The Washington Post, otherwise known as the “Bandar Beacon”, finally sets off the alarm:
By Terence P. Jeffrey
All is not well
When President Obama entered office in January, the greatest problem America faced was neither the war in Afghanistan nor the recession. It was the imminent crisis of the welfare state.
Not only has Mr. Obama failed to deal with this crisis, he is pursuing policies that will bankrupt America.
In March, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, led by former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, calculated the total value of the federal government’s “unfunded liabilities” as they stood at the end of fiscal 2008. These liabilities include the publicly held portion of the national debt plus the amount the government must pay to cover all the entitlement benefits it has promised to living Americans through Social Security, Medicare and other welfare-state programs minus the tax revenue the government can expect to collect to pay for these entitlements under existing tax law.
The sum of these unfunded liabilities, the foundation discovered, stood at $56.4 trillion. That equals $435,000 for every full-time worker in the United States.
How did Mr. Obama respond to this problem?
First, he signed a $787 billion stimulus law. Mr. Obama repeatedly claimed this law – which not one member of Congress read in its entirety – was urgently needed to create jobs. In fact, most of the new spending it authorized was for longer-term projects, including creating a national system of electronic health records for every person in America in anticipation of Mr. Obama’s plan to nationalize the health care system.
The Government Accountability Office reported last month that at the end of fiscal 2009, 78 percent of the stimulus money remained unspent. But don’t worry: Mr. Obama will spend it eventually.
Then, Mr. Obama offered his first federal budget. In 2008, President Bush’s last year in office, the federal government spent $2.983 trillion. Under Mr. Obama’s plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office, annual federal spending will climb to $4.982 trillion by 2019. In 2008, the federal deficit was a record $459 billion. Over the next decade, Mr. Obama’s plan would increase the national debt by a total of $7.137 trillion, running annual deficits averaging $713.7 billion per year.
CBO’s estimate of Mr. Obama’s new federal debt was based on optimistic assumptions. It assumed low inflation rates, low interest rates and a national economy that grows for 10 straight years after this year without dipping into another recession. It also assumed that the Bush tax cuts would expire as planned after 2010 and income tax rates would rise for middle-class Americans.
The CBO estimate of Mr. Obama’s borrowing and spending was also made before Congress finalized drafts of the health care reform legislation that Mr. Obama has pushed as his signature policy proposal.
Mr. Obama has said he would not sign a health care bill that increases the national debt, and when the CBO released its analysis of the Senate health care bill last month it concluded that the bill would actually decrease federal deficits by $130 billion over 10 years.
But that was an illusion.
The key elements of the bill (including federal subsidies to buy health insurance for people making less than 400 percent of the poverty level) do not take effect until 2014 – after Mr. Obama runs for re-election in 2012. As a result, the bill’s full cost is not exposed during the initial 10-year time frame that the CBO analyzes when making its official cost estimates.
In fact, according to CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the new entitlements in the bill will cost $0 in 2010 (when Congress is up for re-election), $1 billion in 2011, $4 billion in 2012 (when Mr. Obama and Congress are both up for re-election) and $4 billion in 2013. The cost will then balloon to $48 billion in 2014, before rising steadily to $196 billion per year by 2019.
Yet it doesn’t end there. The cost of the new health care entitlements will be “growing at about 8 percent per year toward the end of the 10-year budget window,” reported CBO. “As a rough approximation, CBO assumes continued growth at about that rate during the following decade.”
Do the math: If the bill follows the spending trajectory predicted by the CBO, it will cost $423.13 billion in 2029 and its total 10-year cost from 2020 through 2029 will be $3.07 trillion. Obamacare will cost more in its second decade than the entire federal government cost the year Mr. Obama was elected.
At that price tag, it does not even accomplish the goal of universal health care. “By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 31 million, leaving about 24 million nonelderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants),” says the CBO report.
But if Mr. Obama succeeds in enacting his health care reform, he will move on to his plan for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that will put illegal immigrants on a “pathway to citizenship” – making them eligible for the federal health care entitlement.
If Mr. Obama succeeds, get ready for the crash. It is coming.
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSnews.com.
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Although E-Verify is a very good illuminated measure, as seen through the eyes of every jobless American. It is a successful program that implements the need to remove millions of illegal immigrants from the work force. It is still under peril of being scratched-out or at the least, slowly dragged down to the faltering level of the local law enforcement training program 287 G? There are and have always have been powerful forces at work to reduce immigration enforcement, even as other entities are trying to weaken health care legislation. Personages in high places, whether it’s the multi-billion dollar health insurance industry, or pull-down-the-border fence extremists whose agenda is welcoming anybody who can slip past our border agents.
Then we have the accumulation of impoverished illegal aliens, who are in direct competition with our own poverty stricken society. They have not only stolen jobs from blue collar workers, but are taking jobs in the white collar business world as well. This is why we need a moratorium on immigration, to give America time to climb out of this gigantic recession. Illegal immigrants must be deported through the computer mechanism of E-verify, and later when employment rises and the economy is stable, build on the 1986 Immigration act (ICRA). With amendments to Simpson/Mazzoli bill that allows a system of only accepting certain categories of scientific and professional immigrants. We can no longer accept the destitute, uneducated who have sucked the state treasuries of California, Arizona, along with other states dry to the point of bankruptcy.
President Obama and his pro-illegal immigrant disciples have promised another Immigration reform package. The 1986 Act was signed in to law by Ronald Reagan, but was never–ENFORCED–and so that is why we have absolute crisis and an incessant flow of illegal foreign nationals. The numbers are estimated in entrants around 20 and 30 million, not what open border and liberal activists expect us to believe? NO IMMIGRATION LAW EVER WAS MEANT TO WORK? Its only because Sen. Harry Reid, Speaker Pelosi made an error of judgment that E-Verify was not tabled? Today everybody knows about E-Verify, owing to the wealth of information that was exposed by Internet bloggers. It has become a sharp stick in the eye to parasite businesses and every movement in the open border culture. Have not the taxpayers been paying the full burden of subsidizing free health care, education and the tentacles of ever spreading welfare programs for illegal families? America is perceived to be a passionate people, a charitable people, but when we must endure the hardships sprung upon us by other foreign countries population, that this is too much financial baggage to carry any longer.
In Arizona for instance where a newsworthy report has been released:
Governor Jan Brewer and Republican leaders lashed out last Tuesday at the League of Arizona Cities and Towns for its lawsuit challenging a new law in order to eliminate illegal immigrants receiving public benefits. He said,
“At a time when Arizona is suffering from budget deficits of unprecedented proportions and the state is struggling to meet the basic needs of its citizens, it is outrageous and shocking that the League of Cities and Towns would challenge legislation designed to protect the very entities that it was intended for,” Brewer also stated Arizona voters have shown several times, starting with the 2004 election, that they do not want taxpayer money going to help those in the country illegally. AS HAVE CALIFORNIA VOTERS, WITH THE FILING OF PROPOSITION 176, TO STOP WELFARE GOING TO ILLEGAL ALIENS? IT WAS SILENTLY DERAILED–NEVER TO REACH THE HIGHER COURT OF THE LAND.
This proves beyond any doubt, that millions of illegal immigrants are siphoning off government entitlements meant for the legal inhabitants across our country, which is causing near economic collapse of state, county and city treasuries.
Where another MASS AMNESTY is concerned, it is not those already illegally living here–but the unfettered volumes of humanity who will try to steal into America, before the–FINAL AMNESTY BELL–TOLLS? If the border is far from secure now, who will stop those who decide to immigrate here? The scenario is scary and beyond imagination and a harbinger of uncontrolled overpopulation. A boon to businesses and anti-American radical consortium’s, open border subversives, the wealthy and certain Democratic lawmakers looking for extra votes.
Those who believe in America’s survival, without OVERPOPULATION as stated by the US Census bureau better read facts, not the lies at NUMBERSUSA. Those who want details of corruption in WASHINGTON and state government go to JUDICIAL WATCH. Overpopulation, traffic hell should go to CAPSWEB. Other sites of interest on Immigration enforcement is ALIPAC and AMERICAN PATROL. We the people have the ultimate power to throw out anti-sovereignty incumbent politicians. Call and command these do-nothings to–STOP–this facade at 202-224-3121.
I have visions of America in the year 2019. It reminds me of scenes out of Blade Runner.