PK'S NOTE: Sorry about no current events post yesterday. I had it almost ready to go when it disappeared and there was no way I could recreate it.

Hail Armageddon, by Charles Krauthammer

“The worst-case scenario for us,” a leading anti-budget-cuts lobbyist told The Post, “is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens.”

Think about that. Worst case? That a government drowning in debt should cut back by 2.2 percent — and the country survives. That a government now borrowing 35 cents of every dollar it spends reduces that borrowing by two cents “and nothing bad really happens.” Oh, the humanity!

A normal citizen might think this a good thing. For reactionary liberalism, however, whatever sum our ever-inflating government happens to spend today (now double what Bill Clinton spent in his last year) is the Platonic ideal — the reduction of which, however minuscule, is a national calamity.

Or damn well should be. Otherwise, people might get the idea that we can shrink government and live on.
Hence the president’s message. If the “sequestration” — automatic spending cuts — goes into effect, the skies will fall. Plane travel jeopardized, carrier groups beached, teachers furloughed. And a shortage of junk-touching TSA agents.

The Obama administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.

A 2011 Government Accountability Office report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.

Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget, and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office, stacked with nepotistic incompetents, remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck — the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.

After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall.

Because of this year’s payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their belts by precisely 2 percent. They found a way. Washington, spending $3.8 trillion, cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys’ fees.

The problem with sequestration, of course, is that the cuts are across the board and do not allow money to move between accounts. It’s dumb because it doesn’t discriminate.

Fine. Then change the law. That’s why we have a Congress. Discriminate. Prioritize. That’s why we have budgets. Except that the Democratic Senate hasn’t passed one in four years. And the White House, which proposed the sequester in the first place, had 18 months to establish rational priorities among accounts — and did nothing.

When the GOP House passed an alternative that cut where the real money is — entitlement spending — President Obama threatened a veto. Meaning, he would have insisted that the sequester go into effect — the very same sequester he now tells us will bring on Armageddon.

Good grief. The entire sequester would have reduced last year’s deficit from $1.33 trillion to $1.24 trillion. A fraction of a fraction. Nonetheless, insists Obama, such a cut is intolerable. It has to be “balanced” — i.e., largely replaced — by yet more taxes.

Which demonstrates that, for Obama, this is not about deficit reduction, which interests him not at all. The purpose is purely political: to complete his Election Day victory by breaking the Republican opposition.
At the fiscal cliff, Obama broke — and split — the Republicans on taxes. With the sequester, he intends to break them on spending. Make the cuts as painful as possible, and watch the Republicans come crawling for a “balanced” (i.e., tax-hiking) deal.

In the past two years, House Republicans stopped cold Obama’s left-liberal agenda. Break them now, and the road is open to resume enactment of the expansive, entitlement-state liberalism that Obama proclaimed in his second inaugural address.

But he cannot win if “nothing bad really happens.” Indeed, he’d look both foolish and cynical for having cried wolf.

Obama’s incentive to deliberately make the most painful and socially disruptive cuts possible (say, oh, releasing illegal immigrants from prison) is enormous. And alarming.

Hail Armageddon.

http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/03/02/hail-armageddon-by-charles-krauthammer/

Gullible Nation

Those who fall for sequester scare-mongering need a lesson on government wastefulness.

Responding to the Obama administration’s operatic warnings of catastrophe for meals on wheels for the elderly, Head Start, meat inspections, air-traffic controllers, police, fire fighters, and 911 operators if the government reduces the rate of increase of federal spending by 2 percentage points, radio host Chris Plante offered the following suggestion: “Since this 2 percent obviously covers all essential government spending, let’s cut the other 98 percent!”

Even if these “draconian cuts” are implemented, the federal government will spend more this year than it did last year.

Another way to think about it is this: In 2007, the government was 40 percent smaller than it is today. Were poor people sleeping under bridges? Were the elderly starving? Were planes grounded? Was food unsafe to eat?

Here’s another question: Are Americans really this gullible? The president’s doom-saying is so absurd that a mature country would hoot him off the stage. As it is, the housebroken media credulously report his obviously partisan scare-mongering as fact.

As the sequester has loomed, the president and even many Republicans have argued that these “across the board” spending cuts (they’re actually just reductions in the rate of increase) are “stupid” and “destructive” and so forth. This raises the question: If cutting spending across the board is so stupid, what does that say about the priorities of the Congress and president who passed these spending bills in the first place? If our spending priorities are so out of whack that cutting everything equally is unthinkable, why hasn’t the government adjusted those programs before now?

Isn’t it the job of elected representatives to pass laws, oversee their execution, and adjust them accordingly? There is a rumor that the U.S. has a bicameral legislature, but the Senate hasn’t been heard from in years. While the Republican House has passed budgets that would slowly reduce the levels of federal debt over ten years, the Democratic-controlled Senate has played see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, but, alas, not speak-no-evil. In any case, that body has not passed a budget in nearly four years.

Democrats like to pretend that every last penny of government spending is wise, benevolent, and essential. My guess is that perhaps 15 percent of discretionary spending meets all three of those criteria, but we’ll never know, because government programs are rarely evaluated for effectiveness, efficiency, or necessity.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the government runs 50 different programs for the homeless across eight agencies, 23 programs for housing aid through four agencies, 26 programs for food and nutrition aid through six agencies, 27 programs on teen pregnancy, 130 programs for at-risk youth, ten agencies to promote exports, and 342 programs for economic development. The federal government runs 47 different job-training programs at a cost to the taxpayer of $18 billion annually. The GAO found that “only 5 of the 47 programs . . . examined had done detailed impact studies” and that among those “the effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only some demonstrating positive impacts that tended to be small, inconclusive, or restricted to short-term impacts.”

Entitlements eat up two-thirds of federal spending and are excluded from sequestration, which is too bad, because an estimated $20 billion is wasted on Medicare fraud every year. As for Medicaid, a New York Times investigation found that between 10 and 40 percent of New York’s spending was lost to fraud and theft yearly. Other estimates suggest that 33 percent of Earned Income Tax Credit payments (worth about $9 billion annually) are erroneous or fraudulent.

Sure, the government performs some necessary functions, but it is also vulnerable to abuse because nobody is watching. Consider the example of Al Gore. Upon leaving the vice presidency, Mr. Gore’s net worth was estimated at $2 million. But with the advent of Mr. Obama’s “investments” in green energy, Mr. Gore has profited handsomely. His company, General Investment Management, invested in a number of companies that received “green” subsidies. Gore’s net worth (before the sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera) was estimated by the Washington Post to be $100 million. The Obama economy has been awful for average Americans but exceedingly profitable for the well-connected.

Some government spending is necessary, much is sinfully wasteful, and the remainder is corrupt. If Americans have stopped believing that, then a key aspect of the American character is dead.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/341918/gullible-nation-mona-charen

Sequester: A Secret Plan

- See more at: http://www.dickmorris.com/sequester-a-secret-plan/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports#sthash.kkPnoQpW.dpuf

Sequester: A Secret Plan

By Dick Morris

Here’s the answer: He knows the economy is tanking. He realizes that we are headed for a double-dip recession. He expects unemployment to soar. He understands that his almost $300 billion in tax increases this year will drive us into recession. So he needs an out.

That’s where sequestration fits in: If it goes into effect, he can blame Republican budget cuts for the economic disaster that will probably unfold this year.

It will be the GOP’s fault. All the warnings of the dire impact of these across-the-board budget cuts — including a New York Times article about how states fear the economic impact of sequester — are designed to set up a massive blame game in which he excoriates Republicans for the recession.

Such a stance will, of course, be totally phony. Having raised payroll taxes by $200 billion; income taxes by $65 billion; health insurance premiums by 10-20 percent this year alone; and capital gains taxes by 9 percent; as well as having imposed a home sales tax of 4 percent, a package well north of $300 billion — Obama will blame sequester, amounting to $85 billion, for all the fallout his taxes will cause.

Obama has always survived by using excuses. The recession and unemployment were George W. Bush’s fault. The slow recovery was because of the tsunami in Japan, the collapse of Greece was uncertainty over the debt limit, political gridlock in Washington is Republican threats to shut down the government. His policies are always blameless.

But now his failed policies are really coming up for a pasting. With the economy about to slip into a double-dip recession (we are likely already there) and then fall some more, he needs a super-excuse. It’s hard to say that a spending cut of one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product will be responsible.

So the big lie bears repeating again and again and again.

First it emerges as a policy statement, then as a warning and prediction, and finally it becomes an explanation and a justification — a poor substitute for a correct policy in the first place.

Obama realizes he is running out of time and excuses. Now into his second term, a falloff in the economy is less likely to be blamed on Bush and more likely to kindle discontent with Obama’s policies. In bad economic times, we tend to blame the president, not his predecessor.

Obama is looking to the Hoover/Roosevelt model in which the continuing high unemployment rate in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term was universally — and correctly — ascribed to Herbert Hoover’s impact on the economy. But throughout FDR’s first term, unemployment dropped from a high of 26 percent in 1933 down to 13 percent in 1936.

FDR faced his own double dip when the economy crashed in 1937 and joblessness rose back up above 20 percent. The causes were the imposition of the Social Security tax — no benefits were paid out until 1940 — and the Wagner Act, which gave unions new power and radically increased wages. FDR couldn’t blame Hoover anymore. So he blamed the “economic royalists.” He said “the economic royalists hate me and I welcome their hatred.”

So Obama is copying the FDR playbook to avoid being identified with the second dip.

It didn’t work for FDR. He suffered huge losses in Congress in 1938 and only won again in 1940 because of the looming threat of war.

Obama’s blame game won’t work either. Voters will pay him back for his economic stewardship in 2014. Big time.

http://www.dickmorris.com/sequester-a-secret-plan/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

President Obama’s massive and voluble campaign against the sequester has a deep political motivation that is not apparent on the surface. He is engaging in a battle he knows he’ll lose. Republicans are not going to budge on agreeing to tax hikes to avoid the sequester’s spending cuts, and Democrats won’t opt for entitlement cuts to avoid it, either. So why is he fighting so hard when he has no leverage and battling a measure that will take effect on March 1 if Congress does nothing — something it does rather well?
Here’s the answer: He knows the economy is tanking. He realizes that we are headed for a double-dip recession. He expects unemployment to soar. He understands that his almost $300 billion in tax increases this year will drive us into recession. So he needs an out.
That’s where sequestration fits in: If it goes into effect, he can blame Republican budget cuts for the economic disaster that will probably unfold this year.
It will be the GOP’s fault. All the warnings of the dire impact of these across-the-board budget cuts — including a New York Times article about how states fear the economic impact of sequester — are designed to set up a massive blame game in which he excoriates Republicans for the recession.
Such a stance will, of course, be totally phony. Having raised payroll taxes by $200 billion; income taxes by $65 billion; health insurance premiums by 10-20 percent this year alone; and capital gains taxes by 9 percent; as well as having imposed a home sales tax of 4 percent, a package well north of $300 billion — Obama will blame sequester, amounting to $85 billion, for all the fallout his taxes will cause.
Obama has always survived by using excuses. The recession and unemployment were George W. Bush’s fault. The slow recovery was because of the tsunami in Japan, the collapse of Greece was uncertainty over the debt limit, political gridlock in Washington is Republican threats to shut down the government. His policies are always blameless.
But now his failed policies are really coming up for a pasting. With the economy about to slip into a double-dip recession (we are likely already there) and then fall some more, he needs a super-excuse. It’s hard to say that a spending cut of one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product will be responsible.
So the big lie bears repeating again and again and again.
First it emerges as a policy statement, then as a warning and prediction, and finally it becomes an explanation and a justification — a poor substitute for a correct policy in the first place.
Obama realizes he is running out of time and excuses. Now into his second term, a falloff in the economy is less likely to be blamed on Bush and more likely to kindle discontent with Obama’s policies. In bad economic times, we tend to blame the president, not his predecessor.
Obama is looking to the Hoover/Roosevelt model in which the continuing high unemployment rate in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term was universally — and correctly — ascribed to Herbert Hoover’s impact on the economy. But throughout FDR’s first term, unemployment dropped from a high of 26 percent in 1933 down to 13 percent in 1936.
FDR faced his own double dip when the economy crashed in 1937 and joblessness rose back up above 20 percent. The causes were the imposition of the Social Security tax — no benefits were paid out until 1940 — and the Wagner Act, which gave unions new power and radically increased wages. FDR couldn’t blame Hoover anymore. So he blamed the “economic royalists.” He said “the economic royalists hate me and I welcome their hatred.”
So Obama is copying the FDR playbook to avoid being identified with the second dip.
It didn’t work for FDR. He suffered huge losses in Congress in 1938 and only won again in 1940 because of the looming threat of war.
Obama’s blame game won’t work either. Voters will pay him back for his economic stewardship in 2014. Big time.
- See more at: http://www.dickmorris.com/sequester-a-secret-plan/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports#sthash.kkPnoQpW.dpuf

GOP Senator: Obama's golf weekend cost 341 federal workers a pay cut

Daniel Halper at Weekly Standard quotes Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions who really goes after the president and the Democrats for their refusal to negotiate on the sequester:

"Replacing the sequester would require the President to save $85 billion out of a $3,500 billion federal budget. One would think that any President would leap at the opportunity to make government more effective and responsive. But what does the President do instead? He says Republicans are 'cutting vital services for children' in order to 'benefit the well-off and well-connected.' This has been the strategy now for years: block any attempt to reform the government and then relentlessly attack the reformers. Does any lawmaker, reporter, or citizen believe that the only way to save taxpayer dollars is to hurt children, that every government program is effective and helpful and not one penny is wasted?"

Sessions is the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee.

"While the White House operatives may think this attack is clever, it betrays an astonishing elitism: the federal government is perfect and requires no reform. That is why they have no plan to make our government leaner and more efficient. The President had 18 months to develop reforms to improve the government, but instead he announced furloughs of federal workers as a political cudgel. Yet, his golf weekend at the yacht club with Tiger Woods cost taxpayers over a million dollars-enough money to save 341 federal workers from furlough," Sessions writes.

"These workers know firsthand how much waste and inefficiency exists in the government. Our Budget Committee office will look for a way to solicit federal employees to send suggestions for how to save money in their departments, agencies, and divisions. What is better? To furlough someone or to empower them to make their office more efficient?

One of the big problems with the government is that there is zero incentive for agency managers and department heads to be efficient in spending tax payer dollars. If they don't spend every dime appropriated and approved, they may get less next year.

This perverse system manifests itself in the end of fiscal year spending spree many agencies go on, including the purchase of office furniture and other questionable actions that drain their budgets at year end so that they can get an increase the following year.

Sessions is on to something by asking federal workers to help make their offices better managers of the public purse.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/03/gop_senator_obamas_golf_weekend_cost_341_federal_workers_a_pay_cut.html#ixzz2MQATDbq9

Bloomberg: US has 'infinite amount of money'

Furthermore, while saying the federal deficit does indeed need to be curtailed, Mr. Bloomberg argued the United States could owe "an infinite amount of money" and there is no specific amount that would cause the country to default.

"We are spending money we don't have," Mr. Bloomberg explained. "It's not like your household. In your household, people are saying, 'Oh, you can't spend money you don't have.' That is true for your household because nobody is going to lend you an infinite amount of money. When it comes to the United States federal government, people do seem willing to lend us an infinite amount of money. ... Our debt is so big and so many people own it that it's preposterous to think that they would stop selling us more. It's the old story: If you owe the bank $50,000, you got a problem. If you owe the bank $50 million, they got a problem. And that's a problem for the lenders. They can't stop lending us more money."

For the record, any of our creditors could sell their bonds on the open market and refuse to purchase any more - something China has threatened to do several times unless we get our budget and debt under control.
And what happens if the world decides not to use the dollar as a reserve currency? All it would take would be for China to choose another backstop currency and the dollar would collapse.

The post-World War II financial system that was agreed to at Bretton Woods is slowly collapsing. What replaces it may not be as kind to the US as the previous agreement was. If that's the case, then our $16 trillion debt would matter a great deal, Mr. Mayor.

Time to get your head out of your rear about our debt and help us doing something about it.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/03/bloomberg_us_has_infinite_amount_of_money.html#ixzz2MQDVB0oD

Wall Street Legend Warns: A ‘Storm’ Is Coming

Noted hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller, 59, on Friday warned that the U.S. economy is headed for a “storm” that could prove to be far worse than the financial meltdown of 2008.

But first, if you’re not familiar with his name, here’s what you need to know: He’s one of the most respected and successful hedge fund managers in the past 30 years.

Obviously, you don’t achieve that type of success (or notoriety) on Wall Street by running your mouth. That being said, if Druckenmiller, a former partner of billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros, is predicting serious economic trouble for the U.S., perhaps we should listen.

“I see a storm coming, maybe bigger than the storm we had in 2008, 2010. And really, the reason could happen without people looking as for a lot of similar reasons that we could get into,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Stephanie Ruhle.

“But the basic story is, the demographic bubble I was looking at way back in ’94 that started in 2011, we are right at the first ramp-up of this thing that is about to hit,” he added.

His comments were made during a larger discussion on the dangers Social Security, Medicare Medicaid, and unfunded liabilities as high as $211 trillion, pose to future generations.

“I think people like me and others need to speak out. It’s about the future, not about the present where the problem is,” he said.

“While everybody is focusing on the here and now, there’s a much, much bigger storm that’s about to hit,” he added. “I am not against seniors. What I am against is current seniors stealing from future seniors.”

Watch the Bloomberg TV interview here.

However, if it’s any consolation, Druckenmiller isn’t totally without hope. Indeed, he actually thinks the U.S. has a chance of turning this ship around.

“With the proper education and with proper voices out there, we could have 40 million kids marching down to Washington,” he said.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/01/wall-street-legend-warns-a-storm-is-coming/

Friday News Dump: HHS Releases 700+ Pages of New Obamacare Rules

It took the Obama administration more than 700 pages to explain four Obamacare rules on Friday.
The Department of Health and Human Services released the new regulations which are scheduled to be formally published in mid-March.

According to The Hill, "three of the regulations are final and roll out the multistate healthcare exchanges and reforms to the insurance market." These rules become effective on May 11.

The "other rule is a proposal to implement the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP)" that will become effective on Jan. 1, 2015. Comments for this rule will be due by April 11.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/01/HHS-Releases-More-Than-700-Pages-of-New-Obamacare-Rules

Fighting the Real Enemy

That is our situation today. We have a federal budget law which is simply ignored, and immigration laws are not enforced. The Tenth and Ninth Amendments, intended to preserve the autonomy of states and of individuals, have been scrubbed out of the Constitution. We have no "government" in America at all any longer; we have a regime of intimidation whose real masters do not hold public offices.

Those who control information, entertainment, education, and social popularity -- the shadowy inventors of "politically correct" language, emotions, and reality which pull us with ten thousand different strings into perverse puppetry made to mimic true life -- are our equivalent of the Inner Party in Orwell's dystopia.

We cannot defeat them by elections; we can defeat them only by removing their power to dictate the films, music, art, manners, schools, charities, colleges, and causes which create an artificial union of Americans. Adopting this cure to the disease which threatens our souls requires rejecting the banal slogan which even good Americans have lazily absorbed: "United We Stand." No -- no! -- no! That is not America or its promise of liberty. We must repudiate all homogenizing rhetoric. Divided we stand. United we fall.

This is a hard lesson for some Americans to grasp. The mutilation of language has caused noble words like "diversity" to reek of totalitarianism. America and its liberty, however, were very much tied to religious, cultural, and social diversity. The peoples who came here -- Puritans, Jews, Catholics, Quakers, and Baptists, among others -- did so to remain divided in their social and cultural life but united in their passion for liberty.

Even harder for us is how to wage war against those who have seized the bastions of cultural and educational power. There is really only one way: we must eschew with calculation every vestige of the shadow-masters of position in public life. Cast our marketplace votes in consumer decisions to remove all support for network television, new movies, colleges, public schools, and other incarnations of political correctness.

That is half the battle. The other half is to do what ultra-Conservative Jews, Mormons, and other smaller groups have done: create a cultural, educational, entertainment, information, and social system which encompass our values. When those two campaigns begin, and not before then, will we begin to fight the real enemy and to win the war which must be won.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/fighting_the_real_enemy.html#ixzz2MQH6iQ4w

Also Reads:

Senator Coburn's Wastebook 2012

Understanding the Threat of Progressivism's Equality

"There is only one type of equality that is compatible with freedom, and that is the equality of treatment of all individuals by their fellow members of society. Each equally endowed as part of their humanity to enjoy the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which includes the right to property and their right to protect their lives and property among others.) Radical egalitarian redistribution requires unequal treatment by force and a subordination of the rights of some to the dictates of the collective. Mob rule. Arbitrary application of laws. Imposed servitude.
Liberal /Progressives value their utopian, immature, and demonstrably impractical version of equality more than they value freedom. They advocate that it's acceptable to give up a little liberty for "the good of society", for fairness, and for security. A compliant population is gradually conditioned as their loss of liberty occurs in increments. Modern Progressivism is, in fact, Regressivism. Through the pursuit of radical egalitarian equality they are undermining the centuries of true progress of western civilization and threaten its very existence.
Like it or not, we're all being taken along on this ride. The question is: What are we prepared to do about it? "

The Logic of Liberalism

"In sum, the liberal solution almost always involves more governmental intervention, more governmental interaction, and particularly more taxation. Moreover, the liberal wants to be involved in everything; no issue is too unimportant for their watchful eyes. Interesting in the topics above is that each involves considerable expense, all generated by increased taxation on the rich -- whoever they are. One could justifiably argue that every proposed tax dollar increase is earmarked to be spent on three or more distinct venues. This small, though paradoxically large, detail is never explained by anyone.

Final note. Liberal solutions are heartfelt and almost always involve more government expense. They are not intellectual in content. In reality, liberals who need very much to feel they are doing the right thing and want to believe they are on a higher intellectual plane, prefer to remain oblivious to the operational aspects of any idea they may promote. Conservatives, on the other hand, consider all arguments closely and try hard to complete the logic mindful of operational reality."