| One job of presidents is to educate Americans about crucial national problems. On health care, Barack Obama has failed. Almost everything you think you know about health care is probably wrong or, at least, half wrong. Great simplicities and distortions have been peddled in the name of achieving “universal health coverage.” The miseducation has worsened as the debate approaches its climax.Read more at www.washingtonpost.com |
| The government ran up the largest monthly deficit in history in February, keeping the flood of red ink on track to top last year’s record for the full year |
The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year will hit an all-time high of $1.56 trillion, surpassing last year’s $1.4 trillion total. The administration is forecasting that the deficit will remain above $1 trillion in 2011, giving the country thrree straight years of $1 trillion-plus deficits. |
Through the first five months of this budget year, net interest payments totaled $86.5 billion, up 15.3 percent from a year ago. Read more at www.google.com |
Mr. Obama’s fiscal assertions are possible only because of the fraudulent accounting and budget gimmicks that Democrats spent months calibrating. Readers can find the gory details in Mr. Ryan’s pre-emptive rebuttal nearby, though one of the most egregious deceptions is that the bill counts 10 years of taxes but only six years of spending. Read more at online.wsj.com |
“Within 12 years…the largest item in the federal budget will be interest payments on the national debt,” said former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. “[They are] payments for which we get nothing.”
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I have always said, the most wasteful, inefficient thing you can do with money is turn it over to the federal government to spend. It appears the Census Bureau is no different than the rest of the federal government. | The Census Bureau wasted millions of dollars in preparation for its 2010 population count, including thousands of temporary employees who picked up $300 checks without performing work and others who overbilled for travel costsRead more at finance.yahoo.com |
| among the few sectors of the economy showing net employment growth over the past year is the federal government. The federal civil service is rapidly expanding as Obama increases the size of government, with 33,000 new positions being added in January alone. Only 9,000 of those new slots were for temporary census jobs. In other words, what we are seeing is good times for the public sector and the growing prospect of a continuing and perhaps even deepening recession for everybody else. |
| the drop to 9.7 percent unemployment does not reflect the creation of new jobs that normally accompanies an economic recovery. The number of new jobs is actually declining.Read more at www.washingtonexaminer.com |
| The House voted Thursday to allow the government to go $1.9 trillion deeper in debt, an increase of about $6,000 for every United States resident. |
| The accumulated debt already amounts to roughly $40,000 per person. |
| The debt increase, approved 217 to 212, is only enough to keep the government afloat for about another year as it borrows more than 40 cents of every dollar it spends. |
| Thirty-seven Democrats, mostly from Republican-leaning districts, voted against the measure. So did all RepublicansRead more at www.nytimes.com |
The average federal employee now makes $31,000 a year more than the average private sector employee. From a recent USA Today article: “Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time – in pay and hiring – during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.”
“You asked exactly the right question,” Mr. Geithner said after John J. Duncan Jr., Republican of Tennessee, said it had appeared to him that the Federal Reserve was “sowing the seeds of another crisis, another bubble-burst cycle,” and wondered whether executive bonuses should be reined in. |
Mr. Geithner said that in any financial crisis, policy makers are faced with a “tragic choice” between doing nothing and allowing innocent people to be hurt, or bailing out financial institutions. |
“The moral, fair and just choice is to protect the innocent,” he said, clearly pleased that Mr. Duncan had asked the question. “But by definition, that sets the stage and sows the seeds of a future crisis.” He referred several times to this “tragic choice,” and said A.I.G. was a perfect example of it. |
The cost of President Obama’s stimulus plan has jumped another $75 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, and part of the reason is more people are getting unemployment benefits because they’ve lost jobs the bill was supposed to preserve.
Read more at www.washingtontimes.com |
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