Ben Slade

I just love these quotes from Paul Krugman. This one from a June 17, 2010 Op Ed article

"In America, many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple: They’re eager to slash benefits for those in need, but their concerns about red ink vanish when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy. Thus, Senator Ben Nelson, who sanctimoniously declared that we can’t afford $77 billion in aid to the unemployed, was instrumental in passing the first Bush tax cut, which cost a cool $1.3 trillion."

At a time when just about everyone else in the country, including top members of the Bush administration, have come to realize that overzealous deregulation led us to the current crisis, the top Republicans in the House of Representatives actually think the problem is that we haven't deregulated enough. And now they want to finish the job they started by enticing into the banking system a group of money managers who are renown not only for their determined secrecy and lack of transparency, but for taking on even more leverage and more risk.

In theory, there is merit in the other Republican idea of selling government-backed insurance for some of the mortgage-backed securities on the balance sheets of financial institutions...

But wait -- government-backed insurance for mortgage securities? Haven't I heard of that idea before? Why of course, that's what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do -- the same Fannie and Freddie that this same group of Republicans has been trying to kill for more than a decade. Apparently Republicans have changed their minds just in the knick of time, since the government now owns them.

What we witnessed this week was the last death rattle of the Republican old guard in Congress, whose zealotry for tax cutting and deregulation, and whose hostility toward any government involvement in the economy, has now brought the global financial system to the brink of a meltdown. The ideas that brought them to power in 1994, while useful at the time, have since become so corrupt that they now are bankrupt -- intellectually, politically and morally. And though they may have succeeded in delaying passage for a day of a badly needed rescue for the financial system, they failed miserably in their ultimate goal of making themselves relevant again.

From the article Does the U.S. budget reflect the best investments for our future? in the San Francisco Chronicle:

This isn't meant to say that defense is not important. But it's a matter of balance.

The cost of war

If we're making so much progress in Iraq, how come the war keeps getting more expensive?

(By Tim Grieve from Salon.com

In a new report, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says the U.S. military is now spending about $9.7 billion a month on Iraq and Afghanistan -- about $2 billion a month more than in 2005 and about $4 billion a month more than in 2004. As the National Journal's subscription-only Congress Daily reports, the CRS analysts are "a bit mystified" as to why the costs are increasing so dramatically; operating and maintenance costs, higher gas prices, more body armor and training expenses are all factors, but the analysts say they're not enough to explain the size of the increases they're seeing.

More than three years after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration refuses to budget for ongoing costs, instead insisting on funding the war through "emergency" supplemental spending bills. The tactic, which is under attack by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, makes fiscal responsibility all but impossible. None of the "emergency" money for Iraq expected to be requested is "counted in the budget deficit estimates that the administration routinely releases." Also, the funding is not "counted against any budget caps that Congress has set for itself to abide by throughout the year."

Since March 2003, "Congress has approved about $250 billion in supplemental spending for the mission." Now, the administration wants more than $90 billion more to pay for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and rebuilding on the Gulf Coast. The Senate is set to consider an even more bloated version of the request this week. In March, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, lamented, "The administration is running two sets of books here. ... There are two sets of books, and one is not subject to the budget controls." Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, echoed Gregg's concerns, arguing that emergency spending measures are "a good idea if you want to hide the cost of the war. It's a bad idea if you want to be able to offer an accounting of what our war costs are."

The article Two-Thirds On Defense (TomPaine.com 6/10/05) talks about alternate ways to calculate the total amount of money spent on defense.

According to the article, while the Dept of Defense budget was $436.4 billion for 2004, if you include military related spending in Dept of Energy and the Veterans Affairs and other similar departments, the total jumps up to $548.0 billion.

The article also points out that if you exclude trust fund type "transfer payments" (social security like funds that "merely transfer funds among citizens") the $548 billion in defense spending actually constitutes 68 percent of non-interest non-entitlement type federal expenditures.

By Robert B. Reich for Salon.com January 28, 2005

Think the budget deficit is too large, but not really something you should worry about? Think again, says former labor secretary Robert Reich. The deficit may be so large as to seem abstract, but it translates to higher prices on everything you buy. Our economy is steadily slowing down, choked by debt—all so tax cuts for the rich can become a permanent fixture.