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Jim Bunning recently became a villain by using a filibuster to delay legislation. While claimed to be making a principled stand against deficit spending, he played the game rather badly. For example, he made the point that he was suffering by missing a game he wanted to see (easily remedied by a VCR or PVR). This made him seem selfish and lacking in empathy. As another example, when corned at an elevator he came across as an ass.
While I think Bunning earned his infamy, he actually did have a good point behind all his unfortunate antics. To be specific, Bunning seemed to be trying to make the following point: continued deficit spending will hurt the United States and if the folks in congress cannot find the will to pay upfront for this sort of bill, then these folks will never be able to find the will to do what must be done to reign in spending.
While I would not play the game as Bunning did, if this was his point, then it is a good one. Unrelenting deficit spending is an excellent way to contribute to the ruin of America and, as such, is something that needs to be dealt with. If the folks in congress are unable to find a way to provide funds without simply creating more deficits, then there is clearly a need for real change in how congress does things.
However, Bunning’s clumsy and flawed attempts to make his point might have actually hurt attempts at such fiscal responsibility. After all, anyone who attempts to require that funding be provided without deficit spending can now be accused of trying to pull a Bunning. While this is a minor point, it is a matter of some concern.
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“Unrelenting deficit spending is an excellent way to contribute to the ruin of America and, as such, is something that needs to be dealt with.”
Some of us believe this is the #1 threat facing the U.S. This is a must-read by the historian Niall Ferguson:
If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time — it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion — about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/28/opinion/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28
That was me. Fixed now.
It was interesting to hear “Smug” McConnell dance around the deficit spending undertaken by the previous administration and the huge deficits that were projected far into the future even before Obama took office. Mitch is so “in the now”. Selectively, that is. The past? Shrug. All, part of our collective, selective memories. It happened. It didn’t happen? Were those real Republicans? Hey,I’m all for moving forward. But while we’re moving, Republicans should be applying the scourge with each step, not throwing their shoulders out patting themselves on the back.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obamas-trillions-dwarf-Bushs-dangerous-spending.html
But we wouldn’t want to consider how much of the Obama deficit is a direct result of the left over mess from the Bush era that included a snowballing unemployment rate, and an economy still in freefall. Totally unrelated ad hominem: I’ve always found Byron York’s views um, er, uh, ‘interesting’. His hair is second only to The Donald’s.
Yes. Blame Bush.
Blaming Bush is just like a South Park episode. Something goes wrong and someone from the crowd has to yell “Oh, yeah and let’s not forget to blame Bush!”. Really the destinct difference between your average Democrat and Republican politician recently is this: Democrats are spend too much and tax(seems like it would balance out but you end up killing tax revenue eventually). Republicans are spend to much and lower taxes (can only be pulled off in the best of time economically). Both of them are out of control with spending. The deficit and debt are getting way out of control. In the future they will probably have the technology to bring people back to life when they have long been. When they are able they will bring us back to torture us for piling this shit on their heads.
Trillion dollar deficits for the next decade. Will Obama ever take responsibility for anything?
CBO: Huge deficits to average $1 trillion per year over the next decade
By Walter Alarkon – 03/05/10 03:49 PM ET
President Barack Obama’s budget will lead to deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, the CBO estimated Friday.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/85237-cbo-estimates-huge-deficits-average-1-trillion-per-year-for-the-next-decade
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said President Barack Obama’s budget would lead to annual deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion for the next decade.
The estimates are for larger deficits than the budget shortfalls expected by the White House.
Annual deficits under Obama’s budget plan would be about $976 billion from 2011 through 2020, according to a CBO analysis of Obama’s plan released Friday.
Evidence, baby, evidence. Wake up and smell the evidence.
They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the nation’s second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.
But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress — or lack of it — over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold big margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.
Those Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget deficits. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to reduce the power of the Democratic-union combine with referenda was defeated in 2005 when public employee unions poured $100 million — all originally extracted from taxpayers — into effective TV ads.
Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California — almost as many as the number of immigrants coming in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 census.
Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes — and no state income taxes — and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California’s year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.
But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California’s. But its test scores — and with a demographically similar school population — are higher. California’s once fabled freeways are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
In the meantime, Texas’ economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small and large generate new jobs.
And Americans have been voting for Texas with their feet. From 2000 to 2009, some 848,000 people moved from other parts of the United States to Texas, about the same number as moved in from abroad. That inflow has continued in 2008-09, in which 143,000 Americans moved into Texas, more than double the number in any other state, at the same time as 98,000 were moving out of California. Texas is on the way to gain four additional House seats and electoral votes in the 2010 reapportionment.
This was not always so. In the two decades after World War II California, with its pleasant weather, was the Golden State, a promised land, for most Americans, while Texas seemed a provincial rural backwater. Many saw postwar California’s expansion of universities, freeways and water systems a model for the nation. Few experts praised Texas’ low-tax, low-services government.
Now it is California’s ruinously expensive and increasingly incompetent government that seems dysfunctional, while Texas’ approach has generated more creativity and opportunity. So it’s not surprising that Texas voters preferred Perry over an opponent who has spent 16 years in Washington. What’s surprising is that Democrats in Washington are still trying to impose policies like those that have ravaged California rather than those that have proved so successful in Texas.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Low-tax-Texas-beats-big-government-California-86681467.html#ixzz0hXT58ImF
Does the evidence include any consideration of the relative populations size? California’s pop. is 1/3 larger than Texas’–abt. 39 m v 24 m. Any consideration of natural resources? I didn’t see oil mentioned once in the article. What would we have if we evened the playing field? Each state with 31 m people having the advantage of equal oil and natural gas resources? And while we’re on Texas. All these complaints about the various deals, such as the the Nebraska buyout, made in the health care legislation vote-seeking process. Here’s an interesting historical perspective.
“One privilege Texas does reserve, and a condition that appears in the resolution approving its statehood, is the option to subdivide itself into as many as four states (a total of five). But Texas is more likely to leave the Union again than to fragment its identity and its land.” Also–
“The terms of the congressional bill included a requirement that Texas cede to the US all forts, barracks, navy yards, and other property pertaining to the public defense, but it also allowed Texas to keep its public lands, a generous condition rarely found in annexation treaties. However, in exchange for that concession, Texas also had to maintain responsibility for its own public debt.”
http://tafkac.org/politics/texas_secession_rights.html
Snopes.com and fivethirtyeight.com confirm this . At any rate, if Texas can, indeed break into 5 different states that would indeed strain the axle of the Constitutional applecart. I’m thinking of the “two Senators from each state” part, in particular. Imagine, in this super-partisan era starting with a single political entity with fairly uniform political leanings and 2 senators. Then break it into 5 entities, all with the same political leanings and a total of 10 senators. Congress (March 1, 1845, Joint Resolution for Annexing of Texas) approved that. Oh, here’s the text of the actual resolution
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/two/texannex.htm
Is that a sellout of stupendous proportions–or what? The Nebraska deal pales in comparison.
Obama has taken responsibility for numerous things. One example: http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/president/38973574.html
Just do a do Google search using the relevant keywords for more examples.
He is too much like a spoiled child to take the blame for anything. He says he welcomes the responsibility but there is always a ‘but’. If one truly takes on the responsibility of something then they take the blame and praise. Truly childish.
California has their own natural resources they could harvest but they choose not too. They are failing because of their own self destructive policies and the people deserve what they get for electing the same type of jackasses in again and again. California at over half a trillion in debt is a huge liability for the country. Nationalized Helthcare would be a way they could share their pain with illigal immigration with the rest of the country. No thanks. I’ld say California is proof that Progressive politics and the economy do not go together. California=FAIL. When were they falling into the Pacific again? Funny thing is our state has modeled its own policy on California’s. Our state is a big fail economically too. We have 24.9% of our budget going to welfare. Wahoo for no business.
Bunning brought more attention the problems we face, so I support him.
Hopefully, he garners enough support to get someone new in the Whitehouse in 2012.
“California has their own natural resources they could harvest but they choose not too.”
I’ve gone to two resources, directly out of Texas, that make that same claim. Both sources offers darn scant to non-existent detail of the resources they’re referring to. What are they? And no specific evidence of the actual comparability of those resources that I referred to in the first paragraph of my post. The more substantial of the two sources has an interesting set of graphs Ch. 2, p 56.:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/tax/09RSPS/09RSPS_chap2.pdf
I see those two graphs and I see two states that are on an equal basis ( for the purposes of the graphs) in ’98. Suspiciously, in 2000 Texas’ GDP and income growth begin to rise in ’00 and ’01. The Lone Star state begins to pull away in ’03-’05. All the while, California’s ‘and’ the country’s GDP and income growth rise ‘equally’ but at a slower rate. Both articles would have me believe that it all has to do with taxation. I don’t buy it. I’m so tempted to factor in the ‘ex-Governor Republican president’ and the rise in oil prices that increased oil-field production.
For what it’s worth the link to the other article is
http://www.twc.state.tx.us/svcs/commrs/081109chr.pdf
Here’s what I’m thinking. We should allow Texas to secede-even though that’s not constitutional- as an experiment that we ‘real’ Americans can all watch. Give current Texas residents the opportunity to come back home to America. Then close the door. We can all watch the little hamsters in their Stetsons defend themselves against foreign invasion by illegal immigrants and any foreign nation that might wish to seize its oil. The ‘UNITED States’ will naturally have a larger border to defend (it’ll have to defend the current northern, eastern and western borders of the new Texan state from those who eventually overrun Texas.But our 48-9 UNITED States should handle that easily. It should be bloody good fun.