Clipping blog

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – Finally Friday Edition Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST Today – today! – is Friday. Finally. That’s all. And now, links. If Joe Biden isn’t back at the Veep nominee in 2012, he’ll only have the squirrels to blame. Union members make up less than 12 percent of the workforce, yet they account for 40 percent of all Obamacare waivers granted by the White House. Hmmm… Invade a man’s privacy and get an executive government job that includes oversight of private medical records. You’ll never guess the political party of the person who landed the plum gig. Hubble has a photograph of the most distant object yet found. It is a galaxy some 13.2 billion light years from Earth (for comparison, the universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years old). This week’s Trifecta takes on a story most media outlets continue to studiously ignore. If the Cthulhu Cult branches out into tract publishing, this would be a good first one to hand out.

We Can Handle the Deficit, but We’ll Have to Do It Over Harry Reid’s Political Hide. Posted: 27 Jan 2011 09:02 PM PST Megan McArdle is not at all pleased with the latest debt numbers. “Grim” doesn’t seem to be a terrifying enough word to describe the budget outlook that the CBO released Wednesday.  Oh, sure, we sort of knew this was coming–tax cuts are expensive if you don’t find spending cuts to match.  And yet the numbers still hit one like a punch to the gut.  From a guy wearing brass knuckles.  Wrapped around a roll of  quarters.  Shiny new quarters that you can’t really afford to use for punching people, because you’ve got a $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year. What is there to say? Well, Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute read the same report and says we can balance the budget if we’d just slow our roll. Balancing the budget is simple so long as politicians increase spending at a slower rate. If they freeze the budget, we almost balance the budget by 2017. If federal spending is capped so it grows 1 percent each year, the budget is balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington can limit spending growth to about 2 percent each year, red ink almost disappears in just 10 years. These numbers, incidentally, assume that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent (they are now scheduled to expire in two years). They also assume that the AMT is adjusted for inflation, so the chart shows that we can balance the budget without any increase in the tax burden. I did these calculations last year, and found the same results. And I also examined how we balanced the budget in the 1990s and found that spending restraint was the key. The combination of a GOP Congress and Bill Clinton in the White House led to a four-year period of government spending growing by an average of just 2.9 percent each year. Now that’s a pretty big “if” and it doesn’t quite address the entitlement bombs that are steadily ticking away while our politicians high-step around those third-rails. However, Mitchell has come to the same conclusion that Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy reached last month. I calculated that over the last ten years, we could have given Washington an average raise of 2.5 percent each year (not far from the Clinton-era 2.9 that Mitchell found) and we’d have a balanced budget today. As simple as that sounds, it’s still not going to be easy. Harry Reid, who leads a dwindling majority in the Senate, has promised that earmarks will be back no matter what the President and the Republicans have to say. Again, we go back to the Biblical truism that if you can’t be a faithful steward with a little, we sure as heck can’t trust you with a lot. Inevitably, we’re going to have to toss Reid and those who treat the national treasury like their personal slush funds into the outer darkness of the private sector where they’ll have to get by on their business skills and delightful personalities. I predict much weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Both links via memeorandum)

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