Saturday, April 16, 2011

What is in the Federal Budget?


What, exactly, do we spend money on? Many people float from paycheck to paycheck having little idea where their money goes, while others can tell you to the penny exactly where the money goes and when it goes there. What about the Federal government? If you ask most people what we spend money on as a country, you'll find a mixed bag. So just in case you didn't know, here's a breakdown of the 2010 Federal budget.

Here are the top 10 spending categories in the 2010 budget, according to Wikipedia:

  1. Social Security: 19.6%
  2. Dept. of Defense: 18.7%
  3. Unemployment and welfare benefits: 16.1%
  4. Medicare: 12.8%
  5. Medicaid: 8.2%
  6. Interest on the National debt: 4.6%
  7. Dept. of Health and Human Services: 2.2%
  8. Dept. of Transportation: 2.0%
  9. Dept. of Veterans Affairs: 1.5%
  10. State Department: 1.5%


In theory, Social Security should be a self-funding system (it's not in reality, but let's pretend for a moment), so we can debate whether or not to include it in the list. If we choose to leave it off, then #10 becomes the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development at 1.3%.

That up there is $3.5 trillion. Most people can't really wrap their brain around a number like that. The exact number is about $3,552,000,000,000.00. Powerball can't touch that. The Federal income for the same period was about $2.4 trillion. So that's a deficit of $1.1 trillion. We overdrew our bank account by frickin' 60 percent.

How on earth are we supposed to balance that?

Well, for starters, we need to plug the holes in the tax code that permit immensely profitable corporations like GE to receive tax credits of $3.2 billion and simultaneously paying $0.00 tax on their yearly profit of $5.1 billion. That's $8.3 billion in profit, then, actually. If we did that with 1000 corporations, we would balance the budget. I'm *not* proposing raising taxes, or even permitting past tax cuts to lapse. I'm talking about just plugging the loopholes that GE's nearly 1000-employee tax department mines to enrich itself. Of course, GE is extraordinary. Most companies in fact don't make off like bandits that badly. But the bottom line is that if you made a profit, you had better not have gotten back more than you paid in. And I'm specifically not proposing to *cut* taxes. Look: $14 trillion. That's our debt. The majority of it is held by China. Think about that.

Tax credits must go. I'm not talking about tax deductions, which are more like not adding insult to injury. You needed to spend some money on important things, and the government decided not to tax that amount. Tax deductions are okay. Tax credits, on the other hand, are simply bribes from the Feds to induce particular behavior they wish to have occur. I've received tax credits of $1200 for my family to spend to stimulate the economy. Granted, that's money I probably would not have spent otherwise. But that's not always the case. I got $400 back on my taxes because I had to buy new garage doors last summer. They cost $1500 and I would have bought the $1500 doors regardless of whether or not the Feds paid me for it. I also got some money for going to grad school, which again, was money that would have been spent anyway. Yes, I took the tax credits. Nearly all people who are offered them will take them. Corporations will certainly take them.

Some people took the money and put it in savings. Some people took the money and spent it on idiotic things. Corporations do the same thing, but since they have paid lobbyists and know how to work Congress, they can persuade Congress to pass laws that grant tax credits that just happen to be what corporations are already doing, except now they get money from the Feds instead of having to spend their own money, which improves their bottom line to the stockholders. Unfortunately, I can't find a figure for total tax credits paid out to individuals and corporations.

Obviously, there will need to be cuts in unemployment and welfare benefits. There will need to be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. It will hurt people, but there's simply no alternative. We must also cut the military and defense spending, homeland security, and the War on Drugs. This will also hurt people. There is no way to get through this mess without hurting people. Because if we ever default on our debt, things will get much, much, much worse than they have been and are now, and many, many more people will be hurt.

In reality, every single part of the Federal government will need to be cut. But it needs to be done evenly and without the vindictive "social riders" that advance narrow moral agendas. If we're going to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood and PBS, we also need to eliminate funding for the DEA. If we're going to defund the EPA, we need to defund the ATF too. And we will need to do this for an extended period of time. We can't be permitted to just reduce the deficit. That's not good enough. We can't congratulate ourselves with just balancing the budget. We would need to run a $100 billion surplus for over 140 years in order to pay down the Federal debt.

And that's just the Federal government's debt. That's not counting state and local debts. We've wanted the government to give us stuff to make our lives easier, to soften the blow of bad things happening, or to impose our morality on others. That stuff doesn't come free. But I'm afraid we're all still so deeply in denial that the Federal debt debacle can only end in complete, unmitigated disaster, because we are unwilling to do what it takes to live within our means.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Birthers' Reprise, Budget Battles, and the Hijacked Tea Party

If I was looking for a reason to not vote for Donald Trump for president, he handed it to us all last week, once again jumping into the "birther" conspiracy with both feet. This has been a fascinating, if interminable, debate, one that is important to Constitutional law, but good grief, this has run its course. For those of you living under a rock over the last three years, the basis for the argument is that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen, i.e. passed into being in the United States of America proper, and therefore is ineligible to be president. Never before in our nation's history has this ever been brought up with a previous president -- shall I point out, any white president with a white-sounding name. But the prospect of having a black president with an African and/or Middle-Eastern name, whose father was a Muslim? In a post-9/11 America, that's just too much for some people to swallow.

The theory that Barack Hussein Obama was not born in Hawaii has followed a pretty tangled path, and both PolitiFact and FactCheck have attempted to sort it all out in a non-partisan fashion. Both organizations are documented to be scrupulously non-partisan and not, as some folks have suggested, Democratic shills. Part of what seems to be feeding the conspiracy angle on this is that Hawaii is a heavily Democratic state, and that their state functioning would do nothing to undermine their candidate. Whether by being in on the deception, or simply unwilling to look for possibly finding something that would challenge them, the broad suggestion is that the state government of Hawaii is in on it.

So let's quote FactCheck's summary on the issue: "FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate (the birth certificate issued to Obama in 2007 by the state of Hawaii --ed.). We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as 'supporting documents' to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said."

They also pat their PolitiFact colleagues on the back, pointing out their summary: "It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world's biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything's possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what's reasonable has to take over. There is not one shred of evidence to disprove PolitiFact's conclusion that the candidate's name is Barack Hussein Obama, or to support allegations that the birth certificate he released isn't authentic."

The remaining doubts not answered here are a combination of unsubstantiated hearsay (Obama's childhood friend recalls him talking about growing up in Kenya or Indonesia) and flat out James-Bond style espionage. I've been told that if an impartial person went into the document archives in Hawaii, they would find a perfectly formed original long-form birth certificate that says all the right things and looks genuine. Of course they would, because the CIA has ensured that will be the case by planting a perfectly forged instrument that says what they want it to say. They also replaced all the microfiche for all the various archives of the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin newspapers -- every little city and school library in Hawaii, most likely -- with similarly doctored pages from August 13, 1961. What, you doubt the CIA could do that? How naive are you? Oh, I'm sorry, I meant the USIA, bet you didn't even know they exist, eh? You spoonfed sheep....

Why, oh why, after all this time, is this still an issue? Why do some otherwise reasonable folks, under the guise of "just wanting to be thorough and sure for the future, because, you know, this could set a precedent", continue to give ear to the conspiracy nuts? And who *are* the conspiracy nuts? I have found, in my casual observation of the movement, that they actually aren't typical straightforward racists who simply want the Black guy out. Nearly all of them are conservative Republicans with a vested interest in keeping the doubt stoked, and others are particularly bitter Hillary Clinton supporters. For partisan purposes, they want all of Obama's presidency invalidated, all that he has attempted to do to be declared null and void. Most of them actually believe it, while a few know better but keep bringing it up anyway because it is politically expedient to do so. A very small handful are of the "overly reasonable" variety, not wanting to say something so rash as to say "Obama is a natural-born American" because only a liberal Democrat would say such a thing with complete conviction.

This was never about the Constitution. It was always about keeping a Democrat out of the Oval Office. It's just that Barack Obama's unique life experience handed his enemies a plausible cover story. The entire hijacked Tea Party movement has always been about one thing and one thing only: Getting Barack Obama out of office, after an election had put him there. Stopping his health care plan. Saving America from the Liberals. Whatever original noble intention the Tea Party had (it was about TARP, remember?), it became an ugly glob of God, Guns, and Gays. The revolt against the bi-partisan financial corporations' bailout became, instead, Republicans on Steroids.

It's an ugly accusation. I don't like making it. Early on, I was sympathetic to the Tea Party. I thought whatever racist overtones existed within it were subconscious accidents. I still think that the vast majority of Tea Party supporters are not *consciously* racist. No, disagreeing with Obama doesn't make you a racist. But I do think that, after all this, if you still carry water for the birthers, you have a racist streak you probably don't want and wouldn't like to face. I know I didn't. Early on, I was hopeful that the Tea Party might bring (gasp) Libertarians to the fore, in a fashion similar to the effect Ron Paul had on the 2008 presidential race.

Instead, the Tea Party favorites are, nearly to a person, darlings of ultraconservative Evangelical Christians (people with mean streaks call them "fundies", but I find that term too explicitly disrespectful -- it's not wrong to be a person of faith). They are, in essence, transplanted Constitution Party candidates. When Ron Paul endorsed Chuck Baldwin for president, a big part of me inside was betrayed. I've since given every telemarketer from Paul's organizations an earful about that betrayal. It turns out, however, that it was simply a harbinger of things to come. By endorsing Baldwin, Ron Paul anticipated the hijacked Tea Party. The Constitution Party simply serves no purpose any longer. The hijacked Tea Party has injected all of who would have been their candidates into the Republican Party.

The new Republican Party, after the 2010 midterm elections that put so many of the hijacked Tea Party into the House, showed its true colors in grand style during the recent budget debates. The deep cuts in the Federal budget were inevitably aimed at social programs (which they assume are only used by valueless sluts and slackers), with a noticeable lack of cuts in military spending and other neo-con causes, and specific potshots they euphemistically termed "social riders" that included that great Satan of American life, Planned Parenthood.

The next budget battle will inevitably get even uglier, as those ultraconservative "Tea Party" representatives gear up to be re-elected, the entire Republican Party gears up to try to knock off the first incumbent president since George H. W. Bush, and the Federal debt threatens to crush us all. At this point, the status of Obama's citizenship is barely a blip on the radar.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Tread Carefully in Libya

The unrest in the Middle East could have gone bad for the U.S. It still could, but at the moment it seems as if the flow of things is in the direction of democracy -- or whatever passes for democracy in that part of the world. Under Bush, no doubt we'd be picking sides and futzing with it to ensure we gain something out of it, but Obama has wisely taken a cautious tack. It's a dangerous part of the world for us. Remember, this is the part of the world that provoked the confrontation between Rudolph Giuliani and Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential debates, where an incredulous Giuliani erupted at Paul's suggestion that we somehow did something to bring 9/11 down upon us. Paul had a good point, though an unpopular one: Our continual poking and prodding of the Middle East, in the name of "national security", has made us few friends there.

Just as during the Cold War, which provoked much hostility towards the U.S., we were supporting dictatorial leaders in the name of our own War on Terror, and turning a blind eye towards those leaders' abuses and excesses. Mubarak in Egypt, Saleh in Yemen, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and Al Khalifa in Bahrain are all leaders who have, on one level or another, seriously provoked the majority of their citizenry. With the wave of revolts now leading to Libya and Syria, we begin to see situations where supporting the rebels is advantageous, but don't think for a moment that Bush would not have jumped in to defend Mubarak et al. because it was convenient to do so.

Leaving well enough alone is a new and welcome change in American foreign policy. It has left the possibility that Egypt and Tunisia could end up with new governments that are still friendly to the U.S. It turned out that Mubarak and Ben Ali didn't have the stomach to kill their own people. Yemen faces an uncertain outcome, as the country's government was weak to begin with, surviving only by Saleh's near-magical ability to compromise with his enemies yet still best them. We already had concerns about Yemen's ability to keep al-Qaida at bay. Bahrain's situation is different. Al Khalifa has used the spectre of Iranian interference to keep the country's Shi'ite majority repressed. We have a large presence in Bahrain, since they host the majority of our military in the Middle East. If their rebels get the upper hand, we'd best allow them to do so and hope another new government doesn't hate us.

It is fiercely tempting to get into the conflict in Libya. Qaddafi has been a bogeyman for a long time in American minds, and we wouldn't mind one bit to see him get thrown out Mubarak-style, or even torn down and executed Ceaușescu-style. Unlike other leaders who have fled revolts, though, Qaddafi has a big enough ego that he had no problems killing anyone who had the gall to rise against him, and he controls more of his military than the other countries' leaders. It now appears that Libya will reach a stalemate, with the rebels holding the east with their capitol in Benghazi, and Qaddafi digging in around Tripoli. Unless more of his army revolts, this is going to take awhile. Fortunately, there's no support whatsoever to send troops to Libya, though there is much discussion about arming the rebels. If they would like to use some of their oil to buy arms for their rebellion for democracy, so be it. At least they'd be paying for it. I'm not so fond of using our aircraft to patrol Libyan skies. Let France and Italy do it, they're willing and have much greater interest in this than we do. What we don't want is a protracted involvement such as we've gotten into in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Conservatives and Liberals have two minds about military interventionism. Conservatives seem to think that we have the right to intervene anywhere we have significant national interests, like Iraq. Liberals, on the other hand, seem to think that we may only invade a country if we have no interest whatsoever, such as in Bosnia. We may only intervene for altruistic reasons. Which is noble, but also silly, because it is no less interfering with the world as Bush's unilateral incursions. Not so long ago, some Liberals were calling for us to send troops to Sudan. Just as with Federal authority over ourselves, it appears that the only difference between Conservatives and Liberals is who to use force against. If we aren't the world's policeman, that needs to be the case *all the time*, not just when it is advantageous or soul-soothing to do so.

If we spent less time supporting unpopular dictators for selfish reasons, we probably would not have so many reasons for people over there to distrust and dislike us. Ron Paul's assertion that 9/11 was the end result of Cold War policies that had us propping up dictators is not without merit. Just looking at what happened in Iran should be lesson enough. Bin Laden's own admitted motivation for going rogue was our presence in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Sure, there were tough choices to make regarding Israel and the invasion of Kuwait. Maybe those were wise choices and maybe not. But remember that we supported Hussein in Iraq much longer than we opposed him, and things would have been easier for us had we not done that in the first place. It's hard to know how messing with another country's affairs will affect us down the road.

When other countries attempt to meddle in our own affairs, we get all indignant, as if the natural way of things was being violated. And yet we never consider our own foreign actions beyond our own selfish motivations. Conservatives toss the word "isolationism" around every time someone suggests that we, in fact, should not screw with the rest of the world. They, of course, say it as if that was a bad thing. It's not. We can support countries and movements that agree with our values without doing so militarily. The Federal debt has come as much from past military spending (especially under Reagan) as it has from domestic welfare spending. As much as our own interests play a part in our foreign policy, the morals and integrity of the foreign governments we support should play as great a part or even more. If we had done more of that in the past, the world might be a safer place now.