Provided courtesy of Say NO to Socialism!

Newsmax

By Richard Wagner and Martin Gould

The gross costs of the national healthcare law rammed through Congress by [Alleged] President Barack Obama will reach an estimated $1.76 trillion over 10 years – nearly twice the amount originally projected.

The figure, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed on Wednesday, is bound to cause embarrassment to the administration as it comes just as debate on “Obamacare” is starting to heat up again, two weeks before the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on whether the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

Immediately the revelation stirred controversy among opponents of the bill.

“Both fiscally and for the sake of our health care system, Americans cannot afford the president’s healthcare law,” said Georgia Rep. Tom Price, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee.

“The longer the president’s healthcare law remains on the books, the greater the threat it poses to our nation’s healthcare and our fiscal well-being,” said Price, an orthopedic surgeon.

“The CBO’s revised cost estimate indicates that this massive government intrusion into America’s health care system will be far more costly than was originally claimed. The law’s true cost to American taxpayers is part of a series of promises [Alleged] President Obama and Democrats in Congress made that will be broken,: he said.

Healthcare expert Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York State, told Newsmax that the original cost projections of the plan were “a shell game” and that the new report “inches closer to the truth” about the cost of the reforms.

Read this story at newsmax.com ...

_The dirty secret in Uncle Sam’s Friday trash dump

Washington Post

Bryan R. Lawrence

Releasing information on the Friday before a big holiday is a time-tested way to bury bad news. So when the Government Accountability Office’s fiscal 2011 financial statements for the federal government were released on the Friday before Christmas, it made sense to read them closely.

Since 1997, the United States has been a rare example of a government willing to publish financial statements using accrual accounting, which counts the cost of promises made as well as cash paid out. And the GAO’s professionalism over the years has won it a reputation for impartiality and effectiveness.

That professionalism is evident in the GAO analysis of the net present value of the Social Security and Medicare promises Washington has made to Americans. “Net present value” means the total that would have to be set aside today to pay the costs of these programs in the future. The government puts these numbers in appendices, rather than in headlines. But the costs are real.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the promises grew from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. To put that in context, consider that the total value of companies traded on U.S. stock markets is $13.1 trillion, based on the Wilshire 5000 index, and the value of the equity in U.S. taxpayers’ homes, according to Freddie Mac, is $6.2 trillion. Said another way, there is not enough wealth in America to meet those promises.

If the government followed corporate accounting rules, that $2.9 trillion increase would be added to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011 that has been widely reported. And a $4.2 trillion deficit is something that Americans need to know about

Read this story at washingtonpost.com ...

The GAO report is here.

Townhall.com

Colin Hanna

As part of the deal that gave President Barack Obama the increase in the federal debt ceiling he so desperately wanted, both houses of Congress are required to hold a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The House of Representatives has already acted but failed to achieve the two-thirds support necessary for it to pass. Now it's the Senate's turn.

There are actually three different versions of the amendment under consideration. The good, or strong, version sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) not only requires that federal outlays match revenues but also makes it harder to raise taxes by requiring a two-thirds super-majority of both houses to do so. It also pegs total federal spending to an historic proportion of the total U.S. economy and prevents the courts from being able to order a tax increase to achieve balance should the Congress pass a budget in which spending exceeds revenues. It is a balanced budget amendment with teeth. All 47 Republicans senators have co-sponsored this approach, and it will be voted on this week.

The bad version, the one the House voted on but failed to pass, simply requires that expenditures be equal to income. Critics of this approach say it is bad because it would be far less helpful in the effort to hold total federal spending down, and could actually be counter-productive, if the courts were to mandate a tax increase to achieve balance. Some call it the tax-increase balanced budget amendment.

The bogus version, which the Senate is also expected to take up this week, is being proposed by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and is presumed to have the active support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). To say that it has so many holes in it that it resembles a piece of Swiss cheese is unfair to the Swiss. It is much worse than merely bad. It's downright deceitful, in that it masquerades as a balanced budget amendment, when in fact it is no such thing.

Under Udall's Amendment:

A 60 percent supermajority of Congress could vote at any time to waive the requirement that the books must balance.

The amendment would be fully suspended not only in a time of declared war, but also in the event of a minor military action supported by a Congressional resolution. It does not exempt just the costs of the military action from the balance requirement - it exempts the entire budget.

It exempts Social Security revenues and outlays from the balance calculation, while at the same time "Constitutionalizing" Social Security as an entitlement.

It would prohibit Congress "from providing income tax breaks for people earning over $1,000,000 a year, unless we are running surpluses (those surpluses must also not be eliminated, if such a tax break were enacted)." That provision is socially divisive, profoundly partisan, and almost certainly in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Udall Amendment is not a serious effort to address a serious problem, but rather an exercise in the worst kind of political cynicism: a vote purely to provide political cover to senators who are in tough fights for re-election next November and who want to be able to claim that they voted for a balanced budget amendment. They want to pretend to be in favor of a concept that the public overwhelmingly supports, while all along knowing that the Udall amendment will fail because it is so fundamentally fraudulent that no senator who really wants to balance the budget would ever vote for it.

There are effective ways to balance the budget, ineffective ways, and bogus ways. Udall's proposal is a bogus balanced budget amendment that should be exposed for the act of political deceit that it is. Anyone who wants a balanced budget amendment with teeth should be for the Hatch-Lee strong version - and only that good version.

*Passed along courtesy of America's Party of California

The State Worker

California's three largest pension systems have promised $500 billion beyond their current ability to make those payments to retirees...

The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research issued the report, documenting what it claims is the state's deepening pension crisis. California Common Sense, an organization dedicated to engaging the public in "data-driven discourse" is also behind the report.

Read this story at blogs.sacbee.com ...