IMF chides US for fiscal folly - Telegraph

The IMF said the US economy was enjoying a short-term spike as a result of quantitative easing by the US Federal Reserve and the fiscal package agreed by Congress and the White House late last year, but expressed reservations about the side-effects of these policies.

"Although some targeted measures in the US are justifiable at this juncture given the still weak labour and housing markets, the recently implemented stimulus is expected to deliver only a relatively small growth dividend [given its size] at a considerable fiscal cost," the IMF said in its update to the World Economic Outlook.

The IMF said the deficit would remain stuck at 10.75pc of GDP in 2011, with public debt exceeding 110pc of GDP in 2016.

"The absence of a credible, medium-term fiscal strategy would eventually drive up US interest rates, which could prove disruptive for global financial markets and for the world economy," it said. The report called for an assault on America's entitlements behemoth, and caps on discretionary spending.

The deal between President Barack Obama and Capitol Hill extended the Bush tax cuts for rich and poor alike, and added fresh spending, angering the Tea Party hard-liners. "We are much closer to the Greece-Ireland-Spain precipice than any of us would like to believe," said Congressman John Campbell.

Via TheBlaze.com - Pork Survives: Senate Rejects Earmarks Ban

Looks like we just got a list of Republicans that we need to defeat in the primaries, unfortunately only two are up for re-election in the next two years and the American people have short term memories.

WASHINGTON (The Blaze/AP) — The Senate has rejected a GOP bid to ban the practice of larding spending bills with earmarks — those pet projects that lawmakers love to send home to their states.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans combined to defeat the effort, which would have effectively forbidden the Senate from considering legislation containing earmarks like road and bridge projects, community development funding, grants to local police departments and special-interest tax breaks.

Earlier this month, Republicans bowed to tea party activists and passed a party resolution declaring GOP senators would give up earmarks. House Republicans have also given up the practice, but most Democrats say the earmarks are a legitimate way to direct taxpayer money to their constituents.

The legislation would have established an earmark moratorium for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, and also would have covered the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, The Hill reports.

“I believe I have an important responsibility to the state of Illinois and the people I represent to direct federal dollars into projects critically important for our state and our future,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill) said.

The eight GOP senators who voted to preserve earmark spending include: Thad Cochran (Miss.) (2014), Susan Collins (Maine) (2014), James Inhofe (Okla.) (2012), Dick Lugar (Ind.) (2012), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) (2016), Richard Shelby (Ala.) (2016), retiring Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio) and defeated Sen. Bob Bennett (Utah) also voted against it.

Six Democrats voted for the earmark moratorium, including: Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Colorado Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall, as well as retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.) and defeated Sen. Russ Feingold (Wis.).

I understand that earmarks make up a small percentage of the budget but if these Senators won't stop spending our tax dollars on turtle tunnels and bridges to nowhere can we really expect them to be responsible with the big tickets items like defense and social security. I think not.

How the European Bailout Really Works

Contract from America

http://www.thecontract.org/
1. Protect the Constitution
2. Reject Cap & Trade
3. Demand a Balanced Budget
4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform
5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government in Washington
6. End Runaway Government Spending
7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care
8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy
9. Stop the Pork
10. Stop the Tax Hikes

Simple yet elegant just like our founding documents.

Illinois Prison Guards Run Out of Bullets......

Actually it was the trainees. It seems that the great state of Illinois, you might of heard of the place it's the President's home state, is broke as a joke.

State forced to make emergency ammo purchase when usual vendor demands money up front

SPRINGFIELD - The Illinois Department of Corrections was forced to make an emergency purchase of ammunition last month because of the state's inability to pay its bills.

The purchase happened after one of the state's ammunition vendors, Shore Galleries Inc., refused to ship bullets unless the company was paid upfront. The state owes the Lincoln-wood firm $6,000.

The department was able to find a new vendor quickly in Indiana and ordered 761,000 rounds for nearly $200,000.

Requests for comment from Shore Galleries Inc. were not immediately returned.

Corrections spokeswoman Januari Smith said guards were not in danger of having too few bullets to deal with inmates in the nearly 30 prisons throughout the state.

"Public health/safety was never at risk," she wrote in an e-mail response to questions about the no-bid bullet purchase.

Rather, the shortage affected cadet training academies, where future prison guards learn their trade. During their six weeks of training, each cadet uses roughly 600 rounds.

http://www.herald-review.com/news/state-and-regional/fb81093f-7a02-50d0-ac87-435778706729.html

Lawmakers Jack Up Spending For Themselves- I Say We Throw Them All Out

Any Senator or Representative that votes in favor of this bump should be sent packing. Its disgraceful that Americans are tighting their own budgets yet our elected officials feel they are entitled to even more of our money. Vote the bums out!!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090930/pl_politico/27732

Congress is on the verge of giving itself a bump in its annual budget — even as local governments, families and businesses across the country are tightening their belts in the worst recession in decades.

Under a House-Senate conference measure, approved by the House last week and poised for passage in the Senate on Wednesday, spending for the legislative branch will increase 5.8 percent this year, boosting Capitol Hill’s annual budget to $4.7 billion.

The measure includes a hodgepodge of new funding for lawmakers: a $500,000 pilot program for senators to send out postcards about their town hall meetings, $30,000 for receptions for foreign dignitaries and $4 million for consultants — with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) getting up to nine each and Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) getting up to three more.

There’s $15.8 million for salaries for the Senate Appropriations Committee — plus an extra $950,000 for the committee’s administrative expenses.

Funding for House office buildings will jump a staggering 128 percent, to $84 million. Some of that money will go to replace a roof at the Rayburn House Office Building, and an additional $50 million is being allocated to renovate the Cannon House Office Building.

The Architect of the Capitol will see a 17.8 percent hike to deal with infrastructure repairs, and the Government Printing Office’s revolving fund will increase a whopping 155 percent, to $12.7 million, to deal with technology upgrades and repairs, according to the conference report.

The bill — which President Barack Obama could sign as soon as Wednesday — funds operations and staff salaries in the personal offices of the 535 members of Congress, dozens of legislative committees in the House and Senate, the GPO, the Office of the Architect of the Capitol, the Government Accountability Office and the Capitol Police.

Supporters of the bill argue that they were relatively frugal this year. Last year, Congress increased its funding 10.9 percent over the fiscal 2008 level — and the $4.7 it’s appropriating to itself this year is less than the $5 billion Obama set forth in his budget earlier this year.

“This is a fiscally responsible bill,” said Jake Thompson, spokesman for Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), chairman of the Senate’s legislative branch appropriations subcommittee.

But not everyone agrees.

“With an enormous deficit and rest of the country tightening their belts, Congress should be looking at doing the same,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of the Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Added Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “The growth of expenditures particularly in these times is terrible.”

The Appropriations Committee disputes that funding increased by 5.8 percent, arguing that the real number is 3.5 percent — or $157 million — because of emergency spending and the $787 billion economic stimulus that added to Congress’s budget. But critics call the move a budget gimmick that does not represent a true apples-to-apples comparison of the amount of money Congress approved in last year’s spending bills versus the fiscal 2010 bills.

The bill contains just one earmark — a $200,000 Nelson project for a museum in Omaha, Neb. — and it includes language added by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to force the Senate for the first time to put its expenses online.

“We have not seen a significant increase in overall legislative branch expenditures since nearly 2001,” said Jonathan Beeton, a spokesman for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Nelson’s counterpart in the House. “During this time, significant cost increases have occurred, and the Capitol complex has also seen significant deferred maintenance. Many of these maintenance expenses become much more expensive if they continue to be deferred.”

Nelson’s office said the $500,000 “pilot program” for office mailings was included at the request of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and has been in place since 2004. It said the additional $950,000 for the Appropriations Committee accounts for telecommunications, hearing transcripts, and travel and office supplies and that the total for the GPO is far less than the $32.1 million the agency wanted.

It also said that the 5.5 percent increase that will go in part to increasing aides’ salaries was derived from cost-of-living-adjustment projections.

“While the crisis is easing, we are still a nation in financial peril, and we believe it is necessary for the legislative branch to lead by example,” Nelson said last week. He said that, “with one notable but important exception” — a reference to the renovation of the Cannon building — “I think we have been successful.”

Still, at a time when inflation remains low and the national debt is rising fast, leadership offices across the Capitol are expecting a bump in funding. Vice President Joe Biden, who also serves as president of the Senate, will see his budget increase 4.3 percent, to $2.5 million, under the measure. The offices of Reid and McConnell will each get a 4.3 percent increase from last year and will now each have $5.2 million; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is seeing her budget jump 4.1 percent, to $5.1 million; the budget of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) will rise 3.9 percent, to $2.5 million; the budget of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) will increase 4 percent, to $4.5 million; and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) each get a 3.7 percent increase, to $1.7 million and $2.2 million, respectively.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, said the 4.3 percent increase for Reid and McConnell is calculated by the Senate financial office to maintain current staffing levels.

“It is a cap, which neither office will necessarily meet but cannot exceed,” Manley said. He added that the authorization of up to nine consultants “is a long-standing authority to ensure the leaders’ offices can fulfill their duties to the Senate and to their respective caucuses.” Aides stressed that the money will not go to political consultants but to staffers who work on a contractual basis rather than as Senate employees.

The biggest hikes for the leadership offices went to the Senate whips — with Arizona Republican Jon Kyl and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin each getting a 6.2 percent hike and each getting a new budget of $3.3 million. A spokesman for Durbin said that the hike accounts for annual cost-of-living increases, as well as the addition of new staff to oversee a more expanded Senate Democratic majority of 60 members. Even though Republicans have just 40 members, Kyl’s budget is the same as Durbin’s, but a Kyl spokesman said his office “always returns a large amount of funding” at the end of the fiscal year.

The bill is now headed to the Senate floor — and senators will be hard-pressed to block it. With the fiscal year ending Wednesday, Congress needs to pass a short-term, stopgap resolution to keep the government funded through October — and that resolution is included in the legislative appropriations bill, meaning a defeat for the bill could shut the government down.

House Republicans protested the move, with 162 Republicans — including the subcommittee’s ranking member, Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt — last week voting against the bill last week, which was sent to the Senate on a 217-190 vote.

But the increase in funding has otherwise largely been a bipartisan affair. The Senate Appropriations Committee — where McConnell and 29 other appropriators sit — voted 30-0 in June to send the bill to the full Senate, which approved the bill in July by a 67-25 vote.

The Pelosi-Obama Deficits-Even $9 trillion might be too optimistic on current spending trends

Yes, its true that the President speaks very well but was that a good reason to elect him President. Now don’t get me wrong the same disaster would have occurred if McCain was elected because neither party has a candidate that actually is willing to do the tough things:

1) we need to close our overseas bases (if Japan, S. Korea and Germany can’t protect themselves so be it),

2) reduce our government payrolls (17% of the nation is employed by as a government employee so in reality we pay taxes to employ these people),

3) reduce taxes (the only way to increase revenues is to create an environment where companies want to invest, Texas has no corporate or individual income taxes but has a $8B surplus, California has the some of the highest rates and has to write IOUs to pay its bills, you figure out what works best),

4) pay off any obligations we have made to our elderly but not allow the same broken systems to continue (Social Security and Medicare are both broke and broken but we can’t allow our elderly to end up in a gutter so lets institute a cutoff, anyone under 45 gets nothing but in exchange they pay no capital gains or death taxes in the future, those who are older have to pay both taxes but in exchange they keep their benefits)

If we don’t do the above or something similar our only alternatives is to let the system just implode because that’s path laid out in front of us now. Pretty soon, three or four years from now when the Government' checks for welfare, social security, the armed forces and federal employees start to bounce then and only then will people realize what a mess we have gotten ourselves into.

Americans are too stupid to realize that since the 1970’s we have become a nation of slaves. Everyday we go to work to pay our debts whether they be called taxes or consumer debt. We no longer believe that you have to earn what you have but rather we believe that we are entitled to things like free healthcare.

If you think I am over reacting check out today’s WSJ editorial and you’ll soon realize that I’m being rather rational.

“Earlier this year when President Obama was selling his first budget blueprint, he promised to end years of "borrow and spend" budgeting. Yesterday, reality struck.

Mr. Obama's White House and the Congressional Budget Office told us that current U.S. fiscal policy is "borrow and spend" on a hyperlink. The good news is the deficit for 2009 will be "only" $1.58 trillion, about $250 billion lower than expected thanks to less need for TARP funds. But the Obama fiscal plan envisions $9 trillion in new borrowing over the next decade, which is $2 trillion more debt than the White House predicted earlier this year. The 2010 deficit also rises by about as much as the 2009 deficit falls from January, so even the TARP windfall gets spent.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574301043095303118.html?mod=googlenews_wsj