Hoyer Wants It All On The Table?

Steny Hoyer, useless Congressman from Maryland, said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare should be on the table as part of the budget negotiation process. Apparently, a number of other Democrats believe that they should be looked at for spending reductions but should be addressed at a later date. Plink…

That was the sound of the can being kicked down the road.

Hoyer is saying that taking these items off the table is a bad place to start negotiations. He is correct in that and if he is actually serious about having them on the table then the negotiations can begin. However, he is a Democrat and that means he can’t be trusted.

Here is how I see it. Hoyer says these should be on the table and the other Democrats oppose. Republicans jump in and say; “now we’re talking” and then as the negotiations progress the affected constituents are bombarded with negative information from the Democrats who oppose and their lobbying arm at AARP.

The Republicans get blamed for trying to reduce granny’s check and the furor gets louder. Republicans cave, give Democrats tax increases with no real spending cuts because, well you know, they will come later (psst, they never do).

Then Hoyer and the Republican leadership step in front of cameras claiming they tried to do something about these runaway programs but could not so they struck the best deal they possibly could. They will complement each other, slap backs and say they did a great job.

Then they will adjourn for the holidays and Americans will be left with their shorts around their ankles.

Beware of Democrats bearing gifts. How many times do Republicans have to play Charlie Brown to the football holding Lucy before they wake up?

We do not have an income problem. We have a spending problem.

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Big Dog

Gunline

Limits On Spending Never Come

Senate majority Leader Harry Reid has fired the opening salvo in the lame duck session regarding the fiscal cliff that we are rapidly approaching. His first declaration was that the election is a mandate to raise taxes on the rich. I beg to differ and counter that we basically have the same government we had prior to the election and that means the American public wants a divided and gridlocked government. If Americans did not want the gridlock that existed then it would have changed the makeup of Congress.

Reid has further declared that Social Security is solvent for the time being and that it will not be part of any budget negotiations. What Reid is saying is that he will kick the can down the road.

Social Security and Medicare are in trouble. The government has, for decades, collected huge sums of money from workers via the Social Security insurance tax. Over the years far more was collected than was needed to pay retirees because there were far more young workers. The government took that money and put it in the general budget and issued an IOU to the trust fund. We are now at a point where more is being paid out than is coming in but there is no way to compensate for that without borrowing money because the money paid in has long been spent.

AARP released a poll that it took of its members and a majority of those members 50 and older indicated they did not want Social Security and Medicare included as part of the budget negotiation process. They want their benefits that were promised.

This lines up with what I have long said. Social Security and other programs like it are designed to get people dependent on government. The people surveyed are demonstrating that they do not care about the debt or any of the country’s other money problems so long as they get their checks. They are beholden to the nanny state to survive and this axe can be held over their heads to get them to comply with what government wants and can be used to scare them into voting for certain politicians. It is a shame that the elderly, like those on welfare, are held as slaves to government. Keep doing what government wants, keep voting the way it wants, and you can have your soup.

AARP and its members can say they want to keep their benefits and Harry Reid can claim that all is well but it will not be long before the reality of insolvency sets in and Congress will run around like their heads are on fire and their asses are catching in order to raise taxes to pay for the shortfall. By that time the game will be over. Like any Ponzi scheme, there is always an end game where a lot of people get screwed. No matter what AARP members want when there is no money they will get nothing.

[note]As an aside, the death panels in Obamacare should help reduce the elderly population so that there is not as big a drain on SS and Medicare[/note]

Reid is also indicating that he is going into negotiations with the mindset that Congress will raise taxes on the rich. Reid said he feels that there is nothing wrong with asking the wealthy to pay a little more. His statement ignores the fact that the wealthy already pay most of the federal income taxes paid in this country. How much more is a fair share? How much of someone’s income is a fair amount to give? How much is fair when we know it will be wasted and that no matter how much they take it will not solve the debt problem?

The Democrat’s idea of bipartisan negotiations is that you have to agree with them and it is bipartisan. Disagree or work for something else and you are being an obstructionist.

For their part Republicans are indicating they are open to revenue increases (read increased taxes) as long as there are limits on spending. Those limits never come. Tax increases take place instantly and limits are delayed until they are deemed impractical and then never happen.

I think we should allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in their entirety. According to the Democrats they were only for the rich anyway so let them expire. As far as the other draconian measures that will cut many agencies and hurt contractors, well that is what they get for supporting Obama.

Pain is a great teacher and people need to feel that pain.

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Big Dog

Gunline

Pulling Back the Curtains

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain goes a famous line from the Wizard of Oz. This is the point where the weary group sees that the Wizard is just a man who promises a lot of things on which he really can’t deliver. The Democrats have a lot of people behind curtains and what goes on there is certainly hypocritical and usually criminal.

Take Barack Obama. He and his team are running around claiming that Paul Ryan will end Medicare, he will gut it, and he will hurt seniors, blah, blah. The reality is that there is only one candidate who has gutted Medicare and hurt seniors and that is Barack Obama. Obama cut over 700 BILLION dollars from Medicare in order to fund Obamacare. Yes, Obama took nearly three quarters of a TRILLION dollars from the medical program that benefits seniors and moved it to a Socialist program to enslave everyone to government.

Team Obama denies this and is making the claim that Obama did not cut Medicare but he did. Here is a link to a 2009 interview with Jake Tapper where Obama admits that one third of the funding of Obamacare comes from cuts to Medicare. Obama then goes on to say he will veto any bill that tries to undo those cuts. Not only did Obama admit to robbing seniors of the money paid into Medicare but he then doubled down and told them he would veto anything that tried to put the money back.

And yet the media and the followers of Obama continue to claim Ryan will gut Medicare. Paul Ryan has a plan that will save Medicare for those currently on it and improve upon the system for those who will enter it later on. It would be wise to pay attention because Democrats love to lie and they love to rewrite history.

Obama lied, seniors died.

Harry Reid is another POS on the left who loves to demand the curtain be pulled back for everyone else but refuses to step from behind his fortress of lies. Harry Reid is demanding that Mitt Romany release his tax returns for the past decade and has publicly stated that Romney did not pay taxes for all those years. Harry Reid said that Romney paid no taxes and by extension implied that it was because he did something wrong (there is no indication that Romney did not pay taxes). If you have nothing to hide why not release those returns, right?

Harry Reid was raised in poverty, had a few low paying jobs and has been in public service (and I use that word loosely) for nearly his entire adult life. He started with meager means and is now a millionaire. This article presents a pretty good timeline on how Reid made the money and there is no doubt that it was through underhanded and illegal means. I am firmly convinced that Harry Reid broke the law on more than one occasion in order to get wealthy. In a just world he would be in prison.

Reid will not release his tax returns so there is no way of knowing the exact source of his income or if he even paid his taxes. He has no problem attacking Romney but he is not in favor of people seeing how he became very wealthy by misusing his position.

Democrats hate when they are exposed but seem to love to expose everything about their opponents. They also like to expose our Nation’s secrets. The Obama White House has more leaks than a screen door and that does not sit well with those in the business of secrets.

Once again, the curtain is pulled back exposing our secrets thus making our nation less secure.

If Obama kept our Nation’s secrets as well as he hides his personal records (birth records, college transcripts, passport information, etc) then we would not have to worry about leaks and our nation would be more secure.

It is also true that if Obama worked as hard to create jobs for us as he is to keep his own we would not have the worst economy and jobs picture in eighty years.

Democrats are bad for this nation. They do not care for the country and our way of life (if you cared you would not want to fundamentally transform it) so they will do anything to destroy us.

Don’t be a sheep. Vote this November to save this great nation.

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Big Dog

Gunline

More Little Timmy Geithners Got Stimulus Money

Money Burn

The Federal Government runs a lot of programs and it continually looks for more and more to get involved in. While government tells us that it is capable of running things it fails us when it comes to running things well. Every program in the government has waste, fraud, and abuse. The programs get so big and have so many layers of red tape that money is wasted left and right and the government only finds out (if it ever finds out) after millions of dollars have been lost.

The Government Accounting Office released a report that indicated that 1.6 BILLION dollars in Stimulus money went to people who should not have received it. The money was designed to help people who were behind on their mortgages but they had to be current on their taxes. No one bothered to check and 1.6 BILLION dollars of taxpayer money went to people who, like Tim Geithner, cheated on their taxes (whether they committed fraud or just decided not to pay it is still cheating the government out of what is due).

Not only are these people, like the bottom 49% of wage earners, unpatriotic (VP Biden said it was patriotic to pay taxes), they scammed the federal government and the federal government was unable to detect the scam until after BILLIONS had been lost.

Does anyone really think the government will get that money back? It went to people who did not pay taxes in the first place so it is unlikely they would pay anything else they might owe.

Interestingly, those folks were not detected as tax cheats by the government’s money Mafioso, the IRS. In other words, not only did the government NOT detect that the money was going to tax cheats, it did not detect that these folks were tax cheats when taxes were filed.

Once again, government does not run things well.

The Stimulus was a waste of money as any thinking being knew it would be. It is bad enough that the waste of money known as the Stimulus happened in the first place but to have it wasted on people to whom it should not have gone and who are not paying their taxes is ridiculous.

I thought Vice President Joe Biden, Sheriff Joe as it were (not the real Sheriff Joe who actually follows the law) was supposed to be the public’s watchdog. I thought he was supposed to track the money and ensure that it was not wasted.

We need smaller government and we need government to stay out of things it is not designed to “manage”.

Really, does anyone think that a government that can’t find tax evaders and can’t track money that was not supposed to go to such people will be able to ensure there is no waste and fraud in a government run healthcare scheme (Obamacare) that will involve TRILLIONS of dollars?

Hell, Medicare has been around for decades. It has cost many multiples of what was originally estimated (no government estimate is ever right) and it has had BILLIONS in waste over the decades including a recent discovery of fraud worth 4.2 MILLION dollars. It involved penis pumps and seems appropriate considering what happens to taxpayers every time government runs a program.

Remember, the Stimulus (like all Obama spending) is like the Obama Meal. You order and someone behind you has to pay for it…

I recommend that people regularly check in with Citizens Against Government Waste.

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Big Dog

Gunline

Obamacare Becomes A Liability, Again

We already know that a number of Democrats lost their seats in the last election because of their support for Obamacare. This has been well documented and accounts for over a dozen seats that were lost. But Democrats like to say that was not an issue and that it is a wonderful thing even though we had to pass it to see what was in it.

One thing Obama did in his Socialist takeover of health care was to cut Medicare funds (and double count them) and there was a lot of bluster about Medicare Advantage. The DHHS rated many of the plans as “average” and a number of seniors would likely be forced into regular Medicare. A lot of them were not very happy about that and the support among seniors is the lowest with regard to Obamacare.

We are approaching an election season and Democrats are again worried that Obamacare will cause them problems so now Obama wants to give some Medicare Advantage plans bonus points to make them above average and infuse about $6 billion into the system. The regime claims this is to ease a problem and that politics is not involved but the reality is that they are trying to delay some of the more painful parts of Obamacare until after the next election.

They are trying to use taxpayer money for political purposes to the tune of $6 BILLION dollars. We are in a crisis and they are still piddling around spending billions of dollars.

AARP endorsed Obamacare and a lot of seniors left that organization because of it. The plan was rammed through and there was little regard for how it would affect people because the elitist pigs in DC know better how to run our lives than we do. Remember, this was supposed to be a great, pie in the sky plan that everyone would love once they understood what was in it and how great it would be. Now that the uncomfortable parts might hurt Democrats they want to change things.

Screw that. They need to keep it the way it is. People need to feel lots and lots of pain for supporting this and they need to know how bad it is so that they will stop supporting the Democrats who are bound and determined to hurt them.

There are two options, keep it like it was passed or repeal it all together. No Republican should support any change unless that change is repeal. They said it was wonderful and now it is showing to be anything but so we need to hang it around their necks.

Do not allow these weasels to change anything and avoid the wrath of the public. Make them stand on their votes and on their forceful imposition of an unconstitutional law on the American public.

Make them fall on their swords and die for supporting it.

Period.

Repeal is the only option. In fact, repeal should be a part of any plan to raise the debt ceiling and that plan should include a provision that any signing statement makes the entire thing null and void. Obama has already lied about his use of signing statements and he will do so again.

Hang him and his Democrats with their Socialist law.

Cave Canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Big Dog

Gunline

[tip]If you enjoy what you read consider signing up to receive email notification of new posts. There are several options in the sidebar and I am sure you can find one that suits you. If you prefer, consider adding this site to your favorite feed reader. If you receive emails and wish to stop them follow the instructions included in the email.[/tip]