Wednesday Grab Bag

I fell into an old trap of posting political stuff on Facebook, which is never a good idea.  95% of my Facebook friends ignore it, as is their right, and the 5% who read it uniformly think I am a crazy person and tell me so in their comments to my posts.  But making a quick post to FB is just so darn easy.  I need to have some sort mechanism built into my keyboard that gives me an electronic shock whenever I try to go political on Facebook.

At least for today, I will do my ranting right here where it can be uniformly ignored.

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down:  Republican Bob Turner, a Roman Catholic, defeated Democrat Mark Weprin, an observant Jew, in the special election to fill the seat vacated by the Topless Tweeter (and occasionally bottomless also), Anthony Weiner, in New York's predominately Jewish 9th Congressional District.  A Democrat has held this seat without interuption for 88 years.  But while every cogent person in America understands that President Obama's job-killing, economy-wrecking policies are driving the country over a cliff, the so-called "progressives" are out there saying that the real problem is that the President is not liberal enough.  Keep it up guys, because you are guaranteeing Republican domination in the 2012 elections.

UPDATE:  Denial.  It isn't just a river in Egypt.

Ponzi Schemers:  I posted one of my political links on FB a couple of days ago to an article discussing the long history of use of the term "Ponzi scheme" in reference to Social Security.  The focus for this charge has been on Governor Rick Perry, who made the comparison in his book and in the presidential debates.  Much tut-tutting has resulted with claims of the Governor needlessly scaring seniors and general references to him as a mouth-breathing booger-picker who just doesn't understand.  But it turns out that the man with the biggest soapbox in all of liberal punditry, Paul Krugman of the The New York Times, has made the same comparison himself.  Oops.

Regulatory Hangover:  With Son of Stimulus, the new proposal from President Obama to throw another half trillion of taxpayers' Dollars down the old s***hole because, well, the first three-quarters of a trillion just wasn't enough, the President has shown himself again to be someone who never misses an opportunity to double-down on a stupid bet.  Instead, the President would give his own electoral chances a big boost if he would just clamp down on the avalanche of job-killing regulations that are being churned out by his executive bureaucracy faster than you can say "Federal Register."  The President's regulatory spree is a particularly sore point here in West Virginia, where the entire coal industry--our economic backbone--is being threatened with total shutdown by Lisa Jackson and the Environmental "Protection" Agency.  For some insight, check out this and this.

On Debts and Spending

No, the title of this post does not refer to my personal financial situation.  Instead, I have a reality check on our national debt and the effect of current runaway spending on our collective financial security.

"Yawn," you say?  Well then, just try to wrap your mind around the following numbers:

• The current unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare amounts to $107 Trillion.
• The Social Security and Medicare unfunded liability is growing at the rate of $5 Trillion every year!
• Of the Social Security and Medicare unfunded liability, the greatest portion is due to Medicare, which alone accounts for $89 Trillion of the total.  The Medicare prescription drug benefit (enacted by the Bush Administration, which was no stranger to overspending) accounts for $17 Trillion of the Medicare liability.
• By the year 2054 (when my daughter will be approaching retirement age), the payroll tax rate for Social Security and Medicare Parts A, B and D will need to be a staggering 37% in order to cover then-current obligations to retirees.  And remember that the payroll tax does not include Federal, state and local income taxes, with total combined rates that can be as much as 40% in some states.
• According to the Congressional Budget Office, if spending on Medicare and Medicaid continues to increase at its current rate, by the year 2050, at current income tax rates, the entire Federal budget will be consumed just to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Source:  "Social Security and Medicare Projections:  2009", National Center for Policy Analysis, June 11, 2009.

Now, if those numbers do not wake you up, try this one for size:  Obamacare, depending on the final form it takes, will increase the size of the Federal budget by $1 Trillion to $2 Trillion each year.  And the "savings" that will supposedly pay the cost is a myth.  The only way that the Baucus bill that is under consideration in the Senate would achieve revenue neutrality will be if all employers place all of their employees into the government-subsidized plan and then, get this, give all of the savings back to their employees in the form of higher wages!!  Oh yeah, that's gonna happen.

The next time someone says that Obamacare is just like Medicare except that everyone will be covered, ask them whether they have a clear conscience about turning their grandchildren into indentured servants who work for nothing except to pay the bills run up by their grandparents.

And lest you think that the Obama Administration and the Democratic controlled Congress only want to spend your money on Obamacare, you should consider that they have approved increases in domestic discretionary spending of 12.1% for 2010 alone.   The linked article reminds us that inflation is less than 1%, yet the Democrats are increasing domestic spending by 12.1%.  And the increase does not even include the expenditure of the so-called "stimulus" money.  When the stimulus money is included, federal agencies will receive, on average, an increase in their budgets of 57% this year.  And through the magic of baseline budgeting, the increases become a permanent part of the agencies' budgets.  So if a conservative Congressman wants to decrease the size of a particular agency's budget in 2012 by, say, a modest 5%, he or she will be decried by the media and liberal interest groups for taking away from programs that benefit the masses, even though the actual budget, taking into account the 5% decrease, would still be up more than 50% in a two year period.

So remember, even as millions of Americans have lost jobs and real household incomes have shrunk this year, the Obama Administration and the Democrats in Congress are having no trouble at all spending money we do not have on programs we do not need.