President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and their allies, are cheerfully citing “ten year” costs of $940,000,000,000.00 — apparently believing this to be a far more palatable figure than $1 trillion. But even this colossal tally is like the introductory price quoted by a cell phone provider. It’s the price before you pay for minutes, fees, and overcharges — and before the price balloons after the introductory offer expires. Read more at www.weeklystandard.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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| 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 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 |
| Canada pushed the US from the top seven economies deemed to have an entirely free economy due to “notable decreases in financial freedom, monetary freedom, and property rights,” the report said. |
“The US government?s interventionist responses to the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 have significantly undermined economic freedom and long-term prospects for economic growth,” the report said. Read more at www.breitbart.com |
| Despite huge federal budget deficits, total borrowing in the economy dropped in the first half of the year; this hasn’t happened in statistics dating to 1952. |
| Companies hire mainly when they see greater demand for their products and believe that extra workers will generate higher profits. More jobs then elevate confidence and demand. But for now, the logic is running in reverse. To restore profitability, companies are firing workers, and the ensuing pessimism erodes confidence and spendingRead more at www.realclearpolitics.com |
A handful of Democrats pushing for a new jobs bill are criticizing the
$787 billion economic stimulus for not creating enough jobs. |
But they also acknowledge that the stimulus didn’t stop the jobless rate hitting 10.2 percent, a 26-year high.
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Lawmakers said they would approach the issue differently if they had the chance.
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“They’re just trying to change the metrics to lower the bar,” said Ryan, who argued Democrats got the stimulus wrong by focusing too much on spending and not enough on growing the economy and creating jobs.
Read more at thehill.com |
What passes for a joke on Capitol Hill these days is that Bernie Madoff, given his experience managing Ponzi schemes, should be put in charge of the federal budget. Nancy Pelosi & Co. seem to have taken it as a serious suggestion. |
The Comedy Central punchline: “A previous Congress established the policy for paying Medicare doctors, so the update for 2010 is not a new policy to be paid for. . . . The Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act would not increase total payments to physicians above what they are today and therefore, would not be subject to the paygo requirement.” In other words, under the Madoff school of accounting, Democrats rely on straight deficit spending. Read more at online.wsj.com |
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