The U.S. Treasury released its last Daily Treasury Statement for fiscal 2013 yesterday afternoon, revealing that during the presidency of Barack Obama the U.S. government debt held by the public has increased 90 percent.
At the close of business on Jan. 20, 2009, the day Obama was inaugurated, the U.S. government debt held by the public was $6,307,311,000,000, according to the Daily Treasury Statement for that day.
At the close of business on Sept. 30, 2013—the last day of fiscal 2013—the Daily Treasury Statement said the U.S. government debt held by the public was $11,976,279,000,000.
The $11,976,279,000,000 in U.S. government debt held by the public on Sept. 30, 2013 was $5,668,968,000,000 more than the $6,307,311,000,000 in debt held by the public on Obama’s first inauguration day.
That is an increase of 89.879 percent—or approximately 90 percent.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-04 00:40:292013-10-04 00:40:29Treasury: Under Obama, U.S Gov’t Debt Held by Public Up 90%
“This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”
He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.
Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque.
Is all this spending necessary? Every day, the foot-of-page-37 news stories reveal government programs it would never occur to your dimestore caudillo to blow money on. On Thursday, it was the Food and Drug Administration blowing just shy of $200 grand to find out whether its Twitter and Facebook presence is “well-received.” A fifth of a million dollars isn’t even a rounding error in most departmental budgets, so nobody cares. But the FDA is one of those sclerotic American institutions that has near to entirely seized up. In October 1920, it occurred to an Ontario doctor called Frederick Banting that insulin might be isolated and purified and used to treat diabetes; by January 1923, Eli Lilly & Co were selling insulin to American pharmacies: A little over two years from concept to market. Now the FDA adds at least half-a-decade to the process, and your chances of making it through are far slimmer: As recently as the late Nineties, they were approving 157 new drugs per half-decade. Today it’s less than half that.
But they’ve got $182,000 to splash around on finding out whether people really like them on Facebook, or they’re just saying that. So they’ve given the dough to a company run by Dan Beckmann, a former “new media aide” to President Obama. That has the whiff of the banana republic about it, too.
The US government needs money. We are hopelessly in debt. The tax increases that are coming are already over the top. Washington knows, much of official Washington knows that they’ve gone beyond the point here, taxation, because the impact on economic growth and productivity and creativity has now been stifled. I mean, the tax rates are such that real creation of wealth, real opportunity for prosperity is diminishing left and right.
They’ve got to come up with money. And they know this: If you use the popularly accepted figure of 1.3 million abortions a year, go back to Roe vs. Wade 1973, 52 million taxpayers haven’t been born, is the way Washington looks at it. They don’t look at it morally. They don’t look at it in any kind of cultural way or any kind of cultural impact. They just say we’re 52 million people short. We have 52 million fewer people paying taxes. We gotta replace ’em. Hello amnesty..
So one of the reasons for amnesty is to replace the 52 million people aborted. I just want to tell you something. I really think that abortion is at the root — you could do a flowchart — I think abortion is at the root of so much that has and is going wrong in this country. I think that the number of abortions themselves, but what in toto it all means, culturally, in terms of the sanctity of life, how that’s crumbled, I think it’s almost at the root of everything. And if it’s not at the root of everything, it’s clearly had a profound impact on our culture, our society, and our politics, I think in ways that people don’t even stop to consider.
…It’s had impact on crime. It’s had a profound impact on our politics. It is at the root of our cultural rot and decay.
…We need 52 million people that we don’t have. We need the taxes of 52 million people that don’t exist. They were conceived. They were going to be born, but something happened, and they’re not here, but we need ’em. Our birthrate is not at replacement levels. That’s what he means by this fertility business. It’s not a matter of fertility. It’s a matter of abortion.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-18 01:18:302013-06-18 01:18:30Rush: We’ve Got to Have Amnesty Because Abortion Has Wiped Out 52 Million Americans
Photo Credit: Forbes Here’s an indication of how burdensome student loans have become: About one-third of millennials say they would have been better off working, instead of going to college and paying tuition.
That’s a according to a new Wells Fargo WFC +0.57% study which surveyed 1,414 millennials between the ages of 22 and 32. More than half of them financed their education through student loans, and many say the if they had $10,000 the “first thing” they’d do is pay down their student loan or credit card debt.
That’s no surprise when you consider student borrowing topped the $100 billion threshold for the first time in 2010, and total outstanding loans exceeded $1 trillion for the first time in 2011. Student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt in the U.S. which stands at about $798 billion.
Delinquencies are also on the rise. The number of borrowers who are at least 90 days late on student loan payments has jumped from 8.5% in 2011 to 11.7% today, according to a study by the New York Federal Reserve.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-05-26 05:30:372016-04-11 11:20:19One-Third of Young Adults Regret Going to College
Cyprus has agreed to shrink its bloated financial industry and tap big depositors at its two leading banks for billions of euros, clearing the way for a €10 billion European Union bailout the island nation needs to avoid collapse.
The deal with the EU was struck early Monday after days of frantic negotiations that followed the rejection by Cypriot lawmakers of Plan A. That proposal, unveiled little over a week ago, would have imposed a tax on all account holders to raise funds to recapitalize the failing banks.
Now the new bailout plan will protect all deposits of less than €100,000 euros but is likely to mean much bigger losses for account holders with more than €100,000 at the two biggest banks — the Bank of Cyprus and Popular Bank of Cyprus.
Popular Bank will be broken up immediately. Its viable assets will be integrated into the Bank of Cyprus, and its non-performing loans will be moved into a “bad bank” to be wound down.
The “haircut” for Popular Bank depositors will raise about €4.2 billion, while shareholders and bondholders are likely to be wiped out. The scale of depositors’ contribution to the restructuring of Bank of Cyprus has yet to be fixed.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-25 02:08:442013-03-25 02:08:44Confirmed: Bank Deposits To Be Seized In Cyprus, Many Cypriots Have No Cash (+video)
Imagine checking your bank statement one day only to discover that someone had just taken 10 percent out of your savings account without your permission.
You’d be pretty upset, wouldn’t you? So were many citizens of Cyprus, whose government announced last Friday it would be assessing a 9.9 percent “stability levy” on all deposits of more than $100,000 and a 6.75 percent levy on deposits less than that. Cypriots quickly deduced that the government was seizing their property to bail out their nation’s banks and immediately tried to withdrawal their funds. To prevent them, the government of Cyprus has declared a bank holiday that has been extended through at least Wednesday.
The Cyprus crisis began last spring when the face value of Greek debt was cut after that government was bailed out last spring. Cyprus banks, which have longstanding cultural ties with Greece, carried substantial exposure and lost billions. Cyprus Popular Bank alone had $3.4 billion in Greek government debt, whose value was reduced to $2.5 billion. Cyprus was forced to nationalize that bank last November, and things haven’t gotten any better since.
Like the rest of the European Union, Cyprus has been mired in recession since 2011. Its government has been seeking a bailout from its EU partners since last June. But EU member nations, especially Germany, are tired of bailing out their spendthrift neighbors, especially ones like Cyprus, where the banking sector was recently measured to be eight times as large as the entire Cypriot economy.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-20 01:49:422013-03-20 01:49:42Nobody’s Property Is Safe When Bailouts Begin
Photo Credit: APThe Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report Tuesday showing that if cost-control measures are not maintained the Affordable Care Act could increase the deficit by $6.2 trillion, or .7 percent of GDP, over the next 75 years.
The report shows President Barack Obama’s comments that Obamacare would “not add a dime to the long term debt [are] false,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) said at a Budget Committee hearing.
“The result of this brand new report confirmed everything that Republicans were saying about the bill,” Sessions said. The report is the first to look at the long-term effects of the Affordable Care Act beyond a ten-year period.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) previously had projected the cost of Obamacare over a ten-year period and found it would save more than $100 billion if certain policies remained the same—policies that CBO director Doug Elmendorf said would be hard to maintain.
“CBO’s cost estimate noted that the legislation maintains and puts into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time,” Elmendorf said at the time. The new GAO study ran two projections: one in which those cost reduction policies were maintained and another projection in which Congress phased out the reduction policies put into Obamacare.
Photo Credit: Rush Limbaugh RUSH: Folks, I’m sorry here. I can’t help but think that we are all being played for a bunch of fools, a bunch of suckers on this sequester business. I don’t know. Are you like me? Do you really think 800,000 people are gonna lose their jobs in the Pentagon because we cut $22 billion? Do you really think air traffic control’s gonna shut down? Do you really think there aren’t gonna be any meat inspectors? Do you really think that all of these horror stories are going to happen? I don’t.
I feel like I’ve been here. This is deja vu all over again. I remember the 1995 budget battle. That involved a legitimate government shut down. That wasn’t just $22 billion we were not gonna spend. We’re still gonna spend $3.5 trillion. We’re just not gonna spend $22 billion, if it happens.
Now, the government shutdown in 1995, yeah, we were gonna starve kids. That was the plan then. I’m just kidding. Snerdley I’m sorry, it’s all ridiculous to me. Every bit of this. I’ve been doing this — you get new perspective. I’m into my 25th year, and I think I mentioned to you last week and maybe the week before, I’ve been doing this long enough now to start seeing the repeat cycles on everything. I don’t care whether it’s the debt limit or the fiscal cliff or continuing resolution or the budget crisis of 2008 or TARP or the auto bailouts, and now the sequester, it’s the same playbook.
It is the same threats. It’s the same danger. It’s the same crisis. It’s identical. There’s nothing about it that changes, over and over. And everybody gets sucked into it. I try to escape, I try to get out of it, I try to leave it aside, I try to move on, but it just sucks me back in, too, until I realize that I have been sucked back in. And then there’s a part of me that says, “Well, wait a minute now.” You got not just Panetta, but now a uniformed military general, General Odierno, saying that he could lose 600,000 uniformed people, and the common sense of this doesn’t add up. Now we’ve got a guy comparing this to the Oklahoma City bombing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Everything gets repeated. The cycle, the claims, the threats, the crisis, Armageddon, it’s the same. And we’re talking $22 billion. It’s not as though we’re not gonna spend anything. If the sequester happens, the first year is $44 billion. Half of that’s defense. We’re still going to spend $3.5 trillion or $3.3 trillion, even if we don’t spend the $22 billion. Then there’s this guy who draws an analogy to the Oklahoma City bombing.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-02-22 03:12:102016-04-11 11:24:05Limbaugh: ‘For the First Time in My Life, I Am Ashamed of My Country’ (+video)
Photo Credit: Center for American Progress Action FundMICHELLE CARUSO-CABRERA: Does the country have a spending problem sir? Does the country have a spending problem?
REP. STENY HOYER (D-MD), HOUSE MINORITY WHIP: Does the country have a spending problem? The country has a paying for problem. We haven’t paid for what we bought, we haven’t paid for our tax cuts, we haven’t paid for war.
CARUSO-CABRERA: How about what we promised? Are we promising too much?
HOYER: Absolutely. If we don’t pay, we shouldn’t buy.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-02-13 01:37:282016-04-11 11:24:46Video: Hoyer “The Country Has A Paying For Problem,” Not A Spending Problem
Photo Credit: APSince taking office in 2009, food stamp rolls under President Barack Obama have risen to more than 47 million people in America, exceeding the population of Spain.
“Now is the time to act boldly and wisely – to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity,” said Obama during his first joint session address to Congress on Feb. 24, 2009.
Since then, the number of participants enrolled in food stamps, known as the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP), has risen substantially.
When Obama entered office in January 2009 there were 31,939,110 Americans receiving food stamps. As of November 2012—the most recent data available—there were 47,692,896 Americans enrolled, an increase of 49.3 percent.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-02-13 01:19:382016-04-11 11:24:46Food Stamp Rolls In America Now Surpass The Population of Spain
