From National Journal’s Hotline:

A new Gallup/USA Today poll contains a counterintuitive finding: the age group most receptive to House Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s plan to deal with the budget – seniors.

The poll finds 48 percent of seniors (those 65 and over) support Ryan’s plan over President Obama’s plan, while 42 percent back the president.

That’s the highest total among the age groups tested – a 47 percent plurality between the ages of 50 and 64 backed Ryan, and a 45 percent plurality of those between 30-49 backed Ryan. But young voters overwhelmingly sided with Obama by a 23-point margin, 53 to 30 percent.

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By all means, let us pursue the president’s new approach to the budget, the Orwellian ‘reduce spending in the tax code’. But, wherever will we find good examples of wasteful ’spending in the tax code’?

Hey, look here! The Feds are taking your money to create 1,000 jobs! Of course, these jobs wouldn’t exist without this wealth transfer, and are mostly temporary anyway. But, still, it’s only $2 million per temporary job. Guess we’ll make the cost up in volume.

And T. Boone only wants a billion dollars. Then he promises to quit. Really. He’ll be the first.

The Nation also joins in:

[T]he primary problem facing clean alternative energy is the ‘price gap’—they are still more expensive than fossil fuels. As I’ve outlined in these pages previously (see “The Big Green Buy”), economies of scale, along with subsidies and planning, will help close this price gap. Only when clean technologies—like wind, solar, hydropower and electric vehicles—are cheaper than other options will global capitalism make the switch away from fossil fuels.

Of course, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind mostly doesn’t blow so windmills and solar panels require massive redundancy as well as enormous swathes of land, and wind- and solar-powered electricity are just as old as the coal-fired variety, just practical losers. Those are possibly greater challenges than a mere ‘price gap’, and indeed they make this idea of comparing renewables with hydrocarbons as if they were apples to apples endearingly absurd.

But, anyway. While ‘planning’ is euphemistic for preferences and mandates, here you also see green econ 101 amid the author’s ostentatious advertisement of having escaped brushing up on the actual experience and history of these boondoggles.

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The man just doesn’t get it.

In his deficit reduction plan unveiled Wednesday, President Obama proposed a spending reduction of only $4 trillion over the next 12 years, a figure that falls significantly short of the spending cuts proposed by the President’s own debt commission. The speech is yet another reminder that Obama is not serious about cutting federal spending in practice, but rather in delivering platitudes in the midst of what is arguably our most serious budget crisis in history.

And so the spending debate rages on in Washington.

Many forward-thinking Congressional Republicans, particularly those who ascended to office on the wave of Tea Party victories, have cautioned that lawmakers ought not to accept a spending plan without making sure they get something in return—in the name of restoring fiscal accountability to Washington.

This is indeed a wise impulse: The national debt now looms at well over $14 trillion. The national deficit hurdles toward $1.4 trillion. Our country’s deficit has now reached such epic proportions that even if the federal government were to seize the total assets of every American billionaire, we could not cover the costs of this year’s deficit alone.

Judging from speech this week, either Obama has not internalized the enormity of our national debt, or he is simply not concerned with it. Whether that epiphany strikes him or not, though, we are teetering on the edge of budgetary meltdown, and something must be done if we wish to avoid a complete and utter national fiscal crisis.

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From The Wall Street Journal:

Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

Here are its major components:

• Reducing spending: This budget proposes to bring spending on domestic government agencies to below 2008 levels, and it freezes this category of spending for five years. The savings proposals are numerous, and include reforming agricultural subsidies, shrinking the federal work force through a sensible attrition policy, and accepting Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s plan to target inefficiencies at the Pentagon.

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As the nation’s debt reaches 102% of the GDP and the President pushes a $3.73 trillion budget with more government spending than America can afford, there are innumerable ways in which the politicians should be slashing spending, but aren’t. One agency that could use a budget-cutting knife to the heart is the union-controlled National Labor Relations Board.

While the allegedly-independent agency is ostensibly designed to protect employee rights, over the past few years, the NLRB itself has been contaminated with so much rancor and partisanship that its very mission of protecting workers from both employers and (especially now) unions, has been demonstrably nullified. Moreover, given that the purpose of the NLRB is to 1) conduct elections, and 2) prevent and remedy unfair labor practices by both employers and unions, the current caseload (as well as its lack of ideological neutrality) calls for the agency’s budget to be cut back to levels prior to pre-Bush budget levels, at a minimum.

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News reports indicate (even if they often try to bury) that President Obama’s supposed austerity moves include massive increases over already-inflated spending levels for ‘green energy’ boondoggles. These are very economically harmful.

To support this move, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, via its subcommittee chaired by the politically candid Bernard Sanders, will hold a hearing this afternoon touting ‘Green Jobs and Trade’.

After I was first contacted about testifying I prepared remarks which, though I am not appearing, I have submitted. Someone has to say these things before we triple- or quadruple-down on the ethanol debacle, a mess from which we are unlikely to extricate ourselves even after the harm becomes known. That’s what creating then richly feeding constituencies will do.

Below is a truncated version of points made in the opening and first section, ‘China Syndrome’ (with citations omitted). The remarks include other sections — Not ‘New’, Not of ‘the Future’; Green ‘Census’ Jobs and the Green-Jobs Bubble; The German Model; The Broader European Experience; Spain; Expensive Waste; and an appendix of Recent Developments in Other EU “Green Economy” Programs — all of which you can read here:

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Recently the Obama Administration cut funding to Upward Bound, a successful educational program with a proven track record. Upward Bound provides support to participating students in their preparation for college entrance. Upward Bound serves high school students from low-income families and high school students from families in which neither parent holds a bachelor’s degree. 95% of Upward Bound graduates have entered post-secondary education and are four times more likely to earn a college degree than students from similar back-grounds who do not participate in the program. The Obama Administration will cut funding for this successful educational program.

Radical Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings will get a fat raise in funding this year.

At the same time, despite the runaway federal spending and record budget deficits, Barack Obama is including $410 million in the 2011 budget for his “safe schools” czar Kevin Jennings. This is an increase of $45 million over last year’s budget. Obviously, some things are more important than others. These funds ought to buy a whole mess of fisting kits, leather bar guides and child porn books. And, the money will come in handy for the sexual indoctrination of teens and pre-teens.
Citizen Link Blog reported:

So want does Jennings intend to do with this money?

For starters, he says he’s going to make “school climate” measurement a top priority—and, in fact, he’d love for “school climate” to eventually be made part of the “Common Core” national standards movement! He plans to begin with “a new grant program coming out of this department where we’ll be providing possibly as much as $70 million for investments in school climate projects.” (He revealed all this and much more in this month’s Phi Delta Kappan magazine. Scroll down to the “Safe at School” title.)

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From The American Spectator:

ACORN and other left-wing advocacy groups could be eligible for up to $3.99 billion in federal funding included in the $3.83 trillion fiscal 2011 budget blueprint that President Obama unveiled last week.

ACORN and other left-wing advocacy groups could be eligible for up to $3.99 billion in federal funding included in the $3.83 trillion fiscal 2011 budget blueprint that President Obama unveiled last week.

The $3.99 billion comes from a congressional slush fund known as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) $48.5 billion fiscal 2011 budget. CDBG grants, which are awarded to states and localities, pass indirectly to ACORN.

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