American Elephants

New forecasts of the president’s budgetary proposals are due from the Congressional Budget Office on Friday, and they are apparently bad news for the White House.  The White House has already admitted that the Obama budget will produce deficits  of over $6.9 trillion, the CBO may add another $1.5 trillion to that.

According to the story coming out, CBO will say that the president’s budget will burden the country with a budget deficit of more than $700 billion in 2014 —  a little higher than the Obama team’s prediction of $570 billion. CBO estimates of economic growth were far less than Blue Chip forecasts, and this should also affect the debate in Congress. Or at least one would think so.  Costs way more, takes in far less.

This should be a dash of cold water on congressional democrats.  But top aides to the president met on Wednesday evening in the Capitol with House Democratic allies to plan expedited budget procedures to advance Obama’s healthcare initiative  past Senate filibuster threats.  Obama has gone out campaigning.  He is, it seems, totally unconcerned about how much this all costs the country.  He wants all his ideas passed now.

In spite of mountains of evidence that show that electronic medical records will not save any significant amount of money, President Obama is pushing EMR as a money-saving plan. Studies show that not only does it not save money, it produces little, if any, improvement in the quality of care.  And even Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director,  has said that health care will cost far more than is estimated.

Nancy Pelosi is talking (already) about a second stimulus plan.  She would also like to bail out the San Francisco Chronicle, her home town newspaper.  I know that Democrats had a lot of pent-up desires after being out of power for so long, but this is getting ridiculous.  They have no restraint, no ethics, no honor.  They forget why they are there.  They are not there to control us, to destroy our economy in their desperate quest for power, but as our servants.  They serve at our pleasure.

The White House just announced that, since they have so much free time, they will shortly take up reformation of Immigration.  You couldn’t make this up.  Nobody would believe it.

With all this, congressional democrats  are pretending outrage over a problem that they caused. They are  blaming AIG CEO Ed Liddy, who came out of retirement to work for a dollar a year, to try to clean up the AIG mess.  He wasn’t even at AIG when any of the problems occurred.

The $165 million in bonuses that Congress is so “worked up about”, are retention bonuses.  That is, if people will stay on, instead of quitting as most would want to do, they will get a contracted bonus to make staying worthwhile.  The necessity for this, you can imagine, if they had to bring in new people to sort out the problems — who wouldn’t even know where the files were.  Congress has been trying to use the phony outrage to cover their own outrageous actions.   So Speaker Pelosi has led the House to pass a clearly unconstitutional bill, specifically taxing at a 90% rate, those who received, under contract, retention bonuses and did not give them back.

I think they have all gone quite mad.