The Economy, The Debt, The Tea Parties and The Media

[Annie]

As the blog points out, most of us here aren't shocked, but that doesn't mitigate the problem:

Hot Air Big media’s biggest failure?

Big media’s biggest failure?
posted at 10:25 pm on September 22, 2010 by Karl
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Credit Michael Kinsley for a little honesty:

I’m sitting here in a pile of reports and studies by think tanks, public-policy schools, the Office of Management and Budget, and self-appointed grandee fiscal crusaders. They all make the same, tiresomely familiar point: that this can’t go on. ***

There are a dozen ways to look at the national debt and the annual government deficit, and they all lead to varying degrees of panic. What’s especially scary about our fiscal situation is that everybody knows the facts and concedes the implication, but nobody is doing anything about it ***

And the national debt is just a fraction of the problem. State and local governments, unlike the national government in Washington, cannot print money, and many states have constitutions that forbid them to run a deficit. Nevertheless, they will be losing, together, about $140 billion this year. ***

Debt is everywhere you look. Here’s a short inside piece in The New York Times Magazine about state and local unfunded pension obligations for retired employees. They add up to between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. Until that article, I had given no thought whatsoever to shortfalls in state employee pension funds. You?​

Well, yeah. And Matt Welch points out that Reason magazine has been all over the problem. And if you’re reading a conservative blog like this, you probably knew about it from Reason, or the Weekly Standard, or the American Spectator, Fox News, City Journal, the CATO Institute, National Review, the Heritage Foundation, Rush Limbaugh or any of the other right-leaning media that have been discussing it for years, but prominently for about a year...

Lots of links and much more commentary, especially regarding the debt, the media's ability to hide it and the politicians increasing it. Needless to say, quite a bit on Tea Parties here.

 

[Care4all]

well there is some good news, to a degree....we are spending less this year in 2010, than last year for fiscal 2009....i thought we were gonna have a $1.6 tril deficit but it's projected just over $1.3 tril....

an interesting summary on our outlook and read, (pretty scary stuff too!) :http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/117xx/doc11705/2010_08_19_SummaryforWeb.pdf

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates
that the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed
$1.3 trillion—$71 billion below last year’s total and
$27 billion lower than the amount that CBO projected
in March 2010, when it issued its previous estimate.1
Relative to the size of the economy, this year’s deficit is
expected to be the second largest shortfall in the past
65 years: At 9.1 percent of gross domestic product
(GDP), it is exceeded only by last year’s deficit of 9.9 percent
of GDP. As was the case last year, this year’s deficit is
attributable in large part to a combination of weak revenues
and elevated spending associated with the economic
downturn and the policies implemented in response to it.

 

[Charles_Main]

well there is some good news, to a degree....we are spending less this year in 2010, than last year for fiscal 2009....i thought we were gonna have a $1.6 tril deficit but it's projected just over $1.3 tril....

an interesting summary on our outlook and read, (pretty scary stuff too!) :http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/117xx/doc11705/2010_08_19_SummaryforWeb.pdf

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates
that the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed
$1.3 trillion—$71 billion below last year’s total and
$27 billion lower than the amount that CBO projected
in March 2010, when it issued its previous estimate.1
Relative to the size of the economy, this year’s deficit is
expected to be the second largest shortfall in the past
65 years: At 9.1 percent of gross domestic product
(GDP), it is exceeded only by last year’s deficit of 9.9 percent
of GDP. As was the case last year, this year’s deficit is
attributable in large part to a combination of weak revenues
and elevated spending associated with the economic
downturn and the policies implemented in response to it.

yes I was pleasantly surprised to see this years budget Deficit was down a small amount from last year.

Still insanely to high, and that does not even count all the emergency discretionary spending we have done the last 2 years.

That is where the REAL insanity lies.