Tag: budget

Republicans out to Kill Canaries in the Coal Mines

Seeking to protect fossil-foolish interests is at the core of the Republican House majority’s agrenda.

“We think what we can be is the canary in the coal mine,” Republican Representative Darryl Issa told reporters.

Congressman Issa’s words are prophetic — evidently he and his colleagues consider themselves to be the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ since they are taking steps with the newly introduced Continuing Resolution to kill off as many canaries in the coal mine to protect Americans from environmental, safety, and other risks.  For example, the proposal includes a 22 percent reduction in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, massive cuts in basic science research, budgets slashing seeking to essentially eliminate U.S. government research on climate change, … a true anti-science syndrome agenda.

Budget Reform Requires More Than the Sum of Its Parts

The question of budget deficits and the health of government programs has been the largest can frequently kicked down the road.  Though it’s become repetitive to warn or caution in this fashion, we need to make the appropriate steps and institute the proper reforms now.  This issue is not going to go away.  It is perhaps the least politically popular and most divisive.  As we have seen with Health Care Reform, it may even inspire a backlash that shows the door to many courageous legislators who dared to paddle upstream against a strong headwind.  There are some issues which can be dodged without much harm being done, but then there are others which must be confronted.  Some politicians could write whole books (and teach others) about their genius system of embracing political expediency, but what we need now is not an escape artist or a magician.  We need leaders.  

Senate’s Conrad Cashes Out

North Dakota “Democratic” Senator Kent Conrad, 62, has announced he is not going to run for re election in 2012. He is the current majority Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.   He is also on Agriculture Nutrition Forestry, Finance, and Indian Affairs committees.  Kent Conrad


Conrad said he would serve out his term.

“Although I will not seek re-election, my work is not done,” Conrad said in his statement. “I will continue to do my level best for both North Dakota and the nation.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

He says he’s going to spend his remaining time and energy trying to reduce the national debt and dependence on foreign oil.  And working on a Farm Bill.  http://www.valleynewslive.com/…

Senator Kent Conrad’s legacy will include recommending former OMB head Peter Orszag for his White House position early in the Obama administration (Orszag sharing Conrad’s curious blind spot on what drives the deficit, see more of that here: https://www.docudharma.com/diar…    ) , being a phony “deficit hawk,”  who couldn’t see anything wrong with increased military budgets and decreasing domestic needs being met, and opposing the Public Option during the Health Care reform legislative battle. Voting for reducing the payroll tax that funds Social Security, and for continuing the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest in Dec of 2010 during the Lame Duck Session.  http://www.thestate.com/2010/1…    Oh, and being part of that Democratic Senate Supermajority of 2009 That Didn’t Do Any Energy Policy, Global Climate Change,  or Tax Code Changes.  Other than a lot of stimulus money got earmarked for “research.”

Kent Conrad was also on the President Obama Deficit (“Catfood Commision”) Committee of 2010, which called for cuts in Medicare and Social Security.


“You know, a certain amount of this is shock therapy,” Conrad said. “There are different options and, of course, what everybody has fastened on is the most extreme of the options. But, look, the important thing for people to know is that we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. That’s utterly unsustainable. It can’t continue much longer, so it’s got to be dealt with.”



“Fundamentally, if we’re going to raise revenue, I don’t think the way to do it is to raise rates. I think the way to do it is to eliminate some of the loopholes that exist in the system,” the senator said.  

November 14, 2010.  Kent Conrad in an interview with Christiane Amanpour on “This Week” about the Deficit Commission

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek…

Tax Vote: House Blinks Before Leaping Off Cliff With Obama on SocSecurity Plunder

Notice the curious case of passivity and resignation coming from the so – called “progressive” and “liberal” caucuses in the House of Congress lately on this Republican Wet Dream of extending the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest segment of our society during a Depression ?  And unfunded foreign occupation/wars causing an immense deficit?

There are a few faint sparks of realization in the Democratic caucus, that the President’s trade he cut with Republican Senators to gut Social Security (and hope nobody notices)  by decreasing the payroll tax for it 2%, in exchange for extending some unemployment benefits for millions, for a year,  maybe is going to get them in even bigger trouble down the road.     Even if their own President is willing to call them a bunch of “purist”  poopyheads in public, to get what he wants.  

The House Rules Committee vote on the rule to let this abomination go through was supposed to be this evening, and now it’s delayed.   Speaker Pelosi has decided on a curious tact of allowing a scootch of dissent on the whopping Estate Tax giveaway, while ignoring the rest of the Senate’s version of the tax bill as being worthy.  Extending the Bush – era tax cuts is going to add another trillion dollar hole to the deficit.  This pathetic Congress can’t even get it together to at least come up with a coherent narrative as to why the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest were part of a national policy disaster which caused our current problems, and should be repealed.


http://thehill.com/homenews/ho…

The House was set to vote on the rule governing debate on the broad tax bill, but the measure was withdrawn at the last minute when leaders realized it was likely to be rejected. Liberals opposed to the deal Obama struck with Republicans were upset that the procedure approved by the House Rules Committee on Wednesday did not allow them a clean opportunity to vote on the legislation the Senate passed on Wednesday. A final vote on the tax deal had been planned for Thursday evening.

Under the rule approved Wednesday, lawmakers would first vote on an amendment to the estate tax provision of the tax bill, which Democratic leaders want raised to a higher level. If that measure passed, the entire tax bill would return to the Senate, meaning lawmakers would have, in effect, approved the underlying measure with the single change to the estate tax. Liberals objected to that procedure, saying they wanted an opportunity to reject the entire bill, not just the estate tax provision.

If the estate tax amendment failed – which is expected – then the House would vote on the underlying Senate bill.

Notice how the above Hill story says they expect the estate tax amendment to fail also.    Yes, this is such a crappy deal that President Obama cut with the Senate Republicans, that we also are going to watch them make sure billionaires  like the Walton Family can pass on larger estates, while millions of regular Americans continue to lose their life savings and meager retirement funds to foreclosures, job losses, and medical bill bankruptcies, because that Health Care Bill has mostly NOT been implemented.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D, NY 28, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie)  of the so – called Progressive Caucus, one of the most “Liberal” members of the House,  is the current head of the Rules committee that is working this charade. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…

http://www.rules.house.gov/bil…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said some Democrats criticized procedures that would only allow lawmakers to introduce one amendment to the bill, and which, if passed, would send the amended package immediately back to the Senate. The current rule allows each party one amendment and an hour and a half of debate time, with 45 minutes of the Democrats’ time being granted to those in opposition to the bill. The likely amendment would be a change to the bill’s estate-tax provision, presented by Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.).

“A lot of members are saying ‘I’d like to amend it, but I’d like to vote against it,’ ” Waxman said.

Catch 22 !  You vote against the Estate tax in the House, and this POS tax giveaway goes directly back to the Senate who then  gives it gift wrapped to the President to sign !  


Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), who led the charge against the tax deal, said he wants Democrats to be given a chance to make additional amendments to the bill, including changes to tax cuts that could threaten revenue for Social Security.

The leadership is not allowing debate over Social Security because “they don’t have the time,” Welch said. He said Democratic leaders were not “twisting arms” on the matter and would allow dissenting members to state their case.

Still, he said the momentum from the Senate would make it difficult to block the bill.

“I think the die was cast basically in the Senate,” Welch said. “Where we had an opportunity … was by making senators who were going to hold the middle-class tax cuts hostage to the tax cuts at the high end, make them debate that and vote that over and over again.”

They don’t have the time ?

Then why the **** is the Senate going to blow all that non existent time, taking 50 hours reading the budget bill in the Senate ?


12/16/10  GOP will paralyze Senate Floor with reading of 1,924 page spending bill.

http://thehill.com/homenews/se…

Republicans will paralyze the Senate floor for 50 hours by forcing clerks to read every single paragraph of the 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill.

Senate clerks are expected to read the massive bill in rotating shifts around the clock – taking breaks to drink water and pop throat lozenges  – to keep legislative business on track, according to a Democratic leadership aide.

If Republicans follow through on their threat, legislative business couldn’t resume until late Saturday in order to give the staff enough time to read the bill aloud, according to a Democratic leadership estimate.

Sen. DeMint (R, SC)  :  “Again, We’re trying to run out the clock.”

Sen. Kyl (R, AZ)  :  “”To suggest that we can dual-track an issue as important as the funding of the government with this almost 2,000-page, $1 trillion-plus bill at the same time that we are seriously debating the START treaty is a fantasy.”

So called Liberal bloggers, paraphrased: “We’re trying to ignore this latest betrayal because it makes it awkward on the Holiday Cocktail Circuit.”

My personal interactions with my real friends –  I don’t know of anyone who actually supports this continued capitulation routine, nor the crappy Republican policies being put forth as “compromises,” with a Dem supermajority which refuses to govern with it.    

Gibbs: Prez could do Bush Tax Cut for Rich. Orszag: “Save” SocSec by Cutting It

More post election incompetence.

They forgot.  In the good cop, bad cop routine, one of them is supposed to be the “good cop.”  

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs starts off the Lame Duck post election session:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

“He would be open to having that discussion and open to listening to what the debate is on both sides of that,” said Gibbs, during an off-camera gaggle with reporters. “Obviously… making those tax cuts for the upper end permanent is something the president does not believe is a good idea.”

The issue, Gibbs said, will be a topic of discussion when the president convenes a bipartisan meeting of lawmakers at the White House in two weeks. Included in that meeting (and working dinner) will be Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.), incoming Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

At his press conference on Wednesday, the president expressed his first openness to date with the process of negotiating on the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Peter Orszag, right wing neocon, concern troll “deficit spending hawk,” Wall Street mouthpiece, and former Obama Administration head of Office of Budget and Management (OMB)  writes in the New York Times the day after the election, November 3, that the harvest of the last of the middle and working class entitlement programs can’t begin fast enough for his new right wing think tank benefactors at the Council on Foreign Relations.  

Tuesday Truffles: WH Press Sec Gibbs Shares The Love

 As the House convenes today, Tuesday, August 10, to vote on some Senate last minute leftovers, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs shows the House members hesitating on voting for more stuff how to communicate effectively with the voters when they resume their 6 week August vacation and fundraising break.


http://thehill.com/homenews/ad…

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

Gibbs said the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.

Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington “in America,” and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.

In the spirit of bipartisanshipthingee, I’ll quote Fox News now on what happened next:


http://www.foxnews.com/politic…

Tues Aug 10

WASHINGTON — In a rare moment of bipartisanship Tuesday, the House approved $600 million to pay for more unmanned surveillance drones and about 1,500 more agents along the troubled Mexican border.

Getting tougher on border security is one of the few issues that both parties agree on in this highly charged election season. But lawmakers remain deeply divided over a more comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem, and it’s unclear if Congress will go beyond border-tightening efforts.

The House passed the bill by an unrecorded voice vote after brief debate.

In fact, although Pelosi was supposedly calling the House back into session during break to vote on a “jobs” bill, ( which went flying under the radar as some Senate amendment to a House Amendment to a Senate Amendment,)   the HR 6080 Emergency Supplemental for Border Security for Fiscal Year 2010 was the very first thing they debated and suspended the rules and passed by voice vote today, at 10:54 am EDT.  You can see the Clerk of the House’s record here, look up Aug 10, 2010, because there will be NO ROLL CALL VOTE RECORD of this.  http://clerk.house.gov/floorsu…

text of bill from THOMAS here:  http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/…

The True Wealth Deficit

“This is an impressive crowd: the Have’s and Have-more’s. Some people call you the elites. I call you my base.”

George W. Bush

“It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.”

Margaret Thatcher

“Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.”

Margaret Bonnano

lest we forget …

Who is Peter Orszag?

why the fuck is Peter Orszag of OMB even commenting on this ?  

asked Compound F, earlier today.

https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

I picked this off of google cache, written post election, Nov 18 2008, marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives


Obama Wants Orszag At OMB

18 Nov 2008 03:05 pm

Barack Obama has tapped CBO director Peter Orszag to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, my collegues at National Journal report today.

He’s a youngish overachiever, just 40, and subscribes to the theory of what he once called “cool-headed, warm-hearted” economic policy. Judging by his blog, Orszag has smart and interesting things to say about the intersection of psychology and economics, the long-term vs. short-term effects of climate change legislation, honest budgeting and accounting, and lots more.

OMB is the executive branch’s budgetary arm and management oversight evaluator. The director serves as a key presidential adviser on the economy and is responsible for projecting the fiscal consequences of any presidential decision. OMB would figure out how much Barack Obama’s health care plan will cost, for example, as it gets introduced in Congress. It’ll score every bill that Congress sends to Obama. It’s the repository of policy, responsible for official statements. More to the point, though, is that OMB will administer Obama’s transparency agenda. Regulatory reform will originate at OMB.

HuffPo has been following Orszag’s love life, the love child with the Greek tycoon heiress, and the engagement to the drop dead gorgeous young Russian born ABC news “financial reporter.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Stop the Nuclear Weapons Spending Hike

In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama called nuclear weapons the “greatest danger to the American people.” Yet his 2011 budget proposes a major increase in spending on the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Incredibly, President Obama proposes to spend $600 million more on nuclear weapons than did George W. Bush in his final year.1

Tell President Obama to cut the nuclear weapons budget, not increase it.

Obama's proposed new nuclear spending boost will enable construction of new facilities that would allow the U.S. government to develop new nuclear warheads in the future. That flies in the face of Obama's professed goals of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

Nuclear bombs are a grave threat to life on Earth — that's why we need the president to walk his talk.

Tell President Obama today: cut the nuclear weapons budget, don't increase it.

 

Notes:

1. Carol Driver, “Nobel Peace Prize-winner Barack Obama ups spending on nuclear weapons to even more than George Bush.”  Daily Mail, 1/30/10.

 

Some GOOD NEWS from Congress! Drug Policy

(HT to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition’s Cops say Legalize blog)

The Conference Committee dealing with the 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act has approved three significant reforms, following the lead of the House version,

* Washington, DC will finally be allowed to implement the medical marijuana initiative that voters overwhelmingly approved in 1998 but has been blocked by Congress each year since then.

* Funding for the White House “drug czar’s” ad budget has been slashed by more than a third of its size last year. Studies have repeatedly shown that these ads actually cause teens to use more — not fewer — drugs.

* Washington, DC will be able to use federal funds to implement syringe exchange programs.

The advertising budget for the  National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign comes in at $45 million, $25 million below 2009 and the Obama Administration’s request. This follows steady drops since 2000, when the Clinton Drug Czar’s office had a full half billion to play with. in the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton years, this money was selectively applied to reward networks and other media outlets which played ball with the respective Administrations on unrelated issues, as originally exposed in a series of articles by D. Dan Forbes at Salon.com.

I’m pretty sure the lions share of the credit here goes to House Appropriations Chair Dave Obey, who sat on the Conference Committee, and has been strong behind the scenes on drug policy reform since 2003.

On The Costs Of Care, Or, You Don’t Want Every Item On This Menu

I don’t know if you’ve been thinking about it, but the costs of long-term care have been on the mind of some friends of mine lately.

For reasons that we won’t go into here, they are in the process of pricing long-term care at care facilities…and yesterday afternoon, we had a chance to have a look at the “menu” of services (the facility’s term) that can be purchased at this particular location.

If you are facing this issue in your own family, if you are a taxpayer thinking about how we plan to fund long-term care in the future…or if, one day, you expect to be old yourself…this conversation will surely matter.

Let’s Look at the Numbers: Afghanistan edition

17000–that’s the main number folks have been talking about lately–the number of additional young men and women the US government is presently sending into harm’s way in Afghanistan.

$2,080,000,000–that’s one that caught my eye recently. It was in a NY Times article entitled “U.S. Plans Afghan Effort to Thwart Road Bombs.”

Actually you had to do a little math to come up with it. Thom Shanker reports that

the Pentagon is planning to buy 2,080 heavily armored vehicles that are more maneuverable than the 2,000 larger models in place. Each costs about $1 million. The more unwieldy version of the troop transport, known as a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, or M-RAP, has trouble negotiating Afghanistan’s rough terrain.

2080 vehicles at a million per (before cost overruns, of course) is over 2 billion dollars. For armored trucks. Because the 2000 the brass already bought won’t work in Afghanistan. And that’s just one small line item in the tab that is being run up for the expanded and prolonged occupation it sure looks like that poor country has in store.

I know 2 billion can seem like chicken feed when we read how much is being shoveled into AIG’s trick or treat bag, but this is a damn wake-up call. As each day brings new signs that the depression we are spiraling into will be long and ugly, we should think very carefully about how smart it is to pump billions and billions into trying to dominate the country they call The Graveyard of Empires.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

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