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Debt Reduction Super Committee Fails To Agree
Hugh Pickens writes "VOA reports that the latest effort to cut the U.S. government's debt apparently has ended in failure as leaders of the special 12-member debt reduction committee plan to announce that they failed in their mandate from lawmakers to trim the federal debt by $1.2 trillion over the next decade. Democrats and Republicans blame each other for the collapse of the effort. 'Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms,' said Republican Senator Jon Kyl. 'They weren't going to do anything without raising taxes.' Democratic Senator Patty Murray, one of the committee's co-chairs, says that the Republicans' position on taxes was the sticking point. 'The wealthiest Americans who earn over a million a year have to share too. And that line in the sand, we haven't seen Republicans willing to cross yet,' Now in the absence of an agreement, $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts to domestic and defense programs are set to take effect starting in January, 2013, and the lack of a deal will deprive President Barack Obama of a vehicle for extending a payroll tax cut and insurance benefits for unemployed Americans, which expire at the end of the year." (Though the official deadline for the committee's hoped-for plan is tomorrow — the 23d — they were to have provided it for review 48 hours prior.)
The reason they're not getting anywhere with spending cuts is the game has been rigged in favor of spending increases in the first place.
They have generous rates of increase built into the budgeting process. All of the so-called "cuts" are actually (slight) decreases to the rate of increase.
They could plug up the deficit merely by having slightly greater increase rate decreases.
Anyways, they can cut now, or they can have the universe cut for them. There's a limit to how much you can just keep spending pretend money.
A related rant is how Congress has gotten around the 27th amendment. That was supposed to say there should be an election in between Congressional pay raises. But they came up with a process whereby they get automatic cost of living increases without voting on it. Flagrantly unconstitutional. It's the same sort of thing.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I don't mind paying for the elderly, but the program needs to be cut off at its knees now because it is the height of injustice to expect us and Generation X to fund such a horribly mismanaged program now that the Boomers want to retire. They had 1994-2008 to right the ship of state, to try to rebuild the trust fund (which was destroyed on their parents' watch) and ran one of the most irresponsible periods of American government in our history.
To reach that conclusion, you have to have missed a lot of important information:
1. In the late 1980's, the federal government, acting on the advice of Alan Greenspan and others, increased payroll taxes specifically to build up a giant pile of cash for the Boomers to retire on.
2. The Social Security Administration took that pile of cash and invested it in US Treasury bonds, as required by law. They invest in US Treasuries primarily to prevent the risk of corruption and to reduce the risk that the pile of cash will disappear.
3. Congress took that same cash that was invested in US Treasuries, started treating that as income, and spent it, effectively kicking the can down the road.
4. If the general US budget pays off the US Treasuries held by the Social Security Administration, then Social Security will be fine for at least another 40 years.
The only reason Social Security is declared to be in some sort of crisis mode is because it's demanding that the loans they made to the rest of the government be paid back.
The equivalent of this in the private sector would be raiding the pension fund, and then telling people who go to collect on their pensions "Sorry, the money is gone".
I am officially gone from
It was a power envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, even though it wasn't explicitly spelled out. The point of ruling a law "unconstitutional" really is one of recognition: If the court system refuses to acknowledge the validity of a law and therefore doesn't even recognize that the law has been created through a constitutional process, that law really doesn't exist as far as the court system is concerned. Yes, it may appear on the books of statutory law, but effectively a single citation to a higher court judicial opinion (not even the supreme court) invalidating that law renders ineffective any prosecution under that law.
That was the whole point of Marbury v. Madison, so far as in that case even the filing of the case before the Supreme Court was unconstitutionally done and therefore it was unconstitutional for such a petition to have been granted in the first place. This was also a constitutional crises so far as the only legal means to enforce a law was to perform an act that in itself was contrary to the U.S. Constitution. The law under question in that case, the Judiciary Act of 1789, had several provisions that simply were ill advised to even be put into legislation and most significant was an unconstitutional expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court itself and its authority. To have ruled in favor of Marbury would have essentially forced the court to ignore the U.S. Constitution altogether and to have considered statutory law alone on the presumption that it was the domain exclusively of the U.S. Congress to determine the scope of the Constitution. In that sense, I think it was a very wise move for the court to have taken at the time, even if this decision might be abused in other contexts.
Frum was hawkish on Iraq, because the evidence on Iraq was sound (at least, sound enough if you fell for Saddam's bluster, a point which has been lost on the "no blood for oil" crowd: Saddam was desperately trying to prop up the illusion that he had a WMD program for fear that the Saudis or Iranians would decide he'd outlived his usefulness and come in to take Iraq from him themselves).
Don't you mean "if you fell for Saddam's bluster and ignored the reports of the weapons inspectors on the ground"?
Hans Blix* couldn't find any chemical or biological weapons.
ElBaradei** couldn't find any evidence Saddam had rebuilt a nuclear program.
Cheney said they were wrong
History tells us that Blix and ElBaradei were right.
*at the time, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency
**at the time, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Ok, first of all, that's an email. Not a sign. Also, Marylin Davenport was roundly vilified by Tea Party members for that email, and was (if I remember correctly) asked to resign from her position. I don't know what ever came of it, but her's was a view that was NEVER mainstream among the tea party.
Also, there have been some blatantly racist signs at Tea Party rallies, but if you back the picture out a bit and get some context, you would discover that the horrible signs are being carried by people that aren't part of the Tea Party rally, and are often either fringe hanger-on groups, or left-wing infiltrators.
There is plenty of video out there of these people being shouted and chased out of the tea party rallies, while the MSM follows taking pictures only of the fringe people and ignoring the rest of the rally.
Heck, back when the rallies were in full swing there were several topics ongoing at KOS and SA about just that. Crashing the Tea Party rallies with racist signs to try and get press time.
At least among the left, it worked.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Tellingly, from the report I read the Republicans were actually willing to raise taxes, but only for the middle and lower class and as long as the highest income bracket got a permanent 7% reduction in their marginal tax rate (from 35% to 28%).
Fanatically anti-fanatical