Tax Dollars at Play: Recent Chart-Topping Hits of Fraud and Abuse

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On Thursday, a report issued by the Inspector General of the Department of Defense slammed a former senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter for using a government credit card on sexual escapades, alcohol abuse and other illegal actions.

According to the report, Army Major General Ronald Lewis illegally spent nearly three thousand of the taxpayers’ dollars. According to Politico, Carter had this to say:

At the Pentagon, Carter said he was briefed on findings from the investigation, but “will defer any further comment on the report pending the Army’s review.”

“As I said when I first learned about allegations of misconduct against Maj. Gen. Lewis and removed him as my senior military assistant, I expect the highest possible standards of conduct from the men and women in this department particularly from those serving in the most senior positions,” Carter said in a statement. “There is no exception.”

While Lewis’ actions are an obvious violation of the public trust, his three thousand dollars in taxpayer abuse is small potatoes compared to other ways the public loses out to corrupt government officials and corrupt civilians abusing the system.

Here are a few recent examples:

Sickening Medicaid Mischief From a CBS News report Tuesday about Medicaid abuse:

Baby boomers are expected to need more in-home care as they age, but federal investigators are now raising an alarm over what they call persistent fraud and abuse in Medicaid-funded personal care services. Investigators from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General are once again criticizing Medicaid for not cracking down in this area, saying the government needs better regulations to prevent patient neglect and fraud cases. Estimates of questionable billing since 2012 total more than $600 million, reports CBS News correspondent Anna Werner.

Sin City Spending Spree The 2012 escapades of the General Services Administration cost taxpayers over $800,000 on parties and other spending in Las Vegas.

Sure, They Could Use Good PR, But … The federal government has averaged nearly one billion per year in “public relations” spending over the last decade, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office. Some of that money goes to public service ads, like the Centers for Disease Control’s ads encouraging HIV/AIDS safety by promoting condoms and art…but not abstinence.

Booty Calls With Taxpayer Booty Senator David Vitter (R-LA) used a government phone to chat with a prostitute. That use of taxpayer dollars was a major reason he lost his race for governor last year.

Forget His Phone and Pen, How About His Golf Clubs and Swimming Trunks? President Obama was pressed by reporters in 2012 when he appeared to combine official trips and campaign trips. The former may be paid for by taxpayers; the latter must be privately funded. Then there’s the Obama Family Vacation Fund, known as the U.S. Treasury. Investor’s Business Daily estimates that their R&R has cost us over $70 million.

“Federal Fumbles” Finally — in keeping with his predecessor, retired Senator Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican James Lankford published a “Federal Fumbles” report that highlighted 100 ways taxpayer money was wasted by the federal government. One example was the use of six million dollars “to repair a building that remains unsafe.”

This is a quick and dirty list of outrageous offenses, and hardly the most expensive ones. Health care spending by the Feds is rife with abuse, as is the Pentagon’s budget. And over $100 billion is lost to “improper payments” each year, even as big corporations snag tens of billions each year through legal handouts from Congress.

The next time someone says we need to raise taxes, just point out that we’re funding sexcapades, swindles, booze and billion-dollar boondoggles. Stopping that comes long before taking more of your hard-earned money. (For more from the author of “Tax Dollars at Play: Recent Chart-Topping Hits of Fraud and Abuse” please click HERE)

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Just How Many Times Did Tim Kaine Play the Race Card?

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Where to begin with Senator Tim Kaine’s abysmal performance in the vice-presidential debate?

Let’s start here, with this opener:

It is so great to be back at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.

This is a very special place. Sixty-five years ago, a young, courageous woman, Barbara Johns, led a walkout of her high school, Moton High School. She made history by protesting school segregation. She believed our nation was stronger together. And that walkout led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that moved us down the path toward equality.

Stop right here.

How was it exactly that Barbara Johns was forced into a situation that resulted in a segregated school in the first place? Answer: Because Tim Kaine’s political party, the Democrats, had spent the previous 89 years using segregation — racism — as the building block of their party. As Kaine would go on to demonstrate as the debate moved on, playing the race card is still at the core of his party — and the campaign of its latest nominees, Kaine and Hillary Clinton.

Next, incredibly, Kaine said this:

I’ll just say this: We trust Hillary Clinton, my wife and I, and we trust her with the most important thing in our life. We have a son deployed overseas in the Marine Corps right now. We trust Hillary Clinton as president and commander-in-chief, but the thought of Donald Trump as commander-in-chief scares us to death.

Suffice to say, Pat Smith, the mother of State Department Information Officer Sean Smith has a very, very different opinion. Sean Smith was one of the four Americans killed in the terrorist attack in Benghazi. Clinton failed abysmally in taking care of the most important thing in Pat Smith’s life: her son. Smith, in fact, holds Hillary Clinton “personally” responsible for her son’s death. Kaine never mentioned Pat Smith, much less addressed her concerns in the debate.

Kaine never answered the moderator’s question as to why so many millions of Americans think Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy. He responded by praising her passion and career, then, but of course, played the race card by saying this of Trump:

And as a candidate, he started his campaign with a speech where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals, and he has pursued the discredited and really outrageous lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

It is so painful to suggest that we go back to think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States.

This was, of course, a deliberate lie. Trump’s remarks were in the context of illegal immigration, decidedly not a condemnation of “Mexicans.” And all anyone — certainly a sitting US Senator Kaine — has to do to research the subject is check here with ICE, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency. Here’s but one headline from ICE in 2014:

ICE Texas field offices remove more than 800 sex offenders so far this year

More than 2,000 removed every year in past 3 years

The ICE report begins as follows:

DALLAS — The four Texas field offices within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) have deported more than 860 sex offenders so far this fiscal year.

Of the 862 alien sex offenders deported by the Texas-based offices, about 27 percent were convicted of sex offenses against children.

What about this does Kaine not understand? Answer? Kaine does understand and chose to, but of course, play the race card and suggest Trump is a racist for stating what the US government itself states is hard fact. So too have Democrats made the so-called “birther” issue into a race card. The hard fact of history is that this issue has recurred five different times with a sitting president and actual or potential presidential candidates (President Chester Alan Arthur and potential or actual candidates Barry Goldwater (born in the then-territory but not-yet-the-state of Arizona), George Romney (born in Mexico to Mormon missionary parents), Lowell Weicker (considering a run in 1976 for the GOP nod, Connecticut Senator Weicker was born in Paris to parents in the foreign service) and of course Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. (R, 32%), born in the Panama Canal Zone while his Navy-serving father was stationed there. All were white and all Republicans. While I always believed Obama was born in Hawaii, there was and is nothing in the least inherently racist about birtherism — unless, of course, you are a race-card playing Democrat like Tim Kaine.

This is the exact same obsession with using racism as a political ploy that fueled the Democrats’ political power as supporters of slavery, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. Now they use race in the illegal immigration issue or inject race into the ancient previously all-white birtherism ploy. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are now playing the same race cards once played by Kaine’s fellow Virginian and race-card player extraordinaire Woodrow Wilson.

Then there was this Kaine whopper, the reference here to the Bush 43 tax cuts:

The second component of the plan is massive tax breaks for the very top, trillions of dollars of tax breaks for people just like Donald Trump. The problem with this, Elaine, is that’s exactly what we did 10 years ago and it put the economy into the deepest recession — the deepest recession since the 1930s.

This is a flat-out lie. The reason the economy was put into “the deepest recession — the deepest recession since the 1930s” — was precisely because of the Democratic Party’s repeated devotion to forcing banks to give loans to Americans who could not afford them. Those Americans eventually and inevitably defaulted on their loans, triggering the “Great Recession.” This mind-blowing reality was documented in detail in New York Times business reporter Gretchen Morgenson’s book with housing and mortgage investment consultant Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.

The title says it all … and one of those fingered in this cesspool story involving a prominent Democratic Party lobbyist is, yes, President Bill Clinton and his 1994 National Partners in Homeownership policy. But there is Kaine making up out of whole cloth — looking the American people right straight in the television eye — and lying about what caused the Great Recession.

There’s more — much more, of course. The number of outright lies combined with clever sleight-of-hand deceptions by Kaine is stunning. All of this added to Kaine’s widely-panned style that combined arrogance, rudeness, and agitation in varying measure.

A CNN poll after the debate gave the contest to Pence. Most interesting stat from that poll was this:

Still, 29% of debate watchers said what they saw Tuesday made them more apt to vote for Trump, compared with 18% who said it made them more likely to back Clinton.

Thanks to Tim Kaine, and the contrast with the calm, measured, conservative and decidedly truthful approach of Mike Pence, is this any wonder? (For more from the author of “Just How Many Times Did Tim Kaine Play the Race Card?” please click HERE)

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Undercover: Steven Crowder Infiltrates Socialist Student Protest and It Is Absolutely Terrifying

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So, what exactly does a “Students Against Sweatshops” conference entail? Conservative comedian Steven Crowder went undercover — for science — to find out.

The results? Just … just watch and see for yourself.

Today’s college students don’t identify as socialists, but rather as “anarchist-communists.”

Do not confuse “intersecting identities.” You can be “sexuality queer” but NOT “gender queer” and if you get that wrong, well, you’re naturally a BIGOT.

And, of course, a “conference” is really code for paid union protests where the unions don’t actually show up and just use these college students to promote their far-left agenda and do their dirty work for them.

If this is the best our universities have to offer, we’re doomed. (For more from the author of “Undercover: Steven Crowder Infiltrates Socialist Student Protest and It Is Absolutely Terrifying” please click HERE)

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Linking Hurricane Matthew to Climate Change Is Overblown Hype

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Hurricane Matthew is big, dangerous, and (if it makes landfall) something not seen in the continental United States for a decade. This, of course, means it will be linked to global warming.

There will be a lot of “scientists say we can expect,” but little actual data. That’s because the data show for the last 10 years we have had an unusual drought of landfalling major hurricanes (Category 3 and higher) on the continental U.S. That’s right, no major hurricanes have made landfall for over a decade. This is the longest such drought on record.

A lot of it is luck. There have been major hurricanes in the Atlantic whose paths have not taken them onshore. However, there has not been the steady increase in hurricane activity that the doom-and-gloomers predicted following a swarm of major hurricanes in 2005. Yes, there is a lot of change from year to year, but there is no worrisome trend.

In fact, taking a tally of the scariest hurricanes (Categories 4 and 5) indicates things were worse nearly a century ago. For the 44 years from 1926 to 1969, 14 of these most powerful storms made landfall, while the 46 years since then had only three.

Good luck will almost certainly run out and we will have years with multiple major hurricanes making landfall. If so, that is a return to normalcy, not a harbinger of impending climate doom. Since record-keeping began in the 1800s, the average annual landfall of major hurricanes is about two. However, it is far from constant as recent experience shows.

Further, a return to normalcy very likely will be associated with record levels of financial losses. This is due to the explosion of coastal development of recent decades. Again, it will not be due, as some will assert, to more frequent or more intense hurricanes.

The last decade has been a very mild one regarding major hurricanes hitting American shores. If Hurricane Matthew makes its expected landfall in the U.S. this week, the drought will be broken, but it won’t be a sign that we are headed to a man-made climate catastrophe. (For more from the author of “Linking Hurricane Matthew to Climate Change Is Overblown Hype” please click HERE)

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The Media’s Embarrassing Failure to Bring up Obamacare in the Debates

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Maybe Bill Clinton should moderate Sunday’s presidential debate. Referring to Obamacare this week as “the craziest thing in the world,” he seems to understand that the consequences of the health care law might be of interest to voters.

Indeed, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 71 percent of Donald Trump supporters and 77 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters say the issue of health care is “very important” to their vote in 2016.

Which is why it seems odd that not one single question dealing with Obamacare was asked at either the first presidential debate or the only vice presidential debate of the 2016 election. Not one.

Well, perhaps it’s only odd if you don’t know the major broadcast networks have all but ignored the disastrous news stories about Obamacare.

According to the media watchdogs over at the Media Research Center, from Jan. 1 through Aug. 31, ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “NBC Nightly News” have not covered the issue at all. “CBS Evening News” dedicated a whopping 2 minutes and 18 seconds to the subject.

As the Media Research Center notes, “To put that in perspective, these same three evening news shows managed to find 46 minutes and 49 seconds to dedicate to Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte running afoul of Brazilian police.”

Maybe we’ll get a question about Lochte in the next debate.

There are so many questions that could be posited about Obamacare’s failures that perhaps the moderators just haven’t been able to choose which one to ask. For example:

Sir/Madame: The Government Accountability Office just announced last week that its investigation has determined that Health and Human Services has been illegally bailing out insurance companies with taxpayer dollars. What’s your reaction?

Or …

Sir/Madame: What do you say to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have lost the insurance they bought through Obamacare’s public co-ops? So far, 12 of the 23 co-ops have failed and been shut down, costing taxpayers $1.2 billion and forcing 740,000 people in 14 states to scramble to find new health insurance.

Or …

Sir/Madame: Contrary to what President Barack Obama originally promised, many Americans’ premiums did not go down, they’ve gone up. And the evidence suggests they will continue to rise. By 2025, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that employment-based coverage will cost about 60 percent more than it does today because of Obamacare. How will you address that?

Or … (my personal favorite)

Sir/Madame: Former President Bill Clinton referred to Obamacare as “the craziest thing in the world.” Do you agree with his remarks?

So many options but not one single question in either debate on the topic.

And yet, abortion, which fewer than half of voters say is very important to their vote, was a major topic in the vice presidential debate.

And I’m not saying it isn’t important. But why did CBS moderator Elaine Quijano think it was more important to voters than the issue of health care?

If she’d done a little more homework, she might have been able to combine the two issues by asking what the candidates thought about a report from the Government Accountability Office showing that Obamacare forces taxpayers to subsidize bills for abortion services.

One might think that, in the post-debate analysis, some in the media might start asking about what major issues have not been addressed.

The folks over at NBC News apparently did ask that question but got the wrong answer.

An article following the vice presidential debate said the debate “left lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocates stunned, after 90 minutes of questioning failed to address a single LGBTQ issue.”

It doesn’t mention that voters rank that issue over 30 percentage points behind health care as important to their vote.

To say the media doesn’t get it lets them off the hook way too easy. They get it all right. Obamacare is a disaster but they’re hoping voters won’t notice. (For more from the author of “The Media’s Embarrassing Failure to Bring up Obamacare in the Debates” please click HERE)

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This Is Not Why Voters Put the GOP in Control of Congress

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Members of Congress are back on the campaign trail, but before they left Washington, Republican congressional leaders released their list of “accomplishments.” See if any of these would make your list.

(For more from the author of “This Is Not Why Voters Put the GOP in Control of Congress” please click HERE)

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Alaska Family Action Endorses Joe Miller for U.S. Senate

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Alaska Family Action, the political arm of Alaska Family Council, announced its endorsement of Joe Miller for U.S. Senate on Wednesday.

In a statement, Alaska Family Action president Jim Minnery said the AFA’s board of directors voted to back Miller because he “has been a consistent and outspoken supporter of religious liberty, protections of the unborn, support of traditional family policies and parental rights.”

The AFA statement went on to point out that incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski received an “F” rating (just 20 percent) from Conservative Review on its Liberty Scorecard and scored 35 percent on the Heritage Action Scorecard for her votes.

The average for Republican senators on the latter is 57 percent, while conservative senators like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz scored 100 and 97 percent, respectively.

Murkowski is the most liberal “Republican” senator up for re-election, having voted with Pres. Obama 72 percent of the time during the last Congress, according to Roll Call.

She received an 80 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Minnery’s statement concluded, “Alaska Family Action is proud to get behind a bold pro-family, pro-life candidate like Joe Miller who can help turn this country around.”

Miller responded, “I am honored to receive the endorsement of Alaska Family Action. If chosen to serve as Alaska’s next United States senator, I pledge that I will promote a culture of life and uphold our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion.”

Miller has also been endorsed by Alaska Right to Life and Family Research Council Executive Vice President Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Jerry Boykin.

Joe Miller is a limited government Constitutionalist who believes government exists to protect our liberties, not to take them away. He supports free people, free markets, federalism, the Constitutional right to life, the 2nd Amendment, religious liberty, American sovereignty, and a strong national defense.

Bill Clinton Dogged by Protester Reminding Voters of Rape Accusation

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For yet another day, protesters reminded American voters that former President Bill Clinton stands accused of a rape that the alleged victim claims Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton helped cover up.

“Bill Clinton has harmed women!” a woman shouted Tuesday during a rally in Canton, Ohio, at which the former president spoke.

The woman got the attention of TV cameras by holding up a hand-lettered T-shirt reading “Bill Clinton a Rapist.”

“Bill Clinton is a rapist!” she yelled as she walked through the crowd, holding the shirt aloft before being taken out by security at the Ohio event.

Clinton appeared unconcerned with the protest.

“I love it when people come into my rallies, and it’s a dead giveaway when they don’t want to have a conversation because they know they’ll lose the conversation,” he said.

However, the allegation concerns somebody. At Ohio University, where Clinton spoke on Tuesday, someone used the college’s so-called free speech wall to paint a slogan reading, “Bill Clinton Rapes.”

The comment was later painted over before Clinton’s arrival later in the day.

On Wednesday, a young man being interviewed outside a Donald Trump rally near Las Vegas slipped in the phrase “Bill Clinton is a rapist” into his interview with KVVU-TV.

The uptick in actions to remind voters of Clinton’s past kicked off last Friday, when Infowars host Alex Jones kicked off the “Nationwide Campaign to Expose Clinton Sex Crimes.”

The rules of the contest, which are not being followed by those playing, require participants to wear a T-shirt adorned with Bill Clinton’s face and the word “rape.”

“Anyone that gets on national TV with the shirt clearly, for more than five seconds, gets $1,000. That means behind cameras, you name it,” Jones said Friday. “Anyone that gets it on air on national TV and gets the words out ‘Bill Clinton is a rapist,’ or things along that line, with a bullhorn — I could go to this right now, $5,000.”

On Saturday, a man wearing the shirt and chanting the slogan interrupted a Fox and Friends live broadcast in New York City.

On Monday, a man in Loveland Colo., made sure the comment was slipped into his interview with MSNBC.

The rape claim against Clinton stems from an accusation against him made in 1999 by Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed that she was raped by Bill Clinton in April 1978. Clinton was never prosecuted on the charge.

Broaddrick has said that Hillary Clinton was aware of the incident and helped to cover it up. (For more from the author of “Bill Clinton Dogged by Protester Reminding Voters of Rape Accusation” please click HERE)

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ISIS in Huge Trouble at Site of ‘Apocalyptic Battle’ After Blitz by American-Syrian Alliance

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Dabiq should have been the preordained site of an apocalyptic battle between a Muslim army and a Christian legion,, according to Islamic mythology.

That battle would be the harbinger of a new world order in which Islam will be the only religion.

Dabiq is of such great significance to Islamic State that it named its English-language online magazine after the town in northern Syria and believes the battle will bring the end of the world.

This is based on what the Prophet Mohammad foretold 1,400 years ago.

“The last hour will not come” until an Islamic army will defeat the “Romans” there, the Prophet said about Dabiq.

“The spark has been lit in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify — by Allah’s permission — until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq,” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the liquidated founder of ISIS was quoted as saying by Dabiq Magazine last year.

In Islamic State’s version of this prophecy, the U.S.-led coalition is playing the role of the Romans while ISIS will represent the Muslim army.

However, despite Islamic State’s frantic preparations for the battle — the jihadist organization sent hundreds of its best fighters to Dabiq recently — the town is close to collapse and could spell the end of ISIS in Syria, British media reported on Wednesday.

The U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army supported by 300 U.S. Special Forces and coalition warplanes is making rapid gains on the battlefield and the town could even fall within hours, according to the British news site Express.

Mostafa Sejari, a commander of the Free Syrian Army, however, warned he expected the battle for Dabiq would be “the fiercest ever” but nevertheless expected that FSA control over the city was a matter of time.

In Islamic State’s version of this prophecy, the U.S.-led coalition is playing the role of the Romans while ISIS will represent the Muslim army.

“By controlling Dabiq, we break the myth of Daesh and open a road to reach Marea (in Turkey). Controlling Dabiq is just a matter of time, God willing,” Sejari told Express while using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The progress of the American-Syria alliance is hindered by hundreds of mines that have been planted by ISIS ahead of the battle and the expectation is that the jihadist group will use many suicide bombers to block the entrance to Dabiq.

The Obama administration believes the fall of Dabiq will deliver a devastating blow to the morale of Islamic State’s fighters and would make the recapture of more important cities such as Raqqa (ISIS’ capital in Syria) and Mosul (the second-largest city in Iraq) easier.

But the fall of Dabiq will also harm ISIS’ abilities to recruit new fighters, Kyle Orton, a Middle East analyst and research fellow with the Henry Jackson Society, told Express.

“The coming loss of the town — probably in the next fortnight — will be a blow to ISIS’s ability to recruit, and the Turkish intervention, which has closed the border and driven a wedge between the opposition and al-Qaeda by giving the rebels a realistic alternative, jihadist recruitment in general, seems set to suffer in Syria,” Orton said.

The situation in the self-declared Caliphate has become so difficult that it has caused ISIS to declare the state of emergency.

The U.K. Daily Star reported Tuesday that ISIS leaders who gathered for a crisis meeting in the Iraqi town of Mutaibija ”turned on each other with weapons after arguments broke out.”

A commander of the Shiite al-Hashd al-Shaabi militia told the British paper that “the meeting turned into a bloody massacre after exacerbated disputes between the ISIS leaders that led them to use weapons against each other.”

The Shiite rebel commander added that spies had told him that there are growing disputes among Islamic State leaders. (For more from the author of “ISIS in Huge Trouble at Site of ‘Apocalyptic Battle’ After Blitz by American-Syrian Alliance” please click HERE)

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Reminder: Our National Debt Grew $540 Billion Last Year

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With all of the attention given to the presidential elections, it’s easy to forget that the U.S. just ended the 2016 fiscal year. This means it’s time for the annual examination of how much more debt we have!

According to the newest Treasury Department figures (H/T to The Washington Examiner and CNS News), total U.S. debt held by the federal government was $19.573 trillion on October 1. That’s an astronomical amount of debt, quite a bit larger than our current Gross National Product.

As the Examiner and CNS pointed out, and the Treasury numbers confirmed, U.S. debt technically jumped more than $1.4 trillion in the last 12 months. That’s thanks to the Treasury Department temporarily not taking on more debt via use of “extraordinary measures.” Those measures staved off a debt increase from March 2015 through early November — and then the debt jumped hundreds of billions of dollars within a month.

Looking at the Fiscal Year 2016 debt in context to our larger debt picture, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in August that the annual deficit would be about $540 billion. That’s larger than immediate prior years, but lower than what we’ll see over the next decade. (The deficit and an increase in the national debt are two different things, thanks to how the federal government does its accounting.)

Contrary to liberal tripe about the feds needing more taxes, CBO projects that government revenues via taxes, fees, etc. will rise over the next decade as a percentage of GDP and continue to be above the 50-year average. The real culprit for our growing debt, spending, will go up even more — well beyond the 50-year norm — putting the U.S. at an even worse fiscal position than we’re at now. CBO projects we will add nearly $8.6 trillion to our debt by 2026.

But even this scary scenario, which would likely impact our economy’s growth, doesn’t tally up the worst of it all. The big-picture analysis most often cited by media outlets is the “baseline” projection by CBO — the optimistic one. In the August projections, CBO gave a list of alternative fiscal scenarios that could play out, depending on the decisions politicians make. A quick tally of those scenarios shows that the debt could be as much as $2.755 trillion higher than the positive projections, or $792 billion lower.

Short version: We don’t need more taxation. We need more economic growth and less spending. However, neither party wants to effectively reform the entitlements (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, and other parts of the budget that don’t get annually approved by Congress) that are the major cause of our budget increases in recent years, and are projected to, for the most part, rise in cost. And effective tax reform is nowhere to be seen. (For more from the author of “Reminder: Our National Debt Grew $540 Billion Last Year” please click HERE)

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