Obama and the Real View

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An Uncontrolled Man Made Disaster

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We Must Stop Obama and Congressional Democrats From Taking Us Down The Same Failed Path As California Has Gone

California is a paradigm of where Obama and Congressional Democrats are hijacking the rest of the country to. Massive unsustainable spending, oppressive but still rising taxes, gargantuan debt, bloated but ever enlarging government, strangulating regulations and red tape, business and employment unfriendly environment and intrusive government.

All of these are manifestations of years subjected to the unfettered and irresponsible actions of Progressives/Liberals. It now seems, California is at the edge of the abyss … and looking back at the rapidly approaching country as a whole.

We must not go there!

Sunset In Taxifornia?
Investors Business Daily 05/12/2010

Deficits: We've been hard on Arnold Schwarzenegger in recent months, but we're foursquare behind the California governor in his effort to balance the state's budget without raising taxes.

The Golden State's $18.6 billion budget deficit, the nation's largest, is the result of uncontrolled spending by the state's Democrat-controlled legislature — nothing else. Yet the very same Democratic legislators are pushing for tax increases in the middle of the state's worst downturn since World War II — and only a year after passing a $12.5 billion tax hike to boost revenue.

To call this foolish would be the understatement of the year. So we were glad to hear that Schwarzenegger will include steep spending cuts in the budget plan he'll release this week.

"We don't believe that raising taxes right now is the right thing to do," said the governator's spokesman Aaron McLear.
He's right. California's deficit is not only gargantuan, it's getting worse. In April, the state income tax month, revenue came in 26% below expectations at $3.6 billion — despite last year's tax hikes.

Democrats' answer to this isn't cutting back after years of profligacy. They want a new 10% severance tax on oil production, higher taxes on commercial property and a repeal of corporate tax breaks passed last year to help create jobs.

These are the kinds of policies that have driven California's economy into a ditch. Its jobless rate of 12.6% is among the nation's highest, and it has the lowest credit rating of any state.

Companies are fleeing a business-unfriendly environment created by years of leftist legislation that has taken the state from first to worst in terms of job creation. Recent studies call California's tax policies the worst in the nation. The Pacific Research Institute, a think tank, not-so-tongue-in-cheek calls the state "Taxi-fornia."

Job relocation specialist Joe Vranich counts 112 major companies since June 2009 that have either moved or opened new facilities in other states — costing California thousands of jobs. The most recent emigrant was none other than Northrop Grumman, which is moving its global headquarters to Northern Virginia.

"It's no mystery what causes companies to leave California," said Vranich. "High taxes, undue regulation, workers' comp costs, a legal environment stacked against businesses, and lengthy and costly construction-permitting requirements."

Each week, some 3,000 middle-class workers and entrepreneurs move elsewhere, recent estimates show. Some 1.4 million have left already.

If Schwarzenegger wins this fight, it could mark a defining shift toward fiscal sanity. If not, and taxes and regulations surge anew, California's darkest days will still lie ahead.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=533862

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The Dangerous Road Obama Is Taking America Down

This is the road Obama is taking America down:

If Obama succeeds in his socialist, bankrupting, reckless spending policies this is where we will be subsequently heading:

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Democrats Are Leading This Country Down A Fatal Path

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A Value Added Tax (VAT) May Be Inevitable In Order To Pay For Obamacare

Many people consider Obama to be the anti-Christ which that we were warned about and this may or may not be true. However, he surely is the anti-Christ with regard to his unalloyed fiscal irresponsibility as relates to the reckless costs of Obamacare which are placing the United States on the precipice of bankruptcy. Obama is also the anti-Reagan.

In the following cogent editorial, Charles Krauthammer elucidates a possible partial solution to the unpaid for healthcare costs: imposition of a value added tax. It is his strong assertion that such a national sales tax will be inevitable unless Obamacare is revoked. If this indeed comes to fruition, our future and that of our progeny looks bleak.

The VAT Cometh
Charles Krauthammer   3/26/2010

WASHINGTON -- As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh.
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks -- the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) -- is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare pre-empts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health care costs.

Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, "health care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost." But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million new recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.

Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody's is warning that the Treasury's AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.

Hence his deficit reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.

What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.

But this won't be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health care costs -- which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.

That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).

It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.

American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care.
Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.

Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama's triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.

As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.

Ultimately, even that won't be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health care rationing.

It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.

Copyright 2010, Washington Post Writers Group

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/03/26/the_vat_cometh_104936.html

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Obama’s Socialistic Expansion of Unemployment Benefits Is More of “Spread the Wealth Around”

Anyone who doesn’t think that Obama is at minimum a socialist President has not been paying attention to his words and actions starting even before his run for the Presidency. His mantra ”spread the wealth around”, repeated thousands of times, reinforces this position. The ideological underpinnings of Obamacare follow this as does his position for expansion of welfare as delineated in the following editorial.

Tax the rich! All Americans should have …! His attitude is that it is unfair for people not to have houses, college educations, iPods (with his speeches on them) even when they don’t make any attempts to work or make sacrifices in order to better themselves. So… SPREAD THE WEALTH!

Obama’s attitude punishes and denigrates hard work and dedication which are basic tenets of the American way and why we have been the greatest country. It penalizes hard working Americans and disincentivizes those who could and should be productive and contributing members of our society.

This will lead to the indolence and complacency so characteristic of Socialism – that will drive our country into the abyss of mediocrity and excessively high taxes.

We must all vigorously oppose this course.

Welfare Un-Reform
Investors Business Daily  03/23/2010

The Dole: In urging Congress to extend jobless benefits again, the White House warned that unemployment could remain high through the year. Benefits may be part of the problem.

In a joint statement to Congress, the president's top economic advisers hedged against expectations of lower unemployment this year, saying the jobless rate — still hovering around 10% — will "remain elevated for an extended period."
"We do not expect further declines in unemployment this year," the White House budget director, top economist and Treasury secretary testified.

What's got them so pessimistic? Possibly an abnormally high job vacancy rate.
Normally the job vacancy rate goes down after a recession, as the job market stabilizes. But January, the latest reported month, showed an 11% spike in unfilled jobs. Vacancies are now at 2.1% — the highest since February 2009, the Labor Department says.

That means people are not taking jobs as expected at this point in the recovery. Why? Because many don't have to — thanks in part to 99 weeks and counting of unemployment benefits.

Add to that record food stamp payments and other welfare, and the unemployed have been perversely incentivized to keep holding out for better jobs, rather than take less-than-desirable or lower-paying ones. Forty percent of jobless Americans have been out of work for at least 27 weeks — the highest level since the government began keeping records in the 1940s.

"Those programs subsidize unemployment," University of Chicago economist Robert Shimer says. "There could be good reasons to do it, but we should be clear on the cost. It has a pretty substantial impact."

Generous jobless benefits alone account for as much as 1.5 points of the nation's 9.7% jobless rate, Shimer reckons.
There are also new incentives for Americans to go on the dole permanently, thanks to a provision in the stimulus package that includes a $5 billion emergency fund for states to meet demand for more welfare assistance.

The administration is expanding that supposedly temporary fund an additional $2.5 billion. The fund matches states 80 cents on the dollar for each new welfare case, making it more generous than the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) system.

In effect, Obama is paying states a bonus to sign up new welfare recipients.

This reverses the historic 1996 welfare reform, which took more than 2.7 million families off the dole by making welfare truly temporary under the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. TANF lowered the poverty rate for black children as a record number of single mothers learned skills and took jobs. Fixed block grants to states ended Washington paying states on a per-capita basis for every person who entered the welfare rolls.

New succor doesn't stop there. Socialized medicine threatens to add 15 million uninsured to the Medicaid rolls, which are already bloated from the recession. Working Americans with household income well above the poverty line will be eligible for a program once reserved only for the poor.

Overall, ObamaCare represents the biggest federal entitlement since Medicare and Medicaid were passed in the '60s.

Obama is overturning the welfare reform signed by his Democrat predecessor and is rapidly rebuilding the welfare state.
If more and more go on the dole instead of filling jobs that are starting to open up, it will only stall the recovery and widen the deficit.

If unemployment "remains elevated for an extended period," it's because Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue extended unemployment and welfare benefits while refusing to incentivize small businesses — the job engine of the economy — to take risks and staff up.

If Democrats lose Congress in November over chronic unemployment and record deficits, they have only themselves — and the head of their party — to blame.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=528201

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The Congressional Budget Office’s Preliminary Score For Obamacare Is BOGUS!

The preliminary estimates publicized by the Congressional Budget Office have no basis in reality. Though we don't know exactly how they arrived at their artificially low number, it was unquestionably affected by the incomplete and deceptive information that they were provided with. Of course, this does not account for bald faced fraud perpetrated by the Democrats in attempting to reduce the ostensible costs with maneuvers such as removing the Medicare fix costs from the legislation.

Five Reasons The CBO Figures Are Phony
Ed Carson     3/18/2010

The Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary “score” says the health care overhaul will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years, saving $138 billion over that time. But the CBO must assess legislation as written, rather than whether it will actually be carried out. Or, as the Economist put it, “The CBO is required to pretend to believe many impossible things before breakfast.”

1. Medicare cuts
The Senate health care bill relied heavily on unprecedented cuts in Medicare spending increases. If implemented, this would have a huge impact on seniors’ care. But Congress has always balked at Medicare cuts. (See No. 3).

2. Delayed start
To make the budget math work, Democrats plan on delaying the start of subsidies and other costly provisions for several years. (The bill spends just $17 billion through 2013). The true 10-year cost is far higher.

3. The “doc fix” is excluded
The Sustainable Growth Rate imposes automatic cuts in Medicare payment rates to doctors.
For several years, fearing a revolt by doctors — and seniors — Congress has suspended those cuts. The original draft of the House health care bill included a permanent “doc fix.” But that ballooned deficits, so Democrats dropped it, even though everyone knows Congress isn’t going to slash doctors’ rates. The CBO has estimated a “doc fix” would cost $247 billion over 10 years.

4. Student loans are included
Doctors’ payments are excluded from the health bill, but major student loan program changes are included? Yep. The reconciliation bill will end student loan subsidies to lenders. The CBO says this will save $19.4 billion over the first decade, accounting for virtually all of the $19.8 billion in deficit reduction from the health care reconciliation bill. Reconciliation bills must cut the deficit by at least $1 billion. So, without the non-health care items, the health care reconciliation bill would not pass muster.

5. It’s a CLASS act
In the Senate health bill, a new, voluntary long-term care insurance program called CLASS accounted for some $72 billion of the deficit reduction.  The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program is supposed to be deficit-neutral long-term. But Democrats are counting the upfront premium surplus in the short term and ignoring the significant operating deficits after 2029. Update: Democrats also are counting on projected additional Social Security revenues from payroll taxes on higher wages in lieu of lower health benefits. Again, those benefits have to be paid out.

But wait, there’s more! Let’s assume that the cost savings materialize as planned. It still makes the long-term fiscal outlook worse. Why? Democrats are using up a lot of tax hikes, spending cuts and upfront payment just to get barely better than deficit-neutral. That leaves future lawmakers less scope to bring the nation’s finances into order.

On a related note, Democrats continue to maintain the health bill would extend Medicare’s solvency by several years. But they plan to use those as-yet-unrealized Medicare cost savings for a huge new entitlement and to reduce the overall deficit.

http://blogs.investors.com/capitalhill/index.php/home/35-politicsinvesting/1524-five-reasons-the-cbo-figures-are-phony

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The US National Debt Severely Threatens Our Security

The massive and ever increasing debt that the United States is incurring is threatening our future security in a variety of ways and is quite concerning to the military.

Deficits making U.S. military nervous
Will Obama have enough money left for national security?

Jerome R. Corsi    March 17, 2010
WorldNetDaily

With the Obama administration pressing for a government takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy to grant health-care benefits to all Americans, the U.S. military is worried that the United States is already losing the ability to afford national defense.

The deteriorating international trade position of the U.S. as documented by the CIA is a national security concern by the U.S. military, according to the Joint Operating Environment 2010 report, or JOE 2010, released Monday by the United States Joint Forces Command, or USJFCOM.

The CIA World Factbook lists the U.S., with a negative current account balance of $380 billion, in last place among 183 nations in 2009. China, in contrast, is listed as No. 1, with a positive current account balance of $296 billion.
Nor is the United States position in international trade improving.

The U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis reported in December that the U.S. current account deficit increased to $108 billion in the third quarter of 2009 from $98 billion in the second quarter of 2009.

The current account is the broadest measure of international trade, defined as net exports and imports, plus net income and transfer payments made between nations. The largest measure is a positive or negative balance of international trade as defined by the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis

Reviewing the military implications, the JOE 2010 report stressed that the U.S. "chronic trade and current exchange balances have exacerbated both U.S. current account deficits and overall governmental indebtedness such that the amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners has grown from 1.3 trillion to 3.5 trillion dollars representing 40 percent of total U.S. debt."

The USJFCOM points out in the JOE 2010 that total U.S. foreign debt has accumulated to $2.165 trillion, with China holding in U.S. Treasury debt $798 billion of its accumulated $1.95 trillion surplus in foreign exchange reserves.

With China holding a balance-of-trade advantage, exporting $270 billion annually to the U.S., while importing $61 billion to the U.S., the U.S. negative foreign exchange position vis-à-vis China is unlikely to change in the near future.

With concern the JOE 2010 notes "the emerging scale of U.S. government borrowing creates uncertainty about both our ability to repay the ever growing debt and the future value of the dollar."

WND has previously reported that the total negative net worth of the U.S. on a Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, or GAAP, basis was $70.7 trillion in 2009, five times last year's U.S. GDP and $10 trillion more than the world's GDP.

The JOE 2010 correctly noted that the unfunded obligations constitution the nation's $70.7 trillion negative net worth are a result of the U.S. baby-boom generation coming of age to receive entitlement benefits in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, while the underlying working population that pays to support the programs are declining as a consequence both of demographics and unemployment.

With regard to national defense implications of the deteriorating U.S. economic position, the JOE 2010 worried that should China demand higher interest rates as an inducement to continuing to buy the U.S. Treasury debt needed to finance continuing trillion dollar U.S. federal budget deficits, the U.S. could suffer a "hard landing" that could increase the perception the U.S. no longer controls its financial future.

Noting President Obama's warning that the U.S. economy will add $9 trillion debt over the next decade, the JOE 2010 warned the result could be "a decreased ability of the United States to allocate dollars to defense."

"Rising debt and deficit financing of government operations will require ever-larger portions of government outlays for interest payments to service the debt," the JOE 2010 cautioned. "Indeed, if current trends continue, the U.S. will be transferring approximately 7 percent of its total economic output abroad simply to service its foreign debt."

To illustrate its concern, the USJFCOM cited an alarming litany of historic examples, including the following:

•    Habsburg Spain defaulted on its debt 14 times in 150 years and was staggered by high inflation until its overseas empire collapsed;

•    Bourbon France became so beset by debt due to its many wars and extravagances that by 1788 the contributing social stresses resulted in its overthrow by revolution;

•    Interest ate up 44 percent of the British government budget during the interwar years 1919-1930, inhibiting its ability to rearm against Germany.

"Unless current trends are reversed, the U.S. will face similar challenges, anticipating an ever-growing percentage of the U.S. government budget going to pay interest on the money borrowed to finance our deficit spending," the JOE 2010 concluded.

The USJFCOM expressed concern that U.S. current account and federal budget deficits will inevitably mean fewer dollars available to spend on defense.

In 1962, defense accounted for approximately 49 percent of total U.S. government expenditures, but by 2008 defense spending dropped to 20 percent of total government spending.

"Following current trend lines, by 2028 the defense budget will likely consume between 2.6 percent and 3.1 percent of GDP – significantly lower than the 1990s average of 3.8 percent," the JOE 2010 stressed, noting that by 2028 the Department of Defense could shrink to less than 10 percent of the total federal budget.

"The fundamental issues for the Joint Force are the long term sustainability of our current allocation of the federal budget and how we can contribute to continued security while operating within the fiscal constraints that are unfolding."

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=128413

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Obama Is Intentionally Saddling Us With A Gargantuan National Debt

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Unchecked Government Spending Endangers The Dollar, Our Security and Independence

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New Physically Atraumatic Medical Technique Used On Newborns

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A Perspective of Our Debt

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