Budget

(CNSNews.com) – On the same day President Barack Obama told a Wisconsin town hall gathering that his policies mean “the economy is headed in the right direction,” the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that federal debt could reach 87 percent of America’s gross domestic production by 2020, and surpass 100 percent of GDP by 2025.

Nevertheless, the president told the crowd in Racine, Wisc. – a town with the second highest unemployment in the state – that the economy is turning the corner.

“We had to take some tough steps to pull the country out of the freefall we faced when I took office,” Obama said. “Back then, the economy was shrinking faster than it had in decades. Today, it’s growing again. Back then, we were losing an average of 750,000 jobs a month. Today, we’ve added private sector jobs for five months in a row.”

Still, unemployment has risen since Obama took office in January 2009 – it is now at 9.7 percent...

The first spending bill to begin moving through Congress since House Republicans pledged to forgo earmarks shows the vow is working: The bill contains nearly 50 percent less in pork-barrel spending than last year's version.

The 2011 homeland security spending bill, which was approved by a House subcommittee last week, includes just one Republican earmark. And just as telling, House Democrats' earmarks dropped dramatically, with the dollar amount down nearly 20 percent from last year's bill.

"Essentially, the vacuum that was created by virtually no Republican earmarks wasn't backfilled by more Democratic earmarks, and in fact, Democrats actually took less than they did last year," said Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group. "There is a fear of overstepping the earmarking bounds, and also a commitment to at least further whittling away at earmark levels"...

Former Florida GOP Gov. Jeb Bush has grown tired of listening to Barack Obama blame his brother, telling the New York Times he finds the president’s behavior “childish.”

In an interview with the paper, Bush said that he has had enough of Obama frequently pointing back to his brother George W. Bush’s tenure to explain economic and budget problems, as well as failed oversight of the oil industry.

“It’s kind of like a kid coming to school saying, ‘The dog ate my homework,’” the former governor said of the president. “It’s childish. This is what children do until they mature. They don’t accept responsibility.”

“He apparently likes to act like he’s still campaigning, and he likes to blame George’s administration for everything,” Bush added...

Republicans have been railing against the failure of the House to pass a budget this year, with one House GOP leader erupting after President Obama sent a request Saturday night for $50 billion more in deficit spending to help financially-strapped states.

"The spending spree in Washington is continuing to run unabated. The American people are screaming at the top of their lungs, 'Stop!' And to move this without finding other offsets in spending, I think, is irresponsible," said House Majority Leader Boehner, R-Ohio.

Boehner said he agrees with the president that the states may need help to keep from laying off teachers, firemen and policemen, but argues spending should be cut elsewhere to free up the $50 billion...

Republicans on Thursday poked congressional Democrats for their failure to pass a budget -- already two months overdue -- and used a meeting at the White House to pressure President Obama and his allies to focus on cutting spending this year.

"The failure of the Democrats in Congress to move a budget really misses a significant opportunity to cut spending now," House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said after the meeting, which touched on a wide range of topics.

"I pushed them hard to get serious about cutting the spending. It's important for the future of our country. Needless to say, it was little agreement," he said...

Senate Republicans vowed Monday that they will try to force Congress to start cutting programs to pay for new spending. Democrats promised to make the GOP suffer for making their first stand on a bill to extend the time frame that the jobless can collect unemployment benefits.

The unemployment fight has become the battleground for the spending wars, and Republicans lost the first skirmish Monday when the Senate voted 60-34 to begin debate on a bill that would spend $9.2 billion, without offsetting spending cuts, to enact a short-term extension of benefits for the jobless.

"Over the coming weeks, I assure you, Republicans will continue to give our colleagues across the aisle and our president the opportunity to live up to the president's commitment on February 13: 'Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else,' " Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, pledged on the Senate floor...

President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president's budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

"An additional $1.2 trillion in debt dumped on [GDP] to our children makes a huge difference," said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "That represents an additional debt of $10,000 per household above and beyond the federal debt they are already carrying"...

After he signed a law last week authorizing the U.S. Treasury to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion, President Barack Obama delivered a characteristically sanctimonious speech. It was about his deep commitment to frugality.

“After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility,” he said. “It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do. Like families across the country, we have to take responsibility for every dollar we spend.”

To put Obama’s Olympian hypocrisy in perspective, one need only examine the federal budget tables posted on the White House website by Obama’s own Office of Management and Budget...

Billions of dollars in stimulus money is now going to programs that the administration plans to ax or cut down in its new budget, according to USA Today, which reported Wednesday that the total comes to more than $3.5 billion

Among the programs facing elimination or reduction are:

The Army Corps of Engineers' drinking-water project, which has received $200 million in the stimulus package.

The Department of Agriculture's flood-prevention program, the recipient of $290 million.

The Forest Service, which is getting $100 million less for maintenance and construction in national forests even though it received $650 million in stimulus money....

(CNSNews.com) - In his budget message to Congress Monday, President Barack Obama said, “Already, we have made historic strides … to cut wasteful spending.” He made the comment while presenting a budget proposal that for the second year in a row would fix federal spending at a percentage of Gross Domestic Product that is higher than at any time in the past 65 years.

In both fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011, Obama’s budgets would have the federal government spend more than a quarter of the all the wealth produced by the nation in that year.

No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has consumed such a large a share of the nation’s wealth through federal spending—and FDR did it in the midst of World War II.

According to the historical tables that the White House released with President Obama’s budget yesterday, the federal government will spend 25.4 percent of GDP in fiscal 2010, the federal budget year that will end on September 30.  read more »