Budget – The Burning Platform

Beltway Conservative Budget Plans Are Big Spending and Anti-Liberty

Guest Post by Ron Paul

According to a recent poll, 73 percent of all Americans oppose increases in federal spending. Since this anti-government spending sentiment is a major reason Republicans control the House and Senate, one would expect the Republican Congress to hold the line on, or even cut, government spending. Yet, despite the Republican leadership’s rhetoric about “fiscal responsibility,” this year’s House Republican budget spends $104 billion more than the GOP’s 2013 budget.

Some conservatives, most notably the Heritage Foundation, have criticized the GOP budget. Heritage and the conservative House Republican Study Committee (RSC) have both prepared conservative alternatives to the official Republican budgets. Unfortunately, neither Heritage nor the RSC budgets meaningfully reduce federal spending.

Conservative efforts to reduce the size of government are handicapped by their love affair with the military-industrial complex. Since the Pentagon’s budget makes up the largest category of “discretionary” spending, it seems logical that a serious balanced budget plan would reduce spending on militarism.

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Meet John Boehner Ryan——The GOP’s Favorite Fiscal Fake Folds Fast

Guest Post by David Stockman

That didn’t take long. Recall that just two months ago Speaker John Boehner announced he would abruptly resign right in the middle of his term. He said he was tired of taking gaff from conservative backbenchers on account of his serial sell-outs of even tepid House GOP efforts at fiscal discipline.

We greeted Boehner’s announcement with a Bronx cheer: Good riddance to Johnny Lawnchair, the fastest fold on the Potomac!

Supposedly a new era was dawning under his successor Paul Ryan, but not so. The lawnchair never left—-its just got a new occupant.

Now after just 51 days in office Ryan has forced the GOP to walk the plank on what under any honest form of fiscal accounting is a $2.5 trillion addition to the national debt.

Well, make that any form of accounting at all. This whole stinking pile of backroom deals was pushed through so fast that even CBO has not had a chance to fully analyze and score the bill.

In that regard, for the first time in his life, Harry Reid told the truth after this Ryan-Obama midnight special was whisked through the House and Senate. Said the man of legendary forked tongue,

“Sometime in the darkness, the bill was finalized……..no legislation is perfect, but this is good legislation.”

I have said all along the Paul Ryan is a complete fiscal fake. After all, he has spent years braying about the national debt, but never saw a defense program he didn’t want to fund or a bailout that would help his Wisconsin district that he couldn’t rationalize.

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WHEN IN DOUBT – LIE

It’s easy to balance the budget when you make $32 billion of “mistakes” all going in the same direction to make your budget look better than it really is. And millions of willfully ignorant drones in this country want government to have more power, more control, and more of our money. Then they try to blame libertarians for the fucked up state of this country.

How “Accounting Mistakes” Cost California Taxpayers $32 Billion This Year

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/01/2014 20:06 -0400

Spend more than 30 minutes watching TV in California and you will be bombarded by politicians proclaiming they single-handedly balanced the budget, brought prosperity back to the Silicon Valley alone, and turned water into wine. Yet, oddly, there is one thing none of them seem too quick to admit to. As CBS reports, the state office in charge of keeping track of California taxpayers’ money made tens of billions of accounting mistakes. CBS added it up and came up with a big number: $31.65 billion in errors. That’s more than the gross domestic product of Iceland and Jamaica combined.

As CBS reports,

Controller John Chiang’s office is the state’s financial watchdog, but an audit by the Bureau of State Audits claims the office’s accounting is off by billions of dollars.

The audit revealed:

$7.7 billion – Understated federal trust fund revenues and expenditures

$653 million – Overstated general fund assets and revenues

$8 billion – Overstated California State University’s bond debt

$9.1 billion – Reporting error that understated a public building construction fund

Also there was a deferred tax-revenue figure posted as $6.2 billion when it was actually $6.2 million.

All told, that’s more than $31 billion in mistakes.

Sacramento State accounting professor John Corless agrees with auditors saying those glaring mistakes should have been caught by somebody.

“Someone’s not using their equipment right, and they’re not using their heads,” he said.
Republican consultant Mitch Zak is calling for an investigation.

“It’s offensive as a taxpayer,” he said. “There’s no consideration it appears if they misstate or mismanage my tax dollars that there’s any retribution.”

Chiang is running for state treasurer. His aides refused to go on camera for this story.

They said they concur with the assessment, and they blame high staff turnover and a lack of qualified staff, budget cuts, and late and incorrect data from numerous agencies.

Of course, we are sure that no one knows anything about it; no one is responsible for the errors; no one is accountable for the missing money; but a full-scale probe-y investigation will be launched… well played government. Doesn’t matter after all – it’s not their money.