Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Zbigniew Marzurak at The American Thinker on the real figures regarding the defense outlay – in this fiscal year and in general – as a percentage of GDP and of the overall budget. Don’t buy this hooey about how it’s “bloated” and would be a great place to make big budget cuts.
How’s this for obscene? FHer apparatchiks are advising FHer Congresspeople not to bring up cost reduction when discussing FHer-care.
The main point on which they attempted to sell it to us (and never did, per poll numbers both before and since its passage) was that it was going to make the American health care system less expensive.
Well, okay, now that we know what they’re terrified of us bringing up, let’s bring it up – often and loudly.
Michelle Malkin on the “EduJobs” bill.
. . . and Charlie Rangel is at the center of it. No surprise there.
Brian Reidl of the Heritage Foundation has a great WSJ column on how the argument that W-era tax cuts caused the jaw-dropping growth in deficit projections is a big smokescreen for what’s really going on.
It’s quite a spectacle occurring at the G8/G20 summit in Totonto. TCM exhorting the other powers to keep spending “stimulus” money – i.e., money that’s not there. They get it and he’s the one looking isolated by virture of his cluelessness.
Mona Charen on outgoing budget director Peter Orszag and the two most noteworthy things about him – his disingenuousness in coming up with presentable numbers for FHer-care, and his chaotic sex life. She uses her examination to raise some important cultural points about postmodern morality, the fawning celebrity media, the fallacy of early feminism’s attempt to deny differences between men and women, and postmodern society’s utter disregard for childhood.
Steny Hoyer says there will be no budget resolution this year, but there will be tax increases.
Pathetic. Chilling. Enraging.
Now it’s a bailout package for the states. As we approach November, it’s going to be quite easy to pinpoint those federal legislators who are on record as behaving as if the money doesn’t have to come from anywhere.
Not in TCM’s world. He sends Congress a Saturday night plea for federal funds for cash-strapped entities in which lots of union parasites dwell.
As the recent post on health insurance for the unemployed points out, it’s heartening to see an increasing number of legislators say, “We’ve seen the books, and there is no money.”
Congress won’t be extending health insurance benefits for the unemployed.
Cut taxes and regulation and these people could go back to work. But that’s not the post-American way.
Mona Charen has a great column today on how Harry Reid is going to try to paint Sharron Angle as a nutcase because she’d like to see the Department of Education closed up. (She’d also like to see Social Security phased out, the IRS abolished, and the US withdrawn from the UN. It’s going to be delicious to see Harry Reid come to his embarrasingly public realization that millions and millions of Americans also would like to see these developments, and sooner, not later.) Angle would do well to trumpet the litany of failures on the part of the DoE as her handy response to Harry as he gets his campaign underway. The idea that there’s anything fringe about shutting down a massive government entity wasting billions of dollars is a phantom held only by those whistling past the graveyard.
The Federal Trade Commission is looking into the plausibility of taxing websites like the Drudge Report. Out of concern for the institution of journalism, doncha know:
The ideas being batted around to save the industry share a common theme: They are designed to empower bureaucrats, not consumers. For instance, one proposal would, “Allow news organizations to agree jointly on a mechanism to require news aggregators and others to pay for the use of online content, perhaps through the use of copyright licenses.”
In other words, government policy would encourage a tax on websites like the Drudge Report, a must-read source for the news links of the day, so that the agency can redistribute the funds collected to various newspapers. Such a tax would hit other news aggregators, such as Digg, Fark and Reddit, which not only gather links, but provide a forum for a lively and entertaining discussion of the issues raised by the stories. Fostering a robust public-policy debate, not saving a particular business model, should be the goal of journalism in the first place.
The report also discusses the possibility of offering tax exemptions to news organizations, establishing an AmeriCorps for reporters and creating a national fund for local news organizations. The money for those benefits would come from a suite of new taxes. A 5 percent tax on consumer electronic devices such as iPads, Kindles and laptops that let consumers read the news could be used to encourage people to keep reading the dead-tree version of the news. Other taxes might be levied on the radio and television spectrum, advertising and cell phones.
Where to start with the totalitarian nature of this whole line of thought? It’s naked redistribution. It’s naked censorship. It’s blatant propping up of an industry, which is waaaaaay, waaaaaay outside the government’s constitutional purview.
Take a good, square look at what’s happening folks. We can’t procrastinate this fight. This is the domestic front in World War III.
Caroline Glick’s Townhall column today demonstrates the interconnectedness of the various and sundry matters vexing us at present.
No one – not South Korea, the U.S. or any international body – is going to do anything substantive in response to the North Korean sinking of the Cheonon.
North Korea completed a successful fusion test recently, meaning it is preparing to add hydrogen bombs to its nuclear arsenal.
All the Turkey-Brazil deal with Iran did was demonstrate the ascendancy of all three countries. It changes nothing about the timeline for Iran being able to make nuclear bombs. That’s plural, and that timeline is measured in months.
Arms of the most lethal sort continue to make their way to Hizbollah in southern Lebanon.
China will build two more nucler reactors in Pakistan.
Why are those with the most to lose acting like their hands are tied in this scenario? Because China cannot be brought on board, not to knock it off with the nuclear projects with Pakistan, not with getting stern with North Korea, not with meaningful sanctions against Iran.
There is this little matter of its financing of the U.S.’s ever-growing debt. And that leads right back to Pennsylvania Avenue, to spending already in place, like the stimulus and socialist health care, as well as the spending in the pipeline, like the banking-reform bill that just passed the Senate, as well as this “infrastructure” monstrosity Congress wants to pass as soon as possible. Let us also not forget cap-and-trade, which refuses to die, no matter how badly “climate science” has been disgraced.
We’re on our own, folks.
. . . it makes it possible for socialist health care to get passed, but the true numbers eventually come out, and we see how much our already terrifying deficit will really balloon – like an anyeurism.
There are lots of articles and punditry pieces right now looking at how the Greece crisis affects, and provides lessons regarding, our situation in the post-American People’s Republic of Obamica. Take them seriously. And also get your brain around the extend of the madness and power-lust motivating our overlords. They don’t care about debts and deficits and the crisis they lead to. They are so obsessed with socialist transformation that they are willing to lie about the grave damage to the nation’s fiscal health that they are inflicting.
And that’s just on the economic front. They wreak equivalent levels of damage on the security and cultural fronts as well.
And FHer-care expands the expenditure exponentially.
