And if this happens, we are toast. Our deficit will skyrocket.
March 15 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. and the U.K. have moved “substantially” closer to losing their AAA credit ratings as the cost of servicing their debt rose, according to Moody’s Investors Service.
The governments of the two economies must balance bringing down their debt burdens without damaging growth by removing fiscal stimulus too quickly, Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of sovereign risk at Moody’s in London, said in a telephone interview.
Under the ratings company’s so-called baseline scenario, the U.S. will spend more on debt service as a percentage of revenue this year than any other top-rated country except the U.K., and will be the biggest spender from 2011 to 2013, Moody’s said today in a report.
“We expect the situation to further deteriorate in terms of the key ratings metrics before they start stabilizing,” Cailleteau said. “This story is not going to stop at the end of the year. There is inertia in the deterioration of credit metrics.”
The pound fell against the dollar and the euro for the first time in three days, depreciating 0.8 percent to $1.5090, while the dollar index snapped a four-day drop, adding 0.3 percent to 90.075.
U.S., U.K. Move Closer to Losing Rating, Moody’s Says (Update1) – Bloomberg.com
What a shock. The Dems were wrong about how much it would cost… Bush was right and the Dems were wrong. They clapped when the Social Security fix went no where. Well, Dems? Where is that thunderous applause now that we were right and you are proven wrong… again.
As Ed at Hot Air says "The wheels have begun to fly off the entitlement juggernaut."
For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.
Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.
Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.
Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.
That Sound You Hear? That’s The Piper And He Wants To Be Paid: Social Security To Start Cashing In Treasury Bonds Worthless Pieces Of Paper
Wow, they really are going all out here, aren’t they?
UPDATE: Some Twitterers are stating that this is a “shell bill” that will provide a base for actual language later. Rep. Paul Ryan alluded to this move last week.
The Hill is reporting tonight that the Democrats have published a copy of the bill that they plan to use to update the original Senate healthcare socialization bill that Pelosi plans to bring to the floor this week.
And it appears they’ve decided to go all-in on this one. Included in the bill appears to be the “public option” that was removed from the Senate bill. From page 1167 of the bill:
Subtitle B—Public Health Insurance Option
SEC. 221. ESTABLISHMENT AND ADMINISTRATION OF A PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE OPTION AS AN EXCHANGE-QUALIFIED HEALTH BENEFITS PLAN.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—For years beginning with Y1, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (in this subtitle referred to as the ‘‘Secretary’’) shall provide for the offering of an Exchange-participating health benefits plan (in this subdivision referred to as the ‘‘public health insurance option’’) that ensures choice, competition, and stability of affordable, high quality coverage throughout the United States in accordance with this subtitle. In designing the option, the Secretary’s primary responsibility is to create a low-cost plan without compromising quality or access to care.
Democrats release 2300-page reconciliation bill *Updated* | RedState
WOW. Just WOW
I don’t quite believe it, although that’s partly because I don’t want to believe it. It’s the abortion equivalent of death panels, essentially. It’s so sinister, and so perfectly matches the most ogrish caricatures of the pro-choice left, that it’s almost too bad to check. It’d be like Ron Paul claiming that pro-war Republicans told him to vote for Iraq because they were dying to get their hands on all that oil. They simply can’t be this cold-blooded.
Well, actually … sure they can. But would they cop to it?
Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with National Review Online. “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”…
What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”
If Obamacare passes, Stupak says, it could signal the end of any meaningful role for pro-life Democrats within their own party. “It would be very, very hard for someone who is a right-to-life Democrat to run for office,” he says. “I won’t leave the party. I’m more comfortable here and still believe in a role within it for the right-to-life cause, but this bill will make being a pro-life Democrat much more difficult. They don’t even want to debate this issue. We’ll probably have to wait until the Republicans take back the majority to fix this.”
Hot Air » Blog Archive » Stupak: Dems told me they want to fund abortions because more kids mean higher health-care costs
WAAAA. She tries to force the school to accept and promote her lesbianism and when they don’t bow to her demands, she immediately sues. There are several things I would like to say right now, but they have few letters and less syllables and I don’t like to curse on my site too much.
JACKSON, Miss. — A lesbian student who wanted to take her girlfriend to her senior prom is asking a federal judge to force her Mississippi school district to reinstate the dance it canceled
The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi on Thursday filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford on behalf of 18-year-old Constance McMillen, who said she faced some unhappy classmates after the Itawamba County School District said it wouldn’t host the April 2 prom.
"Somebody said, ‘Thanks for ruining my senior year."’ McMillen said of her reluctant return Thursday to Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton.
The lawsuit seeks a court order for the school to hold the prom. It also asks that McMillen be allowed to escort her girlfriend, who is a fellow student, and wear a tuxedo, which the school said also violated policy.
Lesbian Teen Sues School Over Prom Drama – Local News | News Articles | National News | US News – FOXNews.com
We hope Mrs. and Mrs. Barringer have a speedy recovery.
Washington (AP) – The wife of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remained hospitalized Friday with serious injuries suffered when a tractor-trailer rear-ended the minivan in which she and their daughter were riding on a suburban Virginia interstate, officials said.
Landra Reid, 69, suffered a broken back and neck in Thursday’s crash, but her injuries were not believed to be life-threatening. Mrs. Reid and their daughter, Lana Barringer, 49, were taken by ambulance to Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va. The daughter was released Thursday night, hospital spokesman Tony Raker said.
Mrs. Reid was in serious condition, but Reid aides said she was not expected to require surgery.
"Mrs. Reid has a broken nose, broken back and broken neck," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said in a statement. "Lana has a neck injury and facial lacerations." Manley said Mrs. Reid could feel her extremities.
CNSNews.com – Harry Reid’s Wife, Daughter Injured in Traffic Accident
I hope this goes somewhere, but I would doubt it. Not that he didn’t break the law, but that he will cover it all up.
Washington (CNSNews.com) – Two members of Congress said this week that someone in the White House may have committed a crime if they offered Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) an administration job in exchange for him not running in Pennsylvania’s Democratic senate primary against Sen. Arlen Specter, an allegation that Sestak said was true.
Meanwhile, despite several media inquiries over the last few weeks and the comgressmens’ statments, the White House continues to withhold comment on the matter.
Sestak’s opponent in the primary, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, both said this week that if Sestak’s claim is true, such a job offer could constitute a federal crime.
Specter specifically said it would constitute bribery, while Issa referenced three sections of the U.S. code on the matter.
CNSNews.com – Two Members of Congress Say That If Administration Offered Sestak Job to Drop Senate Race It Could Be a Crime
Can we just start recalling everyone who plans to vote YES on this fiasco?
Can this be for real? The Democrats are folding student-loan reform into the health bill so it can be enacted without 60 votes in the Senate.
I’ve written about this here. There’s been a lot of talk about student-loans since the current Administration came to power. The two key features that reportedly will make it into the healthcare legislation are:
1) Putting an end to the subsidized private student loan industry. Citibank, Sallie Mae and hundreds of others will be out of this business (except possibly as servicers rather than finance providers). From now on, the money will go directly from the Federal government to schools.
Senator Tom Harkin says this step is long overdue to stop wasting the taxpayers’s money. I say that if the government really wants to be a bank, they should first prove how they’re going to be any better at it than real banks are.
2) Sharply increasing the maximum amounts of Pell grants for low-income students, and automatically indexing the maximums for inflation every year. Some eight million Pell grants are awarded each year. Economists have been saying since I was in college that federal supports for higher education are the reason that, as with healthcare, the costs have been rising at far more than the general rate of inflation for decades now. We’re going to be kicking those cost increases into a higher gear now.
Student-Loan Reboot to be Folded into Healthcare Reform | RedState
How is this legal? Someone explain it to me.
(CNSNews.com) — The U.S. Census Bureau has changed its interpretation of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to allow it to tabulate same-sex couples who self-identify their union as a marriage, even though DOMA prohibits legal recognition of same-sex unions as marriages.
Prior to the Obama administration, the Census Bureau said that DOMA prohibited the Bureau from tallying homosexual couples as being married. The Bureau plans to issue a report on its same-sex married data that is separate from its nationwide census report.
“What we agreed to do in 2010 is that since some people are answering that they are a same-sex couple who considered themselves to be husband and, and married and the same gender, we will produce a report that shows how many people checked off that box,” Burton Reist, assistant director for communications at the Census Bureau, told CNSNews.com.
The DOMA, which was passed by Congress and signed in law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman for purposes of all federal laws, and says that states need not recognize a marriage from another state if it is between persons of the same sex.
CNSNews.com – U.S. Census Bureau Changes Its Interpretation of DOMA To Allow Same-Sex Couples to Self-Identify as ‘Married’
