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CNSNews.com – Chief Treasury Economist Says White House Economic Forecast is ‘Smoother’ than Can Be Expected in Reality.

(entire article reposted here – please comment!)

Alan B. Krueger, U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy

Tuesday, September 08, 2009
By Matt Cover

(CNSNews.com) – Alan Krueger, assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the Treasury Department, told reporters that the economic projections used by the White House–which foresee a decade of uninterrupted economic growth ahead–are “smoother” than what can be expected in reality.

Even with this smoother-than-reality economic forecast, the administration is predicting that the federal government will run up an additional $905 billion in deficit spending over the next decade, almost doubling the national debt.

Krueger, speaking to reporters at a Friday briefing, said that while the administration’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth forecasts were largely in line with private estimates, numerous factors could affect and alter those estimates.

“It’s the nature of forecasting that forecasts typically are smoother than the realizations,” he said. “Your hope is that the ups and downs balance out and, on average, are on the forecasted path.”

What Krueger did not mention is that, while the administration’s projections are close to those of private economists, known as the Blue Chip Consensus, those private forecasts only extend through 2010, while the White House’s extend through 2019.

When asked by CNSNews.com if the fragility of the administration’s projections meant higher budget deficits in the future, Krueger said that deficits were inevitable during bad economic times.

“Deficits are inevitable when you’re trying to recover from such a steep recession,” he said.

Krueger also said that, because of that steep recession, it was impossible for the administration to produce a balanced budget in the short term, saying such an idea was not “advisable” for Obama.

“In fact, it wouldn’t be advisable to have a balanced budget at this point or anything close to a balanced budget at this point,” he said.

In the longer run, however, Krueger said that the administration planned to put the budget back on a path toward fiscal responsibility, saying that the country relies far too much on borrowing and not enough on public investment.

“One has to draw a distinction between the short run and the long run,” he said. “Certainly in the longer run the administration plans to put the budget on a path that’s fiscally responsible.”

“In the U.S., I think that we rely too much on borrowing and short-term consumption at the expense of longer-run investment, public infrastructure,” he said. “The president has said that it’s very important that when we emerge from this recession that we build a stronger foundation, one that’s less susceptible to these kinds of boom-and-bust cycles.”

However, the Obama administration’s projected budgets rely on what Krueger criticizes: borrowing to finance short-term consumption.

For example, the Obama administration projects that, as a result of its 2010 budget, the federal government will run a cumulative deficit of $9.05 trillion by the year 2019. In total, the government plans to spend $43 trillion during the next decade while taking in only $34 trillion in tax revenue.

In no year between now and 2019 does the administration plan to balance the budget. In fact, the smallest single-year deficit Obama plans to incur is $739 billion in 2015, after which time the deficit will begin climbing again until it hits nearly $1 trillion ($917 billion) in 2019.

However, Krueger claimed that it was a “very important” part of Obama’s budget to move the country toward “responsible budgeting” and a “more sustainable” path.

“That’s why it’s very important, in the administration’s budget, that we make the critical investments in human capital and physical infrastructure, responsible budgeting, health care reform, clean energy, to move the U.S. to a more sustainable economic path,” he said.

Where is Liberty?

Given that every instance of collectivism…

Requires the Force of Government to initiate, regulate and administer; and

Eliiminates all rights of all individuals to determine and act in whatever they perceive as being in their individual best interest, and steals from the citizens whatever monies government, not the individual, deems necessary and appropriate, and

Eliminates the natural benefits of competition and choices always best provided by a truly free market, and

Sacrifices and removes all individual alternatives and incentives toward maximizing one’s life, then

Insist on an answer to this one Question:

How does this enhance or preserve our natural rights to
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The above was my reply to a TownHall post in Digg this morning, listing 10 questions to ask those who are pushing for, in this instance, Obamacare.  The questions were great, designed to show any collectivist all the fallacies in this ruse but, as usual, missed the main point.

I have become simply exhausted and exasperated with every debate over so-called health-care or any other collectivist program deteriorating into a debate over

• whether it’s fascism or socialism or communism or….,  and
• The pro’s and con’s of each and every item in a 14-pound 1,500-page new proposal which is intended to distract everyone from the real truth, which is that…
  
• every word within such “debate” is naught but a different approach to enacting still another, still more, intrusion upon our liberty.
• This is exactly the same distraction as the “numbers game” of yore, which was ‘don’t address the issue, instead, declare that a challenged number renders the entire point void.
  

For many moons now, I have been writing about Morality, and more lately expanding to discussion of the Force and Sacrifice, as these are the basis of all governments, which have nothing to “give” except that which they steal from their citizens.  This morality is not about some high-faluting worship of some lord or allah.  It is simply our natural rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

This is clear and concise in our Declaration of Independence, yet so dispised and distorted and shredded within our Constitution.  Over these 230 years, the collectivist / communist set have diligently set out to subvert these basic principles into a pity-pity society in which moral free market capitalism is said to be the villan, and that individual heights are to be subordinated to some nebulous “greater good”, productivity and self-reliance are less important than sloth, and the supreme “moral” value is to sacrifice one’s own life to anyone from anywhere merely because they hold out their hands and say “oh, pity me”.

According to the collectivists, each man, having his own mind and the unique human characteristic of being able to THINK, is now somehow to be denied that treasured characteristic and his mind deferred to any unknown other, who cannot prove and is not required to prove any superiority of Mind over You, the individual.

The brainless immoral collectivist “ethic” has now gained the foothold sought for at least the last century, and has set America on it’s long winding path to economic and moral devastation.  America is leading the path to worldwide self-destruction, to such extent that we must question now whether humanity can survive.

You wonder why life has become poorer and holds little but nonsense and drudgery?  You wonder why “Atlas Shrugged”?  Well, at least we’ve got you wondering — the rest us up to You!

Some of you folks may have seen this — it’s copied from an email I received today.  It’s one of the best regarding the in-eligibility of Barack Obama to claim he is president of our USA.

From: HumanEventsOnline.com
Subject: Obama Birth Certificate – The Complete Story
Date: Sunday, June 7, 2009, 4:39 A

Dear Friend of the Constitution,

Update on The biggest political cover up in American history

Worse than Watergate, Whitewatergate, or any of the other cover ups of previous administrations, is the question of whether Barack Hussein Obama is eligible to serve as President of the United States of America… OR, is he a FRAUD, a USURPER, a man with no legal authority to sit in the position that he now claims to hold?

Barack Obama could simply put the issue to rest RIGHT NOW by releasing his ACTUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE! But he WON’T! Instead, he has had teams of attorneys all over the country, fighting “tooth and nail” to thwart the efforts of the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), and our allies in a number of states, to compel him to produce an ACTUAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE and to prove that he is Constitutionally eligible to serve as President of these United States!

Ohio, Mississippi, Hawaii, and California! These are the states where USJF has been involved in lawsuits seeking an answer to this critical constitutional question!

And now, in California, just like in every lawsuit filed over this issue, the Obama team of attorneys, working with liberal allies in the office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown, has convinced a Sacramento County Superior Court judge to dismiss USJF’s suit to force the truth to come out about whether Barack Obama is a “natural born” citizen, and, therefore, eligible to serve as President of the United States.

BUT WE’RE NOT GIVING UP! Our clients in this case, including 2008 candidate for President of the United States, Alan Keyes, have given USJF the go ahead to file an appeal of this decision!

AND THAT’S WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO — BUT WE NEED YOUR HELP TO DO IT!

A number of apologists for Barack Obama have gone to great lengths to belittle USJF and our allies in the fight to preserve our Constitution. However, the questions that they cannot answer are: continue reading…

Republished from Source: Original Article by J D Longstreet Socialized Medicine in the United States! : WesternFront America May 27th, 2009

So the big push has begun! The big push for socialized medicine in the United States. Altho, there is little funny about this boondoggle, it is sorta funny to watch the socialists in the US government, including the Obama Administration, tie themselves into knots to avoid using the words “socialized” and “medicine” in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence. Nevertheless, that is exactly what they are proposing… socialized medicine. And again, I expect ignorance to overcome logic and sound reasoning as the government shoves socialized medicine down the throats of American citizens and, in so doing, bring about the collapse of the best healthcare system in the world.

If you are one of those who actually think they are doing this because they care about you, you really need to see a shrink about your mental health, I mean your “delusions.”

America is about to experience something we have never had before in our history. Rationing of healthcare. There is simply no escaping it. Costs of healthcare will have to be brought to heel by the Obama administration and there is only one way to do that… and that is to ration it. In other words you will be placed on a waiting list and your ailment will be treated whenever they get to you, in a couple of weeks, a couple of months, or a couple of years, or maybe never. If you don’t get the care you require and you die, so much the better. That is the other way of bringing healthcare costs down.”

My wife had surgery a few days ago. The surgery was performed by a robot. Yep! A well-qualified doctor was supervising the robot, of course, but the robot did the work. The machine, we were told, costs 2 million bucks per copy. I pleaded with my wife, in the few minutes we had before she was whisked away to the operating room, to take extreme care, and for goodness sake, do not damage or break that 2 million dollar robot.

The machine is so complicated it sometimes takes hours to set it up between procedures and, as a result, it can only perform two surgeries a day.

It took only a few days, less than a week, to have the paperwork, blood work, radiological workup, and the surgery performed and return home, in my wife’s case. I was left sitting in one of those uncomfortable chairs in an ultra-modern waiting room, surrounded with huge TVs with drive-in movie size screens and stereo sound, plus a progress board, all lit up, and hanging on a wall, showing the progress of your patient in the surgical process as the hours dragged by. Those of us waiting had the option of relaxing in an area of the “pavilion” where hot coffee and snacks were offered. We were given a “beeper and every hour or so, the beeper would go off and someone from the surgical team would come out and bring us up to date on where, exactly, our patient was in the process and how, generally, the patient was tolerating the supreme invasion of a knife, even a knife wielded by a robot.

The kind of “express’ healthcare we experienced and described above, will be a thing of the past if Obama and the Democratic Socialist Party gets their way and they create and install a government run healthcare system. Of course, they are going to deny that and tell you that folks like me, who actually tell you the truth about such things, are “full of it” and don’t know what we are talking about. The sad thing about all of this is that by the time you find out that those of us warning against a government system are, in fact, telling you the truth, it will be too late and healthcare in the US will be scraping the bottom of the barrel like so many other socialized medicine programs around the globe. In other words it will be too cussed late to do anything about it!

One other thing: Do not feel secure, if, like me, you have your own private health Insurance, Why? Because the government run plan will run the private plans out of business. The private plans will not be government subsidized. The government plan(s) will. How can the private plans even be expected to compete against the government plans when the deck is so stacked against them? The simple answer is… they can’t. Soon you and I, with our private health care plans, will eventually wind up on the government health dole — whether we want to or not — and that’s the ultimate plan!

In an article titled: “Obama’s ‘Public’ Health Plan Will Bankrupt the Nation” Lawrence Kudlow says: “And does anybody believe Obama’s new “public” health-insurance plan isn’t really a bridge to single-payer government-run health care? And does anyone think this plan won’t produce a government gatekeeper that will allocate health services and control prices and therefore crowd-out the private-insurance doctor-hospital system?

Federal boards are going to decide what’s good for you and me. And what’s not good for you and me. These boards will drive a wedge between doctors and patients.” Kudlow goes on to say:”…. the Obama Democrats are determined to force through a state-run system that will bankrupt the country.” Read the entire article HERE.

Currently, there are four plans under consideration. One would simply expand Medicare. It would be a fully government run program and would not have to remain solvent to remain in business. The second would be set-up by the government and be required to remain solvent while establishing their own networks and payment schemes. Then there is the plan to have each state create it’s own state insurance following government guidelines. And the one with the least chance of making it out of committee is to have no government plan at all — and instead — clean up the current private insurance programs and police them better than they have in the past.

If all this sounds like a mess, believe me when I tell you that it IS a mess!

Look, you get nothing for free. Everything has a price, a cost. The cost may be hidden, but, believe me, it is there. The price of socialized medicine in America will be so unbelievably high if will be impossible to hide. The government will have to choose between continuing to raise taxes to pay for it, or reduce the amount of healthcare available to the patients.

There is always the threat of a tax revolt in America if the government continues to raise taxes. Many believe the tax revolt has already begun with the American Tea Parties. The first round if those tea parties saw an estimated one million Americans meeting, all across America, to protest taxes already levied by the government on her citizens. Another wave of Tea Parties are expected on July Fourth, the birthday of the nation, and many in the Republican Party now suspect the American Tea Parties are simply the birth of a third political party in America.

The GOP is between a rock and a hard place here. If they do not put up an extremely good fight against Socialized Medicine in America, there is good reason to believe there will be a mass migration of conservatives from the GOP and into other conservative political parties. The American Tea Party will be perfectly positioned to welcome those migrants into their conservative party.

The Democrat Socialist Party would be well advised to tread lightly on socialized medicine. It could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for them.

**************************

J. D. Longstreet blogs daily at INSIGHT on Freedom … … http://csadispatch.blogspot.com/

I have wasted most of this past 13 months on Digg.com, in futile jousting with immoral collectivists who do not and will not understand the morality of the personal right to life of each individual on this planet, who seek to use the Force of government to negate our right to property, and don’t give one rip about the objective of happiness.  Our right to property is now diverted from sustaining our life and enhancing our happiness, and is now instead being ripped from our hands (stolen) toward furthering the immoral goals of collectivism via Force.

Much time was simply wasted, trying to avoid reading trivia completely irrelevant to the ongoing economic collapse, and even more trivia wading thru irrelevant comments often nothing more than ignorant abusive blurbs consisting of nothing more than FU, FTW.  While we still hang onto the thread of freedom of speech, having to deal with such ignorance wastes everyone’s time and energy for naught.

During this period we have been clobbered by the burst housing bubble, bailouts serving only to increase the national debt, to the election of a non-citizen communist who now purports to be the president of this new USSA, to an infinitely broad “stimulus bill” which we have now seen serving only to increase the already impossible mountain of national debt.  This cannot be funded because the Federal Reserve cannot find buyers for the T-bills and T-bonds, thus Government cannot pay it’s bills nor even fund the bailouts and stimulus.  This is a GOOD thing, although we doubt the liberals and socialists and collectivists will not understand this just yet!

So what has this to do with Digg?  Well, just yesterday Digg ended it’s Shout feature, which was the way we could pass good articles to our friends.  Digg now suggests Facebook and Twitter be used to compensate.  Now I don’t know that you feel this way, but having to play KissyFace and Tweeting is not my idea of useful productive time on the internet, so you’ll not find me there.  If someone knows an equally active social website devoted to active and serious discussion of philosophical political issues and ideas, PLEASE comment and let me know.

But worse with Digg is it’s now blatant attempts to promote bleeding heart crap and to conceal or even delete anything relevant to true Liberty and the current actions of Government seeking to destroy that last vestage of Freedom. For that reason alone, I am done with Digg.com.  I may submit more (of Morality101) articles to Digg, but will not be otherwise participating.  I see no compelling reason that Digg will survive these fatal mistakes.  Leave that to the collectivists to have a mutual admiration society and continue to scheme how to gain more powers to Force.

I hope to convert this blogger into THE major forum for the serious ongoing discussion mentioned.  I wlll need your help to accomplish this, there is too much for me to learn about doing this and so I need the collaboration of others.  I barely know how to “Submit” an article here via WordPress, much less to set up the tools for good interaction between us.

So, requested action(s)

• My email address is available only  to my Friends who know me as Striker101 on Digg.  If you are one of those, please either use your Digg handle or else email me so I know who you are.  You will be authorized as Authors and thus allowed to Post and to Submit.
• To others, you will find my eaddy at the root website of http://morality101.net.
• ONLY to those who understand the foundations of Objectivist or Libertarian philosophy, REGISTER here at  Morality101 so that you can participate, and then DO participate.
• We are not here to argue with collectivists, who are wholly without virtue.  We are here to expand upon the likes of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises.  We are here to destroy collectivism before it destroys Capitalism, the free market and Liberty.

Leave your comments HERE, don’t even bother with Digg anymore.

Whatever revolution that starts in California, always spreads to the nation. In arguably the most liberal state in America, California taxpayers sent a message to the nation on Tuesday: “We’ve Had Enough and We’re Not Going to Take It Anymore!”

Okay, Okay, “Revolution” is not exactly a tax-strike but Wayne Root makes a case for it.  Already in the run for President in 2012.  I like him.

read more | digg story

Groups represent human fellowship and are therefore nearly always morally superior to individuals. Groups that exist for purposes that advance the common good are morally justified in using the power of the group to circumvent the power of mere individuals. This includes confiscating the assets of wealthy individuals …

The laws of my perceptual universe are, to me, as obvious and irrepressible as the laws of physics.  I have come to embrace them and in so doing have enjoyed some modicum of personal success.  The laws of the liberal universe are no doubt as obvious to liberals, but I would argue that they are not irrepressible because…

Pretty good comparison of the individual as far superior to the collective. Given time to pull his thinking together, he’ll reach a rational summit. Well worth the read.

read more | digg story

This particular Parliament, unprecedented in nearly 400 years, has lost such meagre respect as it still retained after, among other sins, handing, entirely unauthorised and incidentally to the extreme detriment of The Queen’s own position as Head of State of the United Kingdom, nearly all its powers to a junta of unelected foreign potentates…

I usually stay quite focused on issues here in the USA, but this Libertarian Alliance website has done much work over the past 3 years and helps us realize that “We are Not Alone”. Readers may wish to bookmark and spend time surfing this website.

Permanent link to website also posted as ‘Libertarian England’ under our “Best Links”.

read more | digg story

In the American Chronicle novels of Gore Vidal, the left liberal revisionist view of American history has achieved a major breakthrough into the American cultural mainstream. But this is far from its only important victory in recent years. It has also made its way into the textbooks that American high school and college students are required to read when they take courses in American history.

Authored by Jeff Riggenbach at LewRockwell.com. Exceptionally well documented article which cannot help but make one aware of how American History has been subtly revised to suit the purposes of the so-called “progressive” agenda.  Constitutes a huge part of the brainwashing which has brought American Liberty to it’s knees.  This will take some time to read, but be be well worth every minute.

read more | digg story

Human life requires action, so it logically follows that humans must take those actions necessary to sustain their lives. We also acknowledge a corollary: Actions cease to be legitimate when they deny others the freedom to act.

This is a very well-written article, no ranting or screaming, just Reason.

Direct non-digg url: http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20090426-OPINION-904260324

read more | digg story