Smoke, Mirrors, and Fraud

Remember just a week ago when Obama, Boehner and Reed were working so hard at coming to an interim budget agreement to avoid a government shutdown? Well folks it was mostly, if not all, pure horse hockey, crap, BS, call it what you will. We've been tricked into thinking those wonderful guys really did something praise-worthy. It appears those late-night "summits" at the White House were simply the three good old boys getting together to have a nightcap or two while they laughed at how they were fooling the ignorant U.S. citizenry.

Now that those "in the know" are studying the actual agreement reached, we're told most of these wonderful, monumental, hard-fought "cuts" are not reductions at all. We've been lied to, kept in the dark, made to think they agreed on something to really help our economy...and its mostly BUNK.

Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, the Right, the Left, Centrists, they're all crooks and should be thrown out of office at the earliest opportunity. The United States of America is broke, bankrupt, zilched out, ain't got nothin' (but printing presses) and in the not too distant future we're all going to feel the serious effects of a broken, worthless dollar and another country with its economy in ruin.

This just stinks.
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Kevin Drum blogs as follows:

Smoke and Mirrors Watch

— By Kevin Drum| Tue Apr. 12, 2011 12:26 PM PDT

Here's AP reporter Andrew Taylor digging into the $38 billion in spending cuts that Republicans agreed to and finding that an awful lot of it is smoke and mirrors:


Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including [...] $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can't be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.


....The spending measure reaps $350 million by cutting a one-year program enacted in 2009 for dairy farmers then suffering from low milk prices. Another $650 million comes by not repeating a one-time infusion into highway programs passed that same year. And just last Friday, Congress approved Obama's $1 billion request for high-speed rail grants — crediting themselves with $1.5 billion in savings relative to last year.


About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks....Republicans had already engineered a ban on earmarks when taking back the House this year.


Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule — used for years by appropriators — placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.


And this report from CBS News notes two other phantom cuts: $1.7 billion left over from the 2010 census and $2.2 billion in subsidies for health insurance co-ops that are going to be funded anyway via the healthcare reform bill. This stuff alone adds up to $27.4 billion, all of it money that wouldn't have been spent anyway. I suppose you can argue that some of it might have gotten reallocated if it hadn't been removed legislatively, but I doubt that the tea party true believers are in a mood to buy that. If these reports are correct, the bill contains only about $11 billion in hard cuts. Basically, it looks as if the tea partiers may have gotten snookered by their own side.