Archive for February, 2011

Bob Maistros

Suppose I were to suggest a 100-meter race between Usain Bolt and a Maserati – with the Jamaican world-record holder having to wait in the blocks a full second after the starting gun.

How about if I were to propose a tug-of-war between Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his prime) and a Hummer – with the Austrian Oak competing with one hand tied behind his back?

If I only had a REAL brain.

What about this:  Aretha Franklin matching a foghorn decibel-for-decibel – without a mike?

Absurd, you would respond.

Silly, you might say.

Maistros is losing it, you might think.  (OK, you’ve been thinking that anyway.)

So why is it that the whole world is so accepting of the notion that IBM’s “Watson” computer fairly defeated two former champions in a Jeopardy match?

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Dan Calabrese

If you could ever elect a political leader whose only concern was governing well, and not being re-elected, what would that look like?

If you ask me, it would look like newly elected Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder looked yesterday as he unveiled, and explained, his budget and tax reform proposals.

This is called leadership.

Michigan has faced annual budget crises for as long as anyone can remember. Whether the band-aid solution was federal stimulus money or a tax on bottled water, the state has been as beset with delusion at the governmental level as it has been in its chief industry.

We have not had governors willing to do what Snyder did yesterday, which was to deal with cold, hard facts and tell the people of the state the cold, hard truth about where we are and where we need to go.

Not only did Snyder actually cut $1.8 billion in spending to balance the budget, he also proposed to the now Republican-dominated legislature that the tax burden be shifted from businesses to individuals, since you don’t get the sought-after job creation everyone wants by taxing the producers.

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Brett Noel

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David Karki

In the past couple days, the following has transpired:

•  President Obama offers a budget that is a total joke and continues his total rush to spending oblivion on our great-great-grandchildren’s dime (seeing as he’s already spent everything our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will ever earn before they’ve been born) and America’s economic destruction, and then taunts the GOP like a juvenile schoolyard bully with threats to veto their very mild spending restraint, convinced he can repeat Clinton’s government shutdown victory over Gingrich in 1995.

Full speed ahead, says Capt. Obama!

• In my home state of Minnesota, Democratic Governor Mark Dayton offers an equally large joke of a budget that proposes to close a $6 billion deficit by making the state the highest tax place in America and on planet Earth. And he already has vetoed the Republican Legislature’s first round of mild spending cuts that would still leave $5 billion of that deficit to account for.

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Dan Calabrese

Indiana Gov. and former Bush OMB director Mitch Daniels is a very smart guy who has done wonders with a very bad budget situation in his state. I have no idea if he wants to run for president, since I am – unlike seemingly just about everyone else in the commentariat – not obsessed with who might be involved in the 2012 race.

Calm down.

But I do think I understand a comment for which Daniels has been widely attacked in conservative circles, including yesterday by none other than Rush Limbaugh. Some months back, Daniels called for a “truce on social issues” among Republicans, which would set the stage for the party to be united on fiscal and economic issues in the near term.

Limbaugh and others have ripped this suggestion as a) an attack on social conservatives; or b) an attempt to please the so-called D.C. cocktail party set. I have no idea if any such cocktail party set exists, but for some reason, every time a Republican says something not to the liking of the conservative movement, Limbaugh insists that he or she is just trying to get invited to D.C. cocktail parties.

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What?

Dan Calabrese

A day after President Obama proposed the most absurd federal budget in the history of this nation, without one dime of deficit reduction this year, and between $11 trillion and $13 trillion in new debt over the next decade, any sane person must surely lay awake at night and ask, “How can they propose such a thing?”

All propaganda.

The Associated Press provides an answer. With its predictable spin in today’s story on the matter, the AP demonstrates that people awash in the Washington mentality simply don’t think it matters how much money the federal government spends. They reveal this unwittingly, but they reveal it nonetheless.

The AP’s Alan Fram frames it like this (emphasis mine):

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Bob Maistros

Wow.

It seems like mere moments since the Congressional Budget Office released one shock-and-awe sort of prediction – that the budget deficit would hit an incredible, inedible (as in hard to swallow), record $1.48 trillion in this very fiscal year, 2011, which really began on October 1, 2010.

So yesterday.

Real money.

Turns out, according to the President of the United States, one Barack Hussein (“Roll the Printing Presses”) Obama, this year’s actual budget deficit will be $1.65 trillion.

To allow for a little perspective on this matter:  when I was a young but preternaturally aware child of eight years old, the entire federal budget was $100 billion (and the government’s hitting that figure raised a major fuss).  It didn’t clamber up over $170 billion for another seven whole years, driven by LBJ’s “guns and butter” combo of the Great Society and Vietnam.

And it was sometime in that era that legendary Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen is said to have uttered his humorous observation, “A billion here, and billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Real money, huh?  These days, $170 billion is a rounding error in the federal deficit.

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Dan Calabrese

President Obama’s latest budget proposal is so absurd, it reminds me of Leon Spinks, or should I say, it reminds me of one of the all-time funniest Richard Pryor routines I ever heard, which was about Leon Spinks. Here’s the money quote:

“Here’s a ****** get busted for a dollar and 50 cents worth of cocaine . . . Have you ever seen a dollar and 50 cents worth of cocaine? A dollar and 50 cents worth of cocaine melt before you open the paper!”

Leonomics.

Since federal spending can definitely be compared to cocaine use, we can compare Obama’s latest “deficit reduction” proposal to the minuscule speck of cocaine for which Leon Spinks was busted – at least in the comedic universe of Richard Pryor.

The federal deficit is projected to average about $1.2 trillion per year, every year, for the next decade. And that’s without the inevitable adjustments that happen every year because they underestimate it, like the $150 billion adjustment the administration just announced this morning.

So what does Obama propose to do about this? He has announced so-called budget cuts that he says will reduce the deficit $1.1 trillion over 10 years.

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Brett Noel

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