United Liberty

There was a plethora of bad news from the White House this morning:

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) — U.S. unemployment will surge to 10 percent this year and the budget deficit will widen to $1.5 trillion next year, reflecting a “deeper recession” than previously expected, White House budget chief Peter Orszag said.

The Office of Management and Budget also forecasts that the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year, worse than the 1.2 percent contraction the OMB projected in May. For next year, the budget office said the gross domestic product will grow 2.0 percent, less than the 3.2 percent expected in May. By 2011, the economy would be well on its way to recovery, growing at a 3.8 percent annual rate, according to the administration’s mid-year economic review, released this morning.

The “stimulus” bill paid for sex research:

The next fiscal year is set to be one of the friskiest ever in the nation’s science labs, as researchers probe the ins and outs of sex patterns among humans and even some of our four-legged friends.

Among the most titillating grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health are studies that would:

* Examine “barriers to correct condom use” at Indiana University, at a cost of $221,000.

* Study “hookups” among adolescents at Syracuse University. Study’s cost: $219,000.

* Evaluate “drug use as a sex enhancer” in an analysis of “high-risk community sex networks” at the University of Illinois, Chicago. That study will cost $123,000.

* Study how methamphetamine, thought to produce an “insatiable need” for sex among users, “enhances the motivation for female rat sexual behavior.” Some $28,000 has been awarded for the University of Maryland at Baltimore study.

Any member of Congress who voted for this abortion should be impeached.

This revision brings numbers in line with projections from the Congressional Budget Office, which showed a $9 trillion budget deficit over the next ten years back in March:

Obama administration officials have concluded the economy was much worse last year — and tax revenues much lower — than they had initially assumed, which means that the estimated budget deficit will increase from $7 trillion to about $9 trillion over the coming decade.

The planned revision was first reported by Reuters, and White House officials confirmed that account for POLITICO.

There’s no doubt the revision will be interpreted as bad news for an administration whose deficit spending has emerged as a political Achilles’ heel.

This won’t be the last taste of reality for Obama.

So much for reigning in earmarks:

The cost of earmarks increased this year despite lawmakers’ claims they’re working to reduce pork-barrel spending.

Earmarks, which are inserted in appropriations bills by members in order to fund specific projects, added up to $19.9 billion in 2009, according to an analysis by the Taxpayers for Common Sense and Center for Responsive Politics. Earmarks in 2008 spending bills were worth $18.3 billion.
[…]
The earmark study, released Thursday, found that states with smaller populations, and members of Congress on the appropriations panels, were big earmark winners.

Tax Freedom Day was on April 13th this year. If you’re not familiar with Tax Freedom Day, it is the day the federal tax burden was paid for 2009.

However, due to an exploding budget deficit, today (August 12th) is Cost of Government Day. The day when each American has earned enough to pay for government at all levels (federal, state and local), coming 26 days later than in 2008.

According to the report, the cost of government consumes 61% of national income. Think about that for a second. Government at all levels consumes almost 2/3 of what Americans collectively earn.

What is wrong with our country?

Last week, a friend stopped by to show me the IOU he received fromt he state of California because he overpaid on his income taxes. How much did California owe him? $1.01. It probably cost nearly as much to actually produce the letter.

How obsessed is Barack Obama with government? He actually wants to create a commission to deal with the budget deficit:

President Barack Obama said in a newspaper interview on Wednesday a commission may need to be created to examine structural reforms for addressing the federal budget deficit.

“Probably what you end up having to do in terms of structural reforms realistically is you probably have to set up some sort of commission or mechanism that reports back with the prospect of maybe locking in a pledge for action, post-election,” he told the Washington Post, adding that “everything is going to have to be on (the) table.”

Really? I guess it’s just too much to admit that we need to cut spending. You don’t need a commission to tell you the obvious.

The folks are Recovery.Gov are doing their job informing us of the many vital projects that President Obama’s stimulus package is helping to fund.

Projects such as:

$ 5,708,260 for processed cheese for the Dept. of Agriculture

$1,562,568 for Mozarella Cheese, also for the Dept. of Agriculture

On Tuesday night during the All-Star Game, President Barack Obama told Tim McCarver and Joe Buck that the nation is broke, as if that was evident already considering our $1 trillion budget deficit. That apparently means nothing to Vice President Joe Biden (nor the president himself), who recently told the AARP that we’ve got to spend to keep from going bankrupt:

Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.

This neat little video does a great job of putting in perspective the promises the Obama Administration prior to the passage of the stimulus bill, and the reality of what actually occurred: