gdp

Everything Is Bigger In Texas

Posted 1/4/11 at 12:47pm by jamie

Including their deficit:

This month the state's part-time legislature goes back into session, and the state is starting at potentially a $25 billion deficit on a two-year budget of around $95 billion. That's enormous. And there's not much fat to cut. The whole budget is basically education and healthcare spending. Cutting everything else wouldn't do the trick. And though raising this kind of money would be easy on an economy of $1.2 trillion, the new GOP mega-majority in Congress is firmly against raising any revenue.

So the bi-ennial legislature, which convenes this month, faces some hard cuts. Some in the Texas GDP haveadvocated dropping Medicaid altogether to save money.

And the most important part of the article?

So why haven't we heard more about Texas, one of the most important economy's in America? Well, it's because it doesn't fit the script. It's a pro-business, lean-spending, no-union state. You can't fit it into a nice storyline, so it's ignored.

True dat! This isn’t some blue state like California or Illinois. This is the heart of red state America and God forbid the “liberal” media makes them look bad!

From Top To Bottom - A Look Back Over The Past Two Years

Posted 9/2/10 at 11:16am by jamie

Like many others, I have spent the last few days really contemplating what will happen in the elections this November. As much as I want to be optimistic, I just can’t bring myself to it. Democrats are looking at a very dark mid-term and, as Peter Daou puts it, these are “dark days for the left”.

But what happened? What caused the rapid fall from glory for President Obama over the past two years? When he was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama enjoyed one of the highest approval ratings in history. Now he is treading water to keep from hitting bottom. I believe there are three main factors that play into this; healthcare, economy and war. I want to take a minute and look at what happened with each of these issues and how it turned the base sour on the President.

Just Waiting For The GOP To Blast The CBO

Posted 8/25/10 at 10:13am by jamie

A new report out by the CBO finds that the stimulus most likely saved this country:

President Obama's much-maligned economic stimulus package added as many as 3.3 million jobs to the economy during the second quarter of this year, and may have prevented the nation from lapsing back into recession, according to a report released Tuesday by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

In its latest quarterly assessment of the act, the CBO said the stimulus lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points during the quarter ending in June and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million. The higher figure would come close to making good on Obama's pledge that the act would save or create as many as 3.5 million jobs by the end of this year.

The CBO said the act also increased the nation's gross domestic product by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent in the second quarter, indicating that the stimulus may have been the primary source of growth in the U.S. economy. The Commerce Department estimates that GDP grew 2.4 percent in the second quarter, a figure many economists expect to be revised lower in a report due out Friday.

Since the stimulus passed, Republican leaders, like John Boehner, have jumped in front of the cameras at any chance to say it was a failure. These numbers sure don’t look like a failure to me. As matter of fact, they would probably be much higher if we could have had a bigger stimulus passed. Sadly Republican obstructionism wouldn’t allow that.

Tying The Hands Of The Commander in Chief

Posted 11/17/08 at 9:53am by jamie

eisenhower_d-day While our economy continues to go down the tubes, the Pentagon wants to keep increasing their funds:

Before the presidential election, reports began to circulate that the Pentagon was planning to propose a defense spending increase of roughly $450 billion over five years. That's in addition to the increases in the base budget already laid out in the 2009 Future Years Defense Plan.

The services have been laying the groundwork for the request for several months. Earlier this year, briefing slides showing $60 billion to $80 billion per year in new expenditures started making the rounds inside the Beltway, supported by a public campaign by conservative think tanks and politicians to establish a floor on defense spending at 4 percent of GDP.

As if that’s not bad enough, they are also looking at ways to trap Obama into increasing spending in the military:

The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.

They also like the idea of creating an unrealistically high baseline of expectations for defense spending that will allow them to claim President Obama has cut defense spending.

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