This is probably inevitable. As Glenn points out, all of the pensions are broken, and SS can’t continue on the current trajectory.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
How Long Will China…?
…continue to subsidize our military expenditures?
[Update a few minutes later]
China is “worried” about its treasury holdings. It should be.
Fifty-Two Days
…and fifty-two screwups. As is noted in comments, though, he missed some.
Judd Gregg For Treasury Secretary
He made short shrift of Geithner’s lies yesterday. Of course, he would never get the job, because he would never put up with the adminstration’s insane plans:
Gregg said the budget is essentially “putting on our children’s backs a debt they can never get out from underneath.”
He added pointedly, “I think we’re putting at risk not only our children’s future, we’re clearly putting at risk the value of a dollar and our ability to sell debt.”
…”The argument that this budget doesn’t have tax increases [on everyone] is, I think, an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ view of the budget,” he said.
He challenged the budget’s math on cutting the debt: “When you take the deficit and quadruple it and then you cut it and half, that’s like taking four steps back and two steps forward. That’s not making any progress; you’re still going backwards.”
Veronique de Rugy has a pretty scary graph of it:
The Obama administration’s budget, called “A New Era of Responsibility, Renewing America’s Promise,” estimates the deficit for this year will total $1.75 trillion. But things will get better, right? Well, according to Obama’s own ten-year deficit projections (see chart), a New Era of Responsibility produces bigger deficits every single year than during the Bush years: $1.75 trillion in 2009 to $533 billion by 2013 — this budget projects higher deficits in 2014 ($570 billion), 2015 ($583 billion), and 2016 ($637 billion). In 2019, the final year in the budget, the deficit is projected to be $712 billion.
Change! But not much hope.
Megan McArdle is regretting her vote:
Having defended Obama’s candidacy largely on his economic team, I’m having serious buyer’s remorse. Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. Meanwhile, the administration is clearly prioritized a stimulus package that will not work without fixing the banks over, um, fixing the banking system. Unlike most fiscal conservatives, I’m not mad at him for trying to increase the size of the government; that’s, after all, what he got elected promising to do. But he also promised to be non-partisan and accountable, and the size and composition stimulus package looks like just one more attempt to ram through his ideological agenda without much scrutiny, with the heaviest focus on programs that will be especially hard to cut.
The budget numbers are just one more blow to the credibility he worked hard to establish during the election. Back then, people like me handed him kudoes for using numbers that were really much less mendacious than the general run of candidate program promises. Now, he’s building a budget on the promise that this recession will be milder than average, with growth merely dipping to 1.2% this year and returning to trend in 2010. Isn’t there anyone at BLS who could have filled him in on the unemployment figures, or at Treasury who could have explained what a disproportionate impact finance salaries have on tax revenue? These numbers . . . well, I can’t really fully describe them on a family blog. But he has now raced passed Bush in the Delusional Budget Math olympics.
Well, some of us saw this coming. It’s just a shame that the Republican nominee was John McCain. There was no good choice.
Message For The Cultists
Obama isn’t Jesus. Jesus could actually build a cabinet.
Heh.
Another Neocon Weighs In On Freeman
You know, that famous neocon Lanny Davis:
Mr. Freeman’s departing rant explaining his withdrawal, in which did not take any responsibility and obscured the facts about his own actual writings, and made dark and false charges of a conspiracy of nameless people who “libeled” him — again without a single factual example — was ironically the best evidence of all as to why, temperamentally and intellectually, he was not qualified for this particular job of objectively assessing crucial national intelligence facts.
Surely I’m not the only person to be disturbed that this man was nominated in the first place.
Ignorance, Or Lies?
The Brady bunch is at it again. Of course, either way, you’d think that the press would stop paying attention to them. If, that is, they weren’t sympathetic to gun grabbing themselves.
They’re Not Anti-Intimidation
They’re just on the other side.
What Made The Difference?
I was struck by this sentence in Jen Rubin’s piece today on the end of the Obama honeymoon:
The swiftness of the criticism seems remarkable given the reverence which the media displayed toward Obama and the presidential transition which most commentators regarded as unusually smooth.
So what happened? Why was the transition so “smooth” and the actual governing been so rocky and seemingly incompetent?
Well, here’s something that all the transition swooners in the media and other places didn’t consider. What changed on January 20th? Who was in charge before that date? Blinded by the glow of their adoration, did they perhaps misattribute the source of the “smoothness”?
And what does that portend for the next almost-four years?
Making Space Relevant To The American People
In a discussion at NASA Watch about the president’s…interesting…statements on space policy, Andrew Tubbiolo has some ideas:
Launch Vehicle Extreme Makeover:
A team of crack yet touchy feely Engineers arrive on a bus, send the NASA team to Disney World, tear everything apart, and employ John Carmak and XCOR Aerospace to rebuild everything…..It’ll all look nice, but doesn’t really need to work. Employ the typical attendees of the Space Access Conference as the mindless mob cheering the action on.Big Brother, Space Station Edition:
Pick the hottest babes from an international set of scientists, one grumpy Russian, a cut party animal fighter jock from the US Navy and lock them in an orbital space station for one month of intense competition. Make them execute complex, obscure, yet useless tasks that employ almost none of the skills they developed thus far in their lives. Every week someone is voted out the airlock.The Gong Panel:
A panel of three PI’s from past obscure space missions completed at least a decade ago decide the fate of proposed programs as they are presented live on stage. The proposed project with the highest score wins funding. At any time during the presentation panel members are allowed to reject the proposal by banging a gong.I think this would go a long way towards making space more relevant to the general public. Heck, it would make me pay more attention to it.
Don’t give PAO any ideas.
[Late morning update]
Here is the full story on the president’s remarks.
He said nothing about whether he wants to continue the Bush administration’s Constellation program, intended to send astronauts to the moon by 2020. The program’s Ares I rocket is behind schedule and over budget, leading to speculation that it will miss its targeted 2015 launch date and further reduce the skilled work force at KSC.
He was also silent about the fate of the $100billion international space station. Once the shuttle is retired, NASA will depend on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for access to the station.
I’ve been trying, ever since the inauguration, to figure out if the plan is to come up with a new direction for the agency, and then find an administrator to implement it, or to find a good administrator, and direct him (or her) to come up with the plan. Or, given a lot of the other Charlie Foxtrot that’s been going on in general, if there is no plan.