Tuesday, the Washington Post profiled Judd Gregg.
Wednesday, the Post runs this op-ed from Judd Gregg.
I’m betting on Judd Gregg apple pie recipes on Thursday.
By the way, here is what Gregg says in his op-ed about Obama’s budget:
“But don’t be fooled when the president says the economy he inherited is the reason that future deficits and debt skyrocket.
“The president’s budget makes clear that a huge expansion of government is not just about today’s economic downturn. Once the recession is behind us, this budget will continue pushing for more and more government in our everyday lives.
“Instead of tightening Uncle Sam’s belt the way so many American families are cutting back these days, the president’s proposal spends so aggressively that it essentially adds $1 trillion to the debt, on average, every year.
“Except for some accounting gimmicks, the budget makes no attempt to cut wasteful spending or find savings. It ignores reform for major entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which are on track to cost us $67 trillion more than we have over the next 75 years.
“The new spending is coupled with the largest tax increase in U.S. history — $1.5 trillion over 10 years.”
From 1964 to 1975, only two teams other than UCLA won an NCAA men’s basketball championship. If you can name those two schools, you get a new edition of Trivial Pursuit (but you have to pick it up, I’m not mailing the thing). You could also pick a book if you’d rather, and that I’d mail.
Congrats to Paul Sand, who correctly answered the last trivia question, which you’ve probably forgotten by now. He knew that the J. in J. Bonnie Newman stands for Jane. I’m not sure why he knew that, but he did, and for knowing it he took home his choice from my giant stack of books. His choice was Richard Epstein’s “Free Markets Under Seige: Cartels, Politics & Social Welfare.” Don’t judge the book stack by that pick, by the way. I’ve got lots of different types of books, but for whatever reason that’s the one Paul wanted.
On Sunday, a gunman killed eight at a NC nursing home before being felled by a single shot from a local police officer.
Schools, colleges, nursing homes, shopping centers. It was reported that the shooter’s estranged wife worked at this nursing home. But still, have you ever wondered why there’s never a shooting rampage at a shooting range, gun shop or NRA meeting? Have you noticed that they always take place where there are lots of defenseless, unarmed people?
Social issues test NH Democrats
Jonathan Chait’s New Republic article “Why the Democrats can’t govern” is an excellent analysis of the current situation in Washington. I don’t agree with his premise that moderates are botching things, and I think he is wrong to dismiss the idea that Obama, like Clinton, is going too far to the left too fast. But he shows very skillfully how congressional Democrats beholden to pet interests are wrecking things.
He writes: “Democrats have locked themselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When their party controls all of Washington, things tend to go south quickly. The president’s popularity plunges, and soon his copartisans in Congress find themselves scrambling to keep from losing their own seats in the political undertow. It happened to Carter in 1978 and 1980, and again to Clinton in 1994.”
Is US TV news headed in the direction of Europapers? CNN has fallen to third place in prime time ratings. FOX News is first, MSNBC second. The two news networks with decided political tilts are in the top, and the one left-leaning network that still tries to pretend to be objective slips to third. Interesting.
Dead, white men are back in vogue at Harvard, sort of.
Portsmouth takes some heat for following Manchester’s lead on public parking.
Mittersill comes back.
MechaGodzilla has a challenger.
Spokane, Washington, bans dish detergent that contains phosphates. Not “green” enough. Wouldn’t you know it, all the good detergents contain phosphates. So guess what the good residents of Spokane are doing? Smuggling name-brand detergent into the city because, as the AP reports, “Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe’s left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand.”
“Yes, I am a smuggler,” said one resident. “I’m taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with.”
Sen. Judd Gregg delivers the Republicans’ weekly radio address today. Here’s the full text of his address:
“Hello, I’m Judd Gregg, Senator from New Hampshire. We all know these are difficult times. People are worried about keeping their jobs, paying their bills, the value of their homes and the cost of sending their kids to college. It’s hard.
“Thus I appreciate, as do all Americans, the efforts being made by our President and his seriousness about addressing these issues.
“But what concerns many of us are his proposals in the budget he recently sent to the Congress that dramatically grow the size and cost of government and move it to the left.
“It is our opinion that this plan spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much.
“You may have heard this before that the budget of the President spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much.
“What do we mean? Well, let me give you a few examples.
“In the next five years, President Obama’s budget will double the national debt; in the next ten years it will triple the national debt.
“To say this another way, if you take all the debt of our country run up by all of our presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush, the total debt over all those 200-plus years since we started as a nation, it is President Obama’s plan to double that debt in just the first five years that he is in office.
“He is also planning to spend more on the government as a percentage of our economy than at any time since World War II.
“His budget assumes the deficit will average $1 trillion dollars every year for the next 10 years and will add well over $9 trillion dollars in new debts to our children’s backs.
“He also is proposing the largest tax increase in history, much of it aimed at taxing small business people who have been, over the years, the best job creators in our economy. And further, he is proposing a massive new national sales tax on your electric bill. So that every time you turn on a light switch, in your house, you will be hit with a new tax — and it averages over $3,000 per household.
“These are staggering numbers and represent an extraordinary move of our government to the left.
“The President to his credit is not trying to hide this; in fact he is very forthright in stating that he believes that by greatly expanding the spending, the taxing and the borrowing of our government, this will lead us to prosperity.
“Here of course is where we differ. We believe you create prosperity by having an affordable government that pursues its responsibilities without excessive costs, taxes or debt. That it is the individual American who creates prosperity and good jobs, not the government.
“We believe that you create energy independence not by sticking Americans with a brand new national sales tax on everyone’s electric bill, but by expanding the production of American energy, such as environmentally sound off-shore drilling, nuclear power, wind, solar while also conserving more.
“We also believe you improve everyone’s health care not by nationalizing the health care system and putting the government between you and your doctor, but by assuring that every American has access to quality health insurance and choices in health care.
“We believe that you run a sound and affordable government not by running up the national debt to historic levels and unsustainable levels while over-taxing working Americans and spending as if there is no tomorrow, but rather by working on limiting the growth of government in a manner that is affordable not only today but for the next generation through limiting spending and addressing core issues like the cost of entitlements.
“Our nation has an exceptional history of one generation passing on to the next generation a more prosperous and stronger country, but that tradition is being put at risk. The dramatic move to the left and the massive increase in the size and cost of the government, proposed by the budget of President Obama, will lead to an immense national debt that not only threatens the value of the dollar and puts at risk our ability to borrow money to run the government. But it will also place our children at a huge disadvantage as they inherit this debt which will make their chances of success less than those given to us by our parents. It is not right for one generation to do that to another generation.
“Rather, we believe that if you properly steward the responsibilities of the government, if you do not spend too much, if you do not tax too much, if you do not borrow too much, we can leave our children a better nation where they will have even greater opportunity for prosperity, peace and freedom.
“Thank you for taking the time to listen, and have a great weekend.”
Former Clinton Budget Director Alice Rivlin writes in today’s Washington Post:
“Designed to facilitate a rapid economic rebound, the budget’s humongous multiyear deficits (overwhelmingly attributable to the recession itself, the financial rescue and the temporary stimulus) are both inevitable and appropriate. But as the economy recovers, that higher spending should be recouped. The ‘pay-fors’ in the Obama budget are well designed, but they are not big enough to compensate for the increased spending once economic growth returns.
“Obama would shift tax burdens from average working Americans to those who earn most, but the proposed shifts are modest and, on balance, would reduce future revenue. The president would turn the temporary Making Work Pay credit into a small permanent tax cut for most workers and enhance the earned-income tax credit for low-wage earners. He would return the top tax-bracket rates to the Clinton-era 36 and 39.6 percent from the Bush-era 33 and 35 percent.
“Restricting tax deductions to a maximum of 28 percent is a good idea, but it should be pushed further. It would be preferable to convert deductions to credits, so that all taxpayers get the same benefit from a given dollar of, say, mortgage interest paid. Differential subsidies to upper-income homeowners are not only unfair but encourage the building of more McMansions.
“The other major ‘pay-for’ in the budget is the cap-and-trade plan, since auctioning pollution permits would generate revenue. Tightening the emissions cap over time would raise the price of carbon-based fuels in a reasonably efficient way, encourage shifts to alternative fuels and reduce the amount of heat-trapping carbon-dioxide being released into the atmosphere. The impact of rising transportation costs on low-income people would be mitigated by the proposed income tax changes in favor of low-income workers.
“The pay-for package is persuasively designed, but it will not fully compensate for the rising spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, if the president’s budget were approved, deficits would remain above 4 percent of gross domestic product even after the economy recovers and that the national debt as a percentage of GDP would nearly double, from 42 percent in 2008 to 82 percent by 2019. Since much of that increased debt would be held by the Chinese and other foreigners, America’s vulnerability would be heightened.
“Congress could greatly improve the president’s budget by accepting its main outlines but adding steps to reduce long-run deficits.”
In other words, Rivlin says, Obama’s new budget spends waaaaaay more than it takes in. But in his press conference this week, Obama said his budget deficits are caused by “huge health-care costs… that were here long before I got here…”
Here’s the full quote:
“The biggest driver of long-term deficits are the huge health-care costs we’ve got that we’re going to have to tackle. And if we don’t deal with some of the structural problems in our deficit, ones that were here long before I got here, then we’re going to continue to see some of the problems in those out years.”
It’s amazing how he gets away with such plainly false assertions.
At Obama’s press conference yesterday, Chip Reid of CBS News asked the President about his enormous projected deficits, noting that the deficit shrinks by year five but grows every year after that. See if you can figure out the President’s response.
“The biggest driver of long-term deficits are the huge health-care costs we’ve got that we’re going to have to tackle. And if we don’t deal with some of the structural problems in our deficit, ones that were here long before I got here, then we’re going to continue to see some of the problems in those out years,” he said.
So… the reason he projects enormous deficits in “the out years” is because of “huge health-care costs” “that were here long before I got here”?
Reid didn’t buy it, and the President gave it another go:
“It is going to be an impossible task to balance our budget if we’re not taking on rising health care costs. And it’s gonna be an impossible task to balance our budget, or even approximate it, if we are not boosting our growth rates. And that’s why our budget focuses on the investments we need to make that happen.”
Um, what investments would those be, Mr. President? They aren’t in your budget.
“It is going to take a whole host of adjustments. We couldn’t reflect all of those adjustments in this budget.”
So, the deficit grows to astronomical levels because he addresses pre-existing health care problems by applying fixes that he doesn’t actually apply but anticipates having to apply sometime in the future.
What?
“You’re not going to see those savings reflected until much later. And so, a budget is a snapshot of what we can get done right now.”
Oh, OK. So, the budget projects huge deficits because you hope to fix pre-existing health care spending problems in some future budget.
This is what happens when, as a politician, you can’t just say, “Dude, because we spent a gazillion dollars we don’t have! Duh!”
Apparently the greater Boston area’s crunchy no-nukes crowd ain’t what it used to be. This Boston teacher is having a hard time finding someone to argue that alternative energy is better than another nuclear plant.
When Manchester is making downtown property owners remove billboards that generate tax revenue, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Agency is expanding its billboard program to bring in an estimated $6 million in new revenue.
Now tere’s an idea we should be importing from Massachusetts.
