The Obama administration said Tuesday that a balanced-budget amendment heading for a House vote this week could impose serious risks on the economy and force cuts to essential programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
The White House, in a statement, said it strongly opposed the balanced budget amendment being considered by the House. Instead, it said members of Congress should “move beyond politics as usual and find bipartisan common ground to restore us to a sustainable fiscal path.”
The debt ceiling agreement reached last summer that set up the bipartisan supercommittee commissioned with reducing the debt by at least $1.2 trillion over the next decade also required that Congress vote on a balanced-budget amendment.
The version being taken up by the House, sponsored by Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., would require that Congress not spend more than it receives in revenues unless three-fifths of both the House and the Senate vote to do so.
Republican leaders, trying to attract Democratic moderates, opted for the Goodlatte bill over tougher, tea party-backed versions that would put a tight cap on the federal budget and require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes.
The House vote is expected to be close, but the amendment faces a tougher road in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Proposed amendments to the Constitution must be approved by two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate and be ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures.
The White House said a balanced budget amendment would force the government to raise taxes and cut spending in bad economic times when there’s less money coming in, accelerating job losses. It said it could result in serious risks to the retirement security of millions of Americans, and result in big cuts to education, research and development, and other programs.
The House’s second-ranking Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said he voted for a balanced-budget amendment in 1995, but would vote ‘no’ this time around. “Unfortunately, I did not contemplate the irresponsibility that I have seen fiscally” in the ensuing years and in recent months “where Republicans took America to the brink of default and placed the confidence of the world in America’s fiscal judgment at question.”
The federal government now consumes 25 cents on every dollar of GDP. Debt is now at 70% of the GDP, and next year it will reach 100% of GDP — up from 40% in 2008. And estimates suggest that by 2035, debt will be at 190% of GDP. Unfunded liabilities? Somewhere between $62 and $140 TRILLION dollars.
Yet the President is calling for more spending, more debt, more regulation, greater compliance costs, higher energy prices, and increased taxation to raise “revenue” so that the government can continue to spend — while Republicans have shown that they lack the courage to call for any real spending cuts, opting instead for fights over percentage of future spending increases. Even this Balanced Budget Amendment lacks teeth: without tying spending to percentage of GDP, all this is is a cosmetic plan that would lead, in the long-run, to calls for tax increases to keep the revenue stream up — allowing for spending to match that increase.
Let’s face it: the federal government has no intention of ever really reining in spending or shrinking its own size or influence.
Instead, they’ll ride the profligacy right to the brink, then escape with their own version of golden parachutes. And we’ll all be left to pick up the pieces.
Keep plenty of tar on hand, people. And feathers. And a pitchfork or two. Because we’re being told right now — and in no uncertain terms — that the federal government has decided it is too big to fail, and damned if it won’t act like it.
Translation: Those crazy republicans might actually hold us to a balanced budget, and such fiscal irresponsibility must be stopped!
– Did you think Bummblefuck’s circle jerk enclave would let one vote go by without using the old tried and true scare tactics?.
– They know there’s 2.4 trillion in the SS kitty, but they just can’t help themselves.
– Look at the current lede at HuffPo. Apparently no one on their staff knows how to spell “crowd”
Iran will host the 2012 Amputee World Football Cup, for those of you keeping score at home.
“White House Opposes Balanced-budget Amendment”
constitution says stfu
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[…] Jeff, who says: The federal government now consumes 25 cents on every dollar of GDP. Debt is now at 70% […]
Well, this helps:
Steny, at least, has a constituency — or should we call them clientele? — in P.G. County with direct interests in the maintenance of a bloated Federal government.
mr. jeff should have some fun:
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Three!
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a uniter not a divider
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And the other intention of leaving Newt the last not-Romney standing.
I reject all their intentions. This is still the game of “they” choose who who we will be allowed to choose from. Screw that shit. Nobody has voted yet.
annie coulter pimping mittens tonite on hannity. you go grrl(wait what about chris fatman?).
bachmann/santorum for the herstory!!12!!
– How much more will “WE” take of a run-away non-responsive/irresponsible gov and a shift away from individual freedoms, and a free market economy based Republic, toward a Socialist/Communist nannystate. How much?
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BBHunter — as I’ve been thinking of it, “Where is our Rubicon?” What’s the line which makes it obvious we can either have the ruling class or freedom?
The debt ceiling agreement reached last summer that set up the bipartisan supercommittee commissioned with reducing the debt by at least $1.2 trillion over the next decade also required that Congress vote on a balanced-budget amendment.
They really are not reducing the debt. They are tasked with reducing the projected growth. If I recall, the debt is projected in the $15 trillion range over ten years, and this super duper awesome committee is tasked with making sure it only grows to $13.8 trillion. Yippee.
And they come out of the gates with revenue increases, secret deals, and outright fraudulent accounting. SHOCKA
– Personally I don’t view it in that light. Practically speaking, the “ruling class” will always evolve toward an aristocracy. Its the narcissistic nature of the beast.
– The question for me is where do we decide what we have needs to be reined in, and take whatever steps are necessary to accomplish just that.
– The framers themselves recognized the natural tendency to over-governance, and assumption of powers not delegated to them. They knew quite well what would evolve, left unchecked, and tried to set things up in a way that would limit such activity.
– They would be enough, the checks, if we adhered to our founding principles and the Constitution/Bill of rights. But we’ve allowed an unchecked SOTUS to assume powers it was never intended to have, and that’s where we went off the rails.
– In effect we allowed the courts to decide what we should accept as the “meanings” of our documents of freedom. When you do that you’ve already lost control.
– From what I can tell, the ninth and tenth amendments are totally ignored by Washington.
– As a footnote to that I might add that the Left, intent on changing the nature of the country they could never hope to succeed in, are simply taking advantage of the situation.
We know Allred does the sexual smears for the Left, so who does the financial ones, CREW maybe?
Ripe for a “he said-he said”.
600k from Fannie/Freddie is bad. Rahmbo’s millions were just fine. Gore lick’s 15 mil were the price of decency. Raines, pure goodness.
The double standard does yeoman work for them. Expect this to be worked into the insider trading scandal which is of course all [R] as the [D]s are clean as the road snow in March.
The country is quite mad.
Newt might kick ass in a debate, but he is still a fucking whore.
Adam Smith once wrote that there’s a “great deal of ruin in a nation”, by which he meant that it takes an awful lot of bungling by political leaders to destroy a country.
Not so much, when the bungling is intentional.
I honestly don’t see how this country would financially survive a second second term of The Won.
I don’t see how this country would financially survive a second term of itself.
Though I am loathe to admit it, I share the same sentiment Crawford expressed above.
My thought has been that much the same way the nation turned right after both ’72 and ’80, when it became clear that the Democratic party was broadly out of touch with the political traditions–and immediate needs–of much of the US electorate, that the same thing would happen in ’12.
But now I am not so certain. Much of the U.S. manufacturing clout that provided an economic safety valve for thousands of workers (and their families) is gone. In its stead a massive and preposterous financial sector has sprung up that is every bit as corrupt and addicted to cronyism as its critics on the left (and, as now, a few brave souls on the right) allege.
Away from Ron Paul, no one on the right is remotely willing to confront this but sadly, he seems to view foreign policy the way many of us view clogged toilets.
So it is no easy thing to convince people to toss a guy aside whose entire policy approach is to funnel public cash to whomever to buy jobs. it’s worked abysmally, and its effects have been borderline catastrophic, but that’s never worried anybody but the activist right anyhow. Despite only retaining the support of Blacks and union gauleiters, I submit its harder to beat O! in ’12 than many argue.
I may well be horrifically wrong, it goes without saying.
NB: No indication the “journalist” even asked them.
We’ll hit $15 trillion in debt today. There are two questions that Obama’s opponent needs to ask and the electorate needs to answer:
1. Do you care about the future of your children and grandchildren?
2. Can you do math?
31. Well said.
30. I disagree. It’s pretty clear they asked them, from that pullquote at least. FNMA and FHLMC aren’t media problems or creations, they are Washington’s Frankensteins.
No, it’s not. The quote says nothing about asking that question. Read it again:
You’re assuming they asked. It doesn’t say they did.
(Also notice the lack of actual sources, just sock puppets speaking “on condition of anonymity”.)
Well, we’re screwed.
There are so many people willing to put lies into print that I need to see sources.
33. So the former Freddie officials just brought up the issue of Gingrich’s positions (or lack thereof) on the housing bubble or business model of their own volition, unprompted, to a reporter?
That’s really not how things work, reporter to source. I am NOT saying that the article shouldn’t have had a, “When asked about Gingrich’s tenure at…..” in it. That formulation always serves well. i’m simply saying that having written articles like that, for more than a decade, sources invariably won’t talk about that stuff unless pushed and pulled.
I’m also with you on the sourcing issue. I hate background and anonymous sources and the book I wrote, whatever else its merits or faults, did not use them for quotes but for the rarest of circumstances (maybe 5% of the time.) I should note that this self-imposed policy made the work less dramatic in several areas and, I suspect, cost it sales.
I bet the anonymous sources never said anything about Gingrich’s position on Santa Claus, yet nothing was reported on that.
– There are so many ways to evade saying things that would screw up your narrative, it’s hardly worth discussing.
– The “source” can choose to answer question in a very narrow way. If Newt did not address him directly, the source is free to say “no” to any such questions.
– Do not take anything at face value has never been truer.