James Pethokoukis of Reuters is at it again, subversion-via-blog.

So in the little sit down with the President, the Chinese made clear they did not believe a word of the President’s promises about ObamaCare not adding to the deficit.

The Chinese asked uncomfortable questions about the cost of ObamaCare:

Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Turns out that when you lie to everyone, no one believes you. Untrue claims that President Obama makes in the speeches to Joint Sessions of Congress about not adding to the deficit, making mystery cuts to Medicare, or not funding abortion, or not allowing illegal immigrants to gain access to his health care benefit, are actually listened to by other nations.

And the economic implications and the national security implications of a President who no one believes are profound, and none of them are good.

Sounds like the Chinese do not believe that a Democratic Congress and President Obama will do anything about the growing deficit. The only thing the Trillion-dollar President can do is spend more Trillions — first on the stimulus, then another trillion plus on health care. And because the world refuses to buy more of our debt, the Fed has printed (you guessed it) a trillion dollars in the last year to give to banks, with instructions to buy our T-Bills in our debt (rigged) “auctions.” This is how we are paying for our deficit, we are printing money. And our Trillion dollar President keeps spending.

The rational reaction of the Chinese (as opposed to the irrational action of spending a trillion dollars on health care) reminds me of a sign I saw at the 9/12 demonstration:

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Not Right Now: Real Soon Now (via AoSHQ).  Apparently the plan is to wait until after the current wave of spending, then convince the Democratic party to stop spending taxpayer money that does not, in point of fact, quite exist.  Except for funding a new jobs bill, which somehow isn’t expected to ‘count.’

But can he do it, after… oh, let Bryon York get this one:

I asked whether Obama, after presiding over the stimulus, the bailouts, the big Democratic budget, the House cap-and-trade vote, health care reform, and finally, a tripling of the already-high federal deficit, could plausibly position himself as a spending hawk. “Their principle failure is that they have allowed themselves to be defined as government interventioners and huge spenders,” the strategist told me. “If he becomes the great expander of government and the great increaser of spending, he’s going to get destroyed in 2012.”

Actually, the principal failure is that they are government interventionists and huge spenders - and have revealed this blatantly enough that independent voters have noticed. In other words, it’s not ‘If he becomes;’ it’s ‘he has become.’  That’s the primary reason why his economic marks are so poor Right Now - and why waiting for Real Soon Now is contraindicated.

Contraindicated.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The news keeps getting tougher for the House Leadership in their irrational quest to pass their ObamaCare bill.

First, the Associated Press is reporting the bill will cost $1.2 Trillion without the doctor fix of $250 billion.

The new total will be $1.45 trillion — because the House Leadership intends to create a “self-executing rule” that would pull the doctor fix apart from the House ObamaCare bill — in order to keep the cost at $1.2 Trillion, then fuse the doc fix back into the ObamaCare bill after it passes the House.

It is like a magic trick, presto — $250 billion in new spending just appears in the bill after it passes.

Meanwhile, the new $1.45 billion ought to send the Blue Dogs scampering from the bill.

Then, of course, the House is finally grappling with two thermonuclear issues: abortion and immigration.

But, as numerous news reports state, the Democratic Leaders still do not have the votes for the bill — rumors abound, the most credible put the House vote count at less than 200 for the bill.

The more fundamental question is, why is the U.S. House voting before the U.S. Senate? House leadership has already moved the vote from Thursday to Friday, and are now talking about the vote being moved to Saturday or Monday of Tuesday of next week. House leaders should just punt the vote until after the Senate, and save their members — and themselves — the pain of voting.

Especially when the Senate is now talking post-Thanksgiving for its floor vote?

Why is the Speaker forcing its members to walk the plank again, prior to the Senate vote, especially when it is likely that the bill will never get off the Senate floor?

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Much was made of the 3.5% annualized GDP growth that was reported this week. The Bush-Blamer-In-Chief stated that the figures were “an affirmation that this recession is abating and showed the steps we’ve taken have made a difference”. Really? Have they made a “difference”? Have they accomplished anything that will last beyond the massive amount of American taxpayer money that has been thrown at the problem? Let’s look at the numbers.

Of the 3.5% gain, over 2% of the gain was due to durable goods - and most of that was automobile sales, buoyed primarily by the now-ended “Cash for Clunkers” program. Without this gain, the GDP would have increased at a much lower rate of around 1.9%. What about future auto sales? In September, sales plummeted as the C4C program sucked away sales that would have occurred later.  Also, Edmunds.com reported that the overwhelming majority of these car sales would have occurred anyway, so the actual cost of the 125,000 additional vehicles that can be credited to C4C was closer to $24,000 per vehicle, rather than the $4000 average rebate. Of course the Obama administration didn’t appreciate Edmunds calling their baby ugly, so they became an official member of the White House Enemies List.

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One trillion, four hundred twenty billion dollars.  It’s an astounding number.  It’s more than the entire economy of India and enough to give every man, woman, and child in the United States $4700.

It is also our country’s federal budget deficit for 2009.  That means that in the fiscal year 2009, which runs from October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2009, the federal government spent $1.42 trillion more than it took in.  To put this in perspective, last year’s deficit was $459 billion – still an astounding number, but less than half the deficit for this year.

When our nation runs with a deficit like this year, we increase our national debt – or the total debt we owe over the life of our country.  Our current national debt is $9.1 trillion, and climbing every day.  The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that, under President Obama’s spending plans, our national debt will rise to $17.1 trillion by the year 2019, meaning an increase of $8 trillion over the next ten years.  Most of this debt is held by foreign countries.  China, not known for their great relations with our country, holds the most – more than $800 billion.

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Naturally the White House waited until Friday evening to let this news out. It is catastrophic to his agenda even though he’ll want to blame George Bush.

The Obama administration has released new deficit numbers, and they are not pretty.

The deficit for Fiscal Year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, came in at a record $1.42 trillion, more than triple the record set just last year.

In addition, future deficits are currently projected to total $9.1 trillion in the coming decade.

The Democrats’ natural reaction will be to raise taxes. But that would hurt the alleged economic recovery. In fact, the Democrats are going to need to halt their spending spree. Likewise, if the Blue Dogs are serous deficit hawks, it will mean they must vote no on health care reform.

While the cognoscenti of the Western financial world is attempting to spin the recent fall in the dollar as a stylish financial mystery play with a journalist based in the Middle East as its star, the Whodunit spin is a red herring: the facts are that the dollar is weak, and getting weaker.

The world is awash in dollars. There is a massive oversupply. We are electronically creating (printing in another era) hundreds of billions of dollars to buy our own T-Bills. Our deficit and spending has soared.

Kudlow, in his column, “Save the Greenback, Mr. President” explains that solution is to remove the excess dollars from the market and to stop “printing so much debt:”

for therapy, the Fed should begin moving excess cash from the economy….And they need to stop printing so much debt from Congress. All this massive spending and borrowing is killing us.

Instead, the Democrats in Congress and the White House are planning more spending: a second spending bill is on the table — ironically tagged as the second stimulus bill, which ought to stimulate the dollar tanking — and of course, President Obama’s $1 trillion health care spending boondoggle.

When town hall meetings are interrupted with shouts of “stop printing money” the jig is up. Note to the White House: in the age of the internet, you cannot hide printing $600 Billion a year from the world.

Until the Federal Reserve stops printing money to buy our own T-Bills, and the Democrats in Congress stop spending on new programs and we lower our deficit the dollar will continue to drop. End of story, no other outcome is possible.

Simply put, the Dems are killing the dollar.

When Putin announced that Russia would no longer sell its oil and natural gas in dollars, there were the normal — its OK type statements from the financial world, and it was viewed by the Western financial cognoscenti as an anomaly.

However, since the Federal Reserve is printing an estimated $600 billion a year to give to bankers and brokers, who then buy U.S. Treasury bills to finance for our over-spending Federal Government with printed dollars — the value of the dollar drops due to the massive over supply.

Then, those countries holding the U.S. dollar as reserve currency start to speak up. They plead with the President and Congress to start balancing the budget and lowering the deficit.

Instead, President Obama and Congress has not decreased the deficit, it has grown four times it was under Bush, to record numbers — $9 Trillion — under President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

And President Obama, by pushing his trillion dollar health care plan is rubbing the world’s face in their concerns about U.S. spending. He simply does not care that the dollar is dropping and that the value of these country’s dollar holdings is also dropping.

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The last column Camille Paglia did for Salon was highly controversial, but the course of events on health care since her column has her vindicated. Here is the link to this months treat from Salon that is Paglia’s column, and last months column is linked to below:

“What a difference a month makes! When my last controversial column posted on Salon in the second week of August, most Democrats seemed frozen in suspended animation, not daring to criticize the Obama administration’s bungling of healthcare reform lest it give aid and comfort to the GOP. Well, that ice dam sure broke with a roar. Dissident Democrats found their voices, and by late August even the liberal lemmings of the mainstream media, from CBS to CNN, had drastically altered their tone of reportage, from priggish disdain of the town hall insurgency to frank admission of serious problems in the healthcare bills as well as of Obama’s declining national support.”

“But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)”

“By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done…”

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The Washington Post, alas, gets this editorial wrong in the very first sentence:

NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news — especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: considering the amount of time that the Right’s bloggers, pundits, and legislators have spent explaining why the Democrats in Congress needed to institute a Stop spending money we don’t have, you idiots policy, well.  We do live here, too, so our liking is hardly unalloyed - but we did say that this wasn’t going to work*.  Moving on:

And so the Obama administration did not exactly rush to publish yesterday’s required mid-session update to its federal budget estimates of last February. Still, once the numbers finally emerged in the dog days of August, they retained the power to stun: Instead of a cumulative $7.1 trillion deficit over the next decade, the White House now projects a $9 trillion deficit. These figures imply average annual budget deficits greater than 4 percent of gross domestic product through fiscal 2019, a rate of debt accumulation faster than projected GDP growth. This is not a sustainable fiscal path.

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Let’s review the scorecard. Obama has taken over the Auto Industry…check. Obama has taken over the Energy Industry…check. Obama has taken over the Banking and Finance Industry…check. And, despite our collective wails and gnashing of teeth, Obama has presumably taken over the Healthcare and Health Insurance Industries as well.

Obama has been a busy little bee.

At least he has reassured us now by having deigned himself a full partner with God, and thank goodness for that given his plan to open our borders to immigrants this Fall (like a flood) for all those people around the world hoping to come to America and do the jobs Americans won’t do-terrorists or otherwise.

Obama hasn’t worried himself over what any this will cost all of us, and why should he? His eligibility for office will have run its course by the time the bill(s) will come due-it won’t be HIS problem by then, will it? Besides, 9 trillion dollars is chump change to our great-grandchildren…they can just print more money and all will be right as rain.

Given all the hard work and long nights and fierce negotiations he has suffered to endure these past few months, Obama has reached that pinnacle of leadership few Presidents before him have ever been able to achieve, and now he will go off to reflect on his greatness. Well-deserved retreat, dontcha think? And such a bargain at 35 grand a week, on our dime, so he can ponder his next book of memories and accomplishments.

Perhaps he’ll take a little time out while he’s soaking up the sun and salty air on the Vineyard to put the finishing touches on his plans to get even with all that tried (unsuccessfully) to stand in his way. Maybe he’ll have a little sit-down with Gov. Paterson and suggest he stop dragging his name into Paterson’s troubles. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll even give a shout out to Jon Voight in hopes of reassuring Mr. Voight that he really ISN’T a bully and that the only freedoms he’s interested in taking away from us are the ones we never managed very well on our own to begin with.

Whatever he does with his time and my money, I’m sure he’ll come back renewed and refreshed and ready to get back to work. He’ll be well-rested, confident and collected, and he’ll be in full and complete control of the things that matter to all of us.

That housekeeping staff may have to go down to the local WalMart, though, and pick up a few things. Rumor has it he has a pesky little personal problem.

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave his semi-annual report on monetary policy and the economy to the Senate Banking Committee. With the hot Beltway topic being the health care overhaul President Obama is so desperate to get passed and signed before more people find out what the effects of such a policy will really be, a few Senators had questions for the Chairman about the fiscal implications of the three dueling health care bills being written in the House and Senate, all of which have been criticized by elected Democrats and the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office alike for being costly expansions of government that will do nothing to reduce the cost of health care or to cover the millions of American uninsured.

At that hearing, Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison made this spot-on comment:

[O]ne thing we’re trying to do is just slow this down enough that we can find the information and have the best facts that we can. And setting an arbitrary August deadline seems to many of us to be very unwise because so much could happen that would be irreversible if we really do change our health care system to this extent with the costs and in a hard economic time, anyway.

And many of us are concerned, as well, that employers are going to be encouraged to just drop health care coverage, pay the fine, and let people go into the public system, which then becomes a bigger burden on the government, but also the beginning of rationed health care, in many views.

So I thank you for saying that we ought to be very careful before we do add more entitlements to our health care system, and I hope you will work with us, as we are able to get more and more information about the — the real long-term consequences.

Below the fold, a couple more noteworthy points from Hutchison and Evan Bayh (D-IN), as well as Bernanke’s noteworthy answers.

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In an attempt to defend the trillion-dollar health care overhaul bills currently being marked up in Congress, and to shift attention from his own actions to those of his predecessor, President Barack Obama (D-IL) declared in his July 18 radio address that “The same folks who controlled the White House and Congress for the past eight years as we ran up record deficits will argue — believe it or not — that health reform will lead to record deficits. That’s simply not true.”

Leave aside for the moment the fact that any deficit-spending records set in “the past eight years” were wiped out by Obama himself within a single month of taking office, and that the President’s ire was misdirected (it was the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, who made that indictment of the health overhaul bills currently in Congress).The fact is, Obama’s claim to suddenly care about deficit spending at all is belied by his actions and his administration’s statements on a range of issues, from nationalized health care to the so-called “stimulus” package.

In that radio address, Obama urged legislators to “seize this opportunity – one we might not have again for generations – and finally pass health insurance reform this year.” He issued what was intended to sound like a warning along with that plea, saying, “I want to be very clear [that] I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade.”

While this statement was carefully worded to sound to the American people like an admonition to legislators against producing a health care overhaul bill that isn’t revenue-neutral, the phrase “deficits over the next decade” is a direct reference to the recommended “Pay-As-You-Go” (or “PayGo”) policy Obama asked Congress to pass in June.

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Note to historians, the following is a list of strange consequences from Obama’s self-destructive health care reform obsession:

i) Spooked the conservative Democrats who are disrupting the Committee on Energy and Commerce markup and pending floor vote because of their policy concerns about the government option;
ii) telegraphed to the moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats that President Obama agrees with Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Chris Dodd and Chairman Waxman, in general, about the role of government in health care, making the plan an easy target for opponents;

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Awesome video illustration on the federal budget deficit and the shrieks about Bush and the shrugs over Obama. Who says math can’t be fun?

*cross posted @

Jobs are being lost everyday, the deficit continues to explode and the American people are angry.

It’s now been six months since President Obama moved into the White House and in that short time, we have seen all his economic policies fall flat on their face. The unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 9.5%, and the stimulus package has been defined by delays, fraud, and poor management.

Every day, I talk to Americans who are terrified about the path the country is going – the spending, the borrowing, the government intervention. That’s why we have introduced a bill that attempts to save the country from economic and fiscal disaster. It’s called the “Reducing Barack Obama’s Unsustainable Deficit Act” and it makes a much needed turn in the direction of fiscal responsibility.

On May 14th of this year, the President said, “The long-term deficit and debt that we have accumulated is unsustainable. We can’t keep on just borrowing from China, or borrowing from other countries…At some point they’re just going to get tired of buying our debt.”

While true, I think the American people are also getting tired of buying the President’s empty rhetoric.

To actually match word to deed, we have offered legislation to give Americans their money back. The first step is to cancel the spending portion of the stimulus package and recall the $460 billion that has not yet been spent. The money hasn’t gone out the door and we can still get it back.

The second step is to reclaim all unobligated TARP money so none of the remaining $150 billion can be wasted. The legislation then requires that all TARP money paid back must go directly to paying down the debt.

This simple measure will save taxpayers billions and help reduce this year’s projected $1.85 trillion deficit – by far the largest in U.S. history!

A lot of folks out there are saying they want their ‘change’ back, but the truth is Obama’s into us for a lot more than pocket change. And it’s clear buyer’s remorse has set in across this country. I, for one, think it’s time we get our money back.

Mike Pence offers a little pep talk to conservatives via YouTube. He’s ready to fight are you?

There’s talk in DC about how the current stimulus isn’t working, so we really need another stimulus to really get the economy going.  In yesterday’s Kansas City Star, columnist E. Thomas McClanahan commented about the thought of another “stimulus”:

Former Clinton Treasury man Roger Altman had a troubling piece the other day in The Wall Street Journal, saying that quite soon we’ll be facing a big tax increase.

The budget deficit and the national debt is increasing so rapidly, he wrote, that perhaps as early as next year Main Street and the financial markets will “exert irrestible pressure to reduce the deficit.”

His prediction had a chilling plausibility — even moreso if you consider the extra debt that would be loaded on with another stimulus package full of wasteful pork like the last one. Even more troubling was Altman’s preferred levy: A European-style value-added tax.

That would be the perfect capstone to accompany President Obama’s mad drive to replicate the massive tax-and-regulatory structures that have made the European economy so sluggish for the last few decades. An apt word was coined to describe the overall problem: eurosclerosis. Europe built a welfare state it cannot financially support, and its costs and rules suffocate economic dynamism.

Remember, folks (and I’m going to periodically remind you of this fact):

This is OBAMA’S DEFICIT.

Here’s the picture.  Teach it to your children.  Write it on your doorposts.

One of the central points in Senator Gregg’s op-ed about our debt is his warning about the Chinese government not buying our debt:

If the Chinese start to reduce their purchases of our government securities because of our need to borrow increasing amounts of money to finance all the spending that the president has proposed, we will have to start offering higher interest payments to potential lenders to make our securities more attractive.

As that interest on U.S. Treasuries goes up, so does the financial burden on taxpayers in the next generation. This would hit the next generation with a double whammy — unnecessary debt we’re already incurring, plus higher interest rates on our borrowing.

Actually, President Obama not only agrees with you Senator Gregg, but was more clear about what was going to happen than your statement above. Last week the President said there “is no doubt that at some point” the countries buying our debt will stop. Not may stop, but will stop.

Here is the President’s entire quote:

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