Here’s some friendly fiscal advice: Any time some Washington big shot like Ben Bernanke or Tim Geithner claims that immediate spending cuts in the debt deal will harm the economy—ignore them. Completely. You know why? Because in this great country of ours, spending never goes down. Never.

Take a look at the following chart:

The blue line you see is President Obama’s budget. The green line is Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget.

Now, Paul Ryan’s is of course a couple of trillion dollars lower than Obama’s over the next ten years. But what do they both have in common? They both go up. As in spending more, not less. As in, roughly $40-45 trillion dollars more. That’s a whole lot of taxpayer money, folks.

Now why is this? It’s because of something called the “current services baseline” which includes population and inflation increases built into the budget. Entitlements have their own formulas.

So when you hear a politician tell you they’re cutting spending, they’re actually referring only to reducing the growth of spending. Rarely, if ever, do they actually reduce the level of spending.

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After The Washington Post broke the news of the Watergate break-ins in 1972, the Nixon administration circled the wagons. And in 1997 – a full 25 years after the fact – Katherine Graham, who was with The Post in 1972, vividly recalled how “Nixon began making threats of economic retaliation against the paper.”

According to Graham, Nixon bullied the paper, sought to silence it, and launched a “campaign to undermine public confidence in [it].”

Judging from what Graham said, it appears that Nixon wanted to be sure people understood that if they continued to pry into Watergate or talk about Watergate or break news about Watergate as it unfolded, there would be harsh ramifications. (Keep in mind – Nixon had nothing to do with planning Watergate. Only with covering it up once he learned of it after the fact.)

Honestly folks, Watergate provided the Left with such a singularly sweet opportunity to bring down a Republican president that they’ve never gotten over it. As recently as 2004, MSNBC sent reporters to the streets to be sure up and coming generations had not forgotten what Nixon had done. (I don’t want to belabor the point, but Nixon had nothing to do with planning Watergate. Only with covering it up once he learned of it after the fact.)

So for covering up something up, Nixon was crucified by Left: to the point that by the summer of 1974 it became evident the House of Representatives was going to bring up impeachment charges against him. But he nipped those plans in the bud by resigning office on August 9, 1974, and flipping the “V” for victory to the hippies and the war protestors as he boarded the chopper that carried him away from the White House.

No one died during the Watergate break-ins or as a result of Nixon’s cover-up.

Switch gears and jump to 2009, and the ATF’s special operation “Fast and Furious.” An operation with which you’re all familiar by now, where upwards of 2500 guns in Arizona were sold to “straw purchasers” under the assumption that those guns were going to end up in the hands of Mexican cartel members who could then be arrested.

Talk about an embarrassingly ignorant plan.

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We didn’t really follow this case, but realize that many people are upset about the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial. Have at it.

ABANDON ALL HOPE OF CHANGE

PALIN DELENDA EST

Democratic National Committee

Unposted Principals’ Meeting

July 5, 2011

OFFICERS PRESENT

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, National Chair

Mike Honda, Vice Chair

Linda Chavez-Thompson, Vice Chair

OFFICER NOT TOLD OF MEETING

Donna Brazile, Vice Chair

INVITED GUESTS

Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader

Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader

John Zogby, Pollster

Brian Williams, Network Liaison

George “Daddy Warbucks” Soros

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: John, what’s the latest?

ZOGBY:  No change.  A commenter picked at random from Breitbart’s biggovernment.com would thrash President Obama next year in all 57 states, despite ACORN’s Get-Out-the-Dead-Vote project.  The down-ticket effects would be equally catastrophic. (more…)

From ClimateWire (subscription required):

Nuclear operators announce offset purchase (07/06/2011)

NEW YORK — The operator of two upstate New York nuclear power plants yesterday announced a purchase of carbon offsets in the state.Entergy Corp., a power generator in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere, says it has completed the purchase of slightly less than 35,000 tons’ worth of greenhouse gas emission reduction credits certified by the nonprofit American Carbon Registry (ACR).

The company runs the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City along with the James A. Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant on the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario [NB: to clarify this emphasis, the utility actually gets less than half its production from nuclear, with half coming from gas and coal].

The company says it bought the offset credits to boost its environmental credentials, using money from its designated environmental initiatives fund….

“We first set up this environmental initiatives fund back in 2001. We funded it at a level of about $5 million a year for a …[total of] $20 million…” (emphases added)

So. $20 million taken out of the hides of ratepayers, and that means the economy, in a posturing won’t you please love me scheme cooked up with the greens — that is, agreed by no one who actually paid the tab — for ‘green’ posing.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg that is already being inflicted on the economy, before Obama’s ‘other ways to skin that cat’ kick in. Incidentally, Entergy, like AEP, and Duke Energy, Exelon and some other utilities desirous of a state-managed wealth transfer are behind the agenda to mandate ever more of this, but designed (by them) to line their pockets instead of just paying for their posing.

So, keep admitting these things, my rent-seeking crony capitalist friends. Keep talking.

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The President has issued an ultimatum that more tax revenue must be part of budget negotiations. Indeed, he endlessly repeats his desire for a “balanced approach,” implying that as much as 50 percent of the deficit reduction in any agreement should come from higher revenues.

Because I am a thoughtful, middle-of-the-road, pragmatic guy, I’m willing to accept the President’s ultimatum. I do have one tiny request, however, and that is for any such deal to be based on honest math.

What I mean by this is that I don’t want politicians to approve a budget that results in more spending, but then claim that they “cut spending” because the budget didn’t grow even faster. I want a spending cut to mean less spending (gee, what a novel idea).

And when they talk about new revenue, I want to see how much revenue the IRS is collecting this year, and measure revenue increases against that number. After all, the crowd in Washington should be happy to get more money, even if it is the result of benign factors such as more jobs being created, companies earning higher profits, and people getting more pay.

I assume these are reasonable requests. After all, this is how businesses and households operate their budgets, and I’m sure the political insiders wouldn’t want to use dishonest numbers to mislead voters (perish the thought!).

So what would a balanced approach look like, assuming we want to use honest math? The answer isn’t that complicated. I started with the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office for spending and revenues for this fiscal year (FY2011). I then assume, in the interest of a “balanced approach,” that spending should be cut by 5 percent each year and that revenues should climb by 5 percent each year.

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Gary Sinise is best known for his role as Lt. Dan Taylor in the 1994 blockbuster movie “Forrest Gump.” It earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor and a starring role on “CSI: NY.” Now the actor is using his fame to celebrate America’s heroes on the battlefield.

This week marked the debut of a documentary about Sinise’s role with the Lt. Dan Band. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Sinise formed the band — named after his character from “Forrest Gump” — to perform for servicemen and women. Sinise was in Washington last week and visited Heritage to talk about the military and how 9/11 changed his outlook on life.

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Liberal pundits are panicking over constitutional conservatism. They shouldn’t, because every child—whether the parents are liberal or conservative—will benefit from constitutional conservatism’s ascendency. If America elects a constitutional conservative president and Congress in 2012, we’ll move forward as a freedom-loving nation.

Several outlets on the Left—such as The New Republic—are raising an alarm about this disturbing new term, saying that it’s secret code for “absolutists” and “zealots” on economic issues, overturning Roe v. Wade, and implying that constitutional conservatives are segregationists bent on creating a theocracy.

As two constitutional conservatives who wrote a new book on the issue, Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America, we’ll correct the record on defining constitutional conservatism, how it now dominates Republican politics, and why America needs it so desperately.

Constitutional conservatism is the system of government the Founders gave to this country. They set out a series of principles on the rights of man and the role of government in the Declaration of Independence, including that God creates us equal and gives us rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit (not guarantee) of happiness, that government exists to secure these rights, and that the people either consent to this government or have the right to change it.

After years of trial and error, the country then adopted the Framers’ proposed Constitution to be the Supreme Law of the Land to fulfill the Declaration’s purpose. This Constitution strictly defines the federal government as one of enumerated powers, giving it authority over specific areas of our national life, splitting its powers between three branches that check each other, and leaves the states sovereign on all other matters. They also declared certain individual rights. Knowing that they were fallible human beings, the Framers also included an amendment process so that when the Constitution was found lacking, a complex supermajority could change it (and have, twenty-seven times).

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Some of the things we’re reading around the web today:

Over at Powerline, an interview with Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch (!) on the state’s government shutdown.

At the StoneZone, veteran political operative and bon vivant Roger Stone says don’t believe the Cuomo for VP hype.

Shake, Rattle and DOOM! over at Ace of Spades HQ

Forgetting the Talking Points: Rhode Island DEMOCRATS Pass Voter ID Law at JammieWearingFool.

Good advice for a new blogger from Doug Ross

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Judicial Watch recently found that the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a $79,819 grant to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) offshoot Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). This is an apparent violation of an ACORN funding ban passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2009.

On October 1, 2009, President Obama signed the Defund ACORN Act into law, effectively prohibiting the federal government from funding “ACORN and any ACORN-related affiliate.” ACORN challenged the law in court and lost. The federal courts in New York upheld the constitutionality of the funding ban on August 13, 2010. The Supreme Court last month refused to hear ACORN’s appeal of this funding ban.

A Judicial Watch investigation has revealed that on March 1, 2011, HUD announced a $79,819 federal grant to ACHOA to “educate the public and housing providers about their rights and obligations under federal, state, and local fair housing laws.”

In an apparent effort to remedy the prohibition against funding ACORN or its affiliates, the Government Accountability Office issued an opinion in September 2010 claiming that ACHOA is a separate entity from ACORN. Nonetheless, the government’s own website that lists federal expenditures identifies the organization receiving the $79,819 grant as “ACORN Housing Corporation Inc,” and lists ACORN’s New Orleans, Louisiana, address. Moreover, ACHOA maintains the same board of directors, executive director and offices as its predecessor, ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc.

Fraudulent activity on the part of ACORN Housing/ACHOA is nothing new.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Elizabeth Blackney to discuss what a debt ceiling deal might look like, if Republicans should even take it, and what impact it may have on 2012.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

The Mother of All No-Brainers
Harry Reid Moves Forward With “Shared Sacrifice” Bill
McConnell rallies, invites Obama to Hill again
2 Republicans Open Door to Increases in Revenue

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BREAKING>>>

New questions have arisen regarding those 14 Wisconsin Democratic state senators who fled to Illinois for three weeks this February in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop the Badger State’s new public employee labor law.

Somebody is lying.

The Senators have repeatedly insisted that they, themselves, paid their own bills.

Yet at a recent national gathering of liberal activists, one prominent national group bragged about raising $200,000 to help keep these Wisconsin Senators out of state.

Whoa. $200,000?

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WaPo has a front page piece titled (in the print edition, and teased as such on the home page), “The climate issue takes a back seat”. It begins by noting that “Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate-change policy, makes a forceful case for the need to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and boost the efficiency of cars and small trucks: The moves will cut America’s oil consumption, foster the nation’s energy independence, save consumers money at the pump and help revive domestic auto manufacturers.”

Its second paragraph is an intended-to-be-impactful, lone sentence, isolated in the physical layout: “What she doesn’t volunteer is that they will curb climate change”.

WaPo’s best defense for this stunt is that it wasn’t really saying the ‘global warming’ rules would curb climate change, but just saying the White House aide doesn’t volunteer that they do (the reason for this being a Stan Greenberg poll “urging Democrats to play down ‘global warming’“, dropping “warming”, “climate” and “cap-and-trade” in favor of re-branding the effort as “clean energy”. That is, in effect counseling Dems to be even less candid than their Plan A of an end-of-days  fear-based campaign aimed at attaining public acquiescence for state-created energy scarcity).

Later in the piece, WaPo quotes a greenie as saying “I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change”.

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[bluhn-der-krat]

-noun

1.  An official, who in attempting to appease the left works without exercising intelligent judgment, thereby harming or jeopardizing national interest through the implementation of  a series of self-serving policies that ultimately result in gross, stupid, and careless political mistakes .

A great man once declared that “[t]ruth will rise above falsehood as oil above water,” this maxim held for a long time and even penetrated Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue. But the people wanted ‘change’ simply for the sake of change.  And now the declaration reads: “truth will be mixed with falsehood, as oil with ethanol.”

President Obama’s decision to release 30 million barrels of Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) this month qualifies him as one of the great energy blundercrats in modern American history.  The administration’s justification for the release of these critical barrels of crude, which are in reserve for emergency and war purposes only, seems simple but is really insidious.  According to the administration, the ‘market’ is desperate for the light sweet crude that Libya would have exported. Which market, to be clear? Well, not the United States, because Libyan crude is exported almost exclusively to Europe.  But nevertheless, more world crude supply should translate to lower product prices. Unless of course it does not. As one Senior Administration official said, not to worry, because our price-meddling heroes will just tap SPR again:

“At the end of the first 30 days of action by the IEA member, we will review the results…the U.S. stands ready to do more if necessary to address this issue.”

The president now considers himself a one-man market maker armed with 727 million barrels of taxpayer oil and he is not afraid to use them in an election cycle. On a dip, he can draw his bureaucratic paw and say “see what I did to control the price at the pump, p.s. available for hire in 2012”. This of course is supposed to be music to the ears of the uninformed and the unemployed. Gasoline prices had already declined ten percent from the start of the driving season, but only because the economy is a disaster.

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Today, in 1917, Arab troops, under the command of Col. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) capture the port city of Aqaba from the Ottoman Empire.

We could make a quip about one of the more decisive Arab victories in centuries being led by a Westerner, but will take the prudent course instead.

An investigation into New Jersey’s largest teachers union finds that the Internal Revenue Service has an outstanding lien against the New Jersey Education Association for $56,730.31 in back taxes.

The lien involves unpaid taxes from as far back as 2005, though most of the teacher union’s unpaid taxes are from 2009 and 2010.

The federal tax lien was issued against the NJEA on December 7, 2010, and has been on file with the Passaic County Clerk’s office since December 21, 2010.

The investigation was conducted by Education Action Group with the assistance of Mark Kalinowski, founder of North New Jersey Tea Party Group which is based in Passaic County.

The NJEA recently settled two other IRS tax liens totaling $16,581. One of those tax liens involved $13,885.76 in unpaid taxes, going back to 2005 and 2006. That lien was released by the Passaic County Clerk’s office on January 6, 2011.

The other lien, totaling $2,696, was filed on October 13, 2010 and was released by the Union County Clerk’s office on May 3, 2011.

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There is a good chance net neutrality regulations might be stopped before they are ever allowed to take effect, according to Republican Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Robert McDowell. Broadcasting & Cable reports:

Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell says he thinks that there is a “better than average chance” that a court, likely the D.C. circuit, will stay the FCC’s network neutrality rules.

That came in an appearance June 29 on Fox News’ online program Power Play with Chris Stirewalt.

McDowell dissented from the rules, which passed in a party line vote Dec. 21, 2010.

Steven Malanga in City Journal:

Pensions are an enormous part of the problem. New Haven’s $475 million budget, for instance, is projected to grow by just $4 million this fiscal year, but the city’s pension and health-care costs will rise $12 million, forcing cuts elsewhere. In San Francisco, pensions consume about 14 percent of the budget, and rising retirement bills for city workers accounted for one-third of this year’s $306 million deficit. Pension and health benefits account for 20 percent of the $500 billion that the nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts spend annually. In a recent National League of Cities survey, nearly 80 percent of municipal finance officers listed rising pension payments as one of their most significant budgetary problems.

Here again, the problem is disproportionately local. Yes, state-sponsored pension funds have accumulated anywhere from $750 billion to $3 trillion in unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities, depending on how the calculations are made. A huge portion of those liabilities, however, is actually owed by cities, towns, and school districts. States employ just 5.2 million of the 13 million active workers participating in state-sponsored pension funds; the rest are local employees, often teachers, who work for districts too small to manage their own pensions. Experts agree that pension costs for both states and localities are going to skyrocket. But states currently spend just 4 percent of their budgets on pensions, while many municipalities already spend 15 to 20 percent.

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