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President Obama’s 3.5 trillion dollar budget for 2010 is an absolutely stunning number. Having been literally floored by the number, I went into the OMB website to try and make sense of it. For agencies, $1.1 trillion is allocated. More than half of that is for defense at $663 billion. OMB also allocates $1.273 trillion for discretionary spending(just in case we need a new Air Force One dreamliner fleet or the like).
The balance of approximately $1.1trillion would be allocated most likely for wall street executives, reportedly to save their mansions from forclosure, upgrade to larger yachts, and ensure the continuation of shoddy management practices, creating new finacial instruments on toilet paper, and extending the practice of giving themselves and their protoges hefty bonuses, excuse me, retention awards. All kidding aside, Obama’s campaign cry was "change we can believe in". In reflection, I feel like a total fool at this point for having voted for him. He never defined what change it was that we could believe in. Slogans like "the days of business as usual in Washington are over". Well they sure in heck are.
Obama makes Bush look like a true fiscal conservative. The State department budget is up $11 billion dollars. OMB states foreign aid will be doubled under the new budget, including billions for global health initiatives. Well lets look at this for a second. Here we are borrowing money from China, so we can give it out around the world. The American taxpayer is so darn generous. Here we have people in our own country without jobs, without health care without homes. So ya lets just ignore the realities here.
What ever happened to the day when you take care of your own first before you take care of anyone else. To me this country needs to sink every dime we have into reindustrialization. Jobs, jobs, jobs. R & D, invest in our kids future, not rob it from them which is what this budget does. I for one do not believe Obama brought the best of the best talent into his cabinet with some exceptions. He is increasing funding for NASA, lets get to Mars before we fix our energy problems. Do we really need to go to Mars in short order. No. And what about defense? Do we really need 12 carrier groups buzzing around the ocean. Do you realize how much we would save with 6.
With our country on it’s way out of Iraq, now is a good time to go to light and fast. A good missle defense system and a space based defense system. With high tech warfare do we need to "project power" by roving ocean going flotillas. Our bombers have the ability to leave from home, deliver and return. S. Korea has a 700,000 man army. Do we need to keep 25,000 there to protect them? The questions are many, the waste is large. Obama stated his people wil be going through the budget, line by line, cutting ineffective programs. Well if you go on their Website there are very few lines. Obama’s people are either lazy, stupid, or believe the American people are a bunch of saps.
Anyone who gives a sales job to the American people, that Obama gave, then turns around and stuffs it in our face, has parties at the white house, while the average joe suffers, and squanders our future, just fits into the veritable definition of "insanity". It is time to get out from behind the computers and show our faces…like in the movie "I’m mad as hell and I ain’t gonna take it anymore".
19 Comments
You said that ‘discretionary spending’ was for some new airforce dreamliner, and that the other trillion was for the banks.
Your assumptions are based on what?
I really don’t like it when people make stupid assumptions based upon nothing or upon the wind blowing out the as**s of GOoPers at CPAC and then extrapolating that nonsense into all kinds of other stuff.
As far as cutting the defense budget – we are still in the middle of two wars – and until they actually get the troops home – it is quite understandable for any administration to be leery of cutting the defense budget.
After all – while we have a big majority in Congress, don’t forget there are two or three Republicans in the Senate that will still have the last word.
I love this also – the guy has been in office for what 37 days now? Everyone, including the right-wing-infested media said he took over with the worst mess on his plate that any president in history had ever had to deal with. Add that the total and complete obstructionism on the part of the GOP.
And because somehow he has not magically fixed everything already you are now ’sorry you voted for him’. Hmmmph.
I am trying really hard to figure out how we would have been better off with McCain and Palin in charge.
No money for jobs – that’s for sure. No money for middle class tax cuts – only the rich.
Yup. That’s about it.
Oh, and we would not be getting out of Iraq. Yah!
The “Air force one” comment was “satire” or “irony” not fact. All of the figures contained in my article are from the office of management and budget. If you think selling this country down the road and saddling our kids and grandkids with the debt is good stuff, then we deserve what we got. I voted for Obama. He made a whole bunch of promises. Like “business as usual in Washington is over”.
“The irresponsibility of the last 8 years”. He makes Bush look like a choir boy and if you can’t see what is being done here I feel bad for you. Plain and simple…he lied to the American people.
ALL “politicans” are guilty of “he lied to the American people”;one thing to keep in mind when worrying about the future for your kids and their progeny.
Even WITH the outragous spending (and I’m completely disgusted with the $750B MORE for the ‘banks’), the ‘deficit’ is still in the realm of what was being spent versus the GDP after WWII.
My personal opinion is that the lack of accountability regarding actions by the Bush Admin constitue a GREATER danger to your kids than the deficit spending because it takes us away from even the facade of a Republic based on ‘representative democracy’; the money in plotics is more of a danger to your kids than the deficits.
I agree with you about Bush, being more of danger to our
republic and our kids future. Thankfully he never completed his mission, which is defined in the document “project for a
new American century” signees of this document of the 90’s include Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and many fam-iliar neocon names. They would have had our country being the only power, Imperialist nation. George Bush senior was
a member of the tri-lateral commission and set us up in this global thing. I found it interesting that the Sr. Bush
called for his son Jeb to run for Pres. when, Junior finished up. I expected it because Jeb Bush will finish us off, if he ever got elected. As far as the budget. Anytime
huge sums of money gets put in the hands of government, they all get their cut, by the time the money gets to its destination it usually isn’t enough to do the job. It is
almost a neverending cycle. Bill Clinton to me is the model to follow.
One of the reasons Obama’s budget looks so much larger than the Bush budgets is Obama is not pulling the tricks that Bush pulled, such as keeping the Iraq and Afghanistan costs off budget.
If Bush had been reporting his costs/budget honestly, then the Obama numbers would not have been such a shock. State Dept “costs” are up as Obama is asking State (with the support of DoD) to actually take care of some of the humanitarian costs that Bush was hiding in DoD.
The numbers have to be reported with some honesty (which is a change from what Bush did) before the areas needing to be cut can be fully identified.
And Obama even recognizes that a new fleet of Marine One helicopters is wasteful. Which is where you’re “Dreamliner Air Force One” comment probably originated.
I understand that you want the miracle to have happened yesterday but reality tends to put a hold on all miracles.
The cost of Air force one is meaningless in this scheme of things. Cost over runs are the point. The argument that
Bush hid all of the costs does not hold water. If you look at the national debt while bush was in office it did not rise by 25% in one year. No matter how you dice it, what he spent had to reflect in the debt and it was not ”trillions
per year”. Your argument that the money to State came from
Defense also does not hold water. Defense went up $4billion. State went up $11billion. If it was taken away from defense, why did both budgets increase?. OMB states
that foreign aid is being doubled and that has nothing to do with defense. This is the most PORK laden budget I have ever seen in my life. Obama’s people did not go through line by line like he promised. They probably never have even reviewed the entire budget. They have not had enough ntime to read, edit, and develop a new budget. It is what it is, and from my view it is an American tragedy. Not democrat, not republican. It is going to kill our kids in debt.
Bush hid all kinds of things off-budget. Every single funding bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were off budget. They were all passed as ‘emergency supplementals’.
As far as Bush’s deficits – I beg to differ. The deficit for FY 2008 (which ended before Obama took office) was 1.3 trillion dollars. That is way more than 25% in my book.
Further, Bush has added more to the total national debt in 8 years than almost all the rest of the Presidents we have ever had. When he took office, the total debt was somewhere around $5 trillion. When he left office it was close to $11.7 trillion. And BUSH is responsible for over 20 percent of that new debt being held by China.
As far as history – the history is that the total debt always rises and rises much faster under Republican presidents. It either rises much more slowly, or in the case of Clinton, actually went down under Democratic ones.
Bush left this tanked economy on the table for Obama – now he has to fix it. And the fixing is going to be painful. And as usual, the Republicans are not helping. They keep whining about tax cuts. Well, we had tax cuts under Bush. So why are we in so much trouble?
Wish there was a link to the document referenced; 1.2T in ‘discretionary’ seems completely out of what. And the media keeps referring to a Defense budget of $548B.
So it would be nice to see the actual document.
Wish BobHenry wasn’t so disappointed; the ‘writing’ was on the wall about Obama before the election; still, he’s MUCH better than what most people saw as the only alternative.
I think the difference in defense spending comes about this way. The $500+ billion figure is the base budget. The $600+ billion figure is adding in the cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. A $700+ figure can be generated if some defense expenditures that occur through the department of Homeland Security and the Energy Department are added in.
There are 3 budget issues that need to be separated out here. The first is the need for a very major increase in spending (even if it is just on tiddlywinks) to get us out of depression. On this basis, the Obama budget is too small.
The second is as dakine01 points out that Obama is adding in a lot of chronic supplemental spending that doesn’t get figured in. As I keep pointing out, however, this still doesn’t emphasize the on-budget deficit, i.e. the deficit without Social Security surpluses added in to make it look smaller.
Third, I think a lot of the spending in the budget is misdirected although I would not agree with some of bobhenry’s choices although money directed into non-military areas is a lot more stimulative than that spent by the Pentagon.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/
You can get there easily just by typing in omb.gov – but here is the full link.
The website is “OMB.GOV”. The excat figure for discretionary spending is $1.273trillion. The Defense budget is $663billion dollars. There is no line by line
budget yet these are the whole dollars with the summary
of where each is allocated.
Wish I could remember the blurb I read years ago about how, depending on the accounting method for a budget was based, it would show the U.S. not in such a bad shape. Had to do with the type of budget.
AFAIC, the Obama Admin is NOT doing what is necessary to lead to the change that is truly needed.
What you are probably referring to is the concept of zero-based budgeting. In that kind of budget, everything has to start from zero and justify any spending at all. The other type is what we do here in this country – and it applies to State budgets as well as the national one. You take the base budget from the previous year, and then either add or subtract from it.
Both have problems. The zero based budgeting works really well for smallish enterprises – but the larger the entity, the more unwieldy it becomes. The base bugeting is no better because it is how all these non-functioning and wasteful things get perpetuated year after year.
But in any case, this document that Obama presented is merely a starting point. There are 13 separate bills that actually fund the government. Some of what he presented here will get passed, and some will not. I just think it’s a waste of effort to be having a tantrum about this document because the actual ‘budget’ when Congress gets done with it (you know, the taxation WITH representation part) will be a very different animal.
And yes, I expected this budget to be a shocker. All the off-budget stuff Bushco was hiding is now in the budget – as it should be. Obama has set some priorities. State gets money because he wants to do more diplomacy. Diplomacy requires carrots as well as sticks.
The defense budget is not cut yet. Yup. We haven’t seen a single troop coming home from Iraq yet – and it looks like most of them won’t until near the end of the year from the timetable that has been talked about. So, while it will mean savings in the future, not yet. Because we are ramping up in Afghanistan at the same time.
Homeland security did not get an increase.
And while Obama said he was going through the budget line by line – that will take time. Each department of the government will have to do that – and a couple of the cabinet positions either just got filled, or aren’t even yet.
Also, the Stimulus bill was not nearly big enough from what ALL the economists say, and I fully expect that Obama has and will continue to add projects and funding to stuff that will flesh out the rest of what the country needs. It is much easier to get some of that in smaller bites than try to go for the whole thing all at once.
AFAIK, the Social Security surpluses are still off-budget.
They should be. The SS trust fund has been used by Bush and others to make the budget look better. But that money is there for a reason – to pay SS benefits if not this year, in the years to come.
It used to always be off budget and it should have remained that way. But now that’s why the right-wing especially is screeching about SS going bankrupt. Well, they keep stealing the money!
it’s bizarre to me someone could compare giving trillions of dollars to the wealthy under bush as even remotely more economically more productive then investing in our infrastructure with real jobs
it’s bizarre to me someone wants to make that case but there they are
this redistribution of middle class assets to the wealthy began with Reagan’s tax increases
it is another bizarre reality that corporate media gets to claim Reagan lowered taxes when not only did he increase taxes, he increased taxes more then any peace time president before him
and in that increase, he redistributed fee burden, from those who use the most assets (the wealthy), to those who actually produce product through the labor (the middle class)
then came the slight reprieve of a democrat, where not only did the middle class get re-vested but the upper class grew MORE then under the ridiculous republican economic “strategy”
then we have the moron that ran this country further into the ground then even Reagan did, his first economic “stimulus” was to give over a trillion dollars of middle class assets to the wealthy in some absurd “trickle down” nonsense
then of course allowing industry to ignore the regulations that force them into paying their own bills and we are left in this depression
a depression that has been here for over two years, what we see today is the boil not the infection
so we get a grownup using investments to create products, (infrastructure, alternative fuel, cooling the globe research) and we get people who actually believe the old methods would have been just fine
sorry, we are going to have to invest in this country and while I agree we should not be using these finite assets rewarding bankers and gambling profiteers, the progressive programs might be enough to overcome the damage done by Reagan/bushsr/bushjr
possibly
personally I believe these programs are FAR from bold enough, the FIRST thing we should be doing reclaiming the assets that were stolen from the middle class and given to the wealthiest people on the planet
the second thing would be de-certifying the bankers that thought their business model was productive
then I would go about the job of creating the infrastructure, research and development that will grow our middle class once again
of course once the middle class grows, the way FDR did it (using far more by percentage then Obama) and the way Clinton did it), then the republicans will find another method of getting the assets we work so hard acquiring
that redistribution as been a slow bleed of middle class, we’ve been working more hours, producing more product, yet making less income, saving less and having fewer assets
now that we have a grown up trying to reclaim those assets we get people trying to make
Any of you regulars remember reading comments over the last 3 years by “bobhenry”?
I think if you look around you’ll see there’s a pattern of behavior.
Don’t waste your time; this guy is not a progressive and is going to rail against anything he doesn’t understand from a conservative viewpoint.
The first time I have ever been on Firedoglake was this
January. The first time I ever blogged, was last October.
So if youv’e been reading my stuff for 3 years you must be
a visionary. I am not right and I am not left. I am a moderate. My opinions are mine alone and I do not run someone down if you have a progressive viewpoint. That is exactly why this country does have problems. People like you forgot that you are an American first. If half of the country were republican, would you hate them for what they believe or respect them for the fact they have the conviction of their beliefs. I am a Nam Vet and I can tell you one thing my friend, when you have to face the type of situation in a war that we did, we were not worrying about who was republican , democrat, liberal, conservative. We only cared about getting our butts home in one peice. Unfortunately I saw to many come home in peices. But that is about the time the division started here at home. More than once, myself and my fellow vets were spit on when we got back. You see the war had everyone frothed up, they took it out on us. We weren’t heroes in most Americans book, we were dirt to most. Probably, the way to leave this conversation is simply by saying, enjoy your progressive blog. Your’e the kind of person who would blame the Iraqi vets for Bushes war and spit on them because they represent what you don’t like. You have a small view of America and you deserve yourself.
BobHenry, I’m probably to the ‘left’ of a lot of posters at FDL/Oxdown but will speak to the point you make in response to Rayne. There ARE conservative/radical right ‘lurkers’ here but they are usually detected quickly.
I didn’t read what you were saying as a ‘rabid’ conservative or a ‘wingnut’, so I would hope you speak from your ‘moderate’ POV here again as it is thru honest ,sincere, critical thought and discussion that resolution of differences occurs.
As a ‘vietname era’ vet who lost buddies over there, let me share this with you. When Kent State happened, that cut ANY thought the war was ‘honorable’ away. And that same massacre ruined MANY people’s perspective about those who thought they were serving their country. Doesn’t excuse the spitting but maybe provides an insight into the catalyst for those whose minds were sick to begin with to act in such a manner.