The Magic of the Budget

Back in April, Dave Lin­dorff had a post up at Truthout con­cern­ing the por­tion of the fed­er­al bud­get that went to defense. It turns out it is 53%. For that 53% we get the largest mil­i­tary in the his­to­ry of the world. In 2009 US mil­i­tary spend­ing account­ed for 47 per­cent of all mon­ey spent glob­al­ly on war, weapons and mil­i­tary preparedness.

Today, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, (I think at about the four­teen minute mark) Robert Samuel­son explained that half of the fed­er­al bud­get con­sist­ed of tak­ing mon­ey from the work­ers and pay­ing it to the retirees. He was on NPR because he had just writ­ten a col­umn on the sub­ject. From his column:

Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare, Med­ic­aid and oth­er retiree pro­grams con­sti­tute rough­ly half of non-inter­est fed­er­al spending.

So it would seem that the entire bud­get is noth­ing more than defense and mov­ing mon­ey from work­ers to retirees.

But wait. Samuel­son also says:

In 1960, nation­al defense was the government’s main job; it con­sti­tut­ed 52 per­cent of fed­er­al out­lays. In 2011 — even with two wars — it is 20 per­cent and falling.

So is Defense half the bud­get or twen­ty per­cent of the budget?

Well, the bud­get Lin­dorff con­sid­ers does

not count… funds col­lect­ed for Social Security

but does include

$94 bil­lion in non-DoD mil­i­tary spend­ing, $100 bil­lion in vet­er­ans ben­e­fits and health care spend­ing, and $400 bil­lion in inter­est on debt raised to pay for pri­or wars and the stand­ing military.

These two fac­tors would obvi­ous­ly increase the per­cent­age, but from 20% to 50%?

Although he does not say so in his col­umn, I believe Samuel­son did men­tion on NPR that some vet­er­ans ben­e­fits are includ­ed in his “work­ers to retirees” col­umn and so, pre­sum­ably, not in his defense numbers.

If you won­dered why the bud­get is not well under­stood by the elec­torate, the above num­bers explain some of that.

Also, note that Samuel­son says Defense is 20% of the bud­get and falling. Lin­dorff says that defense is increas­ing at 9% which would require the over­all bud­get to increase at a greater than 9% pace for its share to be falling.

I have no idea who is right here. But I would point out that the Social Secu­ri­ty Trust Fund is not in any real trou­ble, a lit­tle tweak­ing and it is fine. Medicare is a seri­ous long term bud­get issue. If defense infla­tion is 9%, then it is also a seri­ous long term bud­get issue (espe­cial­ly if it is 53% of the budget!) .

Final­ly, Samuel­son makes the point that

In 2011 — even with two wars — it [defense] is 20 per­cent and falling.

I would argue that if we have man­aged over fifty years to take defense from 50% of the bud­get to 20% of the bud­get (with the bud­get increas­ing from about 30% to 40% of GDP over that span), that that is some­thing to be very proud of!

With so many ways of mak­ing the bud­get appear the way one wants it to, you would think we could use that mag­ic to solve our bud­get problems!

There’s Bound To Be Some Doozies

On Sat­ur­days, Dai­ly Kos posts sam­ples of the hate mail he received that week. This week he fea­tures sev­er­al emails he has received over the past year all from the same writer, “George Rock­well.” Includ­ed is a copy of the let­ter Mr. “Rock­well” wrote to Supreme Court Jus­tice Antonin Scalia.

If you go to the site, the let­ter (at least as of this writ­ing) is at the bot­tom of Kos’ post, about 1/​3 down the page (due to com­ments). It is amusing.

While read­ing that let­ter, it occurred to me that there must be quite a trea­sure trove of amus­ing let­ters addressed to var­i­ous Supreme Court Jus­tices over the years. I’ve always been aware that Pres­i­dents get a wide vari­ety of let­ters, but it nev­er occurred to me that Supreme Court Jus­tices do too.

Seems like a com­pi­la­tion is in order.

Farm Picked Broccoli

There was a com­mer­cial on TV just now for, I believe, Lean Cui­sine. The claim was made of high­er qual­i­ty ingre­di­ents such as “farm picked broc­coli”. I am at a loss as how this dif­fers from the broc­coli that might be present in com­pet­ing products.

Are there frozen din­ner prod­ucts that con­tain “home picked broccoli”?

I Do Not Know How to Respond to This

Two female Bul­gar­i­an stu­dents vis­it­ing the Unit­ed States for the sum­mer found hid­den cam­eras hid­den in their Flori­da apart­ment this week and fear they may have been video­taped through­out their three-month stay.

If true, this is a seri­ous vio­la­tion of the pri­va­cy of the vic­tims. I do not doubt for a minute that there are peo­ple out there who would com­mit such a vio­la­tion. I hope the crooks are caught and prop­er­ly pun­ished. I espe­cial­ly hope that what­ev­er pic­tures and/​or video that exist of the vic­tims (naked or clothed) nev­er make it on to the inter­net. Real­ly, the whole thing is disgusting.

OR

As I read the arti­cle, I can not help but feel a bit of cyn­i­cism. Was some­one spy­ing on these girls, or were they spy­ing on them­selves? Is the whole thing a set up to pro­mote their soon to be unveiled web site? If this is the case, then they are going to be in trou­ble (right­ly so) for false report­ing of a crime.

OR

The cam­era and equip­ment were left over from some pre­vi­ous use (which may or may not have been crim­i­nal) and were nev­er acti­vat­ed since the two girls moved in.

I find all three sce­nar­ios equal­ly plau­si­ble and I do not want to jump to con­clu­sions. I won­der if we will ever know.

Jumping to Conclusions

It is too bad that jump­ing to con­clu­sions is not a form of phys­i­cal exer­cise. If it were, Amer­i­cans would not be near­ly as out of shape as we are.

A gun­man in Nor­way? Clear­ly he must be an Al Qae­da ter­ror­ist. The after­noon of the attacks, The Week­ly Stan­dard had a post up based entire­ly on the assump­tion that Al Qae­da was behind the attacks. In the Stan­dard­’s defense, the arti­cle does main­tain the “if” stance.

Less than two hours lat­er, Jen­nifer Rubin at The Wash­ing­ton Post, fol­low­ing up on the Stan­dard­’s post, explains the pol­i­cy impli­ca­tions of Al Qaeda’s con­tin­ued existence.

Now we “know” that Al Qae­da had noth­ing to do with what hap­pened in Norway.

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of rape, every­one assumed he was guilty and the maid was a poor vic­tim of a man of wealth and power.

Then it leaks out that the maid had trou­ble keep­ing her “sto­ry” straight and has been/​is a pros­ti­tute and we all assume that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the vic­tim of a schem­ing woman out for a chunk of his change.

If it turns out she is not a pros­ti­tute, is Dominique Strauss-Kahn now guilty all over again?

Be sure to rush to judge­ment when the next detail emerges!

When it first came out that Jus­tice David Pross­er choked Jus­tice Ann Walsh Bradley at the Wis­con­sin Supreme Court (with the added detail that he had recent­ly called Chief Jus­tice Shirley Abra­ham­son a “total bitch”) we all assumed that Pross­er was guilty.

Then it turned out that Bradley had angri­ly approached Pross­er with her fists in the air.

I have no idea what I know about that inci­dent at this point.

Final­ly, here is a sto­ry of a woman who spent sev­en months in jail hav­ing done noth­ing wrong. An ex set her up and the police assumed guilt.

Letter to the Editor

There was an amus­ing let­ter to the edi­tor in Wednes­days Fort Wayne Jour­nal Gazette (yes, I am slow to get to the newspaper…shocking, ain’t it?). The let­ter is head­lined “Obama’s mis­quot­ing Con­sti­tu­tion instruc­tive” and is the third let­ter at the link.

Mr. Rusk, Sr. is upset with Pres­i­dent Oba­ma for mis­quot­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion of the Unit­ed States:

On mul­ti­ple occa­sions Pres­i­dent Oba­ma has mis­quot­ed a key part in the open­ing lines of our most impor­tant pro­tec­tion from tyran­ny. His read­ing is “…all men are cre­at­ed equal and endowed with cer­tain inalien­able rights…”

Atten­tive read­ers have prob­a­bly already not­ed that the “quote” is not even from the Con­sti­tu­tion, but from the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. Details, details.

Read­ers may also be ask­ing what is wrong with the quote. I know I did. One prob­lem is the word “inalien­able”.

If you are unclear on the dif­fer­ence between his “inalien­able” and the prop­er word “unalien­able,” con­sult a good dictionary.

I con­sult­ed four or five online dic­tio­nar­ies and my real life dic­tio­nary. They all agree that unalien­able is a vari­ant of inalien­able. So even if the Pres­i­dent is using the wrong word, the mean­ing is the same.

Mr. Rusk then com­plains about Oba­ma’s omis­sion of the phrase “by their Cre­ator”. Fair enough. Of course it is not clear that the Pres­i­dent con­sid­ers him­self to be quot­ing the Dec­la­ra­tion in the first place. Oba­ma’s freely inserts bib­li­cal and foun­da­tion­al phras­es into his pub­lic rhetoric all the time. That he would fre­quent­ly talk about how all men are cre­at­ed equal and are endowed with cer­tain inalien­able rights is not all that sur­pris­ing. Indeed, any­one who has lis­tened to enough of Oba­ma’s pub­lic speech would be sur­prised if he was not using such language.

Final­ly, Mr. Rusk asks:

If our cre­ator is not the source of our rights, who or what then is? Cer­tain­ly not this or any oth­er government.

Well, we are all enti­tled to our own opin­ion. There are plen­ty of peo­ple that do not believe in a god, but still accept that human beings do in fact have rights. These rights are sim­ply inher­ent. They do not “come” from any­where. Note that the Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights does not invoke god or even men­tion god.

To depend upon a cre­ator for your rights is prob­lem­at­ic when faced with those who do not believe in a creator.

Mr. Rusk’s let­ter is so prob­lem­at­ic that it leads one to won­der if some lib­er­al wrote it try­ing to make Con­ser­v­a­tives look bad (my mon­ey is not on this possibility).

Blueberries!!!

Deb­by and I were out the door ear­ly today to dri­ve thir­ty min­utes north and pick blue­ber­ries! Despite the heat we walked into when we left the house when we arrived at the blue­ber­ry farm it was quite pleas­ant. They had had a lot of rain ear­li­er and it cooled them off. So we got to pick from wet bushes.

We picked 17 pounds!

Deb­by out picked me 9 pounds to 8. I can’t fig­ure out how she has the rock in the buck­et for the weigh­ing but it isn’t there when the berries are poured out. She out picked me last time we picked (a few years ago) but only by a cou­ple of ounces (and we picked a lot more that day!)

I love blue­ber­ries with cere­al and in pan­cakes. Nor­mal­ly, I am not much of a pan­cake fan, but put blue­ber­ries in them and it is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent food.

The wet berries laid out to dry before freezing.

We saved fifty cents a pound by pick­ing the berries our­selves, so $8.50. That took four man hours of labor. So we earned $2.12 an hour. Then there was the gas and the hour of time spent in travel.…

So, no. We did not do this to save mon­ey. We had fun. That was the point (well, that and the resul­tant BLUBERRIES!)

Need a Crisis? Create One!

Eight months ago many Repub­li­cans ran for office on a plat­form of jobs, jobs, jobs. Of course, the prin­ci­ple tool the gov­ern­ment has for cre­at­ing jobs is stim­u­lus spend­ing. Repub­li­cans do not do stim­u­lus spend­ing so once they were elect­ed they had to come up with an alter­na­tive to the jobs crisis.

Just a few months ago, there was no debt cri­sis and there was no debt ceil­ing cri­sis. No one was talk­ing about refus­ing to raise the debt ceil­ing. No one was talk­ing about low­er­ing the coun­tries cred­it rating.

But the Repub­li­cans had run through all the sym­bol­ic votes they could think of (none of which had any­thing to do with jobs) and were sud­den­ly faced with the prospect that the coun­try might start ask­ing about jobs.

So they decid­ed that the debt was a cri­sis. It was­n’t. By his­tor­i­cal stan­dards, the debt is still well below its his­tor­i­cal high. The coun­try still has (for a bit longer) top grades from the rat­ing agen­cies. Unit­ed States bonds are still con­sid­ered the safest invest­ment on the plan­et and buy­ers were still lin­ing up to buy them at very low inter­est rates.

But the Repub­li­cans decid­ed the debt was a cri­sis, and they found a way to make their beliefs real­i­ty: refuse to raise the debt ceiling!

Three days ago, Reuters report­ed that

Rat­ings agency Moody’s on Mon­day sug­gest­ed the Unit­ed States should elim­i­nate its statu­to­ry lim­it on gov­ern­ment debt to reduce uncer­tain­ty among bond holders.

The Unit­ed States is one of the few coun­tries where Con­gress sets a ceil­ing on gov­ern­ment debt, which cre­ates “peri­od­ic uncer­tain­ty” over the gov­ern­men­t’s abil­i­ty to meet its oblig­a­tions, Moody’s said in a report.

“We would reduce our assess­ment of event risk if the gov­ern­ment changed its frame­work for man­ag­ing gov­ern­ment debt to lessen or elim­i­nate that uncer­tain­ty,” Moody’s ana­lyst Steven Hess wrote in the report.

And today:

Stan­dard & Poor’s reit­er­at­ed on Thurs­day it sees a real risk that future U.S. gov­ern­ment deficits may mean­ing­ful­ly miss dis­cussed tar­gets and that there is a 50 – 50 chance the U.S. AAA cred­it rat­ing could be cut with­in three months, per­haps as soon as August.

The deficit reduc­tion debate is com­ing up against an August 2 dead­line when the $14.3 tril­lion lim­it on Amer­i­ca’s bor­row­ing capac­i­ty is exhaust­ed, putting in jeop­ardy pay­ments on U.S. Trea­sury debt as well as pay­checks for fed­er­al employ­ees and soldiers.

If an agree­ment is reached to raise the debt ceil­ing but noth­ing mean­ing­ful is done in terms of deficit reduc­tion, the U.S. would like­ly have its rat­ing cut to the AA cat­e­go­ry, S&P said.

So, there was no debt cri­sis until the Repub­li­cans need­ed to dis­tract the elec­torate from their non-inter­est in jobs. Today there is a real debt cri­sis. The only thing that has changed is that now no one can be cer­tain that the US will not some­day, if not next week, refuse to meet its obligations.

At this point, if the Repub­li­cans are sin­cere in their con­cern for fed­er­al spend­ing and debt, then they have no choice but to elim­i­nate the statu­to­ry lim­it on gov­ern­ment debt. Oth­er­wise, the inter­est the US pays on its debt is going to go up. It will be expensive.

Hat tips to TPM and to The New Repub­lic.

Consistency Is Not Necessarily a Virtue

Steve Benen makes an inter­est­ing com­ment at the end of a blog post:

the GOP has decid­ed that every recent elec­toral set­back should be seen as excuse to move even fur­ther to the right. When Repub­li­cans win, they become more rad­i­cal, assum­ing they’re being reward­ed for their right-wing ide­ol­o­gy. When they lose, they become still become more rad­i­cal, assum­ing they’re being pun­ished for not being right-wing enough.

I think that he is cor­rect. It fits right in with a Repub­li­can pol­i­cy goal: tax cuts. What­ev­er the cur­rent eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion is, the Repub­li­can pol­i­cy response is to cut taxes.

This kind of “think­ing” does spare one­self the effort of actu­al think­ing, so it does have that going for it.

Ahh, the sweet sim­plic­i­ty of ideology.

Dear Congresswoman Bachmann

It has come out that Michele Bach­mann has a more or less con­tin­u­ing expe­ri­ence with poten­tial­ly inca­pac­i­tat­ing (pre­sum­ably tem­porar­i­ly) migraines. She has released a let­ter (the text of which can be seen at TPM) from her physi­cian clar­i­fy­ing her prob­lem and how she is treat­ed for it. I am not a doc­tor, so I have no idea if the let­ter is suf­fi­cient­ly explana­to­ry or not. It does sound as though the headaches are not a seri­ous problem.

There is one ques­tion I have. With­in the let­ter, addressed to Michele by her doc­tor, is the following:

Your migraines occur infre­quent­ly and have known trig­ger fac­tors of which you are aware and know how to avoid.

Dear Con­gress­woman Bachmann,

If you expect Amer­i­cans to sup­port you in your bid to become Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, I sus­pect that a great num­ber of us would like to know just what the known trig­ger fac­tors for your migraines are (just in case one of them might be, oh say, mak­ing a tough deci­sion, for exam­ple). Could you please let us know? Thanks!

Rich Beck­man

I’m sure I’ll be hear­ing from her soon.

dragons