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Buckwheat's Budget Takes Hits On Both Sides

Mike

Well-known member
He's obviously using dividing tactics to gain what?


By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - Even before it is unveiled, President Barack Obama's new budget is opening to poor reviews from liberal allies entrenched in their opposition to shaving benefit programs and GOP opponents equally opposed to new tax increases. The double-edged criticism comes even though the plan reprises a framework that once held the promise of a long-sought "grand bargain" for reducing government deficits.

Obama's budget, two months overdue but to be released Wednesday, mixes almost $600 billion in new taxes over the coming decade with modest curbs on spending, including lower-than-scheduled benefit increases for people receiving Social Security. The wealthy would lose the full benefit of some tax breaks while the poor and middle class would gradually slip into higher tax brackets.

Presidential budgets are often declared "dead on arrival" and this one may be just the latest to get that label. But it differs from last February's campaign-year missive by proposing a new, government-wide inflation adjustment - affecting Social Security, veterans' pensions and the indexing of tax brackets - that has long been offered to Republicans in hopes of winning concessions on new tax revenues.

Democrats in Congress seeking to make the wealthy pay even more taxes have comfortably staked out turf as defenders of "entitlement" programs like Social Security and Medicare despite Obama's willingness to tame their growth. Top Republicans, meanwhile, aren't in a compromising mood on taxes after yielding in January to $600 billion in higher taxes on top-bracket earners over the next decade.

"Mr. President, if you are ready to embrace bold reform - to take the steps that are needed to make our entitlement programs permanently solvent and grow the economy - then Republicans are ready to work with you," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday. "The time has come to summon the political courage to move beyond the status quo, to put the tax hikes and the poll-tested gimmicks aside, and to do what must be done."

The White House has already revealed the broad outlines of the plan, which incorporates a budget offer made by Obama to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in December. Boehner rejected it and quit the talks.

"The president's been clear that it's going to take broad and shared sacrifice," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in an interview with National Public Radio. "He would not find it acceptable to make only reductions in entitlement programs. That we need also to raise revenues so that we have a fair balance."

The White House says the Obama plan would cut deficits by a total of $1.8 trillion over a decade, reducing the annual red ink to the $500 billion range by 2016 and down to 1.7% of the size of the economy within 10 years. Obama presided over $1 trillion-plus deficits for the first four years of his presidency. But Obama also would do away with the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts that were triggered last month, producing a net deficit reduction of just $600 billion.

The GOP-dominated House and the Democratic Senate each have already passed their own budget plans. The House blueprint would slash $4.6 trillion from the deficit over 10 years on top of the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts mandated under a 2011 budget and government borrowing pact. The Senate budget generally resembles Obama's except for the proposal for a stingier inflation adjustment, which is reviled by liberal Democrats.

"I don't like it," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, DW.Va. "We've got to get to the reality of more revenues."

Some Republicans, however, welcomed Obama's overture on reducing the size of future cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other benefit programs. "It shows that the president is willing to talk about some of these ways to preserve our vital but unsustainable entitlement programs," said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

Obama is expected it press his plan Wednesday night when he hosts a dozen GOP senators for dinner at the White House. For the most part, however, Republicans and Obama are still far apart.

Boehner complains that Obama is unwilling to consider things he was willing to do in the summer of 2011 - such as increasing the eligibility age for Medicare and cuts to the Medicaid health plan for the poor and disabled - when he and Obama held their first set of failed budget talks. Boehner and Obama are no longer talking, but they will have to in the not-too-distant future because Congress is going to need to increase the government's borrowing cap this summer to avoid a market-rattling U.S. default on its obligations.

Obama's budget also calls for increased spending, including $50 billion for infrastructure projects and a universal preschool program, financed by increasing the tax on tobacco.

It also reprises lower-profile ideas like higher Transportation Security Administration fees on airline tickets, the end of Saturday mail delivery and higher pension contributions for federal workers, hardy perennials of Obama's prior budgets that have been seen as candidates for inclusion in broader deficit deals that have never come to pass. He also proposes curbing farm subsidies and cutting $140 billion over a decade by reducing Medicare payments to drug companies.
 

MoGal

Well-known member
Let's see..... while they cut those piddly social security Cola's and cut medicare payments so seniors can pay more out of their bulging pockets.... what did our government spend money on????

#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars helping students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.

#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.

#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on “a tattoo removal program” in Mission Hills, California.

#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft. Wouldn’t we all love to have a “research job” like that?

#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.

#7 Fannie Mae is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it will almost certainly get it.

#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.

#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#10 According to USA Today, 13 different government agencies “fund 209 different science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs — and 173 of those programs overlap with at least one other program.”

#11 A total of $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#12 China lends us more money than any other foreign nation, but that didn’t stop our government from spending 17.8 million dollars on social and environmental programs for China.

#13 The U.S. government once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.

#14 One professor at Stanford University was given $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love.

#15 The U.S. Postal Service spent $13,500 on a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.

#16 The National Science Foundation once spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions”.

#17 A total of $1.8 million was spent on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#18 The federal government spends 25 billion dollars a year maintaining federal buildings that are either unused or totally vacant.

#19 U.S. farmers are given a total of $2 billion each year for not farming their land.

#20 The U.S. government handed one Tennessee library $5,000 for the purpose of hosting a series of video game parties.

#21 A few years ago the government spent $123,050 on a Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia. It turns out that Grafton only has a population of a little more than 5,000 people.

#22 One professor at Dartmouth University was given $137,530 to create a “recession-themed” video game entitled “Layoff”.

#23 According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. military spent “$998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida”.

#24 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once shelled out $30,000 to a group of farmers to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight “haycations”.

#25 The National Institutes of Health paid researchers $400,000 to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.

#26 The National Institutes of Health also once spent $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#27 The National Institutes of Health loves to spend our tax money on really bizarre things. The NIH once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.

#28 According to the Washington Post, 1,271 different government organizations work on government programs related to counterterrorism and homeland security.

#29 The U.S. government spent $100,000 on a “Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia”.

#30 The feds once gave Alaska Airlines $500,000 “to paint a Chinook salmon” on the side of a Boeing 737.

How in the world can our government be so foolish?

Anyone that claims that there is not a lot of stuff that can be cut out of the federal budget is lying to you.

A reality TV show in India. The Department of Agriculture’s Market Access Program spends $200 million a year to help U.S. agricultural trade associations and cooperatives advertise their products in foreign markets. In 2011, it funded a reality TV show in India that advertised U.S. cotton.
Studying pig poop. The Environmental Protection Agency awarded a $141,450 grant under the Clean Air Act to fund a Chinese study on swine manure and a $1.2 million grant to the United Nations for clean fuel promotion.
Amtrak snacks. Federally subsidized Amtrak lost $84.5 million on its food and beverage services in 2011 and $833.8 million over the past 10 years. It has never broken even on these services.
Using military exercises to boost biofuels. The U.S. Navy bought 450,000 gallons of biofuels for $12 million—or almost $27 per gallon—to conduct exercises to showcase the fuel and bring it closer toward commercialization. It is the largest biofuel purchase ever made by the government.
Conferences for government employees. In 2008 and 2009 alone, the Department of Justice spent $121 million to host or participate in 1,832 conferences.
Waste Book 2012:
“RoboSquirrel.” $325,000 was spent on a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel.” This National Science Foundation grant was used to create a realistic-looking robotic squirrel for the purpose of studying how a rattlesnake would react to it.

Cupcakes. In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the country, cupcake shops are trending. The 10 cupcake shop owners who received $2 million in Small Business Administration loan guarantees, however, can only boast so much of their entrepreneurial ingenuity, since taxpayers are backing them up.

Food stamps for alcohol and junk food. Though they were intended to ensure hungry children received healthy meals, taxpayer-funded food stamps were instead spent on fast food at Taco Bell and Burger King; on non-nutritious foods such as candy, ice cream, and soft drinks; and on some 2,000 deceased persons in New York and Massachusetts. Food stamp recipients spent $2 billion on sugary drinks alone. Improper SNAP payments accounted for $2.5 billion in waste, including to one exotic dancer who was making $85,000 per year.

Beer brewing in New Hampshire. Despite Smuttynose brewery’s financial success and popularity, it is still getting a $750,970 Community Development Block Grant to build a new brewery and restaurant facilities.
A covered bridge to nowhere. What list of government waste would be complete without a notorious “bridge to nowhere”? In this case, it’s $520,000 to fix the Stevenson Road Covered Bridge in Green County, Ohio, which was last used in 2003.
 

Tam

Well-known member
And let us not forget that Obama is cutting benefits to the elderly while he spends hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars on HIS FAMILY'S ENDLESS VACATIONS, HIS GOLF ADDICTION AND WHITE HOUSE PARTIES.

Obamas' Cost of Living in the White House: $1.4 Billion a Year

Katie Pavlich
News Editor, Townhall
Mar 11, 2013 07:51 AM EST
As Carol touched on yesterday, while the White House keeps its doors closed to the people under the guise of "devastating sequestration," First Lady Michelle Obama is preparing for her glitzy 50th birthday party with performances by Adele and Beyonce. Although the party is being touted as private and therefore paid for by the Obamas, taxpayers will still have to foot the bill for secret service and other accommodations at the White House for the event. Meanwhile, President Obama just held a fancy dinner for Republicans just six blocks away from the White House and of course he took his massive motorcade to get there.

Charles Cooke over at NRO has tallied up the total for the Obamas' cost of living in the White House: $1.4 billion per year.


The executive mansion is not in that much trouble, of course. It’s certainly not in sufficiently dire straits for Air Force One ($181,757 per hour) to be grounded, or to see the executive chef ($100,000 per year) furloughed, or to cut back on the hours of the three full-time White House calligraphers ($277,050 per year for the trio), or to limit the invaluable work of the chief of staff to the president’s dog ($102,000 per year), or to trim his ridiculous motorcade ($2.2 million). If Ellen DeGeneres wants another dancercize session or Spain holds another clothing sale, the first family will be there before you can say “citizen executive.” Fear ye not, serfs: Austerity may be the word of the week, but the president is by no means in any danger of being forced to live like the president of a republic instead of like a king.

The current annual cost of the White House — just in household expenses, not the policy operations for which it exists — is $1.4 billion: Annually, presidential vacations cost $20 million (the low estimate for one presidential vacation to Hawaii is $4 million, but the true cost is probably five times that); the first family’s yearly health-care costs are $7 million; more than $6 million is spent on the White House grounds each year. Transporting the president cost $346 million last year. But as Michelle Obama might say, America is basically a downright mean sort of place, so the tours will just have to go. One hopes at least that the calligraphers were recruited to sign the docents’ pink slips.

So there you have it folks. While the White House has given out talking points to every federal agency telling them to make sequester as painful as possible through canceling meat inspections, forcing long delays at the airport and releasing thousands of criminal illegal aliens into the streets of America, the Obamas are planning their next vacation at the expense of the American people.

I have a question for the libs on here. If the Obama family is so healthy how in the h*ll are they spending $7 million on Healthcare? I realize Obamacare made health insurance premiums sky rocket but that is pure ridiculous. :roll:
 

loomixguy

Well-known member
I'm not a lib, Miss Tam, but I'll try to answer the question.

7 mill might sound like a lot, but it really isn't. Ever notice the one family member you NEVER hear about, Mooch-elle's motha? God knows what might be ailing her that we are paying for. No doubt the family pooch's vet costs are figured into this, as "health care". Dear Leader is probably going through a case of nicotine patches a week, and they aren't cheap, plus, I wouldn't be surprised if he is regularly taking some kind of pharmaceutical cocktail to ward off the HIV virus. God knows that stuff ain't cheap and that he's been exposed to more HIV than any sailor was ever exposed to regular STD's while on shore leave in Angeles City.

Maybe Mooch-elle has a collection of battery powered gadgets, purchased at taxpayer's expense, to help her make it through the night.....but I'll let Jigs investigate this in fine detail, since he's so smitten with his "First Lady".

All in the name of "health care". :wink:
 
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