Budget and Deficit

I was honored to be the speaker tonight for the Flower Mound Area Republican Club's January meeting. The major topic was that it's relatively easy to balance the budget simply by getting spending modestly under control. 

I had prepared two PowerPoint slides to help illustrate the points, but due to a miscommunication I wasn't able to slow the slides. So here they are.

Good for Jon Stewart to see the insanity in Paul Krugman's $1 trillion magic coin idea.

The story is here from Politico.

As we've written, the idea is terrible economics and terrible politics, but that's par for the course with Krugman.

Can't you just picture a scene in the movie "Idiocracy" where President Camacho fires his automatic rifle into the sky and announces "I have a new plan that's going to fix everything! We're going to mint up some $1 trillion coins and that's going to fix EVERYTHING!"

Ever since passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011, most people have assumed that, eventually, some sort of deal would get done. Both sides have something to lose, the thinking went, so both sides will eventually compromise to spare the country from going over the fiscal cliff.

And everyone also assumed that, while the outcome of the election would tilt the balance of power, still both sides had something to lose, so a deal would get done.

And that makes sense, if you assume both sides have something to lose.

But what if, even before the election, one side thought it did NOT have much to lose? What if, in fact, one side thought it had almost nothing to lose and much to gain, and the outcome of the election simply confirmed this calculation? What then?

You get what you elect, whether you're New York City electing a nanny and a scold for a mayor, or whether you're France, electing a Socialist instead of making necessary reforms to an already bloated government sector that promises greater benefits than the productive sector can possibly subsidize.

So the Hollande disaster is beginning for France. Today, Hollande decreed that they would LOWER the retirement age, from 62 down to 60.

Tonight I'm going to be giving a talk about how it's actually easy to balance the federal budget. In fact, it's easy to balance it in 5 years.

Does that surprise you? You don't exactly hear that in the media, do you?

Did you know that if we simply cut federal spending by 1 percent a year, in the fifth year of doing so the federal budget would be balanced, and federal spending would be about 18% of GDP, which is a hair below the historical average since World War II?

According to an opinion piece in today's Politico, Mitt Romney has revealed that he is a Keynesian. Is Romney a Keynesian? Is that a problem? And is anyone surprised?

It has been 1114 days since Congress’ failure to pass a budget, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers says this time, if they can’t accomplish their most fundamental of obligations, it’s literally time to pay.