Month: February 2013

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Federal deficits and debt have risen under President Obama, but
the evidence continues to show that the Bush Great Recession, President
Bush’s tax cuts, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain most of
the deficits that have occurred on Obama’s watch — based on the latest
Congressional Budget Office projections. Excerpts from a new report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

Though some lawmakers and pundits continue to blame record deficits on
the President’s policies in general — and his actions to boost the
economy and stabilize the financial system in particular — these
policies increase budget deficits only briefly; they will have no
significant impact on the long-term problem of large deficits and rising
debt.

* * *

Although longer-term pressures on spending stem chiefly from
an aging population and rising health-care costs, those pressures are
not new.  Policymakers knew about them when they enacted the Bush-era
tax cuts and assented to fighting two wars on borrowed money.  (These
pressures also were taken into account in the Congressional Budget
Office projections issued at the start of 2001, which showed budget surpluses for the next several decades.)

The
goal of reining in long-term deficits and debt would be much easier to
achieve if it were not for the policies set in motion during the Bush
years.  That era’s tax cuts — most of which policymakers extended in
this year’s American Taxpayer Relief Act, with President Obama’s support
— and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the debt that we will owe, under current policies, by 2019. 
By contrast, the economic recovery measures and financial rescues will
account for just over 10 percent of the debt at that time.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

How sad. . . it's official, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward has jumped the shark. Bob Woodward: White House said I would ‘regret’ pursuing story:

Longtime Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward is taking on the White House, saying in multiple interviews that the administration essentially threatened him to try to get him not to write a story.

Politico [Tiger Beat on The Potomac] has an interview with Woodward and his correspondence with top Obama economic adviser Gene Sperling, in which Sperling apologizes for raising his voice at Woodward in a phone call but then proceeds to say Woodward would “regret” it if he pursued his story — about whether Obama had moved the goalposts on the sequester.

“But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post,” Sperling said in the e-mail obtained by Politico. “I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

Woodward, who didn’t name Sperling in his interviews, which occurred before the actual e-mails came out, said that last sentence amounted to a thinly veiled threat.

Of what exactly? Woodward does not say. What is Sperling going to do, take away his birthdays?

I think it is pretty clear from the context that Gene Sperling was trying to waive Bob off from making a fool of himself by taking an untenable position. Woodward has been roundly criticized for his opinion by other Washington pundits for being factually incorrect, to which he has demonstrated an unusual degree of sensitivity and pique to their criticism. Woodward is putting on airs by giving multiple interviews with fawning media villagers essentially huffing "how dare anyone question my reporting."

by David Safier Mark Bittman, food writer for the NY Times, has a column this morning citing a study that concludes the relationship of sugar to diabetes is as clear as the relationship of smoking to lung cancer. One of the study's authors told Bittman, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be … Read more