THE BLOG

I bet you’ve never really wondered what constitutes a full-time employee? You probably figured, like me, that if you worked 40 hours a week (maybe 35), you were considered full-time. Normally, this wouldn’t be a question with which you’d need to concern yourself. Your working hours and the compensation you receive for your labor is between you and your employer. Sure, there are some basic labor laws to ensure you’re not working in a death-trap and that neither you nor your employer get a patently unfair advantage in the negotiation, but that’s pretty much it. Or it should be.

Now that Obamacare has arrived, the federal government has to decide what a full-time employee is because Obamacare contains a lot of rules, triggers, and fines — ahem, taxes — that depend on the designation. As you can imagine, that definition will go on a bit.

In the latest indication of how complicated putting the Affordable Care Act into action will be, the Department of Health and Human Services and Internal Revenue Service issued 18-pages of regulations just to describe what a “full-time employee” is. Of note, to the Feds a full-time employee works an average of just 30 hours a week, not the normally accepted 40 hours.

Now, here is the why. It’s important because when the federal government gets its mitts on something, it gets to call all the rules. That’s why we responsible government types want it as far from our lives as the Constitution demands.

The IRS rule is key because companies with more than 50 full-time employees must provide health insurance under Obamacare, or be fined. Business groups have been warning that small companies might try to replace full-time workers with part-time help to avoid being forced to offer health insurance in 2014, but the 30-hour full-time definition is likely to undermine those plans.

In other words, businesses will do what makes the most sense and cut their employee’s hours to avoid the onerous requirements of Obamacare. The IRS, anticipating that, intends to change the definition of “full-time” to make it harder for businesses to do so.

Now, if businesses have to pay full-time benefits to what are essentially part-time employees, what do you think will happen?

This is simply mind-boggling.

Roughly 100 million people—one-third of the U.S. population—receive aid from at least one means-tested welfare program each month. Average benefits come to around $9,000 per recipient. If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the United States.

[...]

At the beginning of this year, only four of the 80-plus federal welfare programs had work requirements; the Obama Administration has now suspended the work requirements in two of these. After the Obama Administration suspended the work requirement from the food stamp program in 2009, the number of people on food stamps doubled.

Ponder that first paragraph a moment. If we cut every poor person in a world a check for their “share” of what we spend on welfare, we could eliminate poverty. Poof. Gone.

We’re not doing that, though. We’ve turned what should be a safety net into a giant sheet of flypaper, on which we stick the needy practically forever. These days, the quickest way to fall into a life of poverty is to get on the government dole. There are, as Heritage notes, precious few requirements to get the poor off of welfare and standing on their own and it’s only getting worse.

We’re going the wrong way.

By Jeffrey H. Anderson, The Weekly Standard

In the wake of the Treasury Department’s newly released summary of federal spending for 2012, it’s now possible to detail just how profligate the Obama years have been. Here’s the upshot: Under Obama, for every $7 we’ve had, we’ve spent nearly $11 (or, to be more exact, $10.95). That’s like a family that makes $70,000 a year — and is already knee-deep in debt — blowing nearly $110,000 a year.

Read more

Senator Tom Coburn (R-VA) is out with the 2012 edition of his Waste Book, a collection of boondoggles and pork programs approved by Congress every year. He spent the last few days listing some of the more egregious examples of budget banditry on hit Twitter Feed. Here are a few of the best:

entry No. 51: Return of the Jedi? $11,700 federal grant for “Star Wars Day” event at Massachusetts public library.

entry No. 61: $97,000 for floating outhouses for Oregon fishermen

entry No. 46: this year, taxpayers paid $505,000 to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs.

entry No. 9: $3.3 million to bail out failing Alaska tourist boat that’s sinking private business

The Senator points out we’re set to spend $3.6 trillion this year and run a deficit of about $1.2 trillion. Much of that — perhaps even most of that — is due to members of Congress who use our money to secure their own job security. It’s long past time we put people in office who treat our money like the precious commodity is it.

Download the 2012 Waste Book. Share the link with your friends. Tell them about the worst examples you can find. Make sure they know their vote next month can put people in office who won’t tolerate runaway government spending.

I watched the entire Presidential debate last night and, well, it was certainly interesting, wasn’t it? You can get my long-form thoughts here (along with links to several other very good commentaries). Frank Fleming’s roundup of reactions on Twitter is a very good (and funny) read as well.

I’m pleased that spending and the debt got as much attention as it did. Usually, spencing specifics get shoved to the side because there’s rarely enough time to talk at length about them and fit in all the other topics a moderator might want discussed into 90 minutes. Last night, however, Jim Lehrer let the candidates have some room to explain themselves and nibble at their opponent, which made the debate far more substantive than I has expected. Certainly, spending and the debt got more serious consideration than it did during the last two or three Presidential election cycles.

Of course, we still need to hear more about each candidates plans, especially how they expect to knock down our $16 trillion national debt in a timely fashion. I hope we get closer to that in the next debate on October 16th.

All in all, though, a good debate. I’m encouraged. Now let’s see more like it.

When Congress debated the Obamacare bill, plenty of us responsible government types said that it was stuffed full of tax hikes that would hit middle class America every bit as hard as it would hit the much-derided “millionaires and billionaires”. Most of our complaints fell on deaf ears. Obamacare wouldn’t really raise taxes, we were told, and if it did, the middle and lower class wouldn’t have to worry. And even if we did, the hit would be small, more than offset by the massive savings we’d see in actual health care costs.

So far, it appears we are going to take a pretty big hit. And by “we” I really do mean everyone. And by “hit”, I mean at least $1,600 a year.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Wednesday said nearly 6 million Americans, 2 million more than the office’s initial 2010 estimate, will face a “tax penalty” in 2014 for not having insurance once Obamacare is implemented.

President Barack Obama promised not to raise taxes on the middle class, but after the Supreme Court ruled Obamacare was constitutional because it was a tax, the CBO discovered that most of the 6 million Americans that will potentially pay the Obamacare tax are in the middle class.

I never had a big problem with the recent Supreme Court ruling. The Obama administration sold the individual mandate as a tax when it pleased them to do so and the first drafts of the bill called the mandate a tax and not a penalty. In truth, Obamacare in its eventual form as a single-payer health care that encompasses everyone whether they want it or not only works if the mandate is a tax.

The tax hikes are coming, unless Congress repeals Obamacare before it takes effect in 2014. Two years ago, those hikes were supposed to hit “only” 4 million of us. This year, the estimate is 6 million. How many will it really hit if we don’t stop it?

The 2011 fiscal year ended Sunday night and the new debt numbers are in. You might want to sit down before you read more. And send your kids out of the room. If they get a good look at the hole we’ve dug for them, they’re going to get very upset.

According to the U.S. Treasury, the debt of the U.S. government climbed by a total of $1,275,901,078,828.74 in fiscal 2012, which ended yesterday.

That means the federal government borrowed approximately an additional $10,855 for each household in the United States just over the past twelve months.

The total debt of the United States now equals approximately $136,690 per household.

The good news — if there is any good news about a $16 trillion debt — is 2012 didn’t raise the debt quite as much as 2009 or 2010, though it was more than 2011. Your share of the debt is now $10,855 more than it was at the same time last year and there’s no indication right now that the number will drop, at least not for the foreseeable future. Fiscal 2012′s deficit is the fifth straight year we’ve added more than a trillion dollars to the debt.

Here are the year-by-year numbers.

Fiscal 2007: $500,679,473,047.25

Fiscal 2008: $1,017,071,524,650.01

Fiscal 2009: $1,885,104,106,599.26

Fiscal 2010: $1,651,794,027,380.04

Fiscal 2011: $1,228,717,297,665.36

Fiscal 2012: $1,275,901,078,828.74

Remember, we’re still on the edge of the 2008 recession we never quite left. I don’t think another few years of trillion-dollar deficits is going to get our economic engine purring, do you?

The cost of President Obama’s ever-growing big government policies has cost us far more than we can reckon now. There are, quite literally, dozens of economic figures we could quote to support that contention: the trajectory of our national debt, the flaccid GDP growth numbers, the major unemployment indicators, the housing market, consumer debt, and college loan debt are good categories to explore if you want to paint the mural of failure to represent the past four years. One recent statistic, however, tells the story of how fall our nation has fallen and how much work we will all have to do to bring it back to where it once was. A recent Pew poll asked Americans into which economic class they thought they fit. Their answers were more dismal than even the most jaded pessimist would expect.

A Pew Research survey found Americans who saw themselves as being a part of the “lower classes” has increased from 25 percent to 32 percent during President Barack Obama’s tenure. Even worse, those who describe themselves as “lower class” are losing hope, which is consistent with the 368,000 workers who gave up looking for work in August and left the workforce.

Seventy-seven percent said it was harder to get ahead than it was ten years ago and only 51% said hard work brings success. More people in the lower classes said they thought their children would have it worse in the next generation.

Think about what that means. Almost a third of America believes it is at the very bottom of our economy and, worse, these Americans believe they don’t have much chance of climbing up. Hope? Fading fast. Change? Decidedly for the worse.

The Census Bureau reported last month that one out of six Americans is under the poverty line, a new record. More families live in poverty now than ever before and the number of poor women in our country hit a 17-year high. These are the people left behind while our government has spent them into lives of desperate dependence. These are the Americans who believed that our government existed to give them all they could want only to learn that, to put it bluntly, their elected officials have lied to them. These Americans need help now, help that only a vibrant economy, responsible government, and renewed optimism can give them.

We know how to turn our economy around. We know what it takes. We know that gargantuan government filled with Budget Bandits won’t get the job done. It’s time we found some people who remember their job isn’t to pump hope and change into us like we’re hot air balloons but to give us a government that protects our rights and gives us room to find our own happiness.

By The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, September 2012

Having an informed, honest political debate about our nation’s fiscal challenges has never been more important than it is today. Our nation’s debt is currently at 70% of GDP. Under our current policies it will hit 90% of GDP by 2022 and soar to beyond 200% of GDP in the next 30 years. Many economists agree that debt-to-GDP should be 60% or less and that levels above 90% can be risky to economic growth. With the “Fiscal Cliff” approaching, our elected leaders will have an enormous opportunity to create meaningful policy reform.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s State of the Union’s Finances is an all-in-one guide to help you get up to speed on important fiscal policy matters before you head to the ballot box. The guide offers a detailed look at current spending — including Social Security, major health care programs, and defense — as well as government revenues. You’ll have a deeper understanding of the real, long-term fiscal challenges America faces and the questions that should be addressed to help us get on the path to a sustainable fiscal future.

To read the entire article and get the guide, click here.

The chart in this post ought to scare the bejeezus out of you. It shows how much our government has spent per-capita in inflation-adjusted dollars in every year going back to 1977. You won’t be surprised to see that number had trended upwards and that it’s biggest increase, by far, has come in the past four years.

What might surprise you is that Republican administrations have not exactly held the line on spending. The Reagan and Bush 41 years saw overall spending increases while the Clinton administration’s numbers were generally lower than the administration before it. Spending exploded once under Bush 43 and again under Obama.

You can probably make the point that President’s don’t bear much responsibility for government spending — the Constitution gives that duty to Congress — but you can’t take the White House completely off the hook. The President submits the budget that Congress then tweaks and alters. Once a budget is passed (let me note here the Senate has not approved a budget for over three years), the President does have the power to veto it if it’s too large and spends too much. I can’t recall the last time a President rejected a budget that way. For that matter, I can’t recall the last time since Ronald Reagan a President pushed hard in public for a budget smaller than the one Congress wanted to pass.

The President is the Chief Executive and that matters when it comes time to spend the money. We won’t solve our fiscal problems without help from the Oval Office. It’s time we got a President who took the budget seriously.