Tag Archives: Budget

News

Mitch Daniels thinks that government should cut spending

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Story about frugal Indiana governor Mitch Daniels at the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

Daniels is a font of statistics, but one comes to his lips more than any other. “Only 61 cents of every education dollar gets into the classroom in Indiana.” School funding increased every year under Daniels before the recession, and since the downturn, when most areas of state government have seen cuts of 25 percent or more, education has been reduced by only 2 percent. Yet the local school boards and their Democratic allies in the state legislature continue to complain. Daniels calls education funding “the bloody shirt” of Indiana politics: “It doesn’t take long before somebody starts waving it.” One of my favorite bits of Daniels video on YouTube shows him at a press conference defending a bill to end “social promotion” in the state’s grade schools. School districts were appalled that the bill would pass without “additional resources” to educate the kids who would be held back.

A reporter asked him about it.

“By the time a child has finished third grade, the state has spent $40,000 and the school district has had 720 days to teach that child to read,” he said, tight-lipped. “If that child can’t read by then, there is a fundamental failure in that district. And they’ll need to remedy it. The most unacceptable thing to do is to shove that child along to fourth grade into almost certain academic failure. That’s a cruel thing to do, it’s a wrong thing to do, and we’re going to put an end to it.”

The reporter pressed: But won’t the schools need more money?

Daniels’s eyes got wide.

“More than $40,000 to teach someone how to read? No. It won’t and it shouldn’t and any school district that can’t do it ought to face consequences.”

And this is actually normal behavior for him:

When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest.

Yes, let’s elect people like Mitch Daniels who like to cut costs instead of increasing spending – people with a record for caring about balancing the budget.

UPDATE: Or not! ECM pointed me out this “truce” comment that he made. It turns out that he is soft on social issues and probably a little soft on foreign policy issues as well! Thanks, ECM.

Videos

Tragedy strikes! Paul Ryan is not going to run for President in 2012!

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The thing I like about Paul Ryan is that now matter how bad our problems, he has the answers.

But he’s ruled out running for President in 2012.

Excerpt:

Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican… is ruling out a 2012 run for president.

“I’ll give you as Shermanesque a quote as I can,” said Ryan.  “I am not going to run for president. I’m just not going to do it. My head’s not that big, and my kids are too small.”

but Sarah Palin likes him for President:

Over the weekend, Ryan was singled out for praise by Palin during her interview with “Fox News Sunday.”

Asked to handicap the potential Republican presidential field, Palin refrained from commenting on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, three Republicans actively weighing a White House run in 2012.

Palin said, however, that she was “very impressed” with Ryan before later adding that it would be “absurd” not to consider running for president herself.

“[W]e have some strong — some young Turks in this party,” said Palin. “Paul Ryan — I’m very impressed with Paul Ryan. . . . He’s good. Man, he is sharp. He is smart, articulate. And he is passionate about these commonsense solutions that America has got to adopt to get us on the right road.”

I don’t like Pawlenty, and Huckabee and Romney are not conservative enough either. Huckabee is too far left on economic issues and Romney is too far left on social issues. But Ryan is just right.

That quote about his head being too small and his kids not being big enough is at the end of this video:

He’s got his priorities straight.

News

Does the United States have a debt crisis like Greece?

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Story from CNS News featuring lots of quotes from people I like.

Excerpt:

Brian Riedl, lead budget analyst at The Heritage Foundation, agrees that unless the federal government radically curtails spending, a debt crisis as severe as or worse than that now happening in Greece will erupt in the United States in as soon as seven to 10 years.

“We can say that we will be at about the Greek level of debt probably in the next seven to 10 years,” Riedl told CNSNews.com. “There is no reason that with the same economic policies at the same level of debt, that the United States won’t face the same economic and financial crisis as Greece.”

But for Reidl, who recently issued his own report on federal spending, seven to 10 years may be too optimistic.

“It’s very tough to predict when a financial crisis will hit, because much of it depends on bond market psychology,” Reidl said. “As soon as the bond market decides the U.S. may not be able to fully service its debts, they will respond with a flight from our currency. When the bond market makes that decision is really anybody’s guess. It could be two to three years from now, it could be 10 years from now.”

[…]When Greece started to admit its debt problems last November, the government estimated its deficit last year was 12.7 percent of its GDP – a figure that Eurostat, the European Commission’s official statistics agency, said was too low and which it revised to upward 13.6 percent.

Meanwhile, the U.S. deficit is on track to become 10.3 percent of GDP in 2010 under President Obama’s budget.

In his report, “Federal Spending by the Numbers,”  Reidl pointed out that the projected 2010 U.S. deficit would represent the biggest percentage of GDP the United States has seen since World War II.

That same report shows that average deficits over the next 10 years will be almost $1 trillion instead of returning to pre-recession levels of $100 billion to $400 billion. The projected deficits, Riedl pointed out, would double the current national debt.

However, spending — not shrinking revenue — is the principal cause, according to the report, which said “90 percent of the rising long-term budget deficits are driven by rising spending,” and just 10 percent of the rising deficits are caused by falling revenues.

“This is 100 percent a spending problem in the long term,” Reidl said.

The article also cites two budget experts Sen. Judd Gregg and Rep. Paul Ryan, who agree with Reidl that we will be where Greece is now in about 7 years. The IMF was there to bail out Greece with European and American money. But who will bail out the USA?

If you want to know what Obama is doing instead of minding the store, ECM sent me this article. And a few days ago there was this article. He’s having fun with famous people.