Fearless Leader has once again come under attack by members of the ‘Party of Ideas’. No one knows why ‘Ideas’ is pluralized (because they only have one idea; that tax cuts can solve everything and anything.) Which leads us to a particularly disturbing conclusion…how the hell can you support the most advanced military on the planet if you are unwilling to pay for it?
It’s hard to find somebody more ‘patriotic’ than your flag-waving conservative, but somehow their loud and proud refusal to contribute to the defense of our nation doesn’t subtract from their patriotic fervor, or zeal for that matter.
Here we ride the ‘knife’s edge’ of the conundrum, how can conservatives be considered Right Wing, ‘Strong on Defense’, Hawks while refusing to fund the very flag they use to wrap themselves in?
Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question here. What we should be asking is how wonderful is it to own the press? With the press in you pocket, you can fuck up by the numbers and still proclaim yourself the ‘champions’.
You can fool some of the people some of the time but after a while the majority starts to get wise.
So we arrive at tonight’s offering
Obama’s 2010 Budget: Deficit Soars Amid Job Spending
By REUTERS
Published: February 1, 2010
Filed at 1:01 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Risking public anxiety over spending, U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday projected the budget deficit at a fresh record in 2010 as he battles double-digit unemployment before tightening finances in later years.
Criticized by Republicans as a tax-and-spend liberal, Obama is under pressure to convince investors like China he has a credible plan to control the U.S. deficit and debt over time.
"We won't be able to bring down this deficit overnight, given that the recovery is still taking hold," Obama said after laying out $3.8 trillion (2.38 trillion pounds) in spending plans for the fiscal year to September 30, 2011.
"We will continue, for example, to do what it takes to create jobs. That is reflected in my budget. It is essential," he said in a televised statement from the White House. [Um ‘bribing’ small businesses to hire workers they don’t necessarily need isn’t going to ‘solve’ anything. Worse, if the tax incentive is too small cash-strapped companies won’t hire. If it’s too big the, er, ‘temptation’ to cheat (churn their labor pool, just because they can) will only enrich employers while creating zero ‘new’ jobs.]
His blueprint now goes to a Congress deeply split on how to handle the twin woes of a massive deficit and high unemployment amid a still fragile emergence from recession. And lawmakers getting to work on the annual budget battle will be in no mood to anger voters ahead of congressional elections in November. [That’s it, beat them with a ballot box that nobody trusts and the media controls…]
The budget forecast a $1.56 trillion deficit in 2010, or 10.6 percent of the economy measured by gross domestic product (GDP). This funding gap is up from a 9.9 percent share of GDP in 2009. But the shortfall was forecast to shrink to 8.3 percent of GDP in 2011, and to have halved from the level Obama inherited when he took office when his terms ends in January 2013, keeping a key pledge. [There’s some ‘mighty optimistic’ arithmetic at work here considering how much of our economy slide beneath the waves, never to be seen again in 2008.]
The deficit's rise in 2010 was partly due to the $787 billion stimulus package Obama pushed through Congress soon after taking office last year to fight the recession. Obama, a Democrat, pinned the financial mess firmly on his Republican predecessor President George W. Bush. [Ironically the only people who don’t believe the republicans are responsible for this financial disaster are conservative ‘gasbags’ that are always blaming everybody but themselves for the messes they make.]
REPUBLICAN IRE
But Republicans seized on the grim fiscal forecast to criticise Obama's handling of the economy.[How will cutting taxes return our economy to prosperity…no one knows and only conservatives believe. Even the Great Gasbag himself can’t explain how making the already rich, richer is supposed to ‘save’ the economy.]
Senator Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, warned the country was sinking into a "quagmire" of debt and said Obama's stimulus plan had failed to create jobs. [This is the same ass-hat that was set to (and ultimately did) refuse a cabinet post if the Democratic governor of New Hampshire didn’t appoint another Republican to take his place…which raises the question of just who Judd Gregg serves, the people of New Hampshire or the Republican Party?]
"These circumstances call for a bold, game-changing budget that will turn things around, put in place a plan to restrain spending, reduce the debt and tackle the big entitlement programs that are growing out-of-control," he said. "Instead, the president has sent us more of the same." [If the ‘entitlement programs’ that are ‘growing out of control’ weren’t consistently being robbed by the Republicans to fund their wars of choice then Medicare and Social Security would be ‘fully funded’.]
While maintaining policies this year aimed at protecting a still fragile economic recovery, with $100 billion earmarked for measures to create jobs, Obama plans to save money from 2011 by curbing 120 projects, including a powerfully symbolic space mission to return to the moon, but will invest more in education and research. [We’ve been to the Moon, there’s nothing there. Worse…Bush decided we needed to return once China started its own ‘space program’.]
Market reaction was muted and analysts surveyed the numbers with a healthy dose of scepticism. [Um, bizarrely, the markets finished in positive territory today, which must also be ‘skepticism’.]
"I don't think there is anything out there that is job creating and I don't have much confidence that some of the spending cuts will actually happen," said Peter Boockvar, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. [Here’s a guy who knows what he’s talking about, and he’s right…a lot of these ‘spending cuts’ won’t happen…probably because they failed to ‘adjust for inflation’.]
Although Obama submits the budget to Congress, actual decisions about how the government raises and spends money are made on Capitol Hill in a process that usually lasts most of the year. [Isn’t ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ to dick around until the last possible moment then rush like mad at the last minute to ram through a budget so larded with pork your cholesterol jumps 50 points if you look at it for more than twenty seconds.]
Polls show voters are worried by the weak condition of U.S. finances, and Obama plans to create a bipartisan fiscal commission to figure out options on taxes and spending. [Um, nobody is ‘worried’ about the nation’s finances, not after we’ve spent 26 Trillion with a ‘T’ to glue our financial system back together…if that bad boy is broken, ‘We the People’ are going to tear Wall Street apart brick by brick!]
Much of the improvement in the fiscal picture is driven by underlying forecasts adopted in the budget for solid economic growth, yielding higher tax revenue. [Okay, how many of you think we’re in trouble now?]
The economy is forecast to expand by 2.7 percent in 2010, but then pull at an above-average 3.8 percent in 2011 and rise above 4 percent for the following 3 years. [Geez, you can’t help but wonder how much of that is ‘Renewable Energy’? See last night’s post.]
The budget also assumes unemployment will remain high, edging to 8.2 percent in 2012 from 10 percent this year, while inflation stays mild and interest rates rise only slightly.[ What is this? Can you say ‘The ‘New Normal’? If I’m reading this correctly they are expecting a lot fewer people to be spending a lot more money than they have in the past…if this is in any way inflation related we can kiss ‘social stability’ good-bye!]
POLITICAL PAIN
Discontent over the jobless rate translated into political defeat for Obama's Democrats in an election last month for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, costing the Democrats a crucial Senate seat and foreshadowing potentially big losses for the party in the November congressional elections. [This would be true if the Republicans weren’t responsible for the crisis in the first place. So who the hell are you going to vote for, more ‘whacko’ republicans who are likely to start something nobody can get us out of the next time or ‘do nothing’ spineless Democrats that are really just corporate lapdogs? Some choice, eh?]
The budget plan reflects a struggle to bolster the economy and create jobs while tightening the government's belt to reduce the deficit. Those issues are concerns of voters who will elect all 435 members in the House of Representatives and more than a third of the 100 Senate members in November.
To boost jobs, Obama is setting aside $100 billion in 2010 in tax credits aimed at small businesses as well as investments in clean energy and infrastructure, before starting to tighten the country's fiscal belt the following year. [I guess he’s hoping nobody notices we’re going to be buying our ‘clean energy’ from China…]
Economists say withdrawing policies aimed at boosting growth too soon helped prolong the Great Depression in the 1930s. Obama is determined to avoid repeating that mistake. But he must also ensure that investors don't lose confidence in the U.S. ability to put its fiscal house in order. [This IS NOT the freaking Great Depression; IT IS MUCH FREAKING WORSE! These idiots are acting like we still have a gold standard and a ‘closed’ economy when we have neither! That’s why nothing they’ve done so far has had any effect.*]
Democrats control both chambers in Congress. But with Republicans united in opposition to Obama's agenda, he still faces a struggle pulling together Democrats -- who badly need to show voters they are taking steps to reduce unemployment but at the same time face a voter backlash over aggressive spending measures taken to boost the economy. [Aggressive? If anything, the stimulus was too poorly directed to be effective and the fucking Republican’s had a hand in that!]
In a sign of the difficulties Obama has already faced pushing through his domestic agenda in his first year in office, the budget dropped $646 billion in revenues from a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gas emissions -- signaling pessimism that Congress will pass a climate bill with this provision.
You can find the ‘adopted’ version of this article Here
*As I have commented before, it is difficult to see the ‘end game’ here. First the ‘neo-cons’ push the economy off of a cliff and then they have actively acted to block efforts to stem the damage. It’s a damn good thing they ‘own’ the media or they’d be hard pressed to control the message…which isn’t going to work much longer.
The ‘lapdog’ Democrats have not lifted a finger to slow the progress of the ‘corporate revolution’. It is striking how corporate ‘sock puppets’ have run with R’s and D’s after their names even though they all come from the same corporate mold.
There is no longer any discernible difference between Democrats and Republicans, even the ‘animosity’ between the two is ‘superficial’ at best.
Control the parties and you control the process…and it’s sure looking like it’s too late to ensure that the process remains ‘uncorrupted’.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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