Government Spending Archives - Page 26 of 27

Deficit Wars: Bush vs. Obama

A lot of politicians and pundits are grossly misinformed about the deficits during the Bush era, the actual deficits in 2009 and estimated deficits through 2019. The following chart prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office shows the night and day budget deficit difference between the two administrations. When you look at the chart, remember three key facts:

Congress determines the spending of the federal government, not the President. Yes, the President gives his input to Congress, but ultimately it is Congress that writes and passes the laws that set government spending.
The Democrats have had control of the House and the Senate since 2007 and are responsible for passing all federal spending bills during 2007, 2008 and 2009, which includes the last two years of Bush’s administration. Therefore, when you ask how much did Bush spend while in office, do not include his last two years because it was the Democrats who set spending in those years.
The 2009 expenditures were greatly increased because of the emergency TARP money spent to bail out the banks.

Wall St. Journal: “Deficit to Hit All-Time High. Obama’s $3.8 Trillion Budget Forecasts a $1.6 Trillion Shortfall for 2010 Before It Drops. President Barack Obama will propose on Monday a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011 that projects the deficit will shoot up to a record $1.6 trillion this year, but would push the red ink down to about $700 billion, or 4% of the gross domestic product, by 2013, according to congressional aides. The deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, would eclipse last year’s $1.4 trillion deficit, in part due to new spending on a proposed jobs package.”

A story in Reuters today states, “he White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal . . . . In its budget proposal to be released on Monday, the White House predicts a record $1.6 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year that ends September 30 . . . . ”

Obama vs. Bush Deficits

Government Lunacy: New York Pays Teacher $100,000 a Year to Sit in Room and Do Nothing

It’s easy to see why New York City has a $4 billion deficit. New York City bureaucrats are idiots. Years ago the teachers’ union negotiated a deal with the NY Department of Education where teachers who were fired were not actually fired, but sent to the “rubber room” to sit for 7 hours a day for years while receiving full pay and benefits for doing nothing. Although the teachers were found unfit to teach, they continued on the payroll indefinitely. No sane person/government/business would ever agree to such a stupid scheme, but the DOE did. This is what happens when government spends taxpayers’ money, i.e., government doesn’t care about the cost of anything because IT’S NOT SPENDING IT”S MONEY! It’s spending our money.

New York Post: “Easy money for millionaire exile. A Queens teacher who collects a $100,000 salary for doing nothing spends time in a Department of Education ‘rubber room’ working on his law practice and managing 12 real-estate properties worth an estimated $7.8 million, The Post found. Alan Rosenfeld hasn’t set foot in a classroom for nearly a decade since he was accused in 2001 of making lewd comments to junior-high girls and “staring at their butts,” yet the department still pays him handsomely for sitting on his own butt seven hours a day. . . . Rosenfeld simply collects his $100,049 salary — top scale for teachers — plus full health benefits and the promise of a fat pension, about $82,000 a year if he were to retire today.”

California Has $20 Billion Deficit & Will Run Out of Money April 1 So CA Senate Lunatics Pass Bill to Spend $200 Billion a Year on State Single Payor Healthcare

MercuryNews.com: “State Controller John Chiang issued a stern warning Friday about California’s cash reserves, telling legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger they must act on nearly $9 billion in budget cuts the governor is seeking by March — or the state will run out of cash to pay its bills. Without making those cuts — which Chiang says will pump $1.3 billion into the state’s checking account — California would be broke by April 1, no fooling.”

Twenty-two elected idiots (it goes without saying they are all Democrats) in the California Senate decided not to let a small problem like a $20 billion deficit prevent them from spending more of the taxpayers’ money that California does not have. Without the slightest regard for reality and keeping their fingers crossed that California will win the federal equivalent of the Powerball lottery, the California Senate approved a bill to spend an additional $200 billion per year of California’s “play money” to create a government-run single-payer medical care program. The 22 imbeciles senators must have been off the planet when Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate.

See the Investors Business Daily story called “Beyond Our Means.”

How Public Servants Became Our Masters

reason.com: “In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks—out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide—were protected by a ‘shield’ in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy. ‘Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity,’ the Register’s Jennifer Muir reported. “’Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome. Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that drivers are ‘one of their own’ or related to someone who is’. . . .”

Exempting themselves from traffic laws in the name of a threat that no longer exists is bad enough, but what government workers do to the rest of us on a daily basis makes ticket dodging look like child’s play. Often under veils of illegal secrecy, public-sector unions and their political allies are systematically looting the public treasury with gold-plated pensions, jeopardizing the finances of state and local governments around the country, removing themselves from legal accountability, and doing it all in the name of humble working men and women just looking for their fair share. Government employees have turned themselves into a coddled class that lives better than its private-sector counterpart, and with more impunity. The public’s servants have become our masters.

American Taxpayers Work to Support Highly Paid Government Workers

Boston Globe: “Since December 2007, when the current downturn began, the ranks of federal employees earning $100,000 and up has skyrocketed. According to a recent analysis by USA Today, federal workers making six-figure salaries – not including overtime and bonuses – ‘jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months.’’ The surge has been especially pronounced among the highest-paid employees. At the Defense Department, for example, the number of civilian workers making $150,000 or more quintupled from 1,868 to 10,100. At the recession’s start, the Transportation Department was paying only one person a salary of $170,000. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees were drawing paychecks that size. All the while, the federal government has been adding jobs at a 10,000-a-month clip. Between December 2007 and June 2009, federal payrolls exploded by nearly 10 percent.”

Why? What do government workers do other than busy work to justify their jobs? The reason we have the toy police is because the Consumer Product Safety Commission has workers whose sole purpose is to find toys to ban. Isn’t their a better use of government money? USA Today say:

The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker’s pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

Are you kidding? Why are taxpayers paying government workers more than the average private sector worker? I thought the government exists to support the people rather than the people supporting the government. It’s especially obscene when you consider the value of benefits such as life-time health care and retirement. The dollar difference between public and private sector workers is even greater when benefits are included in the calculation.

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