I Agree with Sarah Palin

Betcha didn't see that one coming. She may not be right twice a day like a stopped clock, but she's right every once in awhile, so credit where credit is due:

Sarah Palin: Paul Ryan's budget is 'definition of insanity'
Palin:

Do we still not understand how dangerous it is to allow government to grow unchecked as we shackle ourselves with massive debt -- a good portion of which is held by foreign nations who don't necessarily like us? If we can't balance the budget today, what on earth makes us think it will happen at some future date? The solution is staring us in the face. We need to rein in spending today, and don't tell me there is nothing to cut when we know every omnibus bill is loaded with pork and kickbacks.

The usual disclaimers -- I don't accept the "we," "ourselves" and "us" parts, since I have neither authorized any politician to rack up debt in my name nor have any intention of accepting an obligation to pay off said debt, etc.

But as far as it goes, she's right.

Ryan's budget proposal, which the usual Democratic suspects are already busy labeling "draconian" and so forth, is the usual, completely non-serious, crap.

If the politicians want to balance the budget, here's how to do it:

1. Make a sober estimate of next year's revenues (perhaps based on last year's revenues);
2. Draw up a budget which spends less than that amount;
3. Stick to that budget unless -- and only unless -- revenue shortfalls force you to revise it downward (any unexpected revenue windfalls can go to paying down debt principal).

Yeah, it's really that simple.

Ryan's budget proposal increases spending for the next two years. Then, based on rosy revenue projections and the silly notion that subsequent congresses will consider themselves bound by Paul Ryan's plan (when in fact he won't even consider himself bound by it if he's still in Congress three years from now), it supposedly takes eight more years to hit point (2) above.

Sound familiar? It's the thing the Republicans offer up every year.

Every year, Republicans think that if they offer a budget that doesn't decrease spending for two years, the Democrats will quit whining about "draconian cuts." They should know better. To all Democrats (and most Republicans, especially if the word "defense" is mentioned anywhere in the area under consideration) any cut is "draconian." Heck, it doesn't even have to be a cut at all to be a "draconian cut" --  any proposed reduction in future spending increases is a "draconian cut" too.

Every year, Republicans promise that their proposal will balance the budget ... some day, a long time from now ... with no pain involved for anyone. Not only should they know better, they do know better. But they think you're stupid enough not to know better.

If You Thought Republicans Were for Balanced Budgets ...

... you thought wrong.

House Republicans and Democrats both have some interesting little tricks in their political bags.

The Republican trick is to propose a "moderate/reasonable" budget-balancing path, then count on all the Democrats to vote against it, so that only a few Republicans have to pretend to jump ship to kill it (after which, they blame the Democrats for its failure to pass).

The Democrat trick is to get most Democrats to just vote "present," in the hope that the Republicans will pass said "moderate/reasonable" budget-balancing path (which Democrats consider "extreme"), after which it will die in the Senate or under the president's veto stamp (and the Democrats will campaign on how "extreme" Republicans are).

This time, both plans backfired.

The Republican Study Committee proposed a "moderate/reasonable" bill to balance the budget in four years. That's four years longer than it should take, of course, but a lot less time than other plans (Paul Ryan's budget supposedly balances in ten years, and none of the Democratic plans balance at all, ever, period).

Most Democrats voted "present" in hopes of forcing the Republicans to pass the "moderate/reasonable" -- er, "extreme" -- bill. That didn't work; the bill didn't pass.

The Republicans, not having enough cover from Democrats to blame them for killing it, decided they'd rather kill it themselves than risk the slim possibility that it might ever get through the Senate and past the president.

104 Republicans voted to balance the budget in four years. 118 Republicans voted not to.  QED, at least 53% of Republican US Representatives oppose balancing the budget any time in the near future, so much so that even if they can't shift the blame for not balancing the budget onto the Democrats, they'll still vote against balancing the budget.

And that 53% is a best-case scenario -- some who voted for the bill may have actually opposed it, but knew that it could be killed without a nay vote their constituents might notice.

Even counting the Democrats who did vote, only 15 more Republican votes would have passed the bill.

So Far the Sequester Looks Better ...

... than either of the "mainstream"  alternative proposals.

US Representative Paul Ryan's Republican proposal supposedly balances the federal budget -- over ten years. But it does so by keeping the taxes associated with "ObamaCare" while not delivering the programs associated with "ObamaCare." That's right -- you have to pay for socialized health care and then you don't even get the socialized health care. Oh, and Ryan insists that the federal government must continue to spend 4-5 times the maximum imaginably plausible amount on "defense."

US Senator Patty Murray's Democratic proposal is, if anything, even less convincing. It doesn't even pretend to balance the federal budget over any amount of time, and frankly it's mostly just vivid imagination -- it counts the prospective end of the Afghanistan war and hypothetical reductions in debt interest payments as "spending cuts" on one end, and predicts nearly a trillion dollars in increased tax revenues from "closing loopholes."

A serious 2014 budget proposal would be balanced, on the basis of 2013 revenues and tax rates. Period.

A serious longer-term budget plan would include:

1) Balancing the budget each year on the basis of the previous year's actual revenues;

2) Automatic appropriation of any end-year surplus for additional debt service;

3) An assumption, until and unless evidence to the contrary arises, that the US is smack on top of/in the middle of the Laffer Curve -- and that any proposed tax increases or decreases will therefore require corresponding spending cuts.

Anything short of the above is just  middle school horseplay.

Maybe It's Time Florida Got Off the "Defense" Teat

Florida governor Rick Scott complains that the upcoming* federal budget "sequestration" would hurt Florida because:

Florida is one of America’s most defense centric states. Florida hosts three unified combatant commands, 20 major Air Force and Navy installations, and very large segments of the nation’s defense industry which annually contributes over $73.4 billion and more than 754,000 defense industry jobs to the economy.

This is precisely the wrong way -- 180 degrees ass-backwards -- to look at "defense" spending.

For the sake of argument, let me temporarily (very temporarily, and purely for the sake of argument -- I'm an anarchist) stipulate to the claim that "national defense" as written is a "legitimate government activity."

If that's the case -- if "defense" spending is "necessary" -- let's treat it as what it is: Overhead. A cost, not a "contribution." That money isn't appearing out of thin air. It's coming out of the pockets of the very Floridians whose interests Scott claims to have at heart. And from that standpoint, any analysis of whether the money should or should not be spent should be conducted solely on the basis of how it affects the government's ability to discharge the explicit duty (the meat), not on how many jobs might land in Florida as a result of it doing so (the gravy).

And if we're going to analyze it from that standpoint, well, we should be demanding far larger cuts than the sequestration provides for. The current US "defense" budget is -- and I consider this estimate very conservative -- at least four to five times the size required under any plausible scheme pertaining to "national defense." At least 75-80% of US "defense" spending  is a dog's breakfast of corporate welfare, congressional pork as district "jobs programs," and the kind of featherbedding that's only to be expected in a bureaucracy that's had seven decades to perfect the practice of lobbying for its own perpetual growth.

The US government spends more on "defense" than the next 20 national governments combined, even though it hasn't faced a credible external military threat in decades that wasn't entirely of its own making (largely due to that over-spending -- the military is so obese that the knotheads in DC can't resist the temptation to throw its weight around in places where it has no business).

The sequestration would temporarily (again, very temporarily -- when these things end, they always end in back pay for furloughed employees, etc.) reduce DoD spending to 2005 levels. I'm sure that all of you remember, as I do, those dark days of eight years ago: Pentagon employees paying for new tanks by putting on bake sales and car washes, pan-handling in Taco Bell parking lots to raise the money for aircraft carriers, etc.

If Rick Scott is serious about improving Florida's economy, he'll ask DC to shut down the military bases, cancel the procurement contracts, and refund the money saved to Florida's taxpayers so that they can spend it on real goods and actually useful services instead of on bureaucrats in Washington and make-work "jobs" for constituents and welfare payments to "defense contractors" in Florida.

* I went with "upcoming" instead of "looming" or "imminent" because the latter two make the thing sound a lot bigger scarier than it actually is.

Today's Inquiry into English Usage and Basic Mathematics ...

This one's from the New York Times ...

And as the Pentagon confronts the prospect of cutting its budget by about 10 percent over the next decade ...

... but you can probably find it in just about any newspaper article discussing the upcoming "budget cuts."

So, just how deep are these horrendous, army-killing cuts?

Well, if "sequestration" goes as forecast, the federal government's non-war military spending will only increase by 10% instead of by 18% between 2013 and 2021.

No, that is not a typo. The "cuts" are not cuts in actual spending, they're cuts in the previously projected growth rate of that spending.

Most federal government spending proceeds on rails due to something called "baseline budgeting." The "baseline" is the previous year's spending. Under "baseline budgeting," that previous year's "baseline," plus an increase based on a formula, happens automatically unless Congress decides to tinker with it.

This "sequestration" thing -- triggered by Congress's inability to agree on "deficit reduction" targets last year -- imposes across-the-board reductions in that rate of automatic growth of spending, not in spending as such.

Neat trick, huh? Your congressman can brag to you that he's cutting spending at this morning's town hall, then -- this afternoon, over cognac and cigars -- brag to your local defense contractor or other corporate welfarist that he's increasing that same spending.

Hint: He's lying to one of you. And it's not the guy pouring the cognac and lighting the cigars.

Related articles

• A Shrinking Military Budget May Take Neighbors With It - New York Times (nytimes.com)
• THERE ARE NO CUTS! - The fallacy of baseline budgeting (thehill.com)
• The Vile Baseline Budget Scam !! (theconservativecrawfish.wordpress.com)

Advantage Obama

Now that the "Super Committee" has failed, congresscritters are already talking about ways to get around the $2.2 trillion in automatic across-the-board budget cuts that start kicking in come 2013 if a deal doesn't get done. Anyone remember Gramm-Ruddman-Hollings? Much deficit-cutting sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The difference, if he sticks to his guns, is President Barack Obama, per WaPo:

My message to them is simple: No. I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts.

With one pull quote -- again, if he sticks to his guns -- Obama transforms himself into the alpha deficit uber-hawk -- and, more importantly, into the adult in the room, telling Congress that he's not going to rescue them from their own foolishness and that if they can't figure out for themselves how to play nice, their toys will be taken away.

When his Republican opponent attacks him as a budget blocker, all he has to say is "I'm the chief executive. It's Congress that has to legislate. All I can really do is insist that they legislate within their means on pain of veto, and that's exactly what I'm doing. The details are up to them."

When the constituencies -- including his own -- start howling about the coming cuts, all he has to say is "don't talk to me, talk to Congress."

And here's the secret:

When it gets down to the level it's headed toward, the entitlement constituencies are more powerful than the corporate welfare constituencies.

A congresscritter can afford to be Lockheed Martin's bitch and shamelessly whore himself out to K Street with near-impunity ... as long as Grandma's monthly Social Security deposit makes it to the bank.

But if it's one or the other, the grandmas' votes trump the lobbyists' campaign contributions.

It's just that simple.

All Obama has to do is maintain his cool and he'll not only win re-election but get the budget cuts he wants from where he wants them (the insanely bloated "defense" budget).

Let Me Reiterate

Politicians who talk about "deficit reduction" are not, to co-opt one of the commentariat's favorite terms, serious, nor should they be taken seriously.

That is, when some yahoo presidential candidate is asked to address the issue of the US government's debt and his plan goes something like "right now, the US government spends a LOT more than it takes in each year; elect me, and by the end of my second term eight years from now, it will only be spending a LITTLE more than it takes in each year," you should scratch him or her off your list of serious applicants for the job (if you feel a need to fill the job in the first place; I don't).

The very first element of addressing the issue of the US government's debt is either abolishing the government or balancing the government's budget from here on out, and either repudiating the government's current debt or building debt service that actually reduces the principal into that balanced budget.

I'm all for, and all about, abolition/repudiation. Those who claim not to be need to quit fucking around and prove it. At 235 years, the United States of America is not a startup that needs some time to work its way into profitability. It fancies itself a going concern. And a going concern cannot spend more than it takes in in perpetuity.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

WaPo:

House approves dramatic cuts in federal spending in 235-189 vote

The cuts come to $61 billion. That's about 1.6% of the $3.81 trillion 20011 federal budget. It's about 3.7% of the 2011 federal budget deficit of $1.645 trillion.

Cutting less than 4% of your over-spending isn't "dramatic." It isn't "drastic." And, the fevered imaginings of US Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA) aside, it's for damn sure not even close to "a meat-ax approach on top of a meat-ax approach."

Not only is $61 billion not "dramatic," "drastic" or "a meat-ax approach on top of a meat-ax approach," it's not even, to use a much over-used word, "serious."

"Serious" would be cutting that $1.654 trillion deficit entirely. For a little gold "sensible" star, cut a little more than that to get a surplus and use that surplus to draw down debt principal. Only at some point well beyond those would words like "dramatic" become accurately descriptive.

$61 billion is just campaign propaganda grab-ass.

But I guess it's better than nothing.