The Federal Debt

Just had a look at the FY 2010 Federal Budget, the first totally controlled by Obama (although it would be wrong not to give him credit/blame for changes in the FY2009 budget).

At the end of Bush's last complete fiscal year, the debt held by the public (as opposed to on-the books debt held by the Social Security Administration, Medicare, and other governmental agencies) was $5,803 billion. It is currently, as of 11/12/09, $7,588 billion. By the end of Obama's first term's fiscal year, this debt is projected at $10,985.

At the end of the last complete Clinton Fiscal year (9/30/2000) this debt was $3,405.

So, if my math is correct, Bush added c. $2.6 billion to the public held debt in 8 years, while Obama is adding $5.1 billion in 4 years.

Note: The Total Public Debt (Federal) now is $11,986,954,033,520. as of yesterday.
The FY 2010 budget is projected to add $1,171 billion to the debt.

UPDATE: The FY2010 Budget is already off by $20 Billion with $176.4 Billion in deficits for the month. Revenues at 18% lower than expected.
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/13/october-deficit-bigger-than-expected/

Definitions

Joe Klein recently defined neoconservatism in roughly accurate terms, “as unilateral bellicosity cloaked in the utopian rhetoric of freedom and democracy.”

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1826064,00.html

I like that definition because it got me thinking of the definition of liberalism, as practiced in the US. Winston Churchill famously said that a 20 year old who is not a liberal has no heart and a 40 year old who is not a conservative has no brain. I think that this is true, with the basic reason that liberalism tends to disregard the behavior sciences and doesn't understand how people think and act.

Liberalism perhaps should be defined as “as oligarchy cloaked in the utopian rhetoric of social justice, freedom and democracy.”

Shakeup In the Obama Administration

"Democratic officials said Craig(Chief Legal Counsel) was ousted because of frustration among senior White House aides over his handling of the plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. As the White House's top lawyer, Craig was pivotal in advising Obama to sign an executive order during his first week in office promising to shut the prison by the end of January 2010.


In a politically embarrassing move that has frustrated some of the president's liberal supporters, White House aides have since backed off that deadline, citing complex legal issues surrounding what to do with the approximately 200 terror suspects still detained at Guantanamo."

Who knew that it was a tricky matter dealing with Gitmo people? Oh, that's right-Bush.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/11/12/top-white-house-lawyer-pushed-out/

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Maybe Clinton's directive should be extended to religion as well as sexual orientation in the military.
Nadal Hasan openly talked about jihad, the problems with sending Muslims to fight in "Muslim" wars, etc. The Turkish Army, with strong secular tendencies, would have booted out someone like Hasan some time ago.

http//www.forbes.com/2009/11/12/major-nidal-hassan-fort-hood-muslim-opinions-columnists-melik-kaylan.html

Obama's Health Tax

What is a tax? Wouldn't the requirement to buy insurance (regardless of anything you do, such as driving) constitute a tax? Certainly the dictionary would say so:
"a charge…imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes” is commonly considered a tax."

Anyway, it appears now that there may be a 2.5% of income penalty if someone does not purchase health insurance and a 11% of income "tax" (or compulsory premium) to buy health insurance. It will be interesting to see how many opt for the penalty instead of the tax.

http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/04/obamas-hidden-fees

http://republicans.waysandmeans.house.gov/webreturn/?url=http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10691/hr3962SubsidiesRangelLtr.pdf

Pakistan Drone War

"Obama, far from curtailing the drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush, has dramatically increased the number of U.S. Predator and Reaper drone strikes. There have been 44 strikes in Pakistan this year (two while Bush was still in office), compared with 34 in all of 2008. None of the strikes under either Bush or Obama has targeted Osama bin Laden, who seems to have vanished like a wraith."

"Under President Obama, the strikes have taken out at most half a dozen militant leaders while killing approximately 450 other people. Of those, about 75 percent are reported to have been lower-level militants, and about a quarter appear to have been civilians. The strikes appear to have killed a slightly lower percentage of civilians in the past nine months than during the earlier years of the American drone campaign in Pakistan."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/29/bergen.drone.war/index.html

I just do not get it. So much is being written about waterboarding 3 people under medical supervision and prosecuting those responsible for this action and yet nothing is being done to determine who authorized this undeclared war on Pakistani civilians.

Grad Student Wins Nobel Prize for Economics

"Pfuffnick's Nobel Economics Prize triumph hailed by manyLONDON — The surprise choice of first-year graduate student Quintus Pfuffnick for the Nobel Prize in Economics drew praise from much of the world Friday even as many pointed out the youthful economist has not yet published anything in scholarly journals."

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/10/first-year-grad-student-wins-nobel.html