Forums: Budget Shopping

Well. I wonder if the democrats in Sacto have a clue as to how much money the state lost this morning by not having a budget. Thanks to furlough Friday imposed by the court system, all state offices are again ordered closed every Friday until a state budget is passed. I don't have a figure on the amount of money the state just paid out today to every person on welfare today but it's a pile of cash for sure. The point? The loss of one days interest to the state treasury on billions of dollars just paid out this...

I can see a scenario played out this September as we have no budget for Government Fiscal Year 11 and no prospect of one until after the elections. The Democrats will submit a Continuing Resolution with so much spending and additions that the Republicans will not support it. This will of course shut down the Federal Government just after 1 Oct. The Democrats will then blame the Republicans for shut down the Government and being obstructionist causing a backlash against the Republicans in the November elections. On the other hand, if the Republicans hold their noses and vote for the...

I've been sharing a lot of charts recently, but sometimes a picture really does say it all. This one shows why states such as Nevada, California and New York are facing budget deficits. It's the spending, stupid.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today denounced Proposition 25, which would lower the legislative vote margin for state budgets from two-thirds to a simple majority, and declared that it's a back-door attempt to make it easier to raise taxes. Schwarzenegger,speaking to a business group in Goleta, responded "absolutely no" when asked about his position on the measure, placed on the ballot by Democrats and unions, and then added, "I believe this is also...a majority vote for tax increases."

Aren't these also the same folks who tell us how well JFK and LBJ ran the economy back in the roaring 60s? During the eight years of 1961-69, 46% of all federal spending was on national defense. During President Bush's eight years, defense spending did not even average 20% of federal outlays. Under JFK/LBJ, defense spending was 8-9% of GDP. Under Bush it was about 4%. How did the economy do so well in the 1960s, and so badly in the 2000s, when less than half as much of our resources were devoted to defense in that more recent term?...

In the ongoing budget stalemate, Democrats refuse to accept devastating cuts while Republicans reject new taxes. Nobody is budging. The longer this drags out, the more likely it is that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers will resort to a well-worn playbook of accounting shifts, borrowing and asset sales to close out the rest of the budget. In the past, this has included paying state workers one day later and trying to sell the quasi-public state workers' compensation insurance fund. Such one-time budget tricks delay political backlash but contribute to California's long-term financial instability. They avoid taxes, so Republicans are happy....

By 2012, our national debt will be larger than the entire U.S. economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. So what's on the front burner in Washington these days? Zoning issues in lower Manhattan! Is it OK to put a Muslim community center close to Ground Zero? I don't know, but local authorities don't seem to mind. That should settle it, but what Sarah Palin calls the "9/11 mosque" has somehow become a headline-grabbing controversy. On Friday, President Obama insisted that Muslims have the "same right to practice their religion as anyone else" and can build a mosque near the...

Mark Tapscott has an odd idea of a fun time, but I'm glad he does. He was casually tooling through the info posted on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau and decided to see how many welfare bureaucrats there were working in the states. I know, I know, Tapscott needs to take up bowling or something. But, still, the numbers he found are instructive. He found, for instance, that out of every 100,000 residents, the State of New York has 256 welfare bureaucrats and Wisconsin has 249. That's quite a number, isn't it? That means that New York, having...