Monday, February 13, 2012

Bread, Circuses & Fuzzy Math For All!

It is annual budget roll-out day! I know you've been looking forward to it. We've gone without a budget enacted into law for three years now but we still have the kabuki performance and it was simply spectacular this year.


Everyone walks around these days with an 8GB flash drive or two in their pocket. All the data you might need in a lifetime, indexed and searchable and smaller than the size of your house key! Yet they still print the budget proposal in huge blue bound volumes that look like the Manhattan phonebook, if anyone gets those any more. They load them on pallets and fork-lift them into the halls of Congress where people heft them but will NEVER crack a page or look anything up because they aren't really the budget at all but simply a proposal for a photo op.

Budget Hits the Floor, Congress Critters Swoon

A few minutes ago the satellite let me hear the inspiring words of the Messiah himself as he surrounded his teleprompters with sycophantic community college students and in that familiar Baptist sermon cadence he fanned the flames of class warfare and promised all things to all needy people and a level of discriminatory "fairness" that has never before been contemplated. If you don't have it, you shall be given it! If you think they have too much, it shall be taken from them. If you want a job, you will be hired by a company which will make products which nobody wants but which the government knows you should have because they are good for you.
Obama would also go outside the box by creating new mandatory spending initiatives costing tens of billions of dollars and for the first time, openly tap war savings to fund his domestic agenda.
You see, we are deeply in debt and spending much more than we take in, so we will initiate huge spending increases and after crediting dollars not spent winning wars (which we will have conceded to the enemy)  in Afghanistan and Iraq toward savings we will then spend them on the domestic agenda, aka welfare handouts.
Obama is also proposing an ambitious $476 billion six-year transportation package –a nearly 50 percent increase over current spending—as the centerpiece of his new infrastructure budget. And $231 billion of this cost would be covered by war savings, rather than demand an increase in the gasoline tax.
Try not to notice that he is spending the same money a third time after counting it as savings.
But his long-term deficit reduction plan rests very much on achieving $1.43 trillion in 10-year revenue increases at the households with income over $250,000.
If you achieve a modicum of success, you will be considered a millionaire with only one-quarter of that amount required. See how easy it has become? And in ten years you're going to pitch in a trillion and a half just to insure you don't really become an actual millionaire.

Probably the neatest thing I heard the Bamster say was that Congress (they are to blame for it all, you know!) must not allow college loan interest rates to double or they will be denying Biff and Buffy the opportunity to go to two years of college or retraining for a job or four years for a degree or even more education beyond that!

Recall that as part of Affordable Healthcare, all college loans were federalized. You can't get a college tuition loan from First National Bank of Hometown any more. It's a federal loan and lest we inadvertently teach the lesson that loans have costs, we must artificially hold down the interest rates and deny the fundamentals of economics that might cause an increase.

And the crowd roared! He was in his element! They love him!

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