White House Closed for Student Tours, Open for LA Kings, Galaxy
This year, thousands of school children traveling to DC for Spring Break will be unable to take a tour of the White House. President Obama, in a bid to trim $2 million from the Secret Service budget, has canceled public, self-guided tours of the White House. On Tuesday afternoon, however, Obama is rolling out the White House red carpet for a visit from the professional athletes of the LA Kings and LA Galaxy.Obama is honoring Stanley Cup champions LA Kings and MLS Cup campions LA Galaxy. The athletes will also participate in a sport's clinic with children from Washington, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston and Cleveland. The clinic will be held on the South Lawn of the White House.
Hopefully, the athletes can arrange for those kids to also get a tour of the White House. Better still, maybe each of the athletes can adopt a student locked outside the gates and sneak them in for a tour.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/26/White-House-Closed-for-student-Tours-Open-for-professional-athletes
Dems seek to expand school lunch program to weekends, holidays
Yes, there are hungry children out there. And no child should go hungry in a land of plenty like the US.But using the school lunch program as a supplemental food program for poor kids is inefficent and a waste.
The Hill:
Four House Democrats have proposed legislation that would expand school lunch programs to weekends and holidays.
Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) proposed the bill, which would amend the Richard Russell National School Lunch Act to set up weekend and holiday "feeding programs." The proposal is meant to help ensure that at-risk school children meet their nutritional needs, but it would only extend this help during the school year, not during the summer.
The whole point of creating the food stamp program was to take the dozen or so agencies and departments that had nutritional programs for the poor and combine them into one overall federal program. Now putting school lunches in the business of supplemental nutrition is just spreading things out again, duplicating what another federal program is supposed to do.
Her bill, H.R. 1395, is co-sponsored by Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.).
The bill is the latest entry to the list of legislation meant to tweak the national school lunch program. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), for example, has proposed the Healthy Lifestyles and Prevention America Act, S. 39, which would broaden the federal nutrition program, including by expanding it to childcare centers.
Other proposals have been made by members looking to limit school lunch guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last year, the USDA proposed calorie caps on school lunches, along with caps on grains and proteins that children can eat in meals served by schools.
The agency has since waived the cap on grains and proteins for two years. But last week, Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) proposed the Sensible School Lunch Act, which would permanently eliminate those caps.
Crawford's bill, H.R. 1244, keeps in place the calorie caps that the USDA recommended. But Crawford says that repealing the grains and protein caps would give schools the flexibility to feed children properly.
"USDA's new school nutrition regulations are not working and are leaving students hungry," Crawford said last week. "In October, I hosted a Nutrition Summit in my district where I listened to school administrators, parents, nutritionists and teachers tell me how the nutrition guidelines are affecting their students."
This is how government grows - and wastes money. If the kids aren't getting enough to eat outside of school, then the problem should be addressed by better educating parents in how to shop sensibly to make their food budget last or increasing the monthly SNAP allowance, not setting up a duplicate government service.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Unionized
The San Francisco Bay Area is home to some of most wealthy retirees in America. Joining their ranks this month is Alameda County Administrator Susan Muranishi, who will retire with an annual pension of $423,644 a year. That works out to a little over $35,000 a month.From Matier & Ross on sfgate.com we learn:
According to county pay records, in addition to her $301,000 base salary, Muranishi receives:
- $24,000, plus change, in "equity pay'' to guarantee that she makes at least 10 percent more than anyone else in the county.
- $24,000, plus change, in "equity pay'' to guarantee that she makes at least 10 percent more than anyone else in the county.
- About $54,000 a year in "longevity" pay for having stayed with the county for more than 30 years.
- An annual performance bonus of $24,000.
- And another $9,000 a year for serving on the county's three-member Surplus Property Authority, an ad hoc committee of the Board of Supervisors that oversees the sale of excess land.
Like other county executives, Muranishi also gets an $8,292-a-year car allowance.
Muranishi has been with the county for 38 years, and she's 63. When retirement day comes, she'll be getting a lot more than a gold watch.
That's because, according to the county auditor's office, Muranishi's annual pension will be equal to the dollar total of her entire yearly package - $413,000. She also has a separate executive private pension plan, for which the county chips in $46,500 a year.
From Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee we read:
Moody's
Investors Service, which rates the creditworthiness of state and local
governments, has proposed a new way of evaluating public pension
liabilities that lowers the "discount rate" -- in effect the assumed
future earnings of pension fund investments -- to the level of
high-grade corporate bonds, similar to the rate private pension systems
use.
It also adjusts other accounting techniques that public funds use to minimize liabilities, such as spreading investment losses over many years.
The result of such changes, Moody's says, is that the $766 billion in unfunded liabilities that U.S. pension funds claim triples to $2.2 trillion and if the firm adopts the proposed system for credit ratings, it will amp up pressure on those funds to get more money from taxpayers and/or employees.
That would imply that California, with about 12 percent of the nation's population, could have an unfunded pension debt approaching $300 billion, plus another $100 billion for retiree health care. That's big money in anyone's book.
Who pays for this legal pillaging of our state coffers? We all do, not only in escalating taxes, but also in reduced state services for police, fire, roads, and infrastructure. There are also reductions in medical and mental health service, reduced hours for state parks, and higher tuition at our state colleges and universities. And, unlike the Federal government, states and local governments cannot simply print money; they must painfully soak local businesses and individual taxpayers to make up for the inevitable shortfalls ahead.
Congratulations, Ms. Muranishi you hit the retirement lottery jackpot. The only interesting question is how long will your gold-plated pensions continue, without going bankrupt?
Can It Happen Here?
The decision of the government in Cyprus to simply take money out of people's bank accounts there sent shock waves around the world. People far removed from that small island nation had to wonder: "Can this happen here?"
The economic repercussions of having people feel that their money is not safe in banks can be catastrophic. Banks are not just warehouses where money can be stored. They are crucial institutions for gathering individually modest amounts of money from millions of people and transferring that money to strangers whom those people would not directly entrust it to.
Multi-billion dollar corporations, whose economies of scale can bring down the prices of goods and services -- thereby raising our standard of living -- are seldom financed by a few billionaires.
Far more often they are financed by millions of people, who have neither the specific knowledge nor the economic expertise to risk their savings by investing directly in those enterprises. Banks are crucial intermediaries, which provide the financial expertise without which these transfers of money are too risky.
There are poor nations with rich natural resources, which are not developed because they lack either the sophisticated financial institutions necessary to make these key transfers of money or because their legal or political systems are too unreliable for people to put their money into these financial intermediaries.
Whether in Cyprus or in other countries, politicians tend to think in short run terms, if only because elections are held in the short run. Therefore, there is always a temptation to do reckless and short-sighted things to get over some current problem, even if that creates far worse problems in the long run.
Seizing money that people put in the bank would be a classic example of such short-sighted policies.
After thousands of American banks failed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were people who would never put their money in a bank again, even after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created, to have the federal government guarantee individual bank accounts when the bank itself failed.
For years after the Great Depression, stories appeared in the press from time to time about some older person who died and was found to have substantial sums of money stored under a mattress or in some other hiding place, because they never trusted banks again.
After going back and forth, the government of Cyprus ultimately decided, under international pressure, to go ahead with its plan to raid people's bank accounts. But could similar policies be imposed in other countries, including the United States?
One of the big differences between the United States and Cyprus is that the U.S. government can simply print more money to get out of a financial crisis. But Cyprus cannot print more euros, which are controlled by international institutions.
Does that mean that Americans' money is safe in banks? Yes and no.
The U.S. government is very unlikely to just seize money wholesale from people's bank accounts, as is being done in Cyprus. But does that mean that your life savings are safe?
No. There are more sophisticated ways for governments to take what you have put aside for yourself and use it for whatever the politicians feel like using it for. If they do it slowly but steadily, they can take a big chunk of what you have sacrificed for years to save, before you are even aware, much less alarmed.
That is in fact already happening. When officials of the Federal Reserve System speak in vague and lofty terms about "quantitative easing," what they are talking about is creating more money out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve is authorized to do -- and has been doing in recent years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a month.
When the federal government spends far beyond the tax revenues it has, it gets the extra money by selling bonds. The Federal Reserve has become the biggest buyer of these bonds, since it costs them nothing to create more money.
This new money buys just as much as the money you sacrificed to save for years. More money in circulation, without a corresponding increase in output, means rising prices. Although the numbers in your bank book may remain the same, part of the purchasing power of your money is transferred to the government. Is that really different from what Cyprus has done?
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/03/26/can-it-happen-here-n1548498/page/full/
State of Illinois, meet Reality
Illinois, while not the most populous state, has led the nation in unfunded pension liabilities and bond debt. Now, however, its borrowing binge may be endingThe change has not come about because the state is defaulting on its payments or seeking bankruptcy. As of now Federal bankruptcy law does not allow states to file in Federal court for bankruptcy protection. The real reason for the change is that the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) charged the state of Illinois with securities fraud for misrepresenting its financial position from 2005 to early 2009. In most of those years the Governor of the State was Rod Blagojevich, the carefully coiffed chief executive who was convicted of trying to sell Barack Obama's senate seat when he resigned to run for president.
The governor was convicted of corruption and is now serving a 14-year sentence. Unfortunately, the damage he did to the fiscal stability of Illinois and the taxpayers of Illinois will last much longer than his incarceration. Under his leadership, the state consistently passed wildly irresponsible budgets, and even though the state constitution requires a balanced budget, the budget was "balanced" by issuing bonds every year.
However, after Blagojevich left, from March 2009 to January 2013, the state of Illinois saw its credit rating lowered a total of 11 times by Moody's, Fitch, and S&P combined. This means Illinois must pay 1.45 percentage points more than the nation's AAA-rated states on 10 year bonds. This deprives state programs that assist the poor of badly-needed services, and led the state to choose to cut back on Medicaid spending rather than on lavish pensions. It also has a stack of unpaid bills to vendors amounting to over 7 billion dollars. The Cato Institute has called Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, who followed Blagojevich, the worst governor in the nation for failing to show any leadership in either fiscal responsibility or pension reform.
Today $96.8 billion dollars of unfunded pension debt looms over the state's fiscal future. This will place heavy burdens on the taxpayers of the state for decades to come. And Cook County, the county that contains the City of Chicago and some of its satellite suburbs, also has a startling debt of $140 billion of its own in addition to the state debt. This single county obligation is far greater than the total debt of most other states.
Since the SEC has accused Illinois of misrepresenting its debt, however, Illinois may no longer be able to bail itself out by selling bonds on Wall Street. Just this past January it tried to raise $500 million by selling bonds and Wall Street said no. Its borrowing days are over.
Just a few days ago Illinois passed a new law that will begin to rein in its unfunded pension liability. Now state workers will no longer have their pensions increased three percent per year on their entire pension, just the first $25,000.
For all but two of the past 30 years the Illinois State House has been run by Speaker Michael Madigan. He so thoroughly dominates the Illinois legislature that the state has been renamed "Madiganistan" by Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass.
But in this case the speaker's total control over the legislature does have a benefit. Having been forced to finally begin to come to terms with the state's debt, the speaker is the one person with the power to change things. If Michael Madigan tells the state's public sector unions the state's borrowing days are over, they have no choice but to listen. They have supported him and his party for decades.
But this change was initiated not by the politicians but the private sector. And this may be a harbinger of things to come for Washington, D.C. and Obama's borrowing binge. President Obama learned his spending/borrowing habits from Illinois state leaders and the City of Chicago's mayors. It's no surprise that under his leadership the U.S. has seen its first reduction in its credit rating.
But the private investors who no longer want to invest in Illinois bonds may be the first sign that Obama's spending days are coming to a close. Foreign nations may no longer be willing to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. This point comes nearer every day. In the meantime the president is using Federal Reserve QE3 to raise the national debt limit, since an obstinate House will no longer vote for a significant increase in the debt ceiling.
The inability of Illinois politicians to control their spending is finally being recognized and restrained by the private capital market. This is all good news for residents of Illinois and the U.S. taxpayer. One can only wonder if the SEC will direct is attention toward the Obama's Administration spending; or if the SEC has the authority to charge the White House with misrepresenting the nation's long-term fiscal stability when it issues T-bonds to the global bond market.
While presidents in the past have fought with Congress over spending, Obama has now bypassed the Congress and is spending using the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department. This issue, along with major entitlement program spending liabilities, dominates the long-term economic landscape.
Production Obstruction
Critics cite mounting evidence that Obama administration is blocking oil and gas production
The report is the latest addition to a mounting body of evidence undercutting the administration’s claims that it has fostered increased oil and gas production, critics say. Production on lands the federal government controls has plummeted during Barack Obama’s presidency.
The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) inspector general examined 1,881 applications for drilling permits on public land. Fewer than 4 percent of those applications were “recent,” or filed in the last 180 days. The rest had experienced prolonged delays.
“By not processing these nominations as expeditiously as possible,” the Forest Service, a division of the USDA, “may be causing the federal government to forego revenue or prevent or delay the efforts of the private sector to provide energy to the public.”
The report is the second analysis by a federal body this month to support claims by administration critics that its energy policies have restricted domestic oil and gas production.
“On every front, when it comes to oil and gas production, [Obama’s] agencies have been doing less and less and making it harder and harder” to extract fossil fuels from federal land, said Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research.
The administration continues to tout increases in total U.S. oil and gas production as evidence that its energy policies are furnishing increased domestic energy resources.
But production decreases on federal land have some members of Congress crying foul.
Obama is “trying to use some kind of Jedi mind trick to say, ‘there is no problem here, move along,’” said Rep. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.).
Would-be oil and gas producers “run into nothing but roadblocks and delays” in the federal permit application process, Gardner said.
Gardner is a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which held a hearing last year on those delays.
Chairman Fred Upton (R., Mich.) said at the hearing that the administration had offered “one excuse after another for preventing energy production entirely or subjecting it to years of unnecessary delays.”
The president continues to tout total production numbers while avoiding any mention of the decline in production on federal land.
“We produce more oil than we have in 15 years. We import less oil than we have in 20 years,” Obama said at a March 15 speech on energy policy. The White House website cites similar statistics.
Obama used his speech this month to push for a plan to use federal oil and gas revenues to pay for renewable energy projects. However, the report made available Friday suggests that his policies are restricting those revenues by delaying approval of oil and gas projects on federal land.
The report came on the heels of a Congressional Research Service report showing that oil and gas production on federal land is currently below fiscal year 2007 levels.
“All of the increase [in crude oil production] from FY2007 to FY2012 took place on non-federal land,” the report stated. Natural gas production on federal land fell by about 23 percent during the same time.
CRS found that from 2006 to 2011 the average processing time for an oil or gas drilling permit application on federal land increased from 218 days to 307 days.
As USDA’s IG noted, those delays can reduce energy production and federal lease revenue.
They can also damage communities that depend on small oil and gas producers to power their local economies, according to Dan Naatz, vice president of federal resources for the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
Delays in federal permit applications can have “a devastating impact on communities” in western states such as Nevada where 83 percent of the land is federally owned, Naatz said.
Gardner said his constituents have complained about their inability to secure oil and gas leases on federal land in Colorado. More than a third of the state’s land is federally owned.
One Colorado oil and gas producer recently told the Energy and Commerce Committee that delays in federal permitting for oil and gas production were forcing the company to reconsider activities on federal land.
“While public lands projects almost always take longer than comparable private and state projects, the delays I’ve seen in the last few years make me question for the first time whether I want to undertake new oil and gas business with the federal government,” Reed Williams, president of WillSource Enterprise, a small oil and gas drilling company, told the committee last year.
“That’s a strange thing to say since WillSource now believes the project could produce $3 billion worth of natural gas; generating significant job and economic growth,” Williams added.
“The bottom line is: If we could access more of our public and private lands, we would be creating more jobs,” Gardner said.
http://freebeacon.com/production-obstruction/
Obama Pursues Royal Prerogative as MSM Remains Silent
On Monday, Breitbart's Matthew Boyle broke the story that First Daughters Sasha and Malia Obama are spending their spring break at a resort in the Bahamas. Breitbart's Mike Flynn followed up with an analysis showing how this reflected President Obama's budget priorities. There is enough money in President Obama's post sequester FY 2013 federal budget to provide Secret Service protection for his daughters vacationing outside the country, Flynn noted, but not enough to keep the White House open for tours for the children of average American taxpayers.Throughout the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, President Obama promised to transform America into something better, a land filled with hope and change. It appears, however, that the man who vacations in Martha's Vineyard, golfs with Tiger Woods, and sends the Secret Service to accompany his wife and daughters on international vacations to Spain, Mexico, and now the Bahamas has another agenda in mind. He seeks to transform constitutional presidential authority into royal prerogative. Judging by the failure of any media source other than Breitbart, Drudge, and Instapundit to cover this story, it is also quite clear that the mainstream media has decided to play the role of dutiful courtiers to this expansion of presidential powers.
Prerogative is not a word used very often these days. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as "an exclusive or special right, power, or privilege: as one belonging to an office or an official body . . . [or] to a person, group, or class of individuals." During the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers used this word frequently to refer to those special powers and privileges that could be exercised only by the British monarch, King George III. Their complaint about George III was simple. In his treatment of the American colonies, he had far expanded the royal prerogative beyond those special powers and privileges identified in the unwritten English Constitution.
This, of course, was one reason why our Founding Fathers insisted on a written Constitution, ratified by the citizens, with a Bill of Rights that guaranteed freedom of the press. Presidential authority would be constrained by both the written words of the Constitution and the free press, acting as a watch dog of executive abuse.
But during the Obama administration, presidential authority has been unconstrained to a remarkable degree, ranging from the unconstitutional use of the "recess" appointment to blatant abuses of executive privilege. The courtiers of the mainstream media have been fawning in their treatment of these unfettered and apparently successful attempts to transform traditional constitutionally authorized presidential authority into extraconstitutional royal prerogative.
The mainstream media's protection of President Obama's budget hypocrisy in denying access to the White House to thousands of American school children while authorizing the latest international vacation for the First Daughters is but the latest example of the most troubling transformation of all--that of the watch dog media into fawning royal courtiers.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/03/25/Obama-Transforms-Presidential-Authority-into-Royal-Prerogative-as-MSM-Courtiers-Remain-Silent
Revealing What States Are Hiding
How much are we spending
on education? Actually, far more than we know—because as it turns out, states
are hiding some of the teachers’ benefits.
In a new paper, Heritage expert Jason Richwine reveals that “Proper accounting would reveal tens of billions of dollars in extra teacher pension costs, equivalent to somewhere around $1,000 in unreported spending per student.”
That’s right—the real cost of education is far higher than we’ve been told, but it’s not because of extra classroom resources or newer facilities. It’s because of teachers’ pensions.
Richwine explains:
Richwine says that “The NCES should revise its data collection procedures to require proper accounting of teacher pension costs, giving taxpayers a more accurate picture of education expenditures.”
In a new paper, Heritage expert Jason Richwine reveals that “Proper accounting would reveal tens of billions of dollars in extra teacher pension costs, equivalent to somewhere around $1,000 in unreported spending per student.”
That’s right—the real cost of education is far higher than we’ve been told, but it’s not because of extra classroom resources or newer facilities. It’s because of teachers’ pensions.
Richwine explains:
This undercounting occurs because the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) allows states to define teacher pension costs as whatever school districts happen to contribute to their pension funds each year, rather than the amount needed to pay for future pension benefits.This is not just an accounting problem—it’s a matter of transparency about the real cost of teacher pensions. Governments routinely contribute less than is needed to cover future pension benefits, but those benefits are guaranteed. That means taxpayers must cover the full costs, sooner or later.
Because pension benefits are guaranteed by state law and often by state constitutions, underfunding pension plans today does not reduce benefits or save money in the long term. It simply delays paying for steadily accruing benefits, forcing future taxpayers to deal with the growing problem.Thankfully, this transparency problem can be fixed—states and local school districts just have to own up to the real costs of their teacher benefit programs.
Richwine says that “The NCES should revise its data collection procedures to require proper accounting of teacher pension costs, giving taxpayers a more accurate picture of education expenditures.”
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/26/states-hide-teachers-pensions/?roi=echo3-15012313843-11990012-ccffbedc689098e76248b93fa00fbaf8&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
No comments:
Post a Comment