From Jan. 1 until today, every penny Americans earned paid for federal, state and local spending and regulations.
The drama of the last-minute vote to increase the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion has focused on projected deficits of the federal government and how they will add to the national debt. Those numbers are large. The national debt was $10 trillion when President Obama was inaugurated and is expected to be $15.5 trillion at the end of the year.
Yet focusing on the deficit understates the true cost of government. In fact, this year's deficit of $1.5 trillion is "only" 40% of federal spending. And while federal spending has jumped to $3.8 trillion in 2011 from $2.9 trillion in 2008a 31% increasethat does not include state and local spending, which is estimated to total $1.6 trillion in 2011, according to new report from the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation (ATRF). Nor do these numbers include the cost of individuals and businesses complying with federal regulations: The total cost of such compliance is estimated to be $1.8 trillion.
Focusing national attention on the deficit rather than on the total cost of governmentfederal, state and local spending plus the cost of the federal and state regulatory burdencauses several problems. First, it deliberately understates the true cost of government. It also allows advocates of ever-larger government to misdirect our attention away from the bigger picture to just "the deficit." And there are ways to dramatically increase the cost of government without adding to the deficit: new regulations and new spending programs matched with higher taxes. (Think ObamaCare and cap-and-trade rules from the Environmental Protection Agency.)
To more accurately measure the true cost of government, ATRF has calculated a Cost of Government Day. We determine this each year by adding the cost of government spending at all levels to a conservative estimate of all regulatory burdensand then counting how many days of the year Americans work to pay the costs of government.
The Tax Foundation divides total federal, state and local taxes by total national income to come up with Tax Freedom Day. This year America worked until April 12 to pay all taxes.
When you include the costs of federal deficit spending and the regulatory burden this year, however, you don't reach the Cost of Government Day until Aug. 12. Americans will work for 103 days to pay for federal spending, 44 days for state and local spending and 77 days to cover the cost of the regulatory burden.
This is the third year in a row that Americans will work into August to pay for the cost of government. Before 2009, the day never fell later than July 21. Looking back, we see that the Reagan years held the Cost of Government Day steady at July 4. Under the first President Bush, it moved forward 15 days. But Americans gained 15 days when the day moved back in the last six years of divided government with a Republican Congress against President Bill Clinton.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, however, Cost of Government Day moved forward to July 16 in 2008, from June 28 in 2000, costing taxpayers 18 days of extra labor. Since he took office, President Barack Obama has pushed the day all the way forward to Aug. 12. In other words, Americans are now working 27 more days per year to pay for government spending and regulations than on the day Mr. Obama became president.
Looking at the total cost of government rather than merely the annual deficit gives a more complete pictureand a more frightening understandingof how much government costs each one of us. It also suggests how clever politicians can hide the cost of government, disguising increased spending by urging us to focus on the deficit and then "paying for" higher spending with higher taxes. Government grows but the deficit is unchanged.
Regulations do not even show up in the federal budget and are rarely covered on the nightly news. But this year they will cost Americans $2.8 trillion, consuming 77 days of labor for the average worker. More than two months a year we work just to pay the bills imposed on us by the EPA and other expensive regulators.
The new rule established by House Speaker John Boehner is that any debt-ceiling hike must now be matched by spending cuts of at least the same size, and the Republican rejection of any tax increase constrains the president's ability to further hike spending and debt. So look out for the Obama administration to focus on expanding government through increased regulations.
The watchdog media report relatively well on the White House and Congress. But they don't have the bandwidth to report on, never mind to critique, the explosion of regulations underway. Mr. Obama is counting on this.
#1
They are but a Frankenstein we have created. We elect them, choose to play the games to which they set the rules, buy their cultural products, and pack our brains with their nonsense. But at least we ought to discern their Otherness.
h/t Instapundit
In one of those lapses of news judgment that with regrettable frequency make mainstream journalists resemble characters in Scoop, the media herd that gathered in Wisconsin to chronicle the great Democratic triumph in the state senate elections has gone back to the coasts and missed what could grow into a much more consequential story than the failure of organized labors second attempt to punish the Wisconsin GOP: the outbreak of racial hate violence at the Wisconsin State Fair. A story that involved Scott Walker getting his just deserts, even if it didnt quite work out that way, was infinitely more interesting to our national press than a deeply disturbing gaze into the fragile nature of our social peace. Not just Britain
#1
Seems to me less about race and more about culture. Certain folks (especially in the teens and early twenties) enjoy destruction. They have learned there is now minimal downside from law enforcement or societal condemnation so they do what they please. Many are brainwashed just enough to spit back leftist platitudes to justify their actions but I don't really think they think about that nonsense until after the fact.
So perhaps we have a racial angle to some of it, but I think that is likely a distraction from the greater problem. Decades of idiot policies (dumbing down schools, letting offenders off, promoting illegal immigration that cuts the knees out from the entry level job market, war on drugs that provides money opportunities).
A taste, about the response to the killing of Osama bin Laden:
It is telling that much of the discussion concerned the nation's feelings. To be sure, the emotional response to 9/11 has helped define the past decade--thousands dead who were loved by tens or hundreds of thousands in turn, a sense of national vulnerability to foreign attack entirely new for Americans to grapple with, and the immortal bravery of the passengers and crew of United flight 93. Perhaps we could have done without the psychobabble, but the fact that we discussed the killing of Bin Laden as a means of providing a national catharsis is evidence of a notable American achievement. We could afford to concentrate on the state of our psyches--rather than the fear of instant reprisal--because American policies and actions had kept the homeland safe from attack for a decade.
Over the course of the 10 years, American authorities foiled more than two dozen al-Qaeda plots.
That we know about, anyway...
Those averted tragedies were not foremost on the minds of revelers who gathered to celebrate Bin Laden's demise on May 1 at Ground Zero, Times Square, and in front of the White House. But if a mere few of the plots had materialized, those spaces might not even have been open to public assembly.
Thank you to all those who worked quietly to ensure we reached this stage: the end, perhaps, of the beginning. Those who know more say there is no guarantee how it will end, but I have faith in them, and in us, that we will reach the tipping point, and it will tip in the right direction.
#1
I've noted in past that Obama's mother's history demonstrates that she was a wholly owned property of the CIA, in that almost every activity, from her education to employment, as seen on her Wiki bio, was either funded by, purposed by, or affiliated with CIA fronts and subcontractors.
"Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts.
"In that capacity, she must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money through that bank to its "gray" and "black" activities throughout Asia.
"Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company, Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong, some of whose officers were serving CIA officers.
"The CIA intervened to halt an audit of questionable transfers from BBRD&W in 1983."
"Obama's grandfather is typically characterized as an ordinary furniture salesman, but a photo taken of him in the early 1950s, shows him standing next to Obama's at the time young mother, wearing the insignia of Beirut's elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour.
"Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers.
"The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham's daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA."
#4
"American policies and actions had kept the homeland safe from attack for a decade."
...except for the Beltway Sniper Attacks and the Ft Hood Massacre. The Underwear Bomber and the Times Square Bomber failed to kill anyone because their bombs were defective.
The good guys have to succeed every time, the islamofascists just once. Time and the laws of probability are not on our side. Playing defense while not strongly disincentivizing state sponsorship of terror is ultimately a losing strategy,
#5
Taking the combat to Iraq meant the bad guys died there instead of here and ended up shitting in their own back yard. Had we not done so, they might have overwhelmed the resources of those protecting us. We wedre more lucky than good as far as I can tell. And it is more likely we would have had first stringers attacking us instead of the jv. We made mistakes, to be sure, but we got some things right, not just dronezapping. That is Greenwald's point.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
