trillion

The AP has put out a fact check of President Obama’s claim last night that everything in his jobs program is paid for:

resident Barack Obama's promise Thursday that everything in his jobs plan will be paid for rests on highly iffy propositions.

It will only be paid for if a committee he can't control does his bidding, if Congress puts that into law and if leaders in the future - the ones who will feel the fiscal pinch of his proposals - don't roll it back.

Apparently the Constitution has changed since President Obama took office. I thought that every program laid out by every President since the start of our country was dependent upon a Congress that the President doesn’t control? As matter of fact the Constitution says that and has since day one. Congress is a separate and independent branch of Government. Of course there are times when the President’s party controls both chambers, but that still doesn’t mean the President controls the Congress. That was obvious in 2009-2010, when Republicans launched a record number of filibusters against the democratically controlled Senate.

But even if it isn’t paid for, so what? The trillions of dollars the Bush tax cuts have cost us wasn’t paid for either, yet Republicans still passed them and keep them alive. Where was all the complaining that these had to be paid for? Hell – they are one of the biggest contributors to the national debt.

Does your paycheck still make you cry? Do you wonder why the bosses are all giddy like high school girls? Well this could be why (via Think Progress):

At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found.Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So the big bosses saw raises 13x that of their employees. How can we celebrate that? I know! Let’s give them even more tax cuts, and to pay for it, we can raise the taxes on those that saw the very generous 2.1% raises.

And to show just how bad this problem is, Think Progress adds this little tidbit of joy:

Median CEO pay last year was $9 million, the highest since 2007. The median CEO bonus was $2.2 million. Family wealth, meanwhile, is currently down $12.8 trillion from its 2007 peak.

Yesterday the Republican’s released a plan to cut $2.5 trillion in spending over the next 10 years. The plan is being met with a lot of skepticism, even from FOX News where Neil Cavuto noted that the plan actually saves only $330 billion.

The plan, which does not touch the Pentagon or Homeland Security, calls to return non-discretionary spending to the 2006 level. Think Progress highlights why this is such a bad idea:

Returning non-defense discretionary spending to the 2006 level — and then keeping it there — would result in billions of dollars in cuts to vital and popular programs and agencies like Pell Grants, the FBI, the Coast Guard, the National Institutes of Health and the federal prison system.

But even worse, as Steve Benen points out, is that the GOP’s new plan would cost us thousands, if not more, of jobs:

That’s the cost of the House health care bill. The full CBO report isn’t out yet, but it should be rather soon now. The Hill has some other early numbers:

The nonpartisan budget office told lawmakers that the health bill set for a vote this weekend would cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next decade, and $1.2 trillion  in the second decade of the plan's implementation.

This should set us up for a vote on Sunday.

This really seems like a game of politics to me:

resident Barack Obama will call in his State of the Union address for a three-year freeze on spending for many domestic programs as part of his strategy to rein in the deficit, administration officials said.

The proposal, which wouldn’t affect spending on national security, would save an estimated $250 billion over a decade and reduce the deficit by $10 billion to $15 billion in 2011, according to the two officials, who briefed reporters on the plan. Last year’s budget shortfall was a record $1.4 trillion.

Obama will unveil the plan in his address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow night and include it in the fiscal year 2011 budget he’s set to deliver to lawmakers Feb. 1, the officials said.

Then you got the Republicans questioning the move:

Bernie Sanders does what others should have done:

Sen. Bernie Sanders Wednesday placed a hold on the nomination of Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.  “The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few,” Sanders said. “What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”  

As head of the central bank since 2006, Bernanke could have demanded that Wall Street provide adequate credit to small and medium-sized businesses to create decent-paying jobs in a productive economy, but he did not.  He could have insisted that large bailed-out banks end the usurious practice of charging interest rates of 30 percent or more on credit cards, but he did not.  He could have broken up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that took Federal Reserve assistance, but he did not.   He could have revealed which banks took more than $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed secret loans, but he did not.

Teabaggers are descending upon Capital Hill:

Thousands of Tea Party activists descended on Washington Thursday to protest the trillion dollar health care bill and government spending, holding signs protesting Barack Obama’s agenda while aiming chants of “you work for us” at the Capitol building. .

The gathering was organized by local Tea Party groups around the country, who are arriving in Washington this morning by the busload. Conservative leaders in Congress, led by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), have taken to the airwaves to encourage the activists to show up on the Capitol steps and demand meetings with members of Congress. The crowd grew to about 10,000 by noon. Bachmann has promised to lead some protesters to a press conference inside the Capitol to express their opposition to the health care bill in person to members of Congress.

It’s Thursday and the cal went out for this rally on Monday. Who are these people that can just pickup and head to some big protest in the middle of the week? Seriously. We have a major recession going on and unemployment is extremely high, meaning employees are more expendable. So how do these people just get to up and leave in the middle of the week and head to some protest? My guess are the retired and unemployed, and just think of that demographic – mostly a massive majority living off the government teet right now.

Adding..Why doesn’t anyone in the mainstream media ever ask this very basic question?

The right wing has been touting out this graphic today as proof that Obama is destroying our government through spending:

Now they are saying that Obama is projecting a $1.75 trillion dollar deficit this year. Drudge has had this graphic on top of his blog and even right wing bloggers are on the “apologize to Bush” band wagon:

Will those who accused Bush of being a big spender now apologize?

<p>I admit I am not some big fiscal mind, but I like to think I make up for my economical short falls by exhibiting something I like to call common sense.

Again – the $1.75 trillion deficit is a projection for the current fiscal year, which began September 2008. What’s that mean? Well when the current budget actually drafted and voted on, President Obama was actually candidate Obama in a Democratic primary. That also means the $1.5 trillion spent so far on TARP and the stimulus was not included.

But it seems like something else may have been missing. What could that be?

Oh yeah – President Bush also constantly kept Iraq and Afghanistan out of the budget so he could tout out how great he was doing. Then come a month or two later he told Congress he needed an “emergency supplemental”. I guess Bush thought that both wars would magically end in those couple of months, but was slapped with some harsh reality they weren’t?