5 Replies to “"U.S. Debt Jumped $72 Billion Same Day U.S. House Voted to Cut Spending $6 Billion"”

1. Bordo says:

   March 17, 2011 at 10:02 am

   These people are junkies.

   I mean, look at them. “OK, man, I’m going to get clean this time, I swear. But, you know…easy does it and all that.”

   Like every fucking smackhead I ever ran across when I was a cop. Most of them wound up dead. A few got the point and got right with the Lord, as it were. ALL of them had to hit rock bottom before they did, though.

   Apparently, these motherfuckers don’t feel they’ve hit rock bottom. Unfortunately, they’re going to drag us all there with them. Our intervention failed.

2. Joe says:

   March 17, 2011 at 10:05 am

   Idiotic. GOP just happy they are not blamed for shutting down government because focus groups told them so.

   The only focus group they should be concerned with is the one that convenes in November.

   Meanwhile, Mommar is about to crush Libyan rebels and the U.S. is now mulling air strikes. Well that will be moot in a day. A nondecision is a decision too, but less was at stake in Illinois when Obama voted “present” there.

3. LBascom says:

   March 17, 2011 at 10:10 am

   Meanwhile, Boehner and Cantor’s offices are grousing about the “extreme right wing” of the party […] The current leadership is not of the TEA Party

   The establishment GOP thinks the TEA Party is the “extreme right wing”.

   I’m just surprised they haven’t called us racists yet.

4. Obstreperous Infidel says:

   March 17, 2011 at 10:15 am

   Oh, they’re thinking it, Lee. You bet your ass they are thinking it. There is very little difference between the pragmatists and the left. Statists they are and statists they always will be. And they both will use any canard/weapon they possess to attack their ideological opponents with.

5. LBascom says:

   March 17, 2011 at 11:48 am

   I was reading this at AOS:

   A little while ago, CalPERS (California’s giant pension system) was pondering reducing their “expected rate of return” calculation from a ludicrous 7.75% to a merely ridiculous 7.5%. This was ostensibly to bring future funding rates into closer contact with reality. (Not much closer, though; the actual rate of return considered “safe” is around 4%.) […]

   A decrease in the Calpers rate of return to 7.5% would have bumped up what local California governments pay on behalf of government workers by 1.5% to 3% of payroll costs each year and 3% to 5% of what they pay on behalf of police officers, firefighters and other public-safety officers, a Calpers spokeswoman said.

   Also, a decrease in the rate, also referred to by public pension plans as the discount rate, drives down the funded status of a pension plan, or the difference between its assets and long-term liabilities. Calpers is about 70% funded, it says. […]

   if the states actually had to honestly account for their pension obligations, they’d immediately go into a fiscal crisis due to the huge amount of contributions needed to bring their pensions to “fully funded” status (about 80%).

   [bolding mine]

   So, the actual expected rate of return is set at twice what is considered “safe”, the pension obligations aren’t fully funded, state revenue is severely curtailed due to the recession, as well as 26 billion over budget already, and these assholes are struggling over a quarter percent reduction in the actual rate of return.

   I wonder when it’s going to dawn on the younger public employees that they can count on receiving their wonderful pension plans with the same certainty the private sector ones count on receiving Social Security.

   That would be none.

   (my preview is showing an awful lot of red text, but I can’t seem to change it, sorry in advance if this is as ugly.)

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