Kind Of A Good Thing

The Federal Deficit is coming down in an OK way.

I dunno if that's Damning By Faint Praise or Praising By Faint Damnation.  Feel free to flip a coin on that one, or just blow it all off and walk away.

Not all that long ago, Repubs were wailing about Trillion-Dollar Deficits and how horrible everything was about to get, etc.  New CBO numbers are out now, and the deficit continues to shrink.

From CBO's website:

The federal government ran a budget deficit of $489 billion in the first seven months of fiscal year 2013 (that is, from October 2012 through April 2013), according to CBO’s estimates. That amount is $231 billion less than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year, primarily because revenue collections have been much greater than they were at this point in 2012. In contrast, federal spending so far this year has been slightly lower than what it was last year at this time.

The deficit still annualizes to around $600-800 Billion for the year, but down is down, and that's mostly good.  I say 'mostly' because The KrugMan reminds us that while the Revenue Side is looking better, we still have a problem with the Spending Side because we're actually not spending near enough - which of course, is exactly the opposite of what the Repubs want us to believe.

We're still stuck in this weird Deleveraging Loop - demand is low because people aren't making/borrowing the money they need to buy a lot of stuff, which means the producers aren't making a lot of stuff; which means they don't need to hire a lot of workers; which means people have less to spend on stuff etc.  And as Governments at state & local levels are hemmed in by Balanced Budget requirements (mostly driven by 'conservative' politicians) and in some cases burdened by enormous debt thanks to the sucker loans they got sold during the Bubble, they're cutting spending, which further reduces demand - and on and on and on it goes.

And so anyway, since the Repubs aren't giving up on the whole Austerity thing any time soon, and since Regular People continue trying to dump debt and nobody's really borrowing much at all, we're nowhere near outa the woods yet.

One interesting by-the-by: Simpson-Bowles warned us that we'd be in a full-blown fiscal crisis within two years if we didn't immediately adopt their plan, and - uhm, that was like 26 months ago.  OK OK; we're not exactly livin' the high life, but c'mon.

That damned Kenyan Commie Usurper keeps gettin' shit to work just to make us Repubs look bad - and you know that's all it is.  If he wasn't such a vile back-stabbin' socialist phony, this whole joint'd be in the shitter just like we said it would.  Fuckin' Obama.

Death And Taxes

What does the federal budget actually look like?

Andrea Seabrook explains:


I'm having some trouble finding a good zoomable image of the poster, so you'll have to buy the thing if ya want it.  (it's just the way of the world, sport - get used to it)

Here's an OK version from 2007-08 tho' - just to give you a taste. (from Information2Share)

Order from Amazon for less than 20 bucks:

Beltway Bubble-Think

Wonkette has a good takedown on Paul Ryan and the Very Serious People - and the Press Poodles who just can't give up on the extremely minuscule probability that somebody in the GOP might come up with some proposal that doesn't closely resemble something you stepped in as you were walking through the park.

It is budget season again in Washington, D.C., which means it is time for the villagers in our nation’s capital to pretend that a plan written by Congressman Paul Ryan, who was last seen on election night icing down his tuchus after being spanked hard by Barry Bamz and Old Handsome Joe Biden, is not the legislative equivalent of a rotting whale carcass washed up on a beach.

And, as suggested, here's our new National Anthem:

Iraq By The Numbers

This is the best rundown I've found recently - and expanding on the basic theme (as Fugelsang does) - if you voted for Jr Bush and/or you supported the war in Iraq, you never ever get to make any noise about the deficit or the debt again.  You just get to shut the fuck up while the rest of us get some of this shit straightened out.

The Krugman Speaks

Evan Soltas of Wonkblog and Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider both make the same point, in more detail, that I tried to make in my series on ONE TRILLION DOLLARS: the current budget deficit is overwhelmingly the result of the depressed economy, and it’s not clear that we have a structural budget problem at all, let alone the fundamental mismatch between what we want and what we’re willing to pay for that people like to claim exists. Here’s another chart, showing the primary federal balance — that is, not counting interest payments — since 1972 (data from CBO):

We don't get to talk about the real thing because the Dems need an honest-to-god partner in order to make shit work, and the Repubs are one tent short of a freak show.

I gets pretty obvious pretty fast that what Boehner & Co (and to a very much lesser extent, Obama) are doing is playing their little games.  And it's not even Boehner and Obama who pose the real problem.  I'm not one for simple 10-word solutions to big ugly complicated trouble, but the real problem is that there're just way too many big Corporations and big Trade Groups and big Lobbies, and big Unions and Power Factions inside Government (DoD eg), where everybody has their hands out expecting whatever favors and special treatment they believe they've got coming because of the money they raised for a candidate or the voters they turned out in the election or the vital role they play blah blah blah.  And it doesn't just boil down to the usual pap about "special interest groups" - in a democracy everybody's a special interest group for fuck's sake.  I think it comes down to a weird blend of Obama's semi-conservative centrism and The Repubs getting more and more crazy as we go.  And there's poor ol' Boehner trying pretty hard to get his numbskull caucus to stop being complete dicks about everything while not actually saying straight out (not in public anyway) that they're all a bunch of complete dicks.

Conventional wisdom is saying Boehner's likely to lose his speakership next month.  I'm not sure one way or the other, but I think it probably won't matter.  It could be a huge story that'll keep the Operatives and the Squawkers busy for months, but in the end, if Boehner stays or goes we'll still have a Republican Party that can't manage a High School Car Wash much less help govern an empire - while the rest of us can only sit around waiting for something good to happen.

Raw Data

Here's a look at Paul Ryan's budget proposal via Bipartisan Policy Center.

How Paul Ryan's budget plan compares to that of President Obama and BPC's Debt Reduction Task Force

By Loren Adler and Shai Akabas

Below is the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) summary of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s fiscal year (FY) 2013 budget. All of the information about the budget proposal is taken directly from either The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal or the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Long-Term Budgetary Impact of Paths for Federal Revenues and Spending Specified by Chairman Ryan.

We hope that this comprehensive summary will further clarify the entirety of his plan, and compare it in some key respects to that of President Barack Obama and the plans proposed by the bipartisan fiscal commissions (BPC’s Domenici-Rivlin and Bowles-Simpson).

I still maintain that Ryan is a phony.  Even tho' there are some things he has to say about our fiscal mess that line up with my own views, they are all at the surface.  Once you dig into what Ryan's actually proposing, it's really just more of the same snake oil the GOP's been peddling for 35 years.  Not even guys like David Stockman and Bruce Bartlett are willing to go along with the kind of crap the Ryanites are trying to sell us.

Back In The Black

Not that it's gonna last, but the US Gov't reported a budget surplus of $58 Billion for April 2012.

CBO estimated that receipts were $30 billion higher in April than the same month a year ago, due to declining refunds that month and higher corporate income tax receipts. Spending fell by $69 billion compared to April 2011, marked by lower outlays on defense, Medicaid and the Postal Service.  --Market Watch

How this happened is anybody's guess, but the real question is how long will it take for the Repubs to turn it around, and get the failure they've been pushing for?

Making Government run like a business is great as long as it's never ever allowed to turn a profit.  Which kinda shows how fucked up the GOP's premise actually is.  Because if Gubmint works like a business, then Gubmint is - in fact - working.  And that just can't be because we all know that Gubmint doesn't work at all, so we have to work a lot harder to make it work better, but...  

If your premise is false, your conclusion can't be true.  So, like I've said before - they run in tighter and tighter circles until they disappear up their own assholes.

An Aha Moment

"Conservatives" will always argue against making any serious cuts in Defense Spending by trying to make it all about National Security.  They have to ignore the 6 million American jobs that are directly dependent on the Pentagon because of course, "gubmint don't create no jobs", so they have to rationalize the flat-out waste of things like F-22 and F-35, the B-1 and the B-2, and the maintenance of a Doomsday Capable nuclear arsenal etc etc etc.  Hey, ya just never know when them Rooskies might start feelin' peckish, so we need to be ready.

I have to admit, I've been a little reluctant to hack away at the military budget because of the those jobs.  I remember a few times when cutbacks put a lot of good people out of work and had a pretty bad ripple affect across the economy; and I remember thinking Reagan's huge deficits were OK because the gi-normous military buildup was really just a federal jobs program in disguise.

But guess what.  Turns out it was mostly bullshit.  Imagine that - somebody with a vested interest in keeping the money flowing telling me stories about jobs that weren't really true just to keep the money flowing.  Sometimes, my own ignorance and gullibility shocks even myself.

So here it is - a new look from The National Priorities Project, and The Project For Defense Alternatives

hat tip = Wonkette

Here's the PERI link

Here's the PDA link

Disclaimer: Everybody's playing an angle of some kind, but not all angles are equal.

Planned Parenthood

Bring The Stupid

Lots of talk about cutting back on "government spending".  Whenever some politicians want to score a few points, they start screamin' about spending - even tho' by this time, everybody not living in caves has to know that the guys doing the loudest screaming are the ones who ran up the tab in the first place.

I've said it before - what EXACTLY do you want to cut?

Here's a look at what big bunches of people in this country think we should carve down.

At what point do we realize just how misinformed we are, and start to demand better?