Great piece from the Heritage Foundation on America’s debt:

America’s $15 Trillion Nightmare

This week, the U.S. national debt clock hit a nightmarish milestone: a record $15 trillion. Words can’t even begin to describe the scope of borrowed federal spending, but it is no doubt a staggering figure that has risen dramatically in the last decade and is more than $4 trillion higher than when President Barack Obama took office less than three years ago. Unfortunately, Washington does not appear poised to take action to rectify the problem, and those with their hands on the wheel are ignoring the root of the problem: spending.

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Wednesday said of the news, “Today marks an infamous day in American history. It is the day that the national debt has surpassed the $15 trillion mark. This debt is hurting not only our economy today, but will result in our children and our grandchildren experiencing a diminished future.” Ryan is right. Future generations will be shackled by today’s debt. And Heritage’s Alison Fraser explains how federal spending is headed toward a cliff of terrifying proportions:
Federal spending, at about 24 percent today, is significantly over the average of 20 percent of GDP, but in a decade it will top 26 percent. Within a generation it will reach nearly 35 percent of GDP. Before the end of the decade taxes will have recovered from their recession-driven levels and will continue to rise thereafter.

So what’s Washington doing about it? Fighting over how high to taxes instead of getting to the root of the problem. By Thanksgiving, the 12 members of the congressional “super committee” are required to reach agreement on a plan to achieve $1.2 trillion in deficit-reducing measures–a mere drop in the bucket when measured against America’s spending crisis. Yet even that task appears out of their grasp. Fraser writes that Democrats on the committee have said no to several actions that would alter America’s crushing spending path, such as increasing the Medicare retirement age or changing in the measure of inflation used to calculate entitlement benefits, including Social Security:
Sadly, there are few additional changes on the list for them even to react to — and their so-called boldchanges from several weeks ago have all but dried up. The Democrats’ intractable attitude on entitlement reform defies logic.

The facts are simple: Entitlements are going to generate European style debt levels unless they are reformed. Paying for it without bringing down their spending would require constant, crushing tax hikes on all taxpayers — not just the top 1 percent.

Fortunately, there are actions that Congress could take to rein in entitlement spending (which already comprises 40 percent of all federal spending), and those include bold reforms to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But the same ineffective approaches to cutting costs–like cuts to doctors, hospitals, and other providers–will cause more harm than good and should be scrapped.

And there are some in the House and Senate who understand the problem and are advocating significant action. Seventy-two Members of the House and 33 Senators are standing against continued overspending, over-borrowing, and overtaxing. In a letter yesterday to the super committee, the House Members wrote, “It is evident that America has a fiscal crisis because Washington spends too much, not because it taxes too little,” and warned, “Increasing taxes on Americans would destroy jobs, erase all hope of an economic recovery, and simply serve to feed out-of-control spending in Washington.”

The Heritage Foundation, too, has called upon the super committee to “drive federal spending down — including by fixing ever-expanding entitlement programs — toward a balanced budget, while preserving our capability to protect America, and without raising taxes.” And Heritage vice president David Addington writes, “The super committee has a chance — one chance — to get it right. More taxes means more government and a worse economy. The super committee should recommend legislation that rests on three pillars: (1) cut non-security spending, (2) maintain defense capabilities, and (3) do not hike taxes.”

There are 15 trillion reasons that show how deeply America’s fiscal house is in disorder, and there are 12 members of the congressional super committee who can propose a solution that helps the country turn the corner without raising taxes, without weakening our defense, and without burdening future generations. But getting there will require serious leadership, action, and an understanding that doing business as usual will not bring this nightmare to an end.

You gotta love soldiers, who just tell it like it is:

Being a die-hard Mac fan (some would say Mac nerd) I appreciated this article from the Heritage Foundation on Steve Jobs and his unique contributions to the world:

Steve Jobs, who died yesterday at the too-young age of 56, was a living refutation of all what liberals constantly tell us about our country — that we’re falling behind others and live now in a “post-American world,” as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books puts it in its title.

As anyone who’s ever handled an Apple product or had his life improved by the technological innovations our system has produced in just a decade (that means all of us) will tell you, Jobs and innovators like him epitomize that immeasurable quality the left somehow finds most abject — American exceptionalism.

The meme of the left is that drudgery and mediocrity is not just our future but probably also our just desserts–for being too imperialistic, consumerist, wasteful, patriarchal, or what have you. (For an inexhaustible list of all our ills and sins, please check with the mob gathered at the “Occupy Wall Street” protest.) One should compare this deadened vision with the wonders Jobs wrought.

Apple Computer, the company Jobs founded at the age of 21 along with his friend Steve Wozniak, was valued at the close of business yesterday at $350 billion and some change, more than $100 billion ahead of Microsoft. General Electric, another American giant, weighed in at less than half the price, $161 billion. Ford, GM and Volkswagen? Respectively, $40 billion, $35 billion and $42 billion. That should give some idea of where we are in the 21st century.

That beauty contest, how much a company is worth, is a result of decisions made by millions of investors voting with people’s savings (that is, for most of us, the sweat of our brow and our hedge against an uncertain future). Investors voted for Jobs’ company because consumers loved its products, and consumers bought Apple products not because they were ordered to do so by central planners but because they saw them as magic.

From computing to music to journalism, Jobs changed the way the world did its business and leisure. Very little of what we do today has not been impacted somehow by Jobs and his company. He certainly changed my life from my first Apple III with floppy discs almost 30 years ago, costing about $6000 and possessing a small fraction of the capabilities of my streamlined new iPad 2, all at less than 10 percent of the cost of that early dinosaur.

Macs, with their trademark coloring and sleek design, transformed the way people came to see computers, from gizmos only nerds understood or liked to things almost as organic as the partly bitten apples of the ever-present logos. Creative designing and thinking flowed naturally from a Mac, powering the creativity and productivity that have become the hallmark of the American economy, our present problems notwithstanding. In music, Jobs changed the industry by taking it digital.

As for journalism and reading in general, we have now gone back to where we started: the biblical tablet. The elegant slab we take with us wherever we go can do the same for us and take us, no matter where we are, anywhere in the universe our imagination wants to visit.

All this was the result of the happy coincidence of genius in an individual and a system. Jobs was an individual with special DNA, no question. But this half-Arab boy who was given up for adoption at birth and went on to drop out of college was able to transform the lives of individuals across the world because he lived and worked in this country.

The genius of the American system is comprised of the rule of law, respect for private property and the freedom of the individual to strive to be better than himself and his neighbor and reap the rewards that come from his innate abilities and effort. All of these and many other liberties are safeguarded in our Constitution. It is all part of what makes us an exceptional country.

This is not to say that we don’t have problems. We are indeed falling behind — not behind other countries but behind our promise and potential. Our government spends too much, tries to tell us how to run our private lives, and ties down in red tape the genius that brought you Apple. The great and sometimes cacophonous debate we are having in our country at the moment results from the fact that Americans have finally woken up to the threat our system confronts and are doing something about it.

This is not what you hear. Daily we are told by our government leaders, the media, and academia that we are as exceptional only in the way that is every other country on the U.N. roll, from Albania to Zimbabwe, is exceptional. We are told that we have to manage our decline as a power and that the great debate over ideas that we’re having is evidence that “our politics is broken.” Typically, a columnist from a Manhattan paper has titled his most recent book That Used to Be Us, a line, we’re sad to say, that came straight from a speech by Barack Obama.

This is nonsense. Steve Jobs may have given to liberal causes and politicians throughout his life, but his life proved the existence of the American Dream. As anyone who’s Googled something in her iPad and then Tweeted about it will tell you, Steve Jobs and those like him symbolize American Exceptionalism every day.

Edwin J. Feulner
President, The Heritage Foundation

This is almost unbelievable, but it is an exact quote:

Well, it's official. The nations experiment with liberalism has netted
us 2 TRILLION dollars in additional debt, while getting our credit
dinged for the first time in US history! 

Ouch! Dr. Seuss would say it something like this:

I do not like this Uncle Sam,
I do not like his health care scam..
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books…
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals..
I do not like ex-speaker Nan,
I do not like this ‘YES WE CAN’..
I do not like this spending spree,
I’m smart, I know that nothing’s free..
I do not like their smug replies,
when I complain about their lies…
I do not like this kind of hope.
I do not like it. Nope, nope, nope!!!

And no, I didn't create this, but don't know who did. All I know
is a lot of people voted on the promise of "Hope And Change,"
but next time hopefully they will prefer substance over slogans,
and positive change over the worlds most outlandish spending spree!

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, remember how the house never was able to get a budget out in 2010, for 2011, leading to all those extended budget debates and threats of government shut downs? Well, this image sheds some light.

House Minority Leader  Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, pictured standing, far right, speaks while colleagues Rep. Barbara Lambert, D-Milford and Rep. Jack F. Hennessy, D-Bridgeport, play solitaire Monday night as the House convened to vote on a  new budget.(AP)

The guy sitting in front of these two is on Facebook, and the guy behind Hennessy is checking out ESPN.

These are the people who so desperately want to control your healthcare! What a great idea! I am SO confident they can do it better than the system we have now

This is one of their 3-DAY WORK WEEKS that we all pay for (salary is about $179,000 per year).

I love how the government tries to hide it’s power grabs with happy little names for it’s programs like “Net Neutrality,” the program that sounds harmless but is designed to give them control over the internet.

Nobody, not the people, the courts, or big business want the government sticking their meddlesome, inefficient, “tax and spend” nose in the internet; the coolest, freest, bestest communication method ever.

Of course, the pompous bigwigs running the country so effectively (haven’t they done a GREAT job with bailouts, Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac, Social Security, and health care are convinced they would to a great job running the internet too- and taxing it somehow. Here’s a great piece on it by Heritage.org:

Following his party’s devastating losses last November, President Barack Obama made clear that where his party could no longer legislate, it will regulate. Just a month later, America saw his words become action when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to issue new rules regulating the Internet, even though courts and Congress have stood in opposition to its actions. Tomorrow, the House of Representatives is poised to voice its opposition to the FCC’s unmitigated power grab and will vote on a resolution to block the FCC’s rules, sending a powerful message that enough regulation is enough, and the FCC should keep its hands off the Internet.

The policy the FCC is trying to enact is known as “net neutrality,” an unfortunately vague code word for government regulation of the Internet. Supporters of net neutrality will tell you the regulation is necessary to keep the Internet “free and open” and to prevent corporations from “throttling” network speeds, making it faster to download some things, slower to download others. And, in this doomsday, apocalyptic, dystopian future, only the FCC can save the day with more and more government regulations.

FCC, stay home, the reality is much different. FCC commissioner Robert McDowell, who opposes the net neutrality policy, explains that the policy isn’t needed, and regulation by the FCC can lead to even greater problems, such as rival Internet providers attacking each other in hopes of getting them regulated:

Everybody wants an open Internet that enhances freedom, but that’s what we have today. We already have enough consumer protection laws on the books to cure many of the hypothesized fears (that some see). The goal should be to make the market more competitive.

All we are going to do with this FCC decision is clog up the courts and increase billable hours for lawyers; litigation will supplant innovation.

So how does that affect consumers? The Heritage Foundation’s James Gattuso explains:

The net result [of net neutrality]— a slower and more congested Internet, and more frustration for users. Even worse, investment in expanding the Internet will be chilled, as FCC control of network management makes investment less inviting. The amounts at stake aren’t trivial, with tens of billions invested each year in Internet expansion.

Case in point: MetroPCS, a wireless company that offers low-cost, prepaid cellular plans for consumers who don’t want a long-term contract. The company offers a $40 per month plan for customers on its slower 2G wireless network and, to sweeten the deal, provides compressed versions of YouTube videos to its customers who otherwise couldn’t receive streamed videos with their service. Thanks to the FCC’s rules, MetroPCS is now facing a complaint for violating net neutrality. Its crime? Devising a low-cost way to provide fast, efficient wireless services to its customers. So much for innovation in the marketplace.

The need for regulation of the Internet aside, the FCC doesn’t even have the legal authority to enact these regulations. Like any federal agency, the FCC can only issue regulations if Congress delegates it the power to do so. Though the FCC has the power to regulate telecommunications, it hasn’t been granted the power to regulate the Internet. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC’s attempt to regulate the Internet was outside the scope of its authority. That didn’t stop the FCC, though. It went ahead and issued new regulations anyhow.

That regulatory overreach is unfortunately all too common in the Obama administration. From the FTC to the FCC, the EPA to HHS, an alphabet soup of agencies are issuing a spiderweb of regulations touching all corners of American life. The food we eat, the cars we drive, and now the Internet we surf are all subject to regulations by unelected bureaucrats.

The Internet is one of the Obama administrative state’s next targets. Congress, thankfully, has taken note – this time. But Americans must take note, too, and heed their president’s promise. What he can’t do by law, he will do by regulation. And once enacted under the cover of night, such regulations are not easy to untangle.

We’ve all heard how concerned President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid are about the deficit, right? Well, here’s an example of just how concerned they really are.

Watch as Harry Reid (remember, he’s the SENATE MAJORITY LEADER of this country) defends COWBOY POETRY as he strains to excuse the out of control spending he and his fuzzy thinking cronies endorse (after watching, check out a great example of cowboy poetry below, which, I might add, came into being without a dime of federal government funding (gasp!)

An ol’ cowpoke went ridin’ out one dark and windy day
Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way
When all at once he spied a posse from the GOP
A-hangin’ from that ol’ mesquite his fed’ral subsidy

His pen was still a-fire and he knew how to spell “git”
But an ol’ paint can’t outride a trillion-dollar deficit
If only Harry Reid can head ’em off at that there pass
‘Cuz he hasn’t finished paying off creative-writing class

Yipp-ki-o yippi-ki-ay
Cow Poets On The Dole
Yipp-ki-o yippi-ki-ay
Cow Poets On The Dole…

By Mark Stein

Heart warming stuff! I wonder how on earth he does it without the support of the federal government? Amazing!

John J. Kennedy held a dinner in the White House that included some of the brightest minds of his time. During that event he made this statement:

“This is perhaps the assembly of the most intelligence ever to gather at one time in the White House, with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Here are some of Thomas Jefferson’s great quotes:

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe .

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Some great food for thought from one of America’s brightest minds.