insurance companies...they can keep them....Yeah Right...
…

I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,”
Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”

 "Welcome to the Party Pal..."

The Republicans are trying to help you, you clueless idiots. They told you this law would be a disaster, but you believed all the bullshit Obungler, ex-Speaker Nancy "You have to pass it to see what is in it", and Harry the ghoul  were pushing and you voted for this disaster. You voted to screw yourselves.  You voted against your economic interest in the interest of "fairness" and Diversity....and it now bit you in the ass...

“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

 You can read more at the Link

     I have been told by several liberals   "Well it is the law of the land...so deal with it."  I replied  "Well so was Dredd Scott and 700,000 Americans died fixing that little problem.   You really want to go there again?"

   Now "Dear Leader" is pushing for a blank check on the debt ceiling, and he is totally expecting the establishment GOP to fold and capitulate like the French did in 1940, and for those that don't understand the reference, France had what many experts considered the most powerful modern armed forces in Europe, but Germany had a new way of fighting and the French were divided up with internal division, also a social rot had permeated the culture and many of the French when the time came to fight for their country, they just rolled over, they were mentally beaten by an inferior force but better tactics and leadership.  Now Obungler wants more money to spend,

         I also hear the same place at the Washington mall that was closed by imperial fiat to the average citizen and WWII vets, somehow is open so a  future democrat voters pro amnesty rally can be held today......The double standards are galling and many people still are clueless what is going one.   I am trying to wrap my head around this and I am having a hard time with it.   

How the Obama Porkulus bill was written

We’re talking $850+ Billion here … so maybe it’s time for a little refresher course on just how the wonderful ObamaStimulus bill was written.
When Obama took office in 2009 it was the first time the Democrats had control of the House, the Senate and the White House in 18 years.  That’s 18 years of Democrat constituents demanding money for this, that or the other thing.  That’s 18 years of Democrats telling their followers that they’re very sorry, but they just don’t have the clout in DC to get the spending bills they’re asking for through the congress.
So when Obama was crowned it was time to open the floodgates … time to take care of all those constituents with all those spending requests who have been ignored for 18 years.
So how do you do this?  Well here’s how Obama did it.  He went to Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House.  He told Pelosi to go to the House Democrat Caucus and gather together all of those pork spending requests that have gone unfulfilled since the Democrats last ran the show.  Put all those requests together into one bill, and we’ll call it a stimulus bill.  We’ll tell America that this bill is crucial to bringing us out of the recession and putting Americans back to work again.  Pelosi was given one rule .. one limit.  The bill had to come in at less than $1 trillion dollars.  The people were used to billion-dollar price tags, but a trillion-dollar tag might cause a problem.  Leave some wiggle room in case we have to up the ante on a few projects.  Thus was born the $850,000,000,000 “stimulus” plan.
Remember .. the theory here is that all of this money is better spent by government than by the people who worked for and earned it.  Does that make sense to you?

Public Debt

I am back harping on the debt.  If Obungler get reelected, we will be past the point of no return, and will behave like Greece when the financial necessities force a curtailment of the out of control entitlement spending.

    Here is a poster I saw while surfing around.

 

The entitlement nation?

I have harped for this for years, when people get "Free stuff from the government" they have an entitlement mentality.  They expect more and are totally un appreciative that this is stuff to help them out.  Instead they demand more free stuff because they are "owed" for being here.   I remember a while back when I had posted a story about some person that worked at the IRS for a bit and had to deal with people checking on their tax refund.  he had stated that the people that actually worked were polite and respectful whereas the people that didn't work were rude, obnoxious and DEMANDED their money when they didn't pay anything in but were getting EITC and other "Gimme's" from the government.  If we don't get a handle on this, we will be like Greece and it will get worse.

    

By CHARLES J. SYKES, Wisconsin Policy Institute

March 27, 2012

Milton Friedman may have argued that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but you’d have a hard time convincing millions of Americans of that today. They know better – or at least they think they do.
A record 46.5 million Americans rely on food stamps, and in 2010 the federal government paid out more money in the form of benefits than it collected in federal income taxes. But perhaps the most striking measure of the success of the entitlement state has been the way it’s eroded the stigma of being on the dole, while spreading dependency as a virtue as widely as possible. In other words: Everybody should buy everybody’s free lunch. And free breakfast too. (Did I mention free dinner also would be nice?)
RELATED: The ‘Take Care of Me’ Society is Wrecking the USA
The cultural shift has become so pronounced today that even some progressives are showing signs of unease. Were it not for her impeccable ideological pedigree, Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, might have irreparably damaged her standing with her mother’s friends when she produced a brief video for HBO about her recent encounters outside a New York welfare office. In the Pelosi video, a man waiting in line is drinking beer and smoking cigarettes as he admits that he’s fathered five children by four different mothers. “I’m here to get a check … whatever they’ve got to offer,” he explains. “It’s not like they’ve got a checklist … I’m just here to get what I can get.”
Of course he was. 
In the video, Alexandra Pelosi quizzes one man: “Why should I help you? Why should my tax dollars be going to you?” He replies, “Because my ancestors came here to help build this place – my ancestors, the slaves.” The last time the man worked, he says, was “half a decade” ago.

There was some mild bureaucratic embarrassment in Michigan recently when a 24-year-old woman who won $1 million in the state lottery was found to be collecting food assistance.

Around the country, there is a lot of “taking” going on. There was some mild bureaucratic embarrassment in Michigan recently when a 24-year-old woman who won $1 million in the state lottery was found to be collecting food assistance. “I feel it’s okay because, I mean, I have no income and I have bills to pay,” explained the woman, Amanda Clayton. “I have two houses.” She was utterly without embarrassment of any kind.
Like the upstanding gentleman in Pelosi’s video, Ms. Clayton was echoing the British welfare queen who declared, “I don’t feel bad about being subsidized by people who are working. I’m just working with the system that’s there. If the government wants to give me money, I’m happy to take it. We get what we’re entitled to.”
Clayton, the lottery winner, has now been cut off from government food aid, as of last Wednesday. The Department of Human Services director in Michigan, Maura Corrigan, issued a statement: “Under DHS policy, a recipient of food assistance benefits must notify the state within 10 days of any asset or income change. DHS relies on clients being forthcoming about their actual financial status. If they are not, and continue to accept benefits, they may face criminal investigation and be required to pay back those
But Clayton’s use of taxpayer assistance after buying a new home and car with her winnings was not unusual. Another Michigan resident continued receiving food assistance after he won $2 million in the 2010 state lottery. That’s what prompted congressman Dale Zorn (R-MI) to pass legislation in his state’s House earlier this year that would remove large-sum lottery winners from welfare rolls. (Legislation is pending in the Michigan Senate.)
Yet there’s still plenty of freebies left to dole out. And as those freebies multiply and as politicians up the bidding, notice how often the two sides seem to talk past one another, using words that carry radically different meanings, depending on the speakers.
While GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was campaigning last week in Peoria, Illinois, a young woman was caught on camera declaring: “So you’re all for like, ‘yay, freedom,’ and all this stuff. And ‘yay, like pursuit of happiness.’ You know what would make me happy? Free birth control.”

Wants have been transformed into “rights” in America and ultimately into obligations and entitlements.

Consider this young woman’s thought process. In the alchemy of the new entitlement culture, freedom and the pursuit of happiness are transformed into a demand for free stuff that makes her happy. You could argue with her that freedom means something other than free stuff and that the pursuit of happiness was never intended to imply a guarantee of taxpayer-financed bliss. But she knows what she wants, and she wants it for free. Romney, to his credit, told the woman that if she wanted free stuff, she should “vote for the other guy.”
Romney continued, “Politicians get up and promise you all kinds of free stuff, more and more stuff that you won’t have to pay for, and you know what? We get elected that way, in many cases, politicians do. That’s not something I subscribe to.”
But the Romney heckler illustrated the way in which wants have been transformed into “rights” in America and ultimately into obligations and entitlements. The process can be illustrated this way: “I want you to buy me lunch. Therefore, I need lunch. And if I need something, I have a right to it – and you, therefore, have an obligation to pay for it.”
The equation looks like this: Wants = needs = rights = obligations. The laundry list goes far beyond free lunch to include free health care, free cell phones, free birth control, free mortgage bailouts – and on and on.
We’ve seen how this worked out for the Greeks, of course. But for a growing number of Americans, what happened in Greece is irrelevant: The entitlement state appeals to voters who believe they will bear no consequences for the costs or sustainability of the program. Questions of affordability don’t come into it, because they know they will never have to pay for it. (Recall that 49.5 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax at all.)
They are not thinking of the burden to their children, their grandchildren, their friends, their fellow citizens of the country, or anyone else. As long as it is free to them – it’s free. And good luck telling them otherwise.

The entitlement nation?

 View Enlarged Image

If the Republican primaries are any indication, one big debate in the upcoming election will be whether President Obama is pushing the country toward a European-style welfare culture.
Mitt Romney, for example, argues that "over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society."
Newt Gingrich has taken to calling Obama "the best food-stamp president in American history."
Obama, in contrast, says the government must play an increasing role — what he likes to call "shared responsibility" — to ensure a society that is fairer.
So is Obama turning the country into a welfare society and away from one focused on opportunity?
While it's true that the country has been headed in this direction for many years — with the explosion in entitlements since the 1960s and the aging of the population — Obama has, in fact, greatly accelerated the trend. Examples:
Direct payments. The amount of money the federal government hands out in direct payments to individuals steadily increased over the past four decades, but shot up under Obama, climbing by almost $600 billion — a 32% increase — in his first three years. And Obama's last budget called for these payments to climb another $500 billion by 2016, at which point they would account for fully two-thirds of all federal spending.
People getting benefits. According to the Census Bureau 49% now live in homes where at least one person gets a federal benefit — Social Security, workers comp, unemployment, subsidized housing, and the like. That's up from 44% the year before Obama took office, and way up from 1983, when fewer than a third were government beneficiaries.
Food stamps. This year, more than 46 million (15% of all Americans) will get food stamps. That's 45% higher than when Obama took office, and twice as high as the average for the previous 40 years. This surge was driven in part by the recession, but also because Obama boosted the benefit amount as part of his stimulus plan.
Disability. The number of people on Social Security disability has steadily climbed since the 1970s, thanks mainly to easier eligibility rules. But their numbers jumped 10% in Obama's first two years in office, according to the Social Security Administration. That sharp rise was due largely to meager job prospects since the recession ended in 2009. When employment opportunities are scarce, experts note, many who could otherwise work sign up for disability benefits instead.
Health care. The government's role in health care has grown over the past decades, with 45% of all health spending now coming from the federal government, up from 32% in 1990. But this trend will dramatically accelerate should ObamaCare remain the law of the land. In eight years, ObamaCare will add 16 million people to Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and another 24 million will be getting coverage through heavily subsidized government-run insurance exchanges, with the cost of those subsidies running $130 billion a year.
Corporate welfare. Prior to Obama, the federal government was already dishing out $92 billion in corporate welfare programs — in the form of subsidized loans, special tax breaks, bailouts and the like — the Cato Institute found. Obama added tremendously to this largesse. Federal grants to the energy sector, for example, quadrupled to over $18 billion in 2009, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts' Subsidyscope.
While each of these and other federal benefit programs may be designed with good intentions, their combined weight is already overwhelming the budget.
In just nine years, entitlement spending is on track to eat up 61% of the federal budget, according to the CBO. And unless these programs are cut back, they will soon consume all federal taxes, one CBO budget scenario predicts.
The problem is that once federal benefits get started, few Americans want to see them cut back, much less eliminated. Even with $1 trillion annual deficits, just 24% would support cutting Social Security and only 16% would back Medicare cuts, according to the November 2011 IBD/TIPP poll.
"Once we thought 'entitlement' meant that Americans were entitled to the privilege of trying to succeed in the greatest country in the world," Romney said in a recent speech. "But today the new entitlement battle is over the size of the check you get from Washington."

More Debt Stuff

I havn't posted the past few days due to my work schedule, it was brutal this week so I didn't have time to update my blog.

I got this off Boortz

Raining Money

By Neal Boortz

Here’s a number for you: $189,000.  That is the amount of money every man, woman and child in the United States owes on our national debt plus the cost of all of our unfunded liabilities.  I hope that your children and grandchildren are prepared to be wardens of state – existing to fund the dreams and schemes of our federal government and entitlement society.
Here’s another number for you: 2.4%.  That is the average quarterly growth rate of under our Dear Ruler.  You can compare that number to 4.6%, which was the average recovery rate ten quarters after WWII.  That is nearly twice as good as Obama’s recovery.  According to the Wall Street Journal, “the economy has grown by a cumulative total of about 6.2%. Considering that the economy shrank by about 5% during the Great Recession, overall U.S. output is barely greater than it was at the end of 2007.”
One more number from Barack Obama’s legacy: $800 billion.  That number is familiar to you because that is the cost of Obama’s great stimulus plan.  Just to put this in perspective, Obama’s stimulus plan was the largest such spending program in history.  “Adjusted for inflation, it was nearly five times more expensive than the Works Progress Administration. It was bigger than the Louisiana Purchase, the Manhattan Project, the moon race and the Marshall Plan.”  That’s Barack Obama: big government at the expense of your children and grand children

President Downgrade

It’s gotten so bad that Nigerians are getting emails from administration officials wanting to move money out of the country.


I shamelessly borrowed this from here  

The democrats are intent on raising taxes....no matter what

Debt Talks: The House-passed spending control plan rejected by the Senate is exactly what Republicans were elected to do last November. The president's obsession with tax increases repudiates the will of the people.
Like a headmaster in chief of some Dickensian orphanage, President Obama earlier this month told us to "eat our peas" — meaning accept the tax increases we know are good for us.
Socialism has always come down to contempt for the will of the people, to a benevolent elite force-feeding its enlightened policies down the throats of the masses.
Karl Marx himself once dismissed free elections as merely "deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament."
A CNN/ORC poll this week directly contradicted the media template that most Americans think tax increases are good for them. It found that 66% support the cut, cap and balance bill that passed the GOP-controlled House of Representatives but was killed in the Democrat-controlled Senate on Friday.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid called it "one of the worst pieces of legislation to be brought to the floor of the U.S. Senate." It "violates the spirit of our Constitution," he said. Why? One reason: The cut, cap, balance solution doesn't raise taxes.
Speaking at a "town hall" meeting of his supporters in Maryland on Friday, Obama disingenuously insisted that "we can't just close our deficit with spending cuts alone," avoiding tax increases, because Washington, among other things, shouldn't have to "stop funding clean energy research."
According to Obama, if we don't increase taxes on an economy suffering 9.2% unemployment, "seniors would have to pay a lot more for Medicare." (He failed to mention that Medicare is doomed without substantial reform.If we don't hike taxes  leaving investors with less wealth with which to generate new private-sector jobs  "laid-off workers might not be able to count on temporary assistance or training to help them get a new job," according to the president's circuitous logic.
What's going on here is pure political calculus. Republicans have done their job, offering a plan that raises the debt ceiling, sharply cuts current spending, reforms future spending authority and asks the states to ratify a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.
If that's not big — "big" being what Obama continually says he wants — what is?
The president, however, wants Republicans to co-own this dismal economy. And, at least as much, he wants Republicans to lose all credibility on their pledge not to raise taxes.
The debt battle of 2011 is all about getting Republicans to betray their spending and tax promises so that Barack Obama can be re-elected in 2012.

The true size of our debt.

The Congressional Budget Office released a new report this week showing that the federal government’s publicly held debt would top 101% of GDP by 2021, more than the value of everything produced in this country over the course of a year. Think of it like owing more on your credit cards than your entire family income. By 2035, the publicly held debt, CBO says, could top an almost unfathomable 190% of GDP.
And that was the good news.
The federal government actually has three different types of debt. Debt held by the public, which generated the headlines in the CBO report, is the type of government bonds that you — or the Chinese government — might own. Economists worry a lot about this type of debt because the government has to borrow the money from private credit markets. The government borrowing competes with investment in the nongovernmental sector, leaving less money available for private investment in such things as factories and equipment, research and development, housing, and so on. Growing levels of publicly held debt can drive up interest rates in the long-run, and may already be choking off interbank lending.

But that’s not the only type of government debt. For example, there is “intragovernmental” debt, which is essentially debt that the federal government owes to itself, such as debt it owes to the so-called Social Security Trust Fund. If publicly held debt is like the money you borrowed from a bank, intragovernmental debt is like the money you swiped from your kid’s piggy bank. It may not be on your credit report, but you still have to pay it back.
Today, intragovernmental debt exceeds $4.6 trillion. The good news here is that intragovernmental debt is not projected to grow much in the future. The bad news is that that is because both Social Security and Medicare are already running deficits — there’s nothing left to steal.
As if that’s not enough, there is also a third category of government debt: “implicit debt.” This represents the unfunded obligations of programs such as Social Security and Medicare — the amount that those programs owe in benefits in excess of the amount of taxes that they expect to take in. Think of it as bills you know are going to come in next month but haven’t been delivered yet.
According to the annual report of the Social Security system’s trustees, that program’s unfunded liabilities now exceed $18 trillion. Medicare is in even worse shape. The most recent estimate of its finances, also released this week, warns that Medicare owes $36.8 trillion more in benefits that it is expected to be able to pay for. And that is the optimistic outlook: It assumes that all the projected savings from President Obama’s health care reform actually happen as promised, something that even Medicare’s own actuaries are deeply skeptical of. If those savings don’t materialize, Medicare’s debt could actually top $90 trillion!
Add it all up, and total US debt actually exceeds 900% of GDP. That’s somewhere in excess of $120 trillion. We are beginning to talk real money here.
The CBO also contains bad news for those who believe that we can fix this problem simply by cutting “fraud, waste and abuse.” As CBO points out, the projected growth in the debt “is attributable entirely to increases in spending on several large mandatory programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and (to a lesser extent) insurance subsidies that will be provided through [Obamacare].” There is simply no way to deal with our debt problems without reforming those entitlement programs.
Finally, the CBO report makes it clear that we have a debt problem because spending is too high, not because taxes are too low. In fact, even though taxes are currently at a near historic low as a proportion of the economy, that is largely a result of the recession. If the economy returns to normal growth rates (a big “if”), federal revenues will not only rise, but will actually be higher than the postwar average percentage of GDP by the end of the decade. In fact, this will happen even if the Bush tax cuts are extended and the Alternative Minimum Tax AMT continues to be patched.
GOP lawmakers who left negotiations with Obama this week over his unwillingness to pledge no new taxes understand this. The problem is the money going out, not coming in.
We face a simple choice: Cut spending or face fiscal catastrophe. The question is: Is Washington listening?
Michael D. Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

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more humor...

What can I say, I am warped......