Tag Archives: Debt

Commentary

Parents need to take reponsibility for their children’s prosperity

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Here’s a post from Caffeinated Thoughts. It’s about parenting, faith and prosperity.

Excerpt:

It is my job, as a parent, to raise and protect the children that God has given me. It goes beyond the obvious needs of food, clothing and shelter and into an even greater need of “Train(ing) a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6.  Raising a child involves love, discipline, education and looking out for their needs now, as it will affect them when they are old. If parents in America only provide for a child’s physical needs, forgetting to nurture the whole child, then American parents have done nothing more than what a wild animal does for its offspring. My work as a parent goes well beyond the obvious and must be intentional in training, raising, and nurturing them into moral, ethical and God-fearing adults who will in turn also raise a generation who live and do likewise.

I must also fight for the ethical and moral rights of my children in the political arena, as they are unable to do so for themselves. As [Thomas] Paine stated, “We ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully.” He was looking at his posterity realizing that the condition of the country in which they lived needed a drastic overhaul and unless the adults stepped up and took the initiative, the children would suffer for it.

I like this post because it mentions protecting children’s relationships with God as well as their future economic well-being. I think that most people look at their children and think that their faith will be fine, and that their standard of living will as good as the parent’s, or better. But if we want to give those good things to our children, we need to be careful about how we teach them and how we vote. We can’t just “hope for the best” and expect things to work out – 80% of the young people who attend church through high school fall away from their faith. And the unemployment rate for young people today is over 50%.

News

Did GM pay off its bailout loans by using other government loans?

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Story from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

Moderate Republican Chuck Grassley, who supported Obama’s bailouts, wants to know how GM paid off their debts. He wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Excerpt:

General Motors (GM) yesterday announced that it repaid its TARP loans. I am concerned, however, that this announcement is not what it seems. In fact, it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle.

On Tuesday of this week, Mr. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for TARP, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. During his testimony Mr. Barofsky addressed GM’s recent debt repayment activity, and stated that the funds GM is using to repay its TARP debt are not coming from GM earnings.

Instead, GM seems to be using TARP funds from an escrow account at Treasury to make the debt repayments. The most recent quarterly report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP says “The source of funds for these quarterly [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.” See, Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP, Quarterly Report to Congress dated April 20, 2010, page 115.

Furthermore, Exhibit 99.1 of the Form 8K filed by GM with the SEC on November 16, 2009, seems to confirm that the source of funds for GM’s debt repayments was a multi-billion dollar escrow account at Treasury—not from earnings.

[…]In reality, it looks like GM merely used one source of TARP funds to repay another. The taxpayers are still on the hook, and whether TARP funds are ultimately recovered depends entirely on the government’s ability to sell GM stock in the future. Treasury has merely exchanged a legal right to repayment for an uncertain hope of sharing in the future growth of GM. A debt-for-equity swap is not a repayment.

Ed summarizes:

In other words, this is just a shell game. As Jim Vicevich points out, it’s akin to paying off your Visa credit card with your Mastercard — and then bragging about your financial condition. Taxpayers are still on the hook for GM. Nothing at all has changed.

Instead, we have another good reason for government to refrain from bailing out private companies. It makes them act like government when it comes to transparency about their finances. This claim really does prove that GM now stands for Government Motors.

Michelle Malkin also has a good column here about MORE connections between Democrats and rich Wall Street investment bankers. The Democrats are tightly connected with large corporations and investment banks. As a small government conservative, I find this alarming and unsettling. I believe in separation of government and corporations.

News

CBO estimates Obamacare cost to be 2 trillion from 2014-2023

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From the Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The CBO says that Obamacare would cost $2.0 trillion in the bill’s real first decade (from 2014 to 2023) — and much more in the decades to come.

But $2.0 trillion wouldn’t be the total ten-year costs. Instead, that would merely be the “gross cost of coverage provisions.” Based on earlier incarnations of the proposed overhaul, the total costs would be about a third higher (the exact number can’t be gleaned from the CBO’s analysis, which is only preliminary and is not a full scoring) — making the total price-tag between $2.5 and $3 trillion over the bill’s real first decade.

How would we pay for all of this? According to the CBO, by diverting $1.1 trillion away from already barely-solvent Medicare and spending it on Obamacare, and by increasing taxes on the American people by over $1 trillion. Among the Medicare cuts would be cuts of $25,000 in Medicare Advantage benefits per enrollee — up from $21,000 in the previous scoring.

[…]We’d also pay for this through increased deficits.  Under strict instructions from the Democrats, the CBO gave Obamacare credit for over $400 billion (from 2014 to 2023) in phony “savings” that would allegedly result from cutting doctor’s payments under Medicare by over 20 percent and never raising them back up.  As the CBO notes, one of two things could happen:  Congress could either follow through on these severe pay cuts — in which case doctors would view all Medicare patients as if they have the plague — or, Congress could eliminate these pay cuts — as everyone in Washington expects to have happen under the so-called “doc fix” — in which case the CBO projects that this bill would raise deficits by over $100 billion from 2017 to 2019 alone.

So, after racking up higher deficit spending in two years than President Bush (or any other president) did in two terms, President Obama would leave his successor a 12-figure deficit related to Obamacare alone — for the period from 2017 to 2019 alone.  That’s according to the CBO.

Someone is going to have to pay for all of this spending. Either taxes are going to go up so that we are all out of a job, or the government will print money and devalue the currency via inflation. I hope the young people who voted for Obama like the taste of grass – because that’s all they’ll be eating for the rest of their lives if this spending keeps up.