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House GOP votes to ban all earmarks
"House Republicans approved a conference-wide moratorium on earmarks on Thursday, one day after a House committee enacted a ban on for-profit earmarks."
3/11/2010
Permalink ID:10448
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Grovelling With Gadhafi
"P.J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman and earthy veteran of the Clinton White House, said this on Tuesday: "I understand my personal comments were perceived as a personal attack on the President [of Libya]. . . . These comments do not reflect U.S. policy and were not intended to offend. I apologize. . . . I regret that my comments have become an obstacle to further progress in our bilateral relations."
FLASHBACK: The Obama Administration plans to give $400,000 in funding to a Libyan charity run by the Gadhafi family
3/11/2010
Permalink ID:10447
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Obama facing uprising over new NASA strategy
"Obama's decision to kill NASA's Constellation program to launch astronauts into orbit and return Americans to the moon has prompted soul-searching on whether the United States is prepared to cede a pre-eminent space role to Russia and China."
3/11/2010
Permalink ID:10446
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3/11/2010
Permalink ID:10444
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CBO:Cost estimate for the bill as passed by the Senate on December 24, 2009
"CBO and JCT now estimate that, on balance, the direct (mandatory) spending and revenue effects of enacting H.R. 3590 as passed by the Senate would yield a net reduction in federal deficits of $118 billion over the 2010–2019 period. (Direct spending—as distinguished from discretionary spending—is spending that stems from legislation other than appropriation acts.) In our earlier estimate, the budgetary impact was a net reduction in deficits of $132 billion."
3/11/2010
Permalink ID:10442
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The Little Fed Report that Could…and Did Create a Housing Bubble
"While most of the public is consumed by the health care-death-march spectacle, Senators Bob Corker and Chris Dodd are making serious progress on the Senate’s “financial services reform” legislation. The legislation was dead just a couple weeks ago, but Sen. Corker thought he could snag a seat at the grown-up table and stepped forward to ‘cut a deal."
3/10/2010
Permalink ID:10439
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City of San Francisco's Over-$100,000 Gov. workers Earners
"In the 2007 calendar year, the City and County of San Francisco had more than 8,000 employees with total pay over $100,000. Find out who they were, what departments they worked for and how much they made by searching the database below."
3/10/2010
Permalink ID:10433
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The government ran up the largest monthly deficit in history in February
"The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the February deficit totaled $220.9 billion, 14 percent higher than the previous record set in February of last year."
3/10/2010
Permalink ID:10432
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Toyota Dealers Fight Back Against "Predatory Tactics" by GM
"The head of the Toyota National Dealer Council today blasted the federal government for using 'taxpayer dollars' to fund incentive campaigns to lure customers away from Toyota, and accused GM of using ‘fear’ in an attempt to lure away its customers, 1200 WOAI news reports."
3/10/2010
Permalink ID:10407
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Health Insurance Premiums Fell by 3.2% in 2009
"Describing runaway entitlement spending as “health inflation” is terribly misleading (even when Rep. Ryan does it), because doing so confuses rising prices with rising utilization of medical goods and services by people who are insulated from actual costs by taxpayer-financed subsidies."
"Government subsidies also raise costs to those using private insurance. The CMS notes that 2009’s 4.6% increase “private health insurance premium spending per employee . . . resulted in part from an increase in the proportion of high-cost claims—many of whom have temporary COBRA coverage” [emphasis added], which is 65% financed by taxpayers."
"By contrast, health inflation per se is projected to be 2.8% this year — comparable to other labor-intensive service industries and also down from 3.2% in 2009 and 3% in 2008. Morevoer, “out-of-pocket spending is projected to have grown 2.1 percent in 2009, down from 2.8% in 2008.”
"What about all the uninformed media fuss about health insurance companies supposedly “asking for” premium increases of “up to” 39%?"
"If President Obama really wanted to find out how quickly typical health insurance premiums have been increasing, he could have a staffer call the Bureau of Labor Statistics and ask for Table 3A of the “Consumer Price Index Detailed Report Tables Annual Averages 2009.” It turns out the consumer price index for health insurance premiums fell by 3.2% in 2009."
3/10/2010
Permalink ID:10402
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Under the Byrd rules, legislation is subject to a reconciliation point of order challenge because it is "extraneous" if:
- ...it has no budgetary impact;
- ...it increases outlays or reduces revenues and the instructed committee fails to meet its overall instruction;
- ...it is not in the jurisdiction of the committee reporting the title of the reconciliation bill;
- ...it has a budgetary impact which is merely incidental to the policy components of the provision;
- ...it increases outlays or decreases revenues in any one year after 2014 and that offense is not netted at least to zero by other outlay reductions or revenue increases in that title of the bill in that year; and/or,
- ...IT INCLUDES CHANGES IN SOCIAL SECURITY.
3/10/2010
Permalink ID:10400
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CBO’s Estimate of the Budgetary Effects of the President’s Budget - $1.5 trillion in 2010
"If the President’s proposals were enacted, the federal government would record deficits
of $1.5 trillion in 2010 and $1.3 trillion in 2011. Those deficits would
amount to 10.3 percent and 8.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), respectively.
By comparison, the deficit in 2009 totaled 9.9 percent of GDP."
3/9/2010
Permalink ID:10394
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3/9/2010
Permalink ID:10385
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