The U.S. Department of Education has swung so far off course every citizen should question why we are spending $70 billion to keep it running. Continue reading
Category Archives: cbo
Barry Soetoro aka; obama Health Rationing Is $115 Billion USD Over Budget. This Information Was With-Held Before the Vote By Pelosi!
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told us just weeks before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s health care plan. Well, the nation’s post-passage Obamacare education continued yesterday when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that the federal government will have to spend an additional $115 billion implementing the law, bringing the total estimated cost to over $1 trillion. The estimate had been requested before passage of the bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), but the CBO was too overwhelmed with the Democrats’ other constant revisions to the law to get back to Lewis before the final vote.
This is by far not the only nasty little surprise that has come back to bite Obamacare after passage. Shortly after it became law, U.S. employers began reporting hundreds of millions if dollars in losses thanks to tax changes in the bill. AT&T and Verizon alone pegged their Obamacare tax losses at around $1 billion each. At first, Democrats in Congress were outraged by the announcements and threatened to hold hearings persecuting these companies. But then the Democrats not only found out the companies were obligated by law to report their Obamacare related losses, but that the losses were a signal these companies might have to dump their employees’ and retirees’ health care coverage all together.
Then the Obama administration’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its final cost projections for Obamacare, finding that, contrary to White House claims, the legislation will increase national health care spending by $311 billion over the next decade. The CMS report also revealed that: 1) 18 million Americans will pay $33 billion in penalties for failing to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate and still receive no health care; 2) U.S. employers will pay $87 billion in employer mandate penalties; 3) 14 million Americans will lose their current employer-based health coverage; 4) 7.4 million seniors will lose their current Medicare Advantage benefits; 5) 15% of all Medicare providers will be made unprofitable, thus “jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries.”
Facing this onslaught of reality, the Obama administration has swooped into full spin mode, devoting the Weekly Presidential Address to explaining the “real benefits” Obamacare is “already delivering” to Americans. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius then sent letters to House and Senate leaders touting her “progress” in implementing the law. And then last night White House aides Nancy-Ann DeParle and Stephanie Cutter briefed the House Democratic Caucus on the “tangible benefits” of the law. The sales pitch for all three events were the same: 1) “adults” age 26 and younger can be added to their parents’ plan (never mind that this drives up their parents’ health care costs); 2) new high-risk pools for Americans with pre-existing conditions (never mind that 19 states have rejected working with HHS since Obamacare massively underfunded the pools); 3) supplementing insurance for early retirees (never mind that the Medicare Advantage cuts and tax changes mentioned above are a big reason why seniors will need supplemental coverage).
Democrats know that Americans simply are not buying what they are selling. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) tells Politico: “It’s just like trying to explain the Encyclopedia Britannica.” And John Spratt (D-SC) adds: “You need to know what you’re talking about and this is extremely complex. It’s really difficult to remember, ‘was this in this bill, or was this in the bill Senate side.’” Maybe Spratt should have figured out what was and wasn’t in the bill before he voted for it.
Since the left can’t even figure out what is in the bill they are trying to defend, the latest Rasmussen Reports shows that 63% of likely voters now believe it will increase the federal deficit, and 56% now favor repeal. Not waiting for this November’s elections to change the leadership in Congress, states are leading the way on the road to repeal. According to The Washington Post 33 states have mounted legal and legislative challenges to the new law. Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Goldwater Institute, tells the Post: “This is going to be a long, protracted war of attrition and we haven’t even seen the first wave of regulations yet. … The initial challenges to McCain-Feingold were rejected. But since then, litigators found the vulnerabilities. Likewise, here I think you’re going to see a thousand flowers bloom in terms of lawsuits. I’m hoping that this will die a death of a thousand cuts.”
Pelosi CBO Numbers Willfully Constructed To Deceive And Bleed American Citizens!
“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.”
– Vladimir Lenin 1, 2, 3
THIS IS THE PATHWAY DICTATED BY THE PSYCHOPATH BILLIONAIRES TO REDUCE THE WORLD POPULATION
Why Obama Was Anointed By The Bilderbergs And Illuminati: THE ENDGAME! – A Two Hour Movie
The CBOnumbers released today are being used to cover up the Obamacare fraud. The CBO is doing everything it can, but it is being pressured to produce numbers that the Obama crowd can use in a spurious attempt to show that their bill is not a cosmic budget-buster!
Don’t allow these hucksters toBS you. This porker is going down to defeat! If you are on the phones, pour it on. If you’re not, strap up and get on the field.
Universally Destroying America’s Productivity By Requiring EACH citizen To Submit To Health Rationing, Health Taxing, Forced Reduced Coverage By High Premiums.
Health Reform: What did it take for Congress to schedule a vote on its awful health care reform package? Not much, just a phony low-ball “score” on what the plan would cost from the Congressional Budget Office.
By presenting the CBO with incomplete, inaccurate and misleading data, the Democrats in Congress were finally able to come up with a cost score they like: $940 billion.
That’s the estimate the CBO arrived at. Like a used car dealer pricing a car at $9,999 instead of $10,000, the hucksters in Congress were anxious to get the official cost below the scary $1 trillion level at which things suddenly sound very unaffordable.
Using the rigged $940 billion estimate, Democratic leaders now hope to force a health care bill through as early as Saturday, seizing 17% of the U.S. economy by simply “deeming” the bill is passed — rather than actually passing it in an up-or-down vote.
MSNBC White Supremacists: Socialist Propaganda And Censoring The News.
This is not democracy. Nor is it constitutional. And it will do real violence to the Democrats’ promise to leave 72 hours to debate the health care bill’s contents and to let the public see what’s in it. Transparency? This is legislating through a glass, darkly.
But what really bothers us, as we’ve noted before, is the use of a phony cost estimate to justify it all. The $940 billion figure the CBO came up with is almost wholly bogus. So is the laughable estimate that deficits will be cut by $138 billion over a decade.
And the Democrats know it. That’s why they’re trying to pass this bill using questionable parliamentary maneuvers and outright trickery. Those who agree to this backroom scheme are part of a massive fraud perpetrated on the American people. As frauds, they should expect no sympathy from voters.
We can’t blame the CBO. It can only produce a score, or cost estimate, at the behest of Congress based on the data it is given. As the saying goes in the tech world: Garbage in, garbage out. In this case, they were given 10 years of revenues, but only six years of costs. So of course the “cost” looks reasonable.
And even the CBO, in releasing what it made clear was an unofficial estimate, warned: “This estimate is … preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal …” In short, they want no part of this farce.
In fact, the real cost of this health care takeover is more like $2.5 trillion over 10 years — not $940 billion. That’s off by, oh, 166%.
BREAKING HEALTHGATE: CBO’s Massive Accounting Tricks – Conveniently Discovered After Senate Vote!
Yesterday, David discussed the CBO’s miscalculation regarding the Senate health care bill. Democrats had been insisting that bill somehow cut the deficit and strengthened Medicare, but as it turns out the CBO had to clarify that the savings of the bill were being double counted. The “savings” the bill produces either have to be applied toward the Medicare trust fund or they have to be put toward the cost of the legislation to make it reduce the deficit by $132 billion over the next ten years. (That’s assuming you buy into the shady accounting tricks used to score the bill.) Megan McArdle has a typically astuteblog post up discussing the implications all of this. Megan even observes that as recently as Saturday, President Obama was trumpeting the bill’s twin achievements of deficit reduction and strengthening Medicare. However, Megan didn’t quote Obama in full –fortunately The American Spectator’s Phil Klein did. The entirety of Obama’s remarks in the immediate aftermath of Senate Democrats securing finally securing 60 votes to pass their health care bill are worth pondering:
“This bill with strengthen Medicare and extend the life of the program. Because it’s paid for and gets rid of waste and inefficiency in our health care system this will be the largest deficit reduction plan in over a decade. In fact, we just learned from the Congressional Budget Office that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade of the program, and more than one trillion dollars in the decade after that.”
Well, we now know that whether it was an innocent mistake or fiscal prestidigtation, one of these claims is simply not true. Which is all the more reason you don’t railroad an unpopular bill through in the middle of the night, as this episode proves conclusively that the Senate can’t be trusted not to make mistakes involving literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
But the bottom line is that this is a massive, massive blunder and the President and the Senate Democrats need to come clean about it. They sold the American people, or tried to anyway, on specific promises regarding deficit reduction and preserving Medicare. Now they can’t be sure of either of those promises. And Joe Taxpayer should probably be scared has heck about what else they’ve overlooked regarding the consequences of health care legislation.
If the President and Senate Democrats are serious about their repeated promises to produce health care reform that saves money in the long-term, then they’re going to have to scrap what they’ve got and go back to the drawing board. But nothing in the way that health care legislation has been handled so far suggests that Democrats are hoping for anything other than a short-term, ego-driven legislative victory.
By: MARK HEMINGWAY
Commentary Staff Writer
An Analysis of the Senate Democrats’ Health Rationing Bill
Congressional Budget Office: Released Government Reports Points To Orchestrated Fiscal Doomsday For America
Three recently released government reports now point to fiscal doomsday for America; and one of the reports, issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), says so explicitly:
The CBO paints two future scenarios for the U.S. budget deficit and the national debt. But it plainly declares that fiscal disaster will strike in EITHER scenario. Furthermore …
The CBO states that its fiscal disaster scenarios could cause severe economic declines for decades to come, including hyperinflation and destruction of retirement savings.
The CBO then proceeds to admit that even its worse-case scenario could be understated by a wide margin due to panic in the financial markets or vicious cycles that are beyond control.
Separately, in its Flow of Funds Report for the second quarter, the Federal Reserve provides irrefutable data that we are already beginning to witness the first of these consequences in the United States: an unprecedented cut-off of credit to businesses and consumers.
Meanwhile, the Treasury Department shows that America’s fate remains, as before, in the hands of foreigners, with the U.S. still owing them $7.9 trillion!
And despite all this, neither Congress nor the Obama Administration have proposed a plan or a timetable for averting these doomsday scenarios. Their sole solution is to issue more bonds, borrow more, and print more without restraint.
That is the epitome of insanity.
Yes, the great government bailouts of 2008 and 2009 have bought us some time … but they have promptly proceeded to sell us into bondage.
Yes, they have given us safe passage over tough seas … but only to throw our assets onto the global auction block for the highest bidders.
The one bright spot: Unlike some governments, ours does not conceal the evidence of its folly. Quite the contrary, the proof pours forth from these three government reports in relatively blunt language and unmistakably blatant numbers …
Report #1 Congressional Budget Office (CBO): The Long-Term Budget Outlook
The CBO opens with a chart predicting the most dramatic surge in government debt of all time.
It shows that even in proportion to the larger size of the U.S. economy today, the government debt has ALREADY surpassed the massive debt loads accumulated during World War I and the Great Depression … and will soon surpass even the massive debt load of World War II.
Obama's Henchman Keith Olbermann Employed By General Electric's MSNBC - CEO Jeff Immelt
“Large budget deficits,” write the authors of the CBO report, would …
“Reduce national saving,” leading to …
“More borrowing from abroad” and …
“Less domestic investment,” which in turn would …
“Depress income growth in the United States,” and …
“Seriously harm the economy.”
Worse, on page 14, the CBO warns that:
“Lenders may become concerned about the financial solvency of the government and …
“Demand higher interest rates to compensate for the increasing riskiness of holding government debt.” Plus …
“Both foreign and domestic lenders may not provide enough funds for the government to meet its obligations.”
The magnitude of the problem cannot be underestimated. The CBO declares on page 15 that:
“The systematic widening of budget shortfalls projected under CBO’s long-term scenarios has never been observed in U.S. history” and …
It will also be larger than the debt accumulations of any other industrialized nation in the post-World War II period, including Belgium and Italy, the two worst cases of all.
But the CBO admits that even these frightening projections may be grossly understated because:
“The analysis omitted the pressures that a rising ratio of debt to GDP would have on real interest rates and economic growth.”
“The growth of debt would lead to a vicious cycle in which the government had to issue ever-larger amounts of debt in order to pay ever-higher interest charges.”
“More government borrowing would drain the nation’s pool of savings, reducing investment” and …
“Capital would probably flee the United States, further reducing investment.”
But none of these are factored into the analysis. On page 17 of its report, the CBO writes …
“The analysis … does not incorporate the financial markets’ reactions to a fiscal crisis and the actions that the government would adopt to resolve such a crisis. Because [our] textbook growth model is not forward-looking, the analysis assumes that people will not anticipate the sustainability issues facing the federal budget; as a result, the model predicts only a gradual change in the economy as federal debt rises.
“In actuality, the economic effects of rapidly growing debt would probably be much more disorderly as investors’ confidence in the nation’s fiscal solvency began to erode. If foreign investors anticipated an economic crisis, they might significantly reduce their purchases of U.S. securities, causing the exchange value of the dollar to plunge, interest rates to climb, and consumer prices to shoot up.(Bolding is mine.)
Report #2 U.S. Federal Reserve: Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States
The Fed’s data on page 12 tells it all: The impact on the U.S. credit markets is not just a future scenario. It’s happening right now.
Yes, the government is getting its money to finance its exploding deficits (for now). But it’s hogging all the available supplies, while American businesses and average consumers are getting shut out or even shoved out.
Specifically …
In the first half of last year, the U.S. Treasury raised funds at the annual pace of $411 billion in the first quarter and $310 billion in the second quarter.
But if you think that was a lot, consider this: THIS year, the Treasury has stepped up its pace of borrowing to annual rates of $1.443 TRILLION in the first quarter and $1.896 TRILLION in the second quarter. That’s 3.5 times and over SIX TIMES MORE than last year’s, respectively.
Meanwhile, the private sector is getting killed …
Last year, banks provided new credit at the annual pace of $472.4 billion in the first quarter and $86.7 billion in the second. This year, they’re not providing ANY new credit — they’re actually LIQUIDATING loans at the rate of $857.2 billion in the first quarter and $931.3 billion in the second. So if you’re running a business, you may want to think twice before asking your bank for more money. Instead, they may decide to TAKE BACK the money they’ve already loaned you!
Ditto for mortgages. Last year, mortgages were being created at the annual clip of $522.5 billion and $124 billion in the first and second quarters, respectively. This year, on a net basis, mortgages haven’t been created at all. Quite the contrary, the Fed reports that, on a net basis, they’ve been liquidated at an annual pace of $39.3 billion in the first quarter and $239.5 billion in the second.
Getting cash out of credit cards and other consumer credit is even tougher. Last year, folks were able to add to their consumer credit at annual rates of $115 billion and $105 billion in the first two quarters. This year, in contrast, they’ve been forced to CUT back on their credit at annual rates of $95.3 billion in the first quarter … and at an even faster pace in the second quarter — $166.8 billion.
Never before in my lifetime have I witnessed a more severe case of crowding out in the credit markets!
And never before has the CBO been so right in its forecasts of fiscal doomsday: One of its dire forecasts was already coming true even before it issued its report.
Report #3 U.S. Treasury Department: Treasury Bulletin
Each and every month, the Treasury reminds us of the single fact that no one in the Treasury wants to face:
The U.S. is deep in debt to the rest of the world, and on page 48, it provides the evidence: total liabilities to foreigners of $7,898,435 million (nearly $7.9 trillion)!
This isn’t a new record. It was actually slightly more last year. But the fact is NOTHING has been done to reduce our debt to foreigners. Quite the contrary, it is the deliberate policy of our government to pile up more — to sell foreign investors and central banks on the idea that they must continue to lend us money.
