WASHINGTON (AFP) – The withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will allow for a reduced US defense budget in 2012 but the war in Afghanistan still costs the United States close to 300 million dollars a day.
Under the Pentagon’s proposed budget, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will drop to $117.8 billion for fiscal year 2012, a reduction of 41.5 billion from the previous year.
As the US war effort winds down in Iraq, the budget sets aside $10.6 billion for “Operation New Dawn,” with the remaining 50,000 US troops there due to withdraw by the end of 2011.
Spending for the Afghan mission calls for $107.3 billion, down slightly from the last budget, which requested $113.5 billion.
President Barack Obama has vowed to start a withdrawal in July of the roughly 97,000 troops now in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration’s statement that the government will not be adding to the debt by the middle of the decade clashes hard against the facts, Republicans say, leaving officials straining to justify the budget claim they’ve pushed repeatedly over the past few days.
As it turns out, the administration is not counting interest payments. That means the budget team plans to have enough money to pay for ordinary spending programs by the middle of the decade. But it won’t have the money to pay off those pesky — rather, gargantuan — interest payments. So it will have to borrow some more, in turn increasing the debt and increasing the size of future interest payments year after year.
So how then, visibly agitated Republicans asked, can the administration claim that its 2012 spending plan sets the country on a course to “pay for what we spend” in just a few years?
National debt is over $14 trillion, the federal budget deficit is $1.4 trillion and, depending on whose estimates are used, the unfunded liability or indebtedness of the federal government (mostly in the form of obligations for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drugs) is estimated to be between $60 and $100 trillion.
Those entitlements along with others account for nearly 60 percent of federal spending. They are what Congress calls mandatory or non-discretionary spending. Then there’s discretionary spending, half of which is for national defense. Each year, non-discretionary spending consumes a higher and higher percent of the federal budget.
The spending path that Congress has chosen for the last half-century is unsustainable and will end up with economic collapse but little or nothing can be done about it unless I’m grossly wrong about the American people. Americans who detest our country and those who love our country are hell-bent, wittingly or unwittingly, on destroying it.
You say, “Williams, that’s not only insulting but shows little trust as well. Explain yourself!”
In the video you are about to see, George Soros talks about “the creation of a New World Order”, he discusses the need for a “managed decline” of the U.S. dollar and he talks at length of the global need for a true world currency. So just who is George Soros? Well, he is a billionaire “philanthropist” who came to be known as “the Man Who Broke the Bank of England” when he raked in a staggering one billion dollars during the 1992 “Black Wednesday” currency crisis. These days Soros is most famous for being perhaps the most “politically active” (at least openly) billionaire in the world. His Open Society Institute is in more than 60 countries and it spends approximately $600 million a year promoting the ideals that Soros wants promoted. Soros and his pet organizations have played a key role in quite a few “revolutions” around the globe over the last several decades, but these days the main goal of George Soros is to bring political change to the United States.
So exactly what is it that George Soros is trying to accomplish? Well, in a nutshell, what he wants is a Big Brother-style one world government based on extreme European-style socialism, strict population control and the radical green agenda. It would be a world where the state tightly regulates everything that we do for the greater benefit of the environment and of society as a whole.
However, Soros is not the “mastermind of the New World Order” that some have tried to make him out to be. The truth is that to those in the international banking elite, Soros is considered to be something of a “black sheep” and an “outsider”. Much of what Soros is trying to accomplish lines up with the goals of the international banking elite, but what they don’t like is that Soros won’t stop publicly talking about a global currency and a “New World Order”. Of course the international banking elite very much want a global currency and a “New World Order”, but what they don’t need is a “squeaky wheel” like Soros running around drawing unneeded attention to those goal
“Death panels” received renewed interest over the Christmas season in a New York Times piece by Robert Pear, “Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan That Caused Stir.” The story outlines a new 691-page regulation that to puts into place end-of-life counseling, called “advanced care planning,” via the Medicare program.
The regulation is provided for “in the case where an injury or illness causes the individual to be unable to make health care decisions”. This is essentially a living will where the patient and the doctor would come to a determination about what to do if a patient became incapacitated. This provision was originally removed in the Senate version of the bill after public outcry emerged, spearheaded by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
That it has reappeared in regulation after being rejected by Congress is troubling, and has renewed worries that such “counseling” could be utilized to coerce seniors into foregoing life-sustaining treatments. That is certainly cause for concern, but may only be the tip of the iceberg for “death panels”.
Enacted into Section 3403 of ObamaCare was the Independent Payments Advisory Board, an entity whose express responsibility is to “reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending”.
The whole purpose of this panel is to diminish the amount of money spent on a per beneficiary basis. To hide that, the bill states that “The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care…or otherwise restricts benefits” or restrict eligibility of citizens to access Medicare. This is slightly misleading. The panel is authorized to make near-binding recommendations on Congress to restrict the growth of Medicare spending per individual.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office said it could not render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.
“Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be done to improve federal financial management,” Acting Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said in a statement. “Shortcomings in three areas again prevented us from expressing an opinion on the accrual-based financial statements.”
The main obstacles to a GAO opinion were: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense that made its financial statements unauditable, (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.
The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism.
The attempt to place the blame on laissez faire is readily confirmed by a Google search under the terms “crisis + laissez faire.” On the first page of the results that come up, or in the web entries to which those results refer, statements of the following kind appear:
* “The mortgage crisis is laissez-faire gone wrong.”
* “Sarkozy [Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France] said ‘laissez-faire’ economics, ‘self-regulation’ and the view that ‘the all-powerful market’ always knows best are finished.”
* “‘America’s laissez-faire ideology, as practiced during the subprime crisis, was as simplistic as it was dangerous,’ chipped in Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister.”
* “Paulson brings laissez-faire approach on financial crisis….”
* “It’s au revoir to the days of laissez faire.”
New Speak over the years had created the politically correct name of socialism and progressiveness as an alternative to the term Communism. The same as global warming changed to climate change and to multidimensional atmospheric pressure redistribution (or whatever they are calling it today).
Now, Communist Bill Gates has changed the term Communist to “creative Capitalism.” In the following video, he speaks to the People’s Magazine Editor on the subject.
Defenders of public employee pension systems often make the case that pension benefits are not all that generous. The outrageous cases you see on the news — Long Island police retiring in their 40s with pensions in excess of base pay, administrators “retiring” with six-figure pensions and then going back to work with another government agency, one ex-FDNY firefighter running marathons on his $86,000 “disability” pension — are the exceptions, they say.
By JOSH BARRO and E.J. McMAHON
New York Post
Last Updated: 5:14 AM, December 19, 2010
Posted: 11:49 PM, December 18, 2010
The data, however, tells a different story. According to the Census Bureau, the average New York retiree receiving a corporate or union pension — a retiree from the private sector — was receiving an annual benefit of $13,100 in 2009. For state and local government retirees, that figure was more than twice as high: $27,600. And that average figure includes retirees who were part-time workers or only spent part of their careers in government; full-career retirees often do far better.
To understand what sort of public pension you might be eligible for, the Empire Center for New York State Policy has created a Pension Calculator, available at nypensionbomb.org. Simply enter your age at retirement, years worked and final average salary — typically, the average of your wage earnings in your last three years worked — and you can see what benefit you would be entitled to, if you were lucky enough to work for the government.
By RANDALL HOVEN
New York Post
Last Updated: 10:19 AM, December 19, 2010
Posted: 11:28 PM, December 18, 2010
According to Barack Obama, “The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact.” But according to Margaret Thatcher, “The facts of life are conservative.” Who’s right?
Myth: The deficit was caused by Bush’s tax cuts.
Fact: For over four decades, 1960 through 2000, federal revenues averaged 18.2% of Gross Domestic Product and the trend was virtually flat. The final Bush tax rates became effective in 2003. In 2006 and 2007, well after the new tax rates were in effect, federal revenues were 18.2% and 18.5% of GDP, above historical levels. The federal government collected over half a trillion dollars more in 2007 than it did in 2000.
Myth: Republicans spent like drunken sailors.
Fact: Federal spending from 1960 through 2000 averaged 20.3% of GDP, with a slightly upward trend. The average over all Bush years, 2001 through 2008, was 19.6% of GDP – below the historical average. The 2001-2008 average deficit was also below the 1960-2000 average.
It took two days to print and it will take even longer to read.
According to The Hill, Senate Republicans are going through with a plan to have the entire omnibus spending bill read on the Senate floor, a feat that won’t be completed for 50 hours.
Republicans have vowed to vote against the 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion bill that is loaded with billions in earmarks.
“Senate clerks are expected to read the massive bill in rotating shifts around the clock — taking breaks to drink water and pop throat lozenges — to keep legislative business on track, according to a Democratic leadership aide,” The Hill reports.
That would mean any Senate business would be stalled until Saturday evening.
Yesterday, Senate Democrats dropped their 1,924-page omnibus spending bomb on Capitol Hill. My column today reports on the other omnibus bomb up their sleeves — a massive omnibus land grab that Dingy Harry Reid vowed yesterday to bring up before the stretched-out lame-duck session ends. It’s green pork galore: “Reid’s staff sees a natural resources omnibus as a rare chance for members to bring something home to their districts and therefore worth the extra time needed to see such a large bill through to completion.”
Many of the items on the enviros’ wish list have been divvied up between the omnibus spending bill and the omnibus lands bill. (I’ve uploaded them both below for easy reference.) A San Francisco Bay restoration grant program pushed by Sen. Boxer (p. 874), Great Lakes watershed program (p. 626), Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta heritage designation (p.880), and Montana forest and watershed plan pushed by Sen. Tester (p. 897) are among the eco-goodies stuffed into the omnibus spending bill. Dozens of other land grabs have been bundled together in the omnibus lands bill, including several projects in Reid’s home state of Nevada, as I note below.
May 22, 2012 1813 Richard Wagner 1931 Kenny Ball 1950 Bernie Taupin 1859 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1938 Susan Strasberg 1959 Morrissey 1907 Lord Laurence Olivier 1946 George Best 1970 Naomi Campbell
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