No legacy is so rich as honesty - William Shakespeare

Get ready for the “Cali-Style” federal IOUs

by AlexinCT

There has been a ton of meaningless drivel going around by the usual lefty propaganda outlets about how conservatives, and in particular Rush Limbaugh whom mentioned it back when, want Obama to fail. The meme is that conservatives are going to do things to make that so. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, unlike democrats/leftists, who do actually undermine things they do not like - see Iraq war 2003 to present for undisputable proof – as a matter of recourse, conservatives, notice I did not say republicans BTW, in general do not need to do anything to make the current Obamanomics policy fail. For proof, just look at California where Obamanomics has been the de facto policy for the last 2 decades.

July 6 (Bloomberg)—Last week, we discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU’s in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper. The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.

It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors. California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger.

Bleak Picture

Bleak is an understatement. Remember that Obama and democrats ran and won big on picking at how horribly fiscally irresponsible the republicans had been during the Bush years. Well, Obamanomics is about to outdo those years and deficit spend in one year what it took Bush and the republicans 8 years to do. Have a look at how much money the Obamanomics plan is going to put us in the red by.

By the time Obama is done we will have tripled if not outright quadrupled our current deficit! And it is a guaranteed thing we will see nothing of the growth promised, unless you think a bigger government is equal to an economic boost, for all this spending.

The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.

Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.

Character Deficit

And I should remind everyone that the above projections does not yet contain the massive, and drastically underestimated, costs of the Obama “Cap and Tax” and “Healthcare” plans. The first one is a massive new tax burden that serves but to enrich some politicians and their elected entourage of sell-out companies at the people’s expense. The second is a plan that I should add will do nothing but eventually make government the sole provider of healthcare, drastically reduce its quality and availability – to cut costs – and guarantee a level of intrusion and suppression of our personal freedoms that would be on par with the very tyrannical forms of government so many Americans died fighting off.

Can’t wait for the IOUs to be given to all these old Baby Boomer idiots that voted for this guy. Be it as their primary form of income as the economy continues to tank, as they find themselves looking for energy to meet their needs, or their critical healthcare needs as Obamacare becomes the law of the land. Hope and Change, indeed!

Cross posted at Wasting time with Alex

Update: Reader Miguelito asks:

Like others have already said here in the past: If the real goal is to destroy the capitalist system and fundamentally change the US.. then their strategy adds up perfectly.

In the words of Barack Obama himself:

“Generally, the narrow focus of the [Nuclear] Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets.  When Peter Tosh sings that “everybody’s asking for peace, but nobody’s asking for justice,” one is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem instead of the disease itself.”

I Wonder how this would have played out if the MSM had disclosed this information before the election. In fact, it explains a lot about the current economic strategy pursued by the WH: destroy the economy and destroy the military capability. Then we can all smoke rope and sing Tosh songs about peace while we clamor for social justice.

I no longer doubt that when Biden says the WH underestimated the economic slump and the impact of their actions that they are lying. They created this crisis: they plan to take advantage of it too. And that’s your “Hope & Change” on a big steaming pile of doo.

Update 2: Manwhore brought up the issue of unions:

My personal opinion on how the state intends to do the inevitable is by doing things like issuing IOUs for services and making the work environments hostile in an effort to get some of these people to leave. Afterward they will lay off some people, and then cut services which will mean yet more layoffs.

I just happened to blog about that today:

Liberals love to tell us about the evils of capitalism, the greed of Wall Street, how the top people in big companies fleece us all, but nobody does it better than the liberal’s champion: government! Have a gander over to the WSJ and read about the underfunded Public Pensions and liabilities, and how big government is dealing with these problems:

Public employee pension plans are plagued by overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods—which discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected for investments—these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion.

Public pension administrators argue that government plans fundamentally differ from private sector pensions, since the government cannot go out of business. Even so, the only true advantage public pensions have over private plans is the ability to raise taxes. But as the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out in 2004, “The government does not have a capacity to bear risk on its own”—rather, government merely redistributes risk between taxpayers and beneficiaries, present and future.

Market valuation makes the costs of these potential tax increases explicit, while the public pension administrators’ approach, which obscures the possibility that the investment returns won’t achieve their goals, leaves taxpayers in the dark.

Get that? What’s good for the goose is not even close to being acceptable for the gander. No, really. And it gets worse: they don’t want us to know about it!

Some public pension administrators have a strategy, though: Keep taxpayers unsuspecting. The Montana Public Employees’ Retirement Board and the Montana Teachers’ Retirement System declare in a recent solicitation for actuarial services that “If the Primary Actuary or the Actuarial Firm supports [market valuation] for public pension plans, their proposal may be disqualified from further consideration.”

Scott Miller, legal counsel of the Montana Public Employees Board, was more straightforward: “The point is we aren’t interested in bringing in an actuary to pressure the board to adopt market value of liabilities theory.”

Enron was a greedy and evil corporation because of exactly this kind of stuff. However, government is not. That’s because these blood suckers figure they can always shaft the tax payer to cover their “exceedingly generous” debt obligations. And they need us to stay in the dark about it. This is the hope and change we are getting. Guess it pays to be part of the big government machine. Sucks bigtime otherwise. And we should not kid ourselves that Obama and his people would right now be nationalizing any private company doing what these public ones are doing, while demonizing capitalism, because they were abusing the public.

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