Welcome to America: now stand in line for three hours. Millions of British holidaymakers and business travellers heading for the US this summer face longer waits than ever to be processed by immigration.
Research by The Independent reveals that budget cuts at US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have sharply increased airport queues, with the worst delays in the “Sunshine State” of Florida.
The longest maximum average wait time for international arrivals [...]
The CBO said this week that America’s fiscal deficit will be much smaller than anyone thought, and that long term debt growth will slow by at least 3 points through the next decade.
That’s good news right?
In his note today, Deutsche Bank‘s Joe LaVorgna says there is even more than meets the eye in the report.
Specifically, the rosier CBO report means there’s now less pressure on Congress to keep the Sequester, and more [...]
Over 12,000 Israelis took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities to protest against proposed tax hikes and spending cuts in the state’s new budget. But will the latest iteration of Israel’s social justice protest movement continue? The anger in the streets Saturday may be an indication that the movement will continue and possibly grow.
http://972mag.com/masses-demonstrate-against-austerity-measures-in-israel/71246/
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) ripped the media in a speech Tuesday to the Ripon Society, arguing press coverage is partly responsible for the GOP’s messaging woes.
Cantor, who has tried to recast the image of the GOP with his Making Life Work agenda, said the party’s economic message is often drowned out by coverage of debt and deficits.
“The media has done a great job of sort of shoving us [...]
Of all the military services facing budget pressure this year, the Army is in the direst of straits. The budget Congress finally passed a month ago will help matters, but the service says it’s still more than $15 billion short of funds in fiscal 2013.
Army senior leaders told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that the elimination of a continuing resolution and thepassage of a formal budget only fixed about a [...]
President Barack Obama’s 2014 budget puts a $3 million cap on tax-advantaged retirement accounts to crack down on “wealthy individuals” using these investment vehicles to earn “substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement savings.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/23/Obama-s-3-Million-Retirement-Cap-Would-Not-Apply-To-Himself
The Saudi national injured during the bomb attacks at the Boston Marathon Monday has been cleared and is no longer even a person of interest, intelligence officials told lawmakers Tuesday.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper briefed members of the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors in a pre-scheduled hearing that was supposed to focus on the budget, but Clapper began with an update of the bombings. Ranking RepublicanSaxby Chambliss (R-GA) emerged from the [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Retired as a city worker, Sheila Pugachlives in a modest home on a quiet street in Albuquerque, N.M., and drives an 18-year-old Subaru.
Pugach doesn’t see herself as upper-income by any stretch, but President Barack Obama’s budget would raise her Medicarepremiums and those of other comfortably retired seniors, adding to a surcharge that already costs some 2 million beneficiaries hundreds of dollars a year each.
http://news.yahoo.com/medicare-hike-could-hit-middle-class-075045878–politics.html
from FT:
President Barack Obama’s budget this week makes clear the real political equilibrium in the US. The federal government is shrinking. Discretionary spending in the new Obama budget would shrink to 4.9 per cent of gross domestic product in 2023, compared with 7.9 per cent of GDP in 2008. Both parties have signed on to this shrinkage. Neither will try to stop it.
The implications are enormous. Until 2017 at the [...]
In his weekly radio address, President Obama explained the budget he’ll rollout next week, and said, “the truth is, our deficits are already shrinking.”
“My budget will reduce our deficits not with aimless, reckless spending cuts that hurt students and seniors and middle-class families – but through the balanced approach that the American people prefer, and the investments that a growing economy demands,” said Obama.
“Now, the truth is, our deficits are [...]
Bernie Becker
The Hill
April 6, 2013
President Obama’s budget, to be released next week, will limit how much wealthy individuals – like Mitt Romney – can keep in IRAs and other retirement accounts.
The proposal would save around $9 billion over a decade, a senior administration official said, while also bringing more fairness to the tax code.
The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these [...]
It appears the Portuguese PM’s threats last week that he would resign if the constitutional court rules against the various austerity measures in the proposed 2013 budget (subsequently recanted because he may have just sensed which way the winds are blowing), were not enough to pressure the court into voting the way the German rulers of the Eurozone demanded, because moments ago the high court said that some budget elements [...]
Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.
Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.
Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.
“If we treated the patients receiving the [...]
Were California’s state government a business, it would be a candidate for insolvency with a negative net worth of $127.2 billion, according to an annual financial report issued by State AuditorElaine Howle and the Bureau of State Audits.
The report, which covers the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, says that the state’s negative status — all of its assets minus all of its liabilities — increased that year, largely because it spent more than it [...]
(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama, who has increased the national debt by $53,377 per household, has proclaimed April“National Financial Capability Month,” during which his administration will do things such as teach young people “how to budget responsibly.”
“I call upon all Americans to observe this month with programs and activities to improve their understanding of financial principles and practices,” Obama said in an official proclamation released Friday.
“My Administration is dedicated to helping [...]
Never before have the sentiments of this ‘politics over prosperity’ President been more clear than in the aftermath of the sequestration debate. Since the reality of the $85 billion cuts across government departments, agencies and programs has set in, the President has set a clear and convincing course in trying to punish Americans in a very public manner, for the concept of reigning in government spending, and has continued to [...]
In the last batch of amendment votes to the budget, the Senate voted on several foreign policy proposals.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) introduced an amendment that would prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty in order to uphold the Second Amendment. His amendment passed on a 53-46 vote.
Republicans have been critical of President Obama’s decision to consider the treaty, although Obama has said he would [...]
The Senate will vote Wednesday afternoon on whether to force the White House to start allowing public tours again — one of a series of high-profile showdowns senators have scheduled as they push to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.
After days of stalemate, lawmakers agreed to hold votes on the White House tours, on cutting off funding for political science research and on keeping meat plant inspections up and running in spite [...]
President Obama is meeting with House Republicans at the Capitol. According to GOP sources, members are challenging him on a variety of issues.
Representative James Lankford (R., Okla.) spoke up and talked about the Ryan budget. He urged the president to support a budget that balances in a decade.
Representative Dave Camp (R., Mich.) asked the president to back entitlement reform, and to work hard to find consensus. He wants the president [...]
The estimated population of the United States is 314,551,288
so each citizen’s share of this debt is $53,081.13.
=========================
Treasury Direct link
The Daily History of the Debt Results
Historical returns from 03/01/2013 through 03/06/2013
The data for the total public debt outstanding is published each business day. If there is no debt value for the date(s) you requested, the value for the preceding business day will be displayed.
( Debt Held by the Public vs. Intragovernmental Holdings )
Date
Debt Held by [...]
by Justin Burkhardt, Zero Hedge:
The United Stated economy is hanging on tight in preparation for the looming apocalypse that is the fiscal cliff. Just feet from the edge and a decision was made to… You guessed it, push back the deadlines. You know that progress is weak when the U.S. Government keeps coming to the conclusion that the best decision is to remain in a state of indecision.
Today the U.S. House [...]
US SPENDING ENTIRE GOLD RESERVES EVERY 6 MONTHS!
We “purport” to have just over 8.000 tons of Gold. For round numbers this is valued between $400 billion and $500 billion. The Fed has in place (probably clandestinely much more) a plan to purchase $85 billion per month of Treasury bonds that the Treasury must issue but nobody else wants to buy. $85 billion times 12 equals $1 trillion two hundred 60 billion. [...]
Obama Budgets $307 Billion For the African Internet, etc.
The “Alliance For An Affordable Internet” is a public-private partnership which intends to build a huge, expensive African Internet. Its headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, now dubbed “Africa’s Silicon Valley”.
Hillary Clinton alluded to this monstrous State Department project when she stepped down from her Secretary job on February 1, 2013. She said, “One billion more persons will have access to the Internet”. [...]
Must-read: The real story on Obama and the “sequester”
…The reductions the sequesters require are reductions in the rate of increased spending from those originally planned by Obama and authorized by Congress. Since the federal government has not had a budget in four years, even though federal law requires it to have one every year, these are planned expenditures, not budgetary items, on which the president wants to spend more money.
Congress [...]
“It depends on how long,” Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly WOR radio show with John Gambling. “If it lasts a few weeks, no. If it does, yeah. We get 10 or 12 percent of our budget from the federal government, not all of that is going to be cut back, but there would be effects–not good effects. But in the context of, ‘Is anything going to change tomorrow? Are we [...]
Hedge fund icon Stanley Druckenmiller sat down for a rare one-on-one interview with Bloomberg Television’s Stephanie Ruhle, saying that he’s decided to speak out now because he sees “a storm coming, maybe bigger than the storm we had in 2008, 2010.”
Druckenmiller said that the mushrooming costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with unfunded liabilities as high as $211 trillion, will bankrupt the nation’s youth an pose a much greater [...]
The sequester is here to stay — at least for a while. Lawmakers and aides say they do not expect Congress to turn off budget sequestration before April and that negotiations to freeze the automatic spending cuts could drag into May or beyond.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com …
Some members of Congress apparently don’t like to be reminded about how much debt the country continues to rack up.
During a House Financial Services Committee hearing Tuesday on the budget, two Democrats complained after House Financial Services Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling instructed that two monitors in the hearing room display a real-time running national debt clock.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/26/democrats-complain-about-presence-of-debt-clock-on-capitol-hill/#ixzz2M6YE0aaI
The sequester is officially still three days away, but the Obama administration already is making the first cuts, with officials confirming that the Homeland Security Department already has released several hundred illegal immigrants from detention in order to save money.
The move is proving controversial. Immigrant-rights groups say it shows the administration was detaining folks it never should have gone after in the first place, while Republicans questioned the decision-making.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/26/illegal-immigrants-released-detention-centers-sequ/#ixzz2M2skbatR
WASHINGTON — The Department of [...]
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Senators on Tuesday sounded increasingly pessimistic about avoiding the automatic budget cuts set to kick in on Friday, predicting they’ll go forward absent an elusive deal on taxes.
“Until there’s some agreement on revenue I think we should go ahead with the sequester,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, told reporters on Capitol Hill. Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, told reporters: “The spending cuts [...]
market-ticker.org / By Karl Denninger /
Here’s the bottom line folks:
These are the major spending items in the US Budget, from 1980 to today. I am ignoring all the ones that don’t matter, and I’m also intentionally leaving in one foil often used by both sides of the debate for scale purposes (Education.)
Of particular interest (and alarm) is Welfare, which doubled from 2007 to 2010. But — it appears to have come down some [...]
Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reportedly believes the military should receive a pay cut in order to respond to the budget cuts facing the Pentagon — a position that might strengthen the Republican push to reverse President Obama’s executive order raising the salary of Vice President Joe Biden and other federal officials.
Read more:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/panetta-to-propose-military-pay-cut-after-obama-raised-federal-officials-pay/article/2520741
The “No Budget, No Pay” bill passed the Senate Thursday afternoon, sending the measure to the President’s desk for a final signature.
The bill suspends the debt ceiling until May 18 and contains a measure that cuts off pay for member of Congress in the event that the Senate does not produce a budget that the House approves.
However, the title of the legislation is misleading.
Members of Congress will get paid — members earn $174,000 per year, or $348,000 per [...]
By Dr. Constantin Gurdgiev
One theme I’ve been tracking over some time now is the longer-term state liabilities.
Here’s a note from Fitch on the matter:
“Without the implementation of mitigating reforms the median country analysed in our new report today is projected to see its budget worsen by 0.6% of GDP by 2020 and 4.9% of GDP by 2050. Consequently, many of these countries would experience escalating government debt-to-GDP ratios, with the [...]
Gabriella Hoffman’s paycheck is a little lighter today, thanks to a payroll tax increase that is forcing millions of Americans to make the kind of tough budget cuts their representatives in Washington lawmakers seem unwilling to tackle.
Hoffman, a 21-year-old Virginian who works at a nonprofit, estimates her paycheck will be roughly $30 less this biweekly pay period, or about $780 annually, thanks to the end of a two-year cut on [...]
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