Since being named the president's point-man on the federal budget talks, Vice President Joe Biden has traveled to Russia, Finland and Moldova -- and then to visit the New York Yankees' training camp while on a fund-raising trip for Florida Democrats.
You decide for yourself whether the Obama administration is serious about the federal budget.
Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York was caught on the phone this week admitting -- to fellow Democrats, he thought, but to reporters too, it turns out -- that his party has told him to try to paint Republican budget proposals as "extreme."
"I always use the word 'extreme.' That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week," Schumer said when he thought he was talking only to fellow Democrats.
You decide for yourself whether the Democrats are serious about the federal budget.
Democrats appear to be playing a game of chicken -- sitting back and doing next to nothing, while Republicans, with a mandate from last November's voters to sharply cut back spending to avoid a fiscal collapse, are made to look mean and heartless.
We'll tell you what's heartless: That's an entire generation of Democratic leaders who are content to keep spending trillions of dollars that future generations will have to pay back. And why? So they can look like Santa Claus and maybe win back the House next year if the electorate decides that, hey, maybe the Democrats are right and the money tree is still blooming.
In addition, we ask: Is cutting even $60 billion from a $3.8 trillion budget -- when you're already spending $1.65 trillion more than you have -- "extreme"?
Of course not. But even if it were, we'd argue that extreme cuts are absolutely in order.
Remember, we're not even talking about next year's budget: Republicans are trying to get Democrats to agree to a budget for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
You see, throughout all of 2010, Democrats, who then controlled the White House, Senate and House -- all "three branches" of government, according to Schumer -- never proposed or passed a budget for fiscal year 2011, which we're now in.
Instead, they left the mess to House Republicans.
Maybe one has to be a former Democratic operative to deal with federal spending honestly: Alice Rivlin, former budget chief under President Bill Clinton, warned this week that a "sovereign debt crisis" is possible if the federal budget isn't brought under control.
In a sovereign debt crisis, creditors become worried that a government will default on its loans. Rivlin, notes Politico.com, warns that "a sovereign debt crisis would result in a large interest rate spike, a fall in the global value of the dollar and a period of economic decline much worse than the recession that began in 2008."
"We used to think that only happened to small countries on other continents, but it could happen to us as well," she said on CNN.
It's happened in Latin America in the past, and is happening in Western Europe today.
As the Tea Party-inspired House Republicans try to fend off such a crisis, Democrats seem to think a cynical political advantage in 2012 is more important.
Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., led a "Back Off Social Security" rally this week on Capitol Hill. Never mind that last year, some seven or eight years earlier than predicted, Social Security began paying out more in benefits than it takes in. And never mind that no one is talking about cutting Social Security for current retirees -- only trimming it back slightly for future ones, in order to ensure the program's survival.
But Harry Reid and the Democrats would rather score points with voters by telling them what they want to hear.
Great politics! But a suicidal course for America.
If this game of chicken results in a partial government shutdown April 8, then Americans will be asked to choose sides.
Which will it be? Medicine? Or candy?
A lot of Democrats are good people with big hearts. They are concerned about everyone and everything. But you just can't trust them to make the payments on time. It's best if we don't let them sign anything while we pay the bills and give them an allowance to play with. We don't need the Chinese repo man backing the wrecker up in our driveway.
The age of Austerity is coming, but I wonder if the American people will accept it without violence or unrest...
Wake up folks.
Brad if Wisconsin is an indicator.. there are some who simply do not have the intellect to understand what is going on..(NO Money)..... and all the demonstrations in the world are not going to give them more..they will most likely become more unhinged and violent.
It will be very painful for all of America. We have been living way above our means for a long time. At this time, the Democrats are in complete denial. Mainstream Republicans are making a tepid effort do something. The Tea Party Republicans are the only ones making a serious effort.
The bulk of the US budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Defense. Any truly meaningful cuts will have to come from those areas. You will hear people screaming about the heartless government and how it is hurting real people.
The really heartless people are the ones that are willing to let the government collapse to score political points.
Are we in a fiscal crisis? No, not even close. Causes of the deficit: government spending, sure, but massive tax cuts that we can't afford, plus the recession (which reduced income, thus reducing income tax collections), plus 2-1/2 wars. Discretionary spending is only a tiny part of the picture. If you want to make an analogy with households, as conservatives love to do, here it is: "Sweetheart, I asked the boss to cut my salary by 30%, and for some reason we can't pay our bills anymore." If the super-duper rich don't pay their fair share of the cost of running the country, we can't make ends meet at all. The Republicans favor huge oil subsidies and huge agribusiness subsidies (welfare for the rich) and need to cut those dramatically. As far as the recession, if you cut spending too fast the recession will get worse, income will go down, and then tax collections will go down, and the deficit will ultimately grow worse. Get America back to work, and their income will go up, thus producing more taxes, thus improving the fiscal picture. The basic issue with the immediate crisis--which is a political crisis compounded by ignorance, not a fiscal crisis--is that conservatives are, as usual, oversimplifying issues that are actually very complex. PS: as far as making an analogy with household spending, please remember that the government is not a household. Conservatives have presided over all three of our major depressions, and it's not a coincidence. All the Tea Party has contributed is noise. Good luck.
Cuts we can't afford? Only a loony liberal would believe that you can't afford to spend less money.
Two professors at UCLA, a liberal college, wrote a report that said FDR’s new deal policies did accomplice one thing. His policies were responsible for putting the ‘great’ in the depression. They said, most historical experts agree, that his policies prolonged the depression by at least 7 years. It might have been longer if World War II had not started.
FDR tried to manipulate the economy in many ways. Invoking the Trading with the Enemy act of 1917, Roosevelt declared that “all banking transactions shall be suspended.” Banks were permitted to reopen only after case-by-case inspection and approval by the federal government, a procedure that took months. People no longer trusted the banks and with good reason the federal government was running them.
FDR with the help of the idiots in congress abandoned the gold standard and nationalized the monetary gold stock. Besides being theft, it did not work.
Having hobbled the banking system and destroyed the gold standard, he turned next to agriculture. Roosevelt pushed through the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. It provided for acreage and production controls. It authorized new lending, taxed processors of agricultural commodities, and rewarded farmers who cut back production. The objective was to raise farm commodity prices until they reached a much higher "parity" level. They had thousands of baby pigs and baby chickens killed and crops plowed up in the effort to force prices higher. All that while people in the US were staving.
Industry was virtually nationalized under Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.
I could go on and on but the point is we did not learn. The Obama administration and the democrats are doing the same thing again. They trying to manipulate the economy of the USA the same as FDR did. But just it was with FDR this is more about growing the federal government than it is about helping the country. At last count Obama had 32 Czars. The federal government is pretty much running the banks and most of the auto manufactures. Now they are trying to take over health care and pass one of the biggest cons ever with the Cap and Trade bill.
Obama, like FDR, thinks he is an intellectual and he knows what is best. Obama and congress believe they are so much more capable of making decisions than we are. Many of these people never had a real job in their life. The less decisions those idiots make for me the better.
Biden is doing what obama has been doing since the day he was elected. Enjoying his free travel & entertainment ride on the taxpayer dime. What does going to Russia, Finland or the Yankee training camp have to do with our federal budget?
For that matter what does the largest trip in Presidential history (India), trips to Hawaii, a trip to Spain or a trip to Brazil have to do with running our nation? (well, he did manage to give an oil drilling permit in US waters to a Brazilian firm but I digress....)
What do all the white house parties and private concerts have to do with running our nation?
Answer. Nothing. They are simply spending the money they feel "entitled" to. Money that we don't have. They know the ride is over in 2012.
They do this despite:
1. The Depression we are in.
2. Rampant Inflation.
3. Rapidly rising Food costs. Americans will find themselves hungry soon.
4. Gas prices have DOUBLED under obama's "leadership"/party time.
5. We are now engaged in THREE wars (yes, count them, 3 wars).
They both sicken me. As long as they get theirs that's all that matters. The rest of you peons..... Get to work and pay your taxes so that obama, michelle & the little darlings can get to their next vacation! Darn you, work harder and pay MORE! They deserve it.
Wait a minute, I'm still guffawing over Mike Ryan's report from the Augusta College budget exercise, which proposed this classic: for anyone really interested in budget reform, "cutting government spending for the arts is the FIRST thing we should do." This statement, and many others like it, shows in an almost comical way the sheer hypocrisy of conservative talk of deficit reduction. First of all, the $61 billion in cuts proposed in the Republican-controlled House are directed entirely at discretionary federal government spending, and make up about 1.6 percent of the total domestic budget. Chump change. The conservatives so far have made NO serious proposals to cut entitlement programs, the largest being Social Security and Medicare. And of course, defense spending, the third major chunk of federal spending, is the political third rail for conservatives. So the conservative effort to rein in federal spending so touted by Ryan and ACES merely tinkers at the margins with tiny discretionary spending. But that's not all. While conservatives try to claim their primary concern is fiscal, the majority of their most ballyhooed cuts are political, not fiscal. Ending government spending on the arts, the EPA, Planned Planned Parenthood, public television, and other "liberal" programs has little or NOTHING to do with fiscal responsibility. It's all about politics and ideology. As Rob Emmanuel once said, no crisis should go to waste. Republicans, and Tea Partyers such as Mike Ryan hypocritically go after penny-ante federal spending they oppose on ideological grounds under the pretense of serious deficit cutting. What a joke!
Effete Elitist Liberal, I do believe you are fixated on Mike Ryan. Good for you, I'm glad you found something. But would you rather not save a million here and there? How can you possibly be in favor of lowering the debt and not want to shut down needless programs because doing that only saves a little? It's a cost benefit analysis. The money paid doesn't produce wothwhile results.
Micki, I read the USCA article myself, in its entirety (it's on line), as soon as the bloggers started commenting on it. You are, like them, not reading it correctly. Their entire argument was that FDR made the depression worse by using wage and price controls. They said nothing about Obama-type stimulus programs. So, this particular article does nothing to support your point.
At least the Tea Party crowd is no longer calling for across the board cuts in discretionary spending, since the Dems gleefully pointed out that this would entail cuts in the FBI, ATF, INS, air traffic control, etc.
What the Tea Party crowd still doesn't get, in the midst of the anti-government hysteria, is that the government does many things that are vital for our country's health: national defense, immigration control (the problem is bad, yes, but would be worse without the INS), air traffic and highway safety, food and drug safety, law enforcement, coastal protection, and many other services, many of them very expensive. The Tea Party doesn't want to pay for any of this, but can't deny that much of this is very useful. If you think life would be grand without a strong government, then move to Somalia and see how it works for them. Be realistic, too, that the Tea Party is never going to alienate its largely elderly supporters by making massive cuts in Medicare and Social Security. At some point, Boehner was more right than he knew: the Tea Party needs to have an adult moment.
What the liberals don't understand is the simple fact that you can't keep spending more than you take in without eventually going bankrupt.
Riverman 1: There is noting at all wrong about wanting to save a million bucks of government spending. But of course you beg the question calling some of these program cuts "needless" and not producing worthwhile results. Those are your assertions, not necessarily facts. But that debate, of course, is almost totally beside my point. My point, which you failed to acknowledge, was that House Republicans seem preoccupied with these relatively small programs, small from a fiscal perspective, and their preoccupation stems from ideological motives, not fiscal ones. If you want to debate the philosophy of government (should the government support the arts, PBS, Planned Parenthood, etc.?), that is a worthy debate to have. But it is not a meaningful deficit debate. If all those programs were cut totally from the federal budget, the impact on the deficit would be microscopic. So again, IF the Right's concern is really fiscal and not ideological, let's see some specific proposals for large cuts in SS, Medicare, and defense spending, the real sources of our deficit problems. I bet Republicans will chicken out. Am I wrong?
EEL, it's been widely reported that the Republicans are about to take on social security and Medicare. There will be significant cuts that will ensure the solvency of the programs in the long run. As keeps being said, there is no money regardless of what Michael Moore says. Do you admire the Republicans for that political football they are going to run with?
"It's time to pick a fight. Shut er down."
Alex, another perspective: you can't expect to have necessary services forever unless you are willing to pay for them.
First of all don't you negative people get vacations or not. Second, I'm quite sure they use some of their own money sometimes to take various trips and not taxpayers money al the time. Republican are just as bad as Democrats but they just hide theirs a little better because they have people like Chillen behind them. If all the negative people know so much about budgeting the United States as a whole why don't you run for office and improve it in.......mmmm....say 2 and a half years. Oh yes the United States was in the worse shape when Democrats took over but if I'm not mistaken wasn't Republicans in office then. But it seem to be all Democrats fault from the beginning. Why? Oh and tea party please!
I'll take the Republicans more seriously when they come out against oil and natural gas subsidies and agribusiness subsidies. Oops--I forgot--those are popular (very socialist) programs in red states, aren't they?
It's hard to cut big expenses like defense when the current President has us engaged in three wars.
It's hard to cut big expenses like social security when the current President expands greatly the list of allowable disabilities, thereby adding more people to the public teet.
It's totally impossible to cut many expenses with the liberals still in control of the Senate & the Executive Branch.
You can afford necessary services, if you cut the unnecessary ones!
Riverman 1: The Second Coming has "been widely reported" too. Ain't happened yet, so far as I know. So we will see what the Republicans actually say when the time comes. My bet is that there will be virtually NO change in the SS program, some changes in Medicare that will not take effect for 10 or 15 years at the earliest, and of course NO reduction in defense spending. In other words, at best there will be (highly theoretical) changes which will have NO deficit reduction effects until long after the current fiscal crisis is just a bad memory. Meanwhile, the unemployment figures got better again this week: good news for the economy, bad news for Tea Partyers.
Taxpayers i talk to want to spend money on a fence to protect our southern border but cut back on all the waste. Waste is the key word. If we HAVE to spend money let’s do it in a way that benefits U.S. all. A fence benefits U.S. all.
Chillen: please excuse me sir, for pointing out that our "wars" are "off budget," a little trick which enabled Bush to minimize the costs to our economy of the Iraq War for years. It's not so much the costs of "hot" wars which create our gaping deficits, but the insanely bloated expenses of maintaining a world-wide military presence in over 150 countries at 1200 plus bases (that are not secret) and of paying for fantasyland weapons systems which keep the defense industry humming along.
Of course Republicans will consider cutting defense spending when Hell freezes over, and maybe not even then.
rheteor--you state the tea party needs an adult moment..well the tea party people are the only adults in this discussion. your understanding of the terrible debt problem we have is naive at best. waste, fraud, duplication of programs and over promising are not a revenue problem its a spending problem..12-10-10 cnn.money article stated that the 2-year extension of the bush tax cuts for the rich would cost [ their choice of words not mine] would be approx. 81.5 billion. thats a little over 40 billion a year but we have the last two years run 1.5 trillion dollar deficits.. so blaming tax cuts is alittle ridiculious..its spending**you cannot spend your self into prosperity..
It'd be nice if the American people could lay blame for the budget impasse at the feet of the democrats, but that's clearly not the case.
As well documented by former OMB head David Stockman, the Reagan White House and the Republicans set the American nation on a dangerous path of too much spending, and too little taxing. They ran deficits of $100's billions every year. In fact, the U.S. budget was healed, a little, only when George Bush broke his 'read-my-lips' promise and caved to tax increases. Next, Clinton raised taxes on upper income folks and THIS temporarily improved the budget picture so much that their was a year or two of surpluses.
The long-term path, however, is one of deficit spending that has led to the huge debt we have today. Both Republicans and Democrats have been irresponsible, and it's probably accurate to say, today, that the U.S. faces the grave risks you posit in your editorial. (On the other hand, Stockman began warning as early as 1985 that the U.S. was headed for financial disaster, but that disaster never happened, -- at least not yet!!)
Ironically, as the U.S. steps-up in Libya and elsewhere around the world to hold-up 'democracy' as the 'best system' of governance, America is mocked by the so-called 'triumph-of-politics' at home that shows our system has hopelessly and dangerously dead-locked.
well said socks.. wish a lot of these bloggers would look at the 'whole' picture instead of the narrow view of the last 18 months.
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