Tag Archives: Spending

News

The U.S. government sends out 200 million checks per month

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Marco Rubio talks about how the massive spending spree started when the Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2007, and about how the Democrats have been running government for 2.5 years without a budget, and about Obama’s silly budget proposal which was rejected 97-0 in the Senate. He also hammers Obama for not putting forward a plan, the need to create more jobs in order to get more people to pay taxes without raising tax rates, anf the need to reform entitlement programs in order to save them. He also takes questions from John Kerry.

Why is there so much spending? Radical leftist Ezra Klein explains why in this Washington Post article.

Excerpt:

I’ve been saying the federal government sends out 80 million checks a month, a number I got from the Bipartisan Policy Center. The president says the government sends out 70 million. Alec MacGillis says we’re both wrong:

The figures used by Obama and Geithner were, if anything, too low. They relied on Treasury Department figures from June that include Social Security (56 million checks that month), veterans benefits (4.5 million checks), and spending on non-defense contractors and vendors (1.8 million checks).

But those numbers do not include reimbursements to Medicare providers and vendors (100 million claims in June), and electronic transfers to the 21 million households receiving food stamps.

Nor do they include most spending by the Defense Department, which has a payroll of 6.4 million active and retired employees and, on average, pays nearly 1 million invoices and 660,000 travel expense claims per month.

Obama’s and Geithner’s statements were hyperbolic only in one sense: The vast majority of the payments are now electronic, not checks per se. Of the roughly 80 million payments that the Treasury Department made in June, just 12 million were paper checks, half of them to Social Security recipients who prefer to get their allotment in the mail.Yikes.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News tweeted this today:

Democrats are selling your children into slavery so they’ll have more cash to give to bribe their supporters with.

Most of the time the government writes a check, it is redistributing money from those who work and earn to some other group of people who did not earn that money. In some cases, these expenditures are legitimate – as with defense. But in other cases, it is just borrowing from children’s futures in order to pay off other people who should be taking responsibility for their own lives.

News

Should we cut foreign aid to governments who oppose us at the UN?

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From CNS News, a story about foreign policy.

Excerpt:

A Republican amendment to appropriations legislation would bar funding for any government that opposes the U.S. position at the United Nations more often than not. Although unlikely to make it into law, the amendment draws fresh attention to the fact that a majority of countries, including most leading recipients of U.S. foreign aid, would fall into that category.

Among multiple amendments inserted into the State Department and foreign operations authorization bill during a House Foreign Affairs Committee markup last week was one by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) prohibiting any foreign assistance to governments that vote against the U.S. position at the U.N. more than 50 percent of the time.

Grades would be obtained from annual State Department reports on voting practices at the U.N., which have been required under U.S. law for decades, and would relate to votes in the General Assembly during its most recent session, or in the case of members of the Security Council, to their votes in both the council and assembly.

In order to waive the prohibition, the president would, on a case-by-case basis, have to issue Congress with a determination that invoking the waiver was “important to the national interests of the United States.”

Duncan’s amendment passed by a party-line vote of 22-18, and was among those incorporated into the final version of the bill that passed out of the full committee by a 23-20 vote late last Thursday night.

“We’re $14.3 trillion in debt,” the tea party-backed Republican freshman said in a statement Monday. “Why should we pay countries to hate us when they’ve shown they’re willing to do it for free?”

“The United States has no business giving money away to countries and groups who seek to do us harm.”

This bill makes sense, so the Democrats are opposed to it.

News

John Boehner stands up for spending cuts and job creation

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Obama went on television last night to argue for more wasteful spending and higher taxes on job creators. I guess he thinks that 1.65 trillion dollar deficits and a 9.2% unemployment rate is acceptable for working families, as long as he isn’t personally affected by it.

The Wall Street Journal did not like Obama’s speech at all.

Excerpt:

The Obama Presidency has been unprecedented in many ways, and last night we saw another startling illustration: A President using a national TV address from the White House to call out his political opposition as unreasonable and radical and blame them as the sole reason for the “stalemate” over spending and the national debt.

We’ve watched dozens of these speeches over the years, and this was more like a DNC fund-raiser than an Oval Office address. Though President Obama referred to the need to compromise, his idea of compromise was to call on the public to overwhelm Republicans with demands to raise taxes. He demeaned the GOP for protecting, in his poll-tested language, “millionaires and billionaires,” for favoring “corporate jet owners and oil companies” over seniors on Medicare, and “hedge fund managers” over “their secretaries.” While he invoked Ronald Reagan, the Gipper would never have used such rhetoric about his opposition on an issue of national moment.

[…]Apart from shifting blame for any debt default, the speech was also an attempt to inoculate Mr. Obama in case the U.S. loses its AAA credit rating. He cleverly, if dishonestly, elided the credit-rating issue with the debt-ceiling debate. But he knows that Standard & Poor’s has said that it may cut the U.S. rating even if Congress moves on the debt ceiling. Mr. Obama wants to avoid any accountability for the spending blowout of the last three years that has raised the national debt held by the public—the kind we have to pay back—from 40% in 2008 to 72% next year, and rising. This will be the real cause of any downgrade.

Speaker John Boehner made clear in his speech that the GOP doesn’t want a default but wants more genuine cuts in spending. Mr. Obama is betting his rhetoric will cause the public to turn against the GOP, but we wonder if voters will be persuaded by a man whose concept of leadership is the politics of blame.

Thankfully, John Boehner isn’t going to let Obama get away with wrecking the economy any more.

Here’s Boehner’s response:

The transcript is here.

Obama’s Monday night speech was insulting, deceptive, vindictive and divisive. He doesn’t know how to solve a problem by getting people who are opposed to him to buy into a compromise plan. Instead, he just goes in front of cameras and insults the people he has to work with. That is not the right way to get people to work together. Imagine if a manager in a private company called a press conference to excoriate some people on a different team in that company. Is that any way to get people working together to solve a problem? To point fingers at your co-workers and poison the well? It’s juvenile. Where is his plan? How is he solving the problem?

The only people I see solving the problem are intelligent people like Paul Ryan, John Campbell, Tom Price, Tom McClintock, Mike Simpson, Ken Calvert and Tom Cole. People who work weekends developing solutions. People who understand how to write policies. People with degrees in economics, business and finance. People with private sector experience running businesses and creating jobs. Obama isn’t one of those people. Obama just reads a teleprompter. He doesn’t know how to create jobs – he never did it before becoming President. So why did we elect him?