This video highlights what the left-wing AARP is really about.
Don’t join this organization. If you are a senior, join AMAC instead. They’re more conservative than AARP.
UPDATE:
For those of you without Youtube!
Liberal:
CNN summary
NPR summary
Conservative:
Republican Congressman Reichert
An excellent blog post
Finally. From the Wall Street Journal.
Excerpt:
[Tuesday] morning the new House Republican majority will introduce a budget that moves the debate from billions in spending cuts to trillions.
[…]The president’s recent budget proposal would accelerate America’s descent into a debt crisis. It doubles debt held by the public by the end of his first term and triples it by 2021. It imposes $1.5 trillion in new taxes, with spending that never falls below 23% of the economy. His budget permanently enlarges the size of government. It offers no reforms to save government health and retirement programs, and no leadership.
Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.
A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.
Read the whole article for the details of the budget, which include:
Here’s the official video:
Here’s the official page for Ryan’s Path to Prosperity budget proposal.
Here’s a little more motivation from the grown-ups at Investors Business Daily.
Excerpt:
By the Social Security and Medicare Trustees’ own estimates, we are running headlong into a fiscal tsunami. All told, the government’s entitlement accountants say, we have roughly $107 trillion in unfunded liabilities — $340,836 and change for every American alive today.
Even if you’re generous and reduce that by the amount of assets the government has, the future red ink at the end of the 2010 fiscal year was still about $57 trillion — $7 trillion for federal pensions, $17 trillion for Social Security, $22 trillion for Medicare, and about $11 trillion or so in debt. That’s $481,000 for every U.S. household.
I am sad because children being born today will have a lower standard of living tomorrow. We are spending away their future and it has got to stop! Why fuss about “saving the planet” when we are saddling the young with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?
Related posts
Excerpt:
Government payouts—including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance—make up more than a third of total wages and salaries of the U.S. population, a record figure that will only increase if action isn’t taken before the majority of Baby Boomers enter retirement.
Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.
“The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs, in a note to clients. “Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits.”
The economist gives the country two stark choices. In order to get welfare back to its pre-recession ratio of 26 percent of pay, “either wages and salaries would have to increase $2.3 trillion, or 35 percent, to $8.8 trillion, or social welfare benefits would have to decline $500 billion, or 23 percent, to $1.7 trillion,” she said.
[…]Social welfare benefits have increased by $514 billion over the last two years, according to TrimTabs figures, in part because of measures implemented to fight the financial crisis. Government spending normally takes on a larger part of the spending pie during economic calamities but how can the country change this make-up with the root of the crisis (housing) still on shaky ground, benchmark interest rates already cut to zero, and a demographic shift that calls for an increase in subsidies?
At the very least, we can take solace in the fact that we’re not quite at the state welfare levels of Europe. In the U.K., social welfare benefits make up 44 percent of wages and salaries, according to TrimTabs’ Schnapp.
You can see a nice graph of welfare spending and another graph of single motherhood in this post at Director Blue. He makes the same point I made about increased welfare spending destroys marriage by reducing the need for men in their traditional roles.
WINTERY KNIGHT 