It's that time of year. In honor of the day, our URLs du jour will contain the word "trillion" somewhere.
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First, click on the bill for Jarka Vachuska's classic
visualization of what one trillion dollars looks like.
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I forgot to make fun of last week's column from Mark Bittman,
the Official Food Nag
of the New York Times: "How to Save a Trillion
Dollars".
In the scheme of things, saving the 38 billion bucks that Congress seems poised to agree upon is not a big deal. A big deal is saving a trillion bucks. And we could do that by preventing disease instead of treating it.
Bittman is targeting so-called "lifestyle diseases": diabetes, heart disease, (some) cancer. The trillion dollar figure comes from the cost of treating those diseases and the productivity lost due to people calling in sick (or dead). So we can "save" that money simply by changing everyone's bad habits. Easy peasy!Presumably, once that happens, people will never get sick, at least not in ways that cost any money. (They'll still have to die, though, somehow; otherwise that trillion dollars will get eaten up quickly by Social Security.)
And how does that happen? Well, Bittman is half-honest:
But the trillion-dollar question is, "How do we get people to eat that way?"
Raise your hands, good readers, if you can spot what's coming next:I don't have an easy answer; no one does.
But it for sure will take an investment: it's a situation in which you must spend money to make or save money. (Yes, taxes will go up, but whose taxes?) Some number of billions of dollars -- something in the rounding error area -- should be spent on research to figure out exactly how to turn this ship around.
Bittman adheres to the True Faith, the Gospel According to the New York Times: throwing more tax dollars can solve any problem, even if we have no specific idea how. -
You may have heard that Standard & Poor's downgraded US Government
debt. As in: good luck getting your money back suckers. Kevin
Williamson asks: do they know something we don't?
Actually, they know something we do: Nothing about this is a secret. In the phrase adopted by Rep. Paul Ryan, what is coming is the most predictable economic crisis in our history: a nominal national debt of more than $14 trillion, a real national debt ten times that, and Barack Obama standing between the reformers and the needed reforms with a veto pen and excellent chances of being reelected in 2012. This isn't sophisticated macroeconomic analysis; this is that anvil falling out of the sky onto the head of Wyle E. Coyote, and you don't have to be a super-genius to figure out that it's going to hurt like hell when it hits him. Even S&P gets that.
Speaking of which… -
You should read Keith
Hennessey's (longish) analysis of President Obama's latest
budget proposals.
Hennessey's much more diplomatic than I would
be, his language is moderate in tone, but the bottom line
is pretty clear.
But if you want to see a short explanation of one of the shenanigans the President is using to sell his scheme, this post is also a must. Considering Obama's claim that his plan "matches" the GOP plan of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, Hennessey notes the changing goalpost: Obama's claiming to reach that goal in 12 years as opposed to the GOP's 10 years.
$4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years does not "match" $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. It's not even close.
The game is that the deficit reduction is heavily weighted towards those final two years—when Obama will be safely out of office. The likely net result is:The twelve year timeframe is a red flag. Federal budgets are measured over 1, 5, and 10 year timeframes. Any other length "budget window" is nonstandard and suggests someone is playing games.
The President's new budget plan provides insufficient detail to support his claim of $4 trillion of deficit reduction over 12 years. But if we stipulate that amount, it is likely that the President's new budget proposal would result in $1 trillion more debt over the next ten years compared to the House-passed Ryan plan, and maybe more.
I'm sure that's an honest mistake, and the President will own up to it during his promotional tour. -
OK, I lied: this Fox
News article doesn't have the word "trillion" in it. But it
does report that President Obama's ballyhooed $5 billion
bump to (ostensibly) help lower-income families retrofit their
dwellings to make them more efficient …
It's a complete cesspool of waste," Leslie Paige, vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, told FoxNews.com. "When it's over, we will never know how much went down the tube. They cannot track the money. By the time they get to it, a lot of the money will be gone."
But cheer up: as I type, there's a full-sidal-nudity picture of Bridget Moynahan on the same page. Way to go, Fox!