Read the Numbers: Obama Will Bankrupt America
Terry Jeffrey
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
When President Barack Obama entered office in January, the greatest problem America faced was neither the war in Afghanistan nor the recession. It was the imminent crisis of the welfare state.
Not only has Obama failed to deal with this crisis, he is pursuing policies that will bankrupt America.
In March, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, led by former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, calculated the total value of the federal government's "unfunded liabilities" as they stood at the end of fiscal 2008. These liabilities include the publicly held portion of the national debt plus the amount the government must pay to cover all the entitlement benefits it has promised to living Americans through Social Security, Medicare and other welfare-state programs minus the tax revenue the government can expect to collect to pay for these entitlements under existing tax law.
The sum of these unfunded liabilities, the foundation discovered, stood at $56.4 trillion. That equals $435,000 for every full-time worker in the United States.
How did Obama respond to this problem?
First, he signed a $787-billion stimulus law. Obama repeatedly claimed this law -- that not one member of Congress read in its entirety -- was urgently needed to create jobs. In fact, most of the new spending it authorized was for longer-term projects, including creating a national system of electronic health records for every person in America in anticipation of Obama's plan to nationalize the health care system.
The Government Accountability Office reported last month that at the end of fiscal 2009, 78 percent of the stimulus money remained unspent. But don't worry: Obama will spend it eventually.
Then, Obama offered his first federal budget. In 2008, President Bush's last year in office, the federal government spent $2.983 trillion. Under Obama's plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office, annual federal spending will climb to $4.982 trillion by 2019. In 2008, the federal deficit was a record $459 billion. Over the next decade, Obama's plan would increase the national debt by a total of $7.137 trillion, running annual deficits averaging $713.7 billion per year.
CBO's estimate of Obama's new federal debt was based on optimistic assumptions. It assumed low inflation rates, low interest rates and a national economy that grows for 10 straight years after this year without dipping into another recession. It also assumed that the Bush tax cuts would expire as planned after 2010 and income tax rates would rise for middle-class Americans.
The CBO estimate of Obama's borrowing and spending was also made before Congress finalized drafts of the health care reform legislation Obama has pushed as his signature policy proposal.
Obama has said he would not sign a health care bill that increases the national debt, and when the CBO released its analysis of the Senate health care bill last month it concluded that the bill would actually decrease federal deficits by $130 billion over 10 years.
But that was an illusion.
The key elements of the bill (including federal subsidies to buy health insurance for people making less than 400 percent of the poverty level) do not take effect until 2014 -- after Obama runs for re-election in 2012. As a result, the bill's full cost is not exposed during the initial 10-year time frame that the CBO analyzes when making its official cost estimates.
In fact, according to CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the new entitlements in the bill will cost $0 in 2010 (when Congress is up for re-election), $1 billion in 2011, $4 billion in 2012 (when Obama and Congress are both up for re-election) and $4 billion in 2013. The cost will then balloon to $48 billion in 2014, before rising steadily to $196 billion per year by 2019.
Yet it doesn't end there. The cost of the new health care entitlements will be "growing at about 8 percent per year toward the end of the 10-year budget window," reported CBO. "As a rough approximation, CBO assumes continued growth at about that rate during the following decade."
Do the math: If the bill follows the spending trajectory predicted by the CBO, it will cost $423.13 billion in 2029 and its total 10-year cost from 2020 through 2029 will be $3.07 trillion. Obamacare will cost more in its second decade than the entire federal government cost the year Obama was elected.
At that price tag, it does not even accomplish the goal of universal health care. "By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 31 million, leaving about 24 million nonelderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants)," say the CBO report.
But if Obama succeeds in enacting his health care reform, he will move on to his plan for a "comprehensive immigration reform" that will put illegal aliens on a "pathway to citizenship" -- making them eligible for the federal health care entitlement.
If Obama succeeds, get ready for the crash. It is coming.
2 comments:
Daily we hear that illegal immigrants are here to stay and that it would be almost unfeasible to deport the 12 million people? The question to answer is there—JUST--12 million or is the American public being sold a bill of goods? The majority of bloggers believe the answer is somewhere between 20 and 30 million? Yet even that is a conservative number? We cannot bus them out as this legal route is impossible; if not so expensive to even conceive? But bloggers including myself have for over a year pummeled the Internet that E-Verify, the illegal immigrant restriction program can extracts major numbers from the mainstream workplace. As always huge influences from businesses, politicians and open border organizations whose scheme is mostly monetary gain have incessantly pushed into silence the growing attention to this computer program. Popularity has increased throughout America, as more and more businesses have found its operation easy and practical. Why hold a job summit for Americans, when you will not eject the illegal immigrants squatting here that would open jobs for the less skilled?
The US government has now realized the importance to funding the program, even though Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have unified to crush its importance to this nations working force. Too many highly positioned Democrats and even Republicans have destabilized immigration enforcement for too long. Although only funded for a further 3 years E-Verify is being accepted as a way to bring more legal residents and citizens into the job market and severing illegal labor. The momentum of E-Verify will not stop now as bloggers have infiltrated every media outlet from the West to the East coast. Democrats have not entered the main battle lines to push for what they dress-up as Comprehensive Immigration reform? But most Americans are not fooled, knowing full well this is another word--BLANKET AMNESTY? The previous AMNESTY in 1986 was disguised enough, to promote less attention to the act.
Because the majority of the national press is holding back the exact truth, universal bloggers are supplementing the real facts. Most pro-sovereignty groups have not the money-backing of pariah businesses groups, grants of earmarks from corrupt lawmakers or donations from so called tax exempt foundations and organized church. So proponents of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano and others are limited to grabbing the public attention to the consequences of AMNESTY.
Just today NUMBERSUSA has sent out a warning to their members stating “Massive, Unchecked Immigration Will DESTROY Our Future! But It Doesn't Have to Occur if We Act Now! For the first 200 years of our country's history, about 250,000 immigrants migrated to the U.S. But since 1990, 2 MILLION legal and illegal immigrants are migrating to the U.S. PER YEAR. The current U.S. population of 310 million will soar past half a billion around mid-century if immigration is not reduced. We all support immigration in moderation. Many of our friends and co-workers are immigrants themselves. But too much of anything can become--DESTRUCTIVE. Tell Congress that a half-billion is far too many! We already have enough congestion, traffic, overcrowded schools and overburdened healthcare systems as it is. Join with 932,225 citizens who make their voices heard through NumbersUSA, America's largest-member immigration-reduction organization.”
Amendments to the 1986 act, could import a refined number of highly skilled workers that are required? But not lesser volumes of discount unskilled labor that cannot be recruited from the American people, who are many in our population. Other powerful developed nations can attract highly professional focused workers, without the flotsam that we end up eventually subsidizing. If you remember the last stimulus package was to give jobs to Americans, but as many 300.000 was artfully given to illegal workers?
Don’t procrastinate on this outrageous 2009-2010 Amnesty, as we cannot even feed, house and offer substantial health care to our own poor? We are a debtor to China and other countries, when we once were an influential lender. While our free trade Globalist agreements are completely out of control and corporate owners outsource and in-source cheap labor and in many cases inferior trade goods. INFORM YOUR SENATORS AND CONGRESSMAN/WOMAN AT 202-224-312. NOT TO APPROVE ANOTHER AMNESTY OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES IN THE VOTING BOOTH? MAKE AN EXAMPLE OF SEN. HARRY REID NEXT YEAR AND NANCY PELOSI? Google—NUMBERSUSA FOR MORE FACTS, UNMENTIONABLE EXPENDITURES, ACORN FRAUD, THE POLICE 287 (g) DETAINER AND THE IMMIGRATION GRADES OF POLITICIANS. Read more unadulterated truths at JUDICIAL WATCH, ALIPAC & CAPSWEB.
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