An American Promise
● A Balanced-Budget Amendment to the Constitution, with appropriate exceptions for times of war and recession.
● A line-item veto, to give the President a fighting chance to eliminate pork and earmarks.
● A limitation on federal spending, to 20% of GDP.-
*** About We Elected You ***
Have Your Say!
- John Lumbard on Problems With a Balanced Budget Amendment?
- Chris Curley on Problems With a Balanced Budget Amendment?
- John Lumbard on How to Fix the Health Care Mess
- Did Government Agencies “Raid” Social Security “Coffers”? « Joejolly’s Weblog on “The Debt The Government Owes Itself For Raiding Social Security”
- John Lumbard on The Antidote
- Gen Y on The Keepers of the Flame
- Chuck Bailey on Amendment Filed. Call Your Congressman!
- Phoebe Addington on Party On!
- FaGaurlwal on Incentives Rule!
- James Schaefer on The ENTIRE Government Runs on Borrowed Money
Topics
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entitlements Archive
Whence We Came
By James Schaefer.
The original colonists of America and Canada were risk-takers -- by definition, a self-selecting group of people -- willing to leave behind family and culture and language and all that stood for civilization to cross an ocean in search of a better life.
No government handouts awaited them.
That entrepreneurial spirit...
Read More Putting It in Perspective
By James Schaefer
This snapshot of federal spending recently crossed my desk, and it is worth sharing. It simply converts the federal numbers into an equivalent household budget. The numbers are approximately correct for 2012, though they don't have to match exactly to make the point.
Why the U.S. was downgraded:
• U.S....
Read More Contagion and Eurosclerosis
By John Lumbard.
The debt of Portugal has fallen in value so much that a buyer can now get a yield of 16% on long term, ten year bonds. Portugal won't have to actually pay 16% until it has to borrow again (most likely when an old bond issue matures and...
Read More Are We Like Greece?
By John Lumbard.
The fear that Europe will drag the U.S. into a recession is ebbing, and it's about time. It's likely that Europe is already in a recession, but we're not---and there's little reason why we should be, because our exports to the continent are only worth about 4% of our...
Read More The Truth about Entitlements
By James Schaefer.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, the lead editorial discusses the problems of government overspending (The Road to a Downgrade, July 28, 2011).
Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid prove Milton Friedman's thesis: we cannot get something for nothing. There is no free lunch; and indeed, it is quite an...
Read More About That Trust Fund . . .
By James Schaefer
Mr. Obama recently stated that he couldn't guarantee that Social Security checks would go out in August if America's debt ceiling weren't raised (Obama's Debt-Ceiling Scare Tactics).
America's taxpayers have paid $2.5 trillion in FICA taxes over the past several decades to create the Social Security trust fund. It isn't enough...
Read More How to Fix the Health Care Mess
By John Lumbard.
Since 1994 Jeffrey Flier, MD, now Dean of the Harvard Medical School, has been offering a plan for health care reform that would rein in the galloping cost increases that threaten to bankrupt our government and make health care unaffordable to the middle class.
His concept---universal health care...
Read More The Most Predictable Economic Crisis In History
That's what Erskine Bowles, co-chair of the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, said about our government's ever-so-slowly-developing fiscal calamity in this Senate Budget Committee testimony. The President disavowed the findings of his commission, but it continued on in a scaled-down group of six members (all Senators) called the Gang of...
Read More