Budget Trickery The President also employs budget trickery on spending. He first assumes that Iraq spending will continue indefinitely at 2008 levels (which was never going to happen, according to the military’s own Joint Campaign Plan), and then calculates $1.5 trillion in savings against that baseline. If you eliminate that …
Heritage Foundation vice president for domestic and economic policy studies Stuart Butler attended President Barack Obama’s “Fiscal Responsibility” Summit today. He reports: The President said he wanted the sessions to be the first step in a national conversation about how to deal with the long-term fiscal problem. If he truly …
Liberal author Robert Kuttner doesn’t believe in the entitlement crisis. His argument – reflecting conventional far left thinking on the issue – goes something like this: Conservatives exaggerate the entitlement problem by using shady figures. Social Security is just fine, so don’t worry about it. Medicare is a problem, but …
President Obama will host a three-hour “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” at the White House Monday to “underscore how big the problems are.” Sixty members of the House and Senate, and representatives from various think-tanks and advocacy organizations from across the political spectrum will attend in an effort to sort out the …
Maintaining and modernizing our armed forces doesn’t just protect America, it fulfills the Constitution’s mandate to “provide for the common defense.” Yet the defense budget appears to be one place where President Barack Obama and Congress are looking to offset massive new spending elsewhere – “stimulating” or otherwise. “The Pentagon …
After making news earlier this week for promising to make Social Security and Medicare reform a “central part” of his plan to curtail federal spending, President-elect Obama has pledged to hold a “fiscal responsibility” summit focusing on entitlement reform. Although the devil is in the details, facing up to the …
Two days into the new Congress, the majority has signaled they are unlikely to take their promise of fiscal discipline seriously. House democrats have turned off the Medicare trigger under the rules package for the 111th Congress, which means they are unlikely to even debate entitlement policy, let alone engage …
Earlier this week the Treasury Department released its 2008 Financial Report of the U.S. Government. According to the report, while government revenues stayed relatively flat, increasing only 1%, the government’s net operating cost more than tripled from the prior fiscal year. The report warns: “In both the near and long …
Most people are skeptical about statistics, claiming that mathematically-minded people just bend numbers to their will. But when it comes to long term budget projections, economists from the left, right, and center all agree we on an unsustainable course, and that the entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are the main driver …
