Minor Thoughts from me to you

Obama Update (Feb 26)

Obama Delivers $3.6 Trillion Budget Blueprint - WSJ.com

The president blamed the nation's economic travails on the administration that preceded him and on a nation that lost its bearings. His budget plan projects a federal deficit of $1.75 trillion for 2009, or 12.3% of the gross domestic product, a level not seen since 1942 as the U.S. plunged into World War II.

"This crisis is neither the result of a normal turn of the business cycle nor an accident of history," the president states in an opening message of the 134-page document. "We arrived at this point as a result of an era of profound irresponsibility that engulfed both private and public institutions from some of our largest companies' executive suites to the seats of power in Washington, D.C."

By 2013, the deficit would drop to $533 billion but begin to climb from there again as the heart of the Baby Boom begins drawing Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Mr. Obama proposes large increases in education funding, including indexing Pell Grants for higher education to inflation and converting the popular scholarship to an automatic "entitlement" program. High-speed rail would gain a $1 billion-a-year grant program, part of a larger effort to boost infrastructure spending even beyond the funds in his $787 billion stimulus plan.

In one of the budget's most ambitious proposals, the president plans to cap the emissions of greenhouse gases, forcing polluters to purchase permits for emissions that would be slowly brought down to 14% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% below 2005 levels by 2050. The sale of those permits, beginning in 2012, would reap $646 billion through 2019. Of those revenues, $525.7 billion would be devoted to extending Mr. Obama's signature "Making Work Pay" $800 tax credit for working couples. Another $120 billion would go to clean energy technology.

Obama's 2% Illusion - WSJ.com

Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama's new spending ambitions.

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

As the journal points out, incomes are falling fast right now. Taking a bigger share of a smaller income isn't really going to give you any extra money.

The Obama Baseline - James C. Capretta - The Corner on National Review Online

Politicians like to say they are "cutting the budget." But budget cutting can only be understood in context. Compared to what?

In budget-speak, there is a "baseline" against which budget decisions are measured. Normally, the "baseline" assumes current law and policy. But if you want to look like you are cutting the budget without really doing so, the answer is to inflate the "baseline" so that the cut is measured against an artificially high target.

President Bill Clinton did exactly that in 1993. In 1990, President Bush 41 had negotiated hard caps on appropriations spending that lasted through 1995. The "baseline" Congress used in 1992 assumed these caps held because a breach would trigger across-the-board cuts. In the first year of his presidency, Clinton wanted to look like he was cutting one dollar in spending for every dollar of taxes he was increasing, even though he wasn't willing to take the heat for real cuts. The solution? He redefined the baseline to assume the caps were no longer operative, announced his support for keeping what was already the law of the land, and claimed a sizeable spending "cut" as his own.

Pres. Barack Obama may be about to do the same thing.

Hope, change, and transparency gives way to huge, bloated budgets and more of the same old Washington tricks.

Happy Thursday!