The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Yeah, It’s Time For The Circle Jerks

Posted on | July 31, 2011 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

Stacy recommends stocking up on personal lube. His wisdom is impeccable on this. The following video is not exactly safe for work, but this is sort of a bluesy take on the CJ’s immortal classic:
via Jimmie Bise, we have a Speaker Boehner slide show, the text of which I’ve extracted:

TWO-STEP APPROACH TO HOLD PRESIDENT OBAMA ACCOUNTABLE
Emerging framework has three main features:
(1) cuts government spending more than it increases the debt limit;
(2) implements spending caps to restrain future spending;
(3) advances the cause of a Balanced Budget Amendment
Framework accomplishes this without tax hikes, which would destroy jobs, while preventing a job-killing national default.

NO TAX HIKES

  • Same as House-passed bill, the framework includes no tax hikes.
  • Requires baseline to be current law, effectively making it impossible for Joint Committee to increase taxes.

 

CUTS THAT EXCEED THE DEBT HIKE

  • Same as House-passed bill, framework includes spending cuts that exceed the amount of the increased debt authority granted to POTUS.
  • Would cut & cap discretionary spending immediately, saving $917B over 10 years (certified by CBO) & raise the debt ceiling by less – $900B – to approximately February.
  • Before debt ceiling can be raised, Congress and the president must enact spending cuts of a larger amount first.

 

CAPS TO CONTROL FUTURE SPENDING

  • As in House-passed bill, framework imposes spending caps that would set clear limits on future spending & serve as barrier against gov’t expansion while economy grows.
  • Failure to remain below these caps triggers automatic across-the-board cuts (“sequestration”). Same mechanism used in 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement.

 

BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT

  • Same as House-passed bill, framework requires both House & Senate to vote on a BBA after Oct. 1, 2011 but before the end of year.
  • Similar to House-passed bill, framework authorizes POTUS to request second tranche of debt limit increase of $1.5T if:
  • Joint Committee cuts spending by greater amount than the requested debt limit hike,

OR

  • A Balanced Budget Amendment is sent to the states.
  • Creates incentive for previous opponents of a BBA to now support it.

 

ENTITLEMENT REFORMS & SAVINGS

  • Same as House-passed bill, framework creates a 12-member Joint Committee required to report legislation by November 23, 2011 that would produce a proposal to reduce the deficit by at least $1.5T over 10 years.
  • Each chamber would consider Joint Committee proposal on an up-or-down basis without any amendments by December 23, 2011.
  • If Joint Committee’s proposal is enacted OR if a Balanced Budget Amendment is sent to the states, POTUS would be authorized to request a debt limit increase of $1.5T.
  • Sets up a new sequestration process to cut spending across-the-board – and ensure that any debt limit increase is met with greater spending cuts – IF Joint Committee fails to achieve at least $1.2T in deficit reduction.
  • If this happens, POTUS may request up to $1.2T for a debt limit increase, and if granted, then across-theboard spending cuts would result that would equal the difference between $1.2T and the deficit reduction enacted as a result of Joint Committee.
  • Across-the-board spending cuts would apply to FYs 2013-2021, and apply to both mandatory & discretionary programs.
  • Total reductions would be equally split between defense and non-defense programs. Across-the-board cuts would also apply to Medicare. Other programs, including Social Security, Medicaid, veterans, and civil & military pay, would be exempt.
  • Sequestration process is designed to guarantee that Congress acts on the Joint Committee’s legislation to cut spending.

Overall, I think the BBA is pure hooey on two levels:

  1. Enacting it is fraught with procedural peril. It will be delayed, torn, spindled, and mutilated before a fangless version of it is enacted.
  2. There will be some loophole, some sophistry, in the final product that enables business as usual.

Oh, and then there is Yet Another Committee To Ignore. Bollocks.
If the government wants to obey the will of the people and make cuts, then it should make cuts. This is just so much talking about cutting, while managing, I predict, to worsen the problem.

America, you are Ellen Nordgren, and this is Tiger telling you that pollsters have told Tiger he’s sorry about dick-shanking into financially strange territory these decades. Won’t we just give love one more chance?
We have to unwind whole federal bureaucracies and entitlements, or we’re collectively, progressively touching ourselves in a very big way. But go ahead, America: this is what you’ve done in the past, and the Ruling Class has no indication you’ll do anything more than roll over again.

Hot Air brings the POTUS:

Wow. What a breathtaking load of hooey. I’m tempted to post a picture of something the World’s Youngest Blogger did in a diaper for comparison, but I don’t want to insult the diaper.
Seriously–the President just serves up the Reasonable Man cop as if the American people have been paying no attention, as if he hasn’t been swinging a golf club in lieu of doing his job, as if repetition makes the lies true, repetition makes the lies true, repetition–
America, this Federal government cannot reform itself. Further ballot box revolution is required. The Ruling Class Progressives, of either the Democrat or Republican flavor, are Simply. Fricking. Useless.
On the other hand, via Dan Riehl, we know that these Progressive knobs will likely make the cuts in the ‘right’ places:

Category: Barack Obama, Budget

Comments

11 Responses to “Yeah, It’s Time For The Circle Jerks”

  1. AngelaTC
    August 1st, 2011 @ 2:22 am

    Welcome to my world. Sit down and stay a while. 

    Pretty soon I’ll have you believing that the real plan to eliminate the debt involves massive amounts of inflation.

  2. Who’s Gonna Be The Pivot Man? « That Mr. G Guy's Blog
    July 31st, 2011 @ 10:27 pm

    […] Yeah, It’s Time For The Circle Jerks. […]

  3. Anonymous
    August 1st, 2011 @ 3:29 am

    O’Sputnik is still talking taxes in his speech. Unacceptable.
    As predicted earlier this is a trap. No matter what this super-cool committee does or says, short of a tax reform bill that supersedes the expiration of the Bush tax cuts taxes will go back to Clinton rates Jan 2013. At some risk of error I assume that all rates will go up as the House wont agree to only raising the top rate.

    As part of taking a “short” position on our government and economy I recommend taking up flint knapping. 

  4. Charles
    August 1st, 2011 @ 4:54 am

    The BBA is the only chance for structural change. However, the spending overrides should go to popular referendum not to supermajority in Congress, as that would be business as usual.

  5. Adjoran
    August 1st, 2011 @ 6:04 am

    The “defense cuts” also include Homeland Security, so it isn’t all from military budgets, and Congress still has to approve what comes out.  So this isn’t any “grand bargain” at all, it just gets us past the debt issue until the next President and finally puts some constraints on spending.

    The reason the Democrats and Obama have been avoiding following the law and submitting actual budgets is they can spend more without budgets.   Here’s how their scam worked:  not only did they avoid any tough budget votes or those messy hearings, but budgets put limits on committee chairmen in what they can spend.  Without a budget, each chairman is free to pass whatever he could convince a majority to vote for, no limits.  And they did under Pelosi and also Reid.

    The Democrats prefer to do business by Continuing Resolution because it is impossible to find out exactly what is what in it, the relevant committees don’t have targets to meet or hearings.  We can slow them down now that we have the House, but they had two years of wild-eyed liberal spending and made the most of it.

    The only way to deal with it is to beat them decisively and change the budget law to eliminate the baseline, or use one from ten or twenty years ago for starters (that doesn’t solve entitlements, which still must be reformed, but would stop a significant amount of creep in discretionary programs).  Better still, adopt a Zero Base Budgeting law, and make every penny be justified every cycle – no more “last year plus the growth” mindset about it.

  6. watsons123
    August 1st, 2011 @ 9:54 am

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  7. Mike
    August 1st, 2011 @ 11:51 am

    We don’t need a BBA. We need for our Congress critters to read and comprehend the Constitution, then the excessive, unconstitutional spending would go down. I’m just sayin’

  8. ThePaganTemple
    August 1st, 2011 @ 1:25 pm

    No it wouldn’t because they clearly don’t give a damn what’s in the constitution.

  9. ThePaganTemple
    August 1st, 2011 @ 1:40 pm

    None of the cuts have to come from the military. There’s no reason not to pay military personnel and provide the equipment they need. Anybody that says it does is just trying to derail the bill. Either that or they are just unfathomably stupid. We can probably make some of the cuts by shutting down a few overseas bases. We can also give an early retirement to a few Pentagon paper pushers who are useless. A lot of these bureaucrats would have already been laid off in the private sector, but the computer age never seems to catch up to the world of the government bureaucrat. We can also freeze civilian hiring.

    Finally, I’m not sure whether this money comes from the Defense or State Department, but stop giving money to these assholes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. If that makes them start acting up again, bullets and bombs are a hell of a lot cheaper. So is just getting the hell out of there and letting them massacre each other.

    How much oil are we getting out of Iraq again? The last I heard, nothing. Europe is getting the lion’s share of it, which is the only reason we have any “allies” there. Piss on all of them

  10. McGehee
    August 1st, 2011 @ 2:04 pm

    Yeah, It’s Time For The Circle Jerks

    I saw this title and thought, “What’s Smitty got against people who use Google+?”

  11. The Camp Of The Saints
    August 2nd, 2011 @ 5:01 pm

    Debt, Be Not Proud…

    This quip by Ann Barnhardt is getting quoted a lot around the Interwebs this morning [tips of the fedora to Stacy McCain and Memeorandum]: I stand here in abject stupefaction. The so-called “right” or “Tea Party” in this republi…