Let’s start with the bottom line. Obama proposes to spend $3.78 trillion dollars in FY2014, the highest level of spending ever. Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards calculates this against the budget that preceded Obama’s term in office, the FY2008 budget that was the last to get a signature from George W. Bush. Obama’s proposal increases spending by 27 percent over those six years and by 8 percent over the last normal-order budget for FY2010.
This increase comes despite Obama’s promises to introduce budget and deficit discipline, and in defiance of voters who want the federal government to reduce spending. It comes after the initiation of the budget sequester, which was supposed to lop off a mere $85 billion in spending each year for the next decade, which would have been just 2.3 percent of last year’s budget. Instead, this proposal would increase spending by $154 billion, almost twice what sequestration was supposed to save taxpayers.
So much for a multi-year approach to fiscal discipline! Obama’s budget bypasses the very sequester his White House demanded and got in 2011. AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis pointed out that Obama’s own budget office projected that the new budget proposal would lead to a balanced budget by … 2055. That assumes, of course, that whatever savings Obama claims to make in this budget will last 41 years longer than the sequester savings did.
Needless to say, Republicans on Capitol Hill were not impressed.
Also known as Eskimo Ice Cream, akutaq, (pronounced agoodik or agooduk) is a classic native dish that is still popular today. Traditionally, women made a batch of the frosty treat when the men returned with a freshly killed polar bear or seal. Today, modern versions are usually prepared with Crisco, but traditional recipes called for meat and fat from caribou, moose, bears, seals, and fish.
Ingredients: Reindeer fat, seal oil, salmonberries, blackberries
Fat content: It’s hard to estimate without a known serving size of this native treat. But consider this: An average serving of reindeer fat packs a whopping 91 grams of fat. A different version made with fish, berries, and seal oil contains 9 grams of fat.
And you know what? Those on the traditional Inuit diet have very low rates of hearth disease. So what does this do for your thesis? You know what’s wrong with most of the dishes listed? Hint: it’s not fat.
This is a pet peeve of mine. For anything less than four or five floors, I much prefer stairs to elevators, not just for health reasons, but because it can be faster than waiting for one, but in a lot of places, they make it very hard. I just found the stairway here at the Broadmoor Conference Center, but it’s very clear that they’d prefer the guests not see or use it. At the Grace Inn in Phoenix, where Space Access has been for the past few years, they lock the doors to enter it from the bottom, so you can go down, but not up.
There was supposed to be a hearing to decide whether or not to dismiss the Mannsuit on Thursday morning. We just learned that the court has postponed it until June 19th.
Boy, they just don’t seem to be able to catch a break. First, the sequester is preventing some big-name speakers from attending (and probably attendees as well), and now there’s four to eight inches of snow forecast for Tuesday. Guess I’d better pack some winter gear for my trip tomorrow.
The first thing to note is that none of our critics actually defend Obamacare, and therefore none dispute the argument of the piece. Their dispute is entirely with what we propose instead — which our piece of course lays out only briefly and broadly, since we assumed that the argument that replacement is still the right way to think about things first had to be made. Their lack of interest in defending the law is interesting. Do they agree with us that Obamacare cannot work as enacted? Do they agree that piecemeal reforms will not work and Obamacare must be replaced? If they do, do they imagine that the party that forced this unpopular law down the country’s throat will be trusted to fix or replace it once it fails?
If they don’t agree that Obamacare is untenable (as we assume at least some of them don’t), how would they defend it? Do they not think it is headed for an insurance death spiral? Do they not think the financial incentives it sets up will result in far higher federal spending and far fewer insured Americans than its advocates promised? Do they think it will lower premium costs? Is it sustainable over time? Have you seen much of a substantive answer from the left to these commonly voiced concerns?
The critics of our piece offer no such answers, and actually suggest that we’re wasting our time repeating the obvious case against Obamacare. Several of them want to get right to a debate about what should replace it. That’s great. Not all of them, though, want to discuss the solution we pointed to. Kevin Drum acknowledges (twice) that he didn’t actually read our piece; he just read Yglesias and Klein (who just summarized Yglesias) and “sighed.” We know the feeling.
I guess we shouldn’t expect any better of him — after all, he’s only been in the Senate for a quarter of a century — but he apparently needs to be told that the purpose of a filibuster is not to prevent debate, but to prevent its end.