The (Almost) $18 Trillion Question: Does it Really Matter?

Happy New (Fiscal) Year!

Yep--the calendar on the wall may still say it's 2014, but to the friendly folks who run YOUR United States Government, Fiscal Year 2015 is already upon us. Break out the party favors and the champagne, we gots lots to celebrate. Or maybe not.

Actually, I figured this would be a good time to resurrect one of my old hobbies, namely checking in with the federal government's own Debt to the Penny website and see how our national indebtedness situation is doing. Hmmm, not so well actually. As of the beginning of the new fiscal year, America now has an imbalance of $17.875 trillion, around $1.1 trillion more than it owed exactly one year ago.

But does it really matter?

While it is true that the past few years the annual federal deficit has fallen by about one-third from where it stood during the depths of the financial crisis, the government is still borrowing more than twice as much every year as it did in ANY year prior to FY-2009. In fact, since 10/1/2008, the national debt has risen by almost $8 trillion, so even with another two years of no increase in the annual deficit we'll still have managed to double the total amount of the national debt in just eight years (or the length of Obama's presidency) and THAT comes after we had already doubled the national debt during Bush's presidency.

But does it really matter?

Another interesting factoid that comes right from Debt to the Penny is who holds our debt. This is divided into two categories. The first is Intragovernmental Holdings, which is defined thusly:

Intragovernmental Holdings are Government Account Series securities held by Government trust funds, revolving funds, and special funds; and Federal Financing Bank securities. A small amount of marketable securities are held by government accounts.

In other words, largely Social Security. The second is so-called Public Debt:

The Debt Held by the Public is all federal debt held by individuals, corporations, state or local governments, Federal Reserve Banks, foreign governments, and other entities outside the United States Government...

The reason I bring up the difference is that there is something quite interesting about the additional $8 trillion we've racked up since 2008--namely, it has nearly all accumulated in that second category. Whereas the two types of federal debt were nearly even six years ago, Public Debt now exceeds Intergovernmental Holdings by approximately $7.7 trillion.

So why is that important? Well, consider for a moment who it is buying all this federal debt. According to National Priorities.org, approximately 46% of all U.S. debt, amounting to about $8.2 trillion or two-thirds of all Public Debt, is held by either the Federal Reserve or "International Investors," i.e. the central banks of other nations.

Collectively, the world's central banks are literally propping up the finances of the USG, and without that support the entire house of cards would instantly come crashing down. Yet the U.S. blithely continues to "borrow" more than a trillion dollars each year, even as it shakes a scolding finger at "deadbeat" nations such as Argentina.

But does it really matter?

I keep asking that question because many have predicted that America was going to strangle itself with debt--that borrowing a trillion plus dollars each year is unsustainable. Heck, I'll admit I've said it myself plenty of times. Never would I have believed four or five years ago that this country could keep borrowing at such a frantic rate and, not coincidentally, manage to keep interest rates at effectively zero without the whole thing blowing up on us long before now.

And yet, somehow it hasn't. Why? Well, if I knew the answer to that one, I'd be a one-percenter's one-percenter and wouldn't just be some obscure blogger sitting on his basement couch, screaming into the wilderness.

So does it matter? I'm going to have to throw up my hands and say, no, I guess it really doesn't.

Until the day finally comes when it does.


Bonus: "Fuck you, pay me"

Look Who's Crying About Sequestration

I gather that most people around the country are too busy just trying to make ends meet and keep their heads above water to be paying much attention to the ticking time bomb our fearless "leaders" set for themselves during last year's debt ceiling fight. That ticking time bomb is called sequestration, and it is set to explode on the second day of the coming new year as part of a much larger federal budgetary "Armageddon" known as "the fiscal cliff," which also includes the expiration of Bush tax cuts, the end of Obama's insane payroll tax "holiday" and the need to raise the debt ceiling yet again. Given that there is ZERO political will to deal with these thorny issues prior to election day, it means that all of them will come to a head on the watch of a lame duck Congress (and perhaps president) between November 6th and the end of the year.

I'll no doubt be writing a lot about this gigantic shit sandwich in future posts, but for the moment I want to focus on the sequestration aspect of it since it is already on the lips of plenty of nervous bureaucrats and contractors in the DC area. So what does sequestration mean for them? Well, here is the "bible" of Inside-the-Beltway thinking itself, Government Executive magazine, with the answer:

At last week’s Excellence in Government Live event, attendees from across government packed rooms to hear budget experts, not typically the most popular brand of speakers, explicate the budget battle ensuing on the Hill. The consensus was not optimistic.

Sequestration, automatic budget reduction, was placed into the 2011 Budget Control Act as a threat to spur the budget ‘super committee’ into action. The super committee failed to reach a consensus, and so budget cuts between 8.5 and 10 percent for FY2013 are slated for January 2, 2013 should Congress fail to pass a budget resolution in time.

Agencies, however, have just nine months to achieve the cuts as FY2013 begins in October. The effective monthly rate is then between 11.3 and 13.3 percent. Sequestration is not a one off occurrence, either. It is a ten year budget reduction, essentially freezing agency accounts for the next decade.

In other words, rather than carefully planning how they might reduce federal spending, the idiots in charge have set things up so that every federal agency is going to get whacked with a budgetary meat cleaver. If this actually is allowed to happen, it will cause unprecedented chaos in Washington.

Not that I expect anyone who will not be directly affected to give a shit. Even though sequestration is going to have dire effects on many people whom I know personally and indeed Virginia actually receives more military spending per capita than any other state, I acknowledge that it is probably the only way the federal government is EVER going to start to reduce its insane levels of deficit spending short of default and a total collapse of the dollar. So I say, enough fucking around. Bring it on, already.

One would also think given the above that sequestration would be a political conservative's wet dream. After all, didn't that slimy asshole Grover Norquist say he wanted to "drown the federal government in the bathtub?" Sequestration may not be a drowning, but if it happens the patient IS going to start looking a little peaked.

Well as it so happens (surprise! surprise!), some conservatives are whining like little titty babies about sequestration. And who might that include? Why, none other than the Heritage Foundation for starters:

Considering the recent violence directed at the U.S. in the Middle East and the looming January 2 deadline for sequestration, it would be imprudent for Congress to remain idle. Waiting to address the military’s budgetary concerns until it is politically easier or until a decision is forced by a direct conflict is irresponsible. This is especially true given the strained resources with which the armed forces are already operating around the world. Members of Congress need to act now to stop defense sequestration and support robust national security funding.

Cutting an Already Weakened Force

Sequestration refers to the automatic cuts in the federal government’s operations mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA). This legislation requires an automatic, across-the-board $1.2 trillion cut in federal spending. National security funding suffers the bulk of these cuts—roughly half a trillion dollars. The Department of Defense has already shrunk by roughly $800 billion through efficiencies measures in 2009 and the first portion of cuts from the BCA.

While the OMB report does not indicate which military capabilities will be reduced under sequestration, the House Armed Services Committee has made stark projections. The cuts will cause the smallest Navy fleet since before World War I, the smallest ground force since before World War II, and the smallest Air Force in its history. These reductions will hinder the U.S. military’s ability to perform its varied missions throughout the world on a daily basis.

Implications for U.S. Security

What will these defense cuts mean for U.S. security and interests in the Middle East? The recent engagement in Libya provides some answers. The U.S. eventually had to take the lead in this conflict because European NATO forces were inadequate for certain missions, such as enforcing a no-fly zone. If NATO forces become engaged in a similar scenario with a more capable adversary, the U.S. may not be as confident in a leadership role.

The aging U.S. Air Force F-16s and Marine Corps Harriers that flew over Libya are set to be replaced by the fifth-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). However, under the President’s fiscal year 2013 budget request, the nascent F-35 fleet will shrink by 179 aircraft over the next five years. Furthermore, sequestration could eliminate the entire fleet for the Marine Corps JSF variant. This has implications for American allies as well. The United Kingdom has staked its entire future fighter jet force on the Marine Corps variant, and allies such as Israel, Canada, and Japan also intend to buy the fighter.

The U.S. Navy maintains an important presence in the Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean. Through this presence, regional maritime choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Bosporus, the Dardanelles, and the Suez Canal remain open shipping lanes. If any of these vital shipping lanes were disrupted, there would be significant economic consequences. The Strait of Hormuz is particularly vulnerable given its extremely narrow passage and proximity to Iran.

The Navy’s presence would also be important if the U.S. were to engage in a conflict similar to the one in Libya. Aircraft carriers host a variety of critical air assets such as F-18 fighters, surveillance aircraft, and, in the future, the F-35. Each carrier hosts an air force rivaling that of most nations. However, one ship cannot be in two places at the same time. Under sequestration, the Navy will reduce its fleet of carriers from 11 to 10.

U.S. Special Operations Forces will also be affected. The President has regularly touted Special Forces as low-intensity tools for his foreign policy ends, exemplified by their successful strike on Osama bin Laden and deployments in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and North Africa for various other missions and training exercises with local forces. However, even if Special Forces retain robust funding, the cuts in conventional forces will hinder them. SEAL teams embark from Navy vessels, and reducing conventional manpower end strength also reduces the pool from which elite troops are selected. Furthermore, modernization accounts such as the V-22 will be used for irregular and unconventional missions.

Provide for the Common Defense

The ideal solution is for the Administration and Congress to solve the budget impasse today, as each additional day of delay makes it more difficult for defense suppliers and military leaders to plan ahead in a very risky world. If that cannot be done, then Congress should offset sequestration for just 2013 with spending cuts elsewhere. Then the new Congress could work with the President next year to solve the rest of the defense sequestration problem.

While the Obama Administration continues to sacrifice national security forces to achieve other goals, Congress should focus on its constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense. Congress already has all the tools needed to agree on a real budget. Members need no new devices to do this but only the will.

Yep, that's right, these fucking assholes really do believe that maintaining a global military empire at the expense of bankrupting and ruining our economy is "providing for the common defense" even though, as I have pointed out repeatedly on this blog, there is no nation nor potential combination of nations that is even a remote conventional military threat to the United States. Once upon a time, way back in the dark ages of 1972, one of the two major party candidates for president actually promised that if elected he would reduce military spending by a whopping 40%. But this stupid fucking country turned its back on George McGovern in a big way and thus also on its last real chance to hold the military-industrial complex at bay before it started eating us from within like malignant tumor.

More disturbingly, if you combine this insane stance with the heartless, blame-the-poor rhetoric coming from the right in the presidential campaign, you get a pretty good idea of just how intellectually bankrupt mainstream conservatism has become. Apparently, they will not be satisfied until every job has been offshored, every rich fucker pays zero taxes and the federal government does NOTHING WHATSOEVER for its own citizens while going around blasting the shit out of dirty little foreigners all over the globe. What is even more laughable about this hysterical shrieking about the supposed damage to our national security is that their ideal dystopian society as I just described it would hardly be worth defending at all.

So as it turns out, sequestration is actually not a mainstream conservative's wet dream but instead that of a passionate antiwar zealot like me. Like I said, bring it the fuck on already.


Bonus: Unfortunately, they will undoubtedly come to some bipartisan "compromise" and this will be yet another dream I'll never see

Amtrak’s $151 Billion Pipe Dream

I said last month that one of the main reasons I was going to reduce my blogging was that I was getting sick and tired of paying so much attention to the “yadda, yadda” of our delusional and largely meaningless national discourse. Today, however, I came across yet another example of the yadda, yadda that was SO delusional that I just had to make a comment on it. I’ll let Talking Points Memo tell you the details:

Amtrak, the government-owned national rail corporation, on Monday released an ambitious $151 billion plan to develop a high-speed rail line along the currently existing Northeast Corridor rail network by 2040.

The proposed high-speed rail line would travel at top speeds of 220 miles-per-hour in some sections and be able to deliver passengers from Washington, D.C. to Boston in a little over 3 hours.

Distances between other major Northeastern cities would be shortened even more markedly, with travel times between New York and Boston or New York and Washington, D.C. down to 94 minutes, and a little over a half-hour between New York and Philadelphia.

Compare that to the current fastest Amtrak trains along the route, those in the Acela Express line, which take three-and-a-half hours to get from Boston to New York and a little under three hours to get from Washington, D.C. to New York.

The new Amtrak plan included the following chart showing the estimated time saved as construction on the new plan proceeds over the next 28 years.

Reading that, the very first thing that leapt to mind was to wonder whether, given that they have to be aware that the U.S. is already nearly $16 trillion in debt and that any form of mass transportation project faces determined institutional opposition from a Republican Party that considers it to be “socialist,” the Amtrak executives who announced this proposal haven’t completely lost their marbles. The proposal itself is a big enough fantasy, but then they had to go ahead and make it even more out in space:

But the plan proposes that Amtrak spend the next 13 years making improvements and upgrades to the 457 miles of current rail infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor, which stretches from Washington, D.C. to Boston, before laying down the new track that would be necessary for a high speed rail line.

In fact, Amtrak’s detailed outline, titled “The Amtrak Vision for the Northeast Corridor: 2012 Update Report,” is itself an updated and consolidated version of two other rail plans released by the corporation back in 2010, one focused on improving existing infrastructure and the other onhigh-speed rail, which Amtrak at that time estimated would cost $117.5 billion.

So, Amtrak expects to spend thirteen years making “improvements” before it even STARTS construction? And worse yet, the proposed cost of the project has already ballooned by nearly one-third in just the past two years alone? Pardon me for asking, but what exactly are they smoking over there? I just hope they aren’t sharing it with the train operators.

Just when I thought Amtrak had gone completely off the rails, to use yet another in my long line of unfortunate metaphors, they did at least somewhat acknowledge reality:

Still, Amtrak noted that “public sector leadership and funding is essential during the early years.”

In other words, the odds of this plan ever being approved are somewhere between nada and a snowball’s chance in hell.


Bonus: Play a fucking train song

U.S. Environmental Satellite System ‘Is At Risk Of Collapse’ And Could Decline 75% By 2020

Hat tip to Vinland of Silent Country for alerting me to this story.

Despite spending nearly a trillion and a half dollars more than it has taken it from taxes every year for the past four years, the federal government is still having difficulties maintaining its basic services. Here is Think Progress with the story:

The Nation’s leading scientists have issued a stark warning: America’s ability to monitor the environment is rapidly diminishing. And if we don’t properly fund our satellite capabilities, the country could lose three quarters of its Earth observation systems by 2020.

That alarming conclusion comes from the National Research Council in a new report assessing the progress of the nation’s Earth observation programs. In short: our leading scientific institutions aren’t actually making much progress.

Rather, a lack of funding and infrastructure will result in “a rapid decline” in our ability to monitor extreme weather and changes to the climate.

Like everything else, it all comes back to money...in this case, the lack of money for anything other than entitlement programs and defense war contractors:

There are three major factors contributing to this unprecedented decline in Earth monitoring capabilities: budget cuts, a rapidly aging fleet of satellites, and a lack of launch capabilities.

The budgetary issues have been ongoing. According to the NSA progress report, NASA’s Earth science program still hasn’t been funded to the requested $2 billion to meet future objectives.

And as Climate Progress reported last year, Republican lawmakers proposed slashing $1.2 billion from NOAA’s funding levels, cutting into satellite programs. The satellite programs were eventually funded to requested levels, but future funding is uncertain. Senate lawmakers have proposed moving NOAA’s satellite program over to NASA where operational efficiencies could potentially save money.

Officials at these agencies say that more money is needed to replace the fleet of aging satellites that will inevitably fail in the coming years. According to the NSA report, there’s also a severe lack of launch vehicles for Earth satellites that “directly threatens programmatic robustness.”

After all, satellites aren’t much good without a way to launch them.

If this story doesn't portend a society in the early stages of collapse, I don't know what would.

Crumbling Infrastructure Porn: Drivers Pay "Secret" Road Tax In $15 Billion For Car Repair

The days of Happy Motoring, as Jim Kunstler is fond of calling it, may be drawing to a close. Here is Bloomberg with the details:

Gil Giro doesn’t need a license plate to tell where a car is from -- he just looks underneath the chassis.

“Every time we see a car that comes in from the district, you can see that its suspension is torn up,” said Giro, the owner of Gili’s Automotive in Rockville, Maryland, outside Washington. “It’s almost like the vehicle has been driven off- road.”

The nation’s capital isn’t alone in offering motorists teeth-rattling rides as U.S. lawmakers tussle over how to pay the bill for mending battered roads. Mechanics such as Giro say they see the hidden tax car owners pay every day in torn tires, misaligned front ends and bent axles.

Drivers won’t get relief anytime soon.

The U.S. Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for road and transit projects in Washington and all 50 states, has been bailed out by Congress three times since 2008 for a total of $34.5 billion. The gasoline tax that supports the fund hasn’t been raised in 19 years, and with the cost of materials such as steel and asphalt on the rise, the fund is expected to have a deficit of about $10 billion this year.

Car owners already are shelling out far more than that to repair damage done to their vehicles by America’s ruined streets and highways, industry and academic researchers say.

Motorists pay $67 billion annually for increased fuel consumption, body dents, worn tires and premature wear wrought by pitted roads, according to The Road Information Program, a Washington-based research group. The group’s board includes representatives from construction-equipment makers Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Deere & Co. (DE), as well as Vulcan Materials Co. (VMC), a Birmingham, Alabama-based asphalt and concrete producer.

That works out to $324 per licensed driver, says Frank Moretti, TRIP’s director of policy and research. The figure is an average of all vehicles and can vary widely between cars and large commercial trucks, which are prone to costlier damage, he says.

Karim Chatti, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University in East Lansing, estimates that damage linked to poor roads probably runs between $15 to $25 billion annually for car owners, not including tire damage and fuel-efficiency costs.

As a denizen of the DC-area, I can attest to how crappy the roads are around here. And this is happening in a part of the country where local tax revenues are still fairly robust because of federal government spending. I can't imagine what it must be like in some of the less well off locales. It's now a race to see what will destroy our automobile-centric economy first, high oil and gasoline prices, or our crumbling highways.


Bonus: Some Drivin'n'Cryin' seemed appropriate here

USDA To Lay Off 1,000 Inspectors--Let Poultry Industry Self Regulate

If you eat chicken that you don't raise yourself, you need to read this story...and perhaps reassess your culinary choices. Here is Yahoo News with the details:

Chicken is the top-selling meat in the United States. The average American eats 84 pounds a year, more chicken than beef or pork. Sorry red meat, chicken is what's for dinner. And now the USDA is proposing a fundamental change in the way that poultry makes it to the American dinner table.

As early as next week, the government will end debate on a cost-cutting, modernization proposal it hopes to fully implement by the end of the year. A plan that is setting off alarm bells among food science watchdogs because it turns over most of the chicken inspection duties to the companies that produce the birds for sale.

The USDA hopes to save $85 million over three years by laying off 1,000 government inspectors and turning over their duties to company monitors who will staff the poultry processing lines in plants across the country.

The poultry companies expect to save more than $250 million a year because they, in turn will be allowed to speed up the processing lines to a dizzying 175 birds per minute with one USDA inspector at the end of the line. Currently, traditional poultry lines move at a maximum of 90 birds per minute, with up to three USDA inspectors on line.

Whistleblower inspectors opposed to the new USDA rule say the companies cannot be trusted to watch over themselves. They contend that companies routinely pressure their employees not to stop the line or slow it down, making thorough inspection for contaminants, tumors and evidence of disease nearly impossible. "At that speed, it's all a blur," one current inspector tells ABC News.

According to OMB Watch, a government accountability newsletter, cutbacks at the USDA have coincided with a significant rise in salmonella outbreaks. The group says 2010 was a record year for salmonella infection and 2011 saw 103 poultry, egg and meat recalls because of disease-causing bacteria, the most in nearly 10 years.

Perhaps the idiots in charge of the USDA these days forget why their agency exists in the first place--because back in the 19th century people routinely died from consuming contaminated food products made by producers who in the pursuit of maximum profits didn't give a shit if their customers got sick and died from eating their wares. In fact, tainted canned food was likely a major contributing factor to the demise of Sir John Franklin's arctic expedition in 1847 that was one of Victorian England's most famous calamities.

One of the reasons that this type of thing is being allowed to occur is that there are few Americans still alive who were around before the New Deal era, and thus have no experience of living in a time in which there was very little regulation of corporations. Most really seem to believe that the big corporations would never be so crass as to place their customers at risk in the name of increased profits if the government wasn't there looking over their shoulders. This is what 30 plus years of "free market" conservatives bashing the government at every turn has wrought--a credulous public that doesn't realize that corporate power is at least as much a threat to their individual liberty as big government, and that the best a modern industrialized society can hope for is that the two will effectively watchdog each other.

Like those chickens being taken to the processing plant, most Americans will continue to have this naive faith in the system until the day that salmonella or some other horrible food borne pathogen lays them into an untimely grave.


Bonus: Not really sure why, but this story brought this song to mind

"Pothole Nation" = Spoiled Rotten Nation

It must be great to be a liberal think tanker-type...to be able to sit around in your ivory tower coming up with new ways to explain how America can be fixed that have no basis whatsoever in reality. The best part is, because your ideas are only ever considered by other liberals and progressives, there is never anyone around who will be willing to tell you that you're actually full of shit. This is where I, as a former member of the tribe come in.

At first glance this article, entitled "Pothole Nation," by Sam Pizzigati of the Institute for Policy Studies seems reasonable in that it decrys how America has for the past generation or two been allowing its infrastructure to slowly decay:

Investing in infrastructure used to be a political no-brainer. Politicians of nearly every ideological stripe supported government spending on everything from school buildings to bridges.

The more conservative pols would typically favor highways, the more liberal preferred mass transit. But nearly all elected officials considered quality infrastructure essential. Businesses simply couldn't thrive, even conservatives understood, without it.

This consensus remains solid — among the American people. Only 6 percent of Americans, one poll last year found, consider infrastructure "not that important" or "not important at all." Among our politicians, it's a different story. Infrastructure has become a political hot potato. Congress can barely reach any consensus at all. Lawmakers have spent more than two years haggling over a bare-bones transportation bill.

Overall, U.S. infrastructure spending has declined dramatically. Back in 1968, federal outlays for basic infrastructure amounted to 3.3 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Last year, federal infrastructure investments made up only 1.3 percent of GDP. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that we would now need to spend $2.2 trillion over five years to adequately "maintain and upgrade" America's roads, dams, drinking water, school buildings, and the like.


But lawmakers in Congress are moving in the opposite direction. The House's 2013 budget, if adopted by the Senate, would force massive cutbacks in infrastructure investment.

The impact of these cutbacks? Still more potholes, brownouts, and overcrowded classrooms and buses.

The irony in all this: We ought to be witnessing right now a historic surge in infrastructure investment. The cost of borrowing for infrastructure projects, the Economic Policy Institute's Ethan Pollack points out, has hit record lows — and the private construction companies that do infrastructure work remain desperate for contracts. They're charging less.

"We're getting much more bang for our buck than we usually do," says Pollack.

Yet our political system seems totally incapable of responding to the enormous opportunity we have before us. Center for American Progress analysts David Madland and Nick Bunker blame this political dysfunction on inequality.

The more wealth concentrates, their research shows, the feebler a society's investments in infrastructure become. Our nation's long-term decline in federal infrastructure investment — from 3.3 percent of GDP in 1968 to 1.3 percent in 2011 — turns out to mirror almost exactly the long-term shift in income from America's middle class to the richest Americans. And the U.S. states where the rich have gained the most at the expense of the middle class turn out to be the states that invest the least in infrastructure.

Why should this be the case? Madland and Bunker cite several dynamics at play. In more equal societies, middle classes will be more politically powerful. That matters because the middle class has a vested interest in healthy levels of infrastructure investment. Middle class families depend on good roads, public schools, and mass transit much more than rich families. Rich kids may attend private schools, and the ultra-wealthy can even commute by helicopter to avoid traffic congestion.

Some wealthy people, Madland and Bunker acknowledge, do see the connection between infrastructure and healthy economic development. But increased investment in infrastructure demands higher taxes, and lower tax rates have always been among the "more cherished priorities of the rich."

"When push comes to shove, infrastructure is likely to take a backseat to keeping taxes low," they posit. "There is a significant body of evidence that suggests a strong middle class is important for public investments."

Unequal societies — like the contemporary United States — have weak middle classes. That leaves Americans with a basic choice. We can press for greater equality. Or spend more time dodging potholes.

Notice the most basic element that is missing here? There is absolutely no mention that America is in a deep financial hole and that it is going to take a lot more than just raising taxes on the wealthy to not only get us out of our financial fix but to be able to afford a robust infrastructure repair program.

Instead we get a bunch of blather about the supposed connection between unequal societies and the lack of infrastructure spending. I'm not sure what country Mr. Pizzigati has been living in these past 40 years, but as a child and into my early adult years, I seem to remember America actually having a fairly robust middle class. Certainly, they were large enough in number that they could have voted to support infrastructure projects. But that's not what they did, is it? Nope, instead they voted for the assholes, starting with Ronald Reagan, who promised to cut their taxes. The rich might as a class like lower taxes, but they hardly have enough votes to win elections unless they pull a substantial portion of the middle class (and working class) along with them.

So why did Americans so docilely agree to give away the store? Because even though they may want their government services, they don't want to pay for them and hate paying taxes even more. That is the very essence of Spoiled Rotten Nation. Me first and fuck the rest of you...until one day the whole stinking system collapses under the strain, as our deteriorating infrastructure will no doubt eventually do.

But it's those last two sentences of the article that really made me laugh. This November, tens of millions of delusional idiots are going to go to the polls and cast their vote for rich, Wall Street asshole Willard Mitt Romney, who will essentially be promising to do what every President since Reagan has done. And tens of millions of other delusional idiots will go to the polls and cast their ballots for President Hopey-Changey, who will blow smoke up their asses like he already has for four grueling years, until he gets reelected and then proceeds to continue doing what every President since Reagan has done. Either way, the infrastructure will remain right where it is today: fucked.



Bonus: I don't believe I have yet used a Cars song...time to correct that deficiency

DRS Technologies (Florida) Lays Off 150

Another rising trend that we have seen here at TDS is mass layoffs involving the defense war industry. Here is nwfdalitynews.com with the details on the latest:

Local defense contractor DRS Technologies laid off about a quarter of its staff Thursday.

DRS, located at 645 Anchors St. in the Fort Walton Beach Commerce and Technology Park, let go about 150 employees.

“In this time, it’s really aligning our staffing levels with the current business realities and the outlook for the rest of the year,” said Richard Goldberg, senior vice president of public affairs for DRS. “Our business is contract driven, and between the downturns in defense spending and other efficiencies that you try to do to remain competitive, (that) caused us to have to adjust the workforce at that facility.”

DRS’ Fort Walton Beach plant was the only location to have layoffs Thursday. Goldberg said the cut was across the board in every department, including hourly employees and managers.

The company still employs about 450 people in Fort Walton Beach.

“We’re committed to that operation long-term,” Goldberg said. “This adjustment is cyclical. When you do have surges in your business you have to increase your workforce, and when contracts get completed or are completed ahead of schedule, you have to adjust accordingly.

Here is the problem with the assessment by Mr. Goldberg in that last paragraph. America is fundamentally insolvent, and these layoffs are occurring at a time when defense war spending is merely leveling off and has not yet really begun to decline. So there is going to be a "cyclical adjustment" all right...it's just going to be a downward spiral as the military-industrial complex slowly collapses under its own bloated and unsustainable weight.

Budget-Battered IRS Sinks Under Workload

I know what you are thinking...why should I give a rip if the IRS is overworked and understaffed? Isn't that a GOOD thing? Well, not entirely. Here is azcentral.com with the details:

At 12:30 p.m. Monday, about 50 people waited for help at the IRS center in Fort Myers, Fla. Another dozen who couldn't find seats stood in a line that stretched out the office suite door and into a lobby.

At the walk-in center in East Harlem, N.Y., Belquis Castillo, 40, left in exasperation Monday afternoon after waiting more than an hour. Castillo needed copies of her 2010 tax return so her son can enroll in online college courses, but was told the computers were down.

The long waits are the result of the IRS' expanded workload and diminished workforce, says IRS Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, whose 2011 annual report identified inadequate resources as the most serious problem facing taxpayers. In 1995, the IRS had a staff of 114,018 to process 205 million tax returns. In 2010, it had 90,907 people to process nearly 236 million tax returns. For this tax filing season, the IRS has 5,000 fewer employees than it did a year ago.

"This is the lowest staffing level I've ever seen, and I've been with the IRS 26 years," says David Carrone, president of the Louisiana chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). The New Orleans Taxpayer Assistance Center has six employees, down from 12 eight years ago, Carrone says. Sometimes, it doesn't even have that many: Louisiana has several one-person walk-in centers, and when that employee calls in sick, someone from the New Orleans office has to fill in.

Increasing the IRS' budget has never been politically expedient, and the Republican Party's anti-tax message has made the agency even more unpopular, says Bruce Bartlett, an economist who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. "Beating up on the IRS is never going to hurt you politically, regardless of which party you're in, and we're paying the price for this kind of attitude."

And here is the real problem for taxpayers:

Nonetheless, there are times when taxpayers or tax preparers need to talk one-on-one with the IRS, and that's becoming increasingly difficult, says James Smith, a certified public accountant and former chairman of the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants.

Smith says the hold times for his calls to the IRS range from 30 minutes to an hour and 45 minutes. "I've had to ask my secretary to stay on hold so I can go to the bathroom."

Staff shortages have also delayed IRS responses to letters from taxpayers seeking to resolve issues or set up payment plans, according to the NTEU. Some of these hold-ups can result in financial hardship for taxpayers, Smith says. One of his clients waited four months to get his refund after Smith filed an amended return. During that period, the client almost lost his home to foreclosure, Smith says.

But the issue goes far deeper than just inadequate funding for the IRS:

Still, increasing the IRS' budget won't address a more fundamental problem, says Mark Robyn, an economist for the Tax Foundation, a non-partisan organization that supports low taxes. Currently, he says, the tax code is so complex that average taxpayers can't prepare their returns without professional help.

Olson agrees that the tax code is too complex, but says that's no excuse for poor service. If individuals with questions about their taxes can't get help from the IRS, she says, "you're really harming taxpayer trust."

Mary Wright, an IRS employee and president of the NTEU chapter in Colorado, agrees. "Most people want to be compliant," she says. "But the tax code is complicated, and they need help."

And what is the REAL reason why the tax code is so complicated? Because Congress keeps creating loopholes and deductions that largely benefit rich people. People for whom hiring an army of accountants and lawyers to prepare their taxes, not to mention making huge campaign donations bribes to their favorite congresscritters is still cheaper than paying what ought to be their fair share in taxes.

Leon Panetta's Weekend Commutes Cost As Much As That GSA Party

Maybe we shouldn't be so hard on those Las Vegas partiers at the GSA. After all, the Secretary of Defense has been blatantly wasting taxpayer money for his own personal convenience as well. Atlantic Wire has the details:

That Leon Panetta has spent an incredible $860,000 to fly between his day job in Washington and his home in Northern California since taking office may not exactly be his fault, but even the thrifty secretary of defense himself this week can't help but notice the irony of that flight bill. Today, the airfare bill is even getting compared to the Government Services Administration's now infamous Las Vegas bender.

A brief rundown of the controversy: Earlier in April, the AP revealed that the secretary of defense, pushing to get the military to stop spending money like it's still the Cold War, billed the government $32,000 per private flight home since taking office in July, reimbursing the government only $632 for each, an amount dictated by law. Now, Panetta had no choice but to fly on the government's dime, if he wanted his weekends home. "No one understands the budget pressures on the Pentagon better than Secretary Panetta," a Defense spokesperson defensively noted. "As a required-use traveler, he must use government aircraft for all travel." But this Monday, Panetta had his hat in hand, saying he regretted the burden the trips put on taxpayers. And in a comparison of ironies, Foreign Policy notes today that $860,000 is only $28,000 more than the clown-filled Vegas conference for the GSA, an agency tasked with curtailing spending.

But really, Panetta and his flights aren't worthy of the ire of GSA's party. "I’ve gone home because my wife and family are there and because, frankly, I think it’s healthy to get out of Washington periodically just to get your mind straight and your perspective straight," Panetta explained to reporters Monday. We want our family-man military chief to be happy, too. As Time's Mark Thompson puts it, "It is a grueling, relentless job. If Panetta wants to jet off to his California walnut farm to tend to a different kind of nut than those he has to deal with daily in the capital, he should."

But ultimately, the flights are for personal use and not business, so we do have a modest request, Secretary Panetta: as you look for ways to cut military spending, consider your flight bill. If not for taxpayers, then just for the sake of good optics as you push more significant spending cuts elsewhere.

I've got a better idea...why not have Secretary Panetta MOVE HIS FUCKING FAMILY TO WASHINGTON, like any other government official has to do. Or better yet, if he wants to be with them so goddam badly, let the fucker resign. It's not as if there aren't another couple of dozen or so completely amoral high ranking assholes who wouldn't take the fucking job in a minute if he stepped down. We have have a trillion-and-a-half dollar annual federal budget deficit that is actually the gravest national security risk we face. SOMEBODY has to make fucking sacrifices, and it might as well start with the guy who heads the fucking war machine.


Bonus: This sounds like an idea that's actually long overdue

GSA Scandal Addendum: What I Did On My Taxpayer Paid Las Vegas Vacation

Protip: If you are a government official who wastes a shit pot load of taxpayer money taking completely frivolous trips to Las Vegas with your wife, you should probably make sure wifey doesn't post the vacation photos on the internet. Here is Atlantic Wire with the story:

G.S.A. regional commissioner Jeffrey Neely had a rough Monday as he very publicly invoked his 5th Amendment rights during a Congressional hearing into his agency's spending scandal, and photos of he and his wife doing all that aforementioned spending leaked around the internet, thanks to ABC New's Jake Tapper.

Neely's wife posted photos of their trip to the Las Vegas M Hotel in 2009 on her Google+ account. The trip was one of eight pre-conference "scouting" forays the agency apparently required just to make sure they weren't, you know, wasting $800,000 of taxpayers' money on hotel with small tubs or bad views. Judging from Neely's contented smile in the hotel tub, they weren't. (Insert your own "in hot water joke" here.)

We'd like to think being a hotel scout for your agency's indulgent conference is about as awesome a job as testing all the well-fed king's food for poison. That's to say, it's pretty awesome gig, until you get poisoned, or, in Neely's case, you get a Congressional hearing and possible criminal investigation. As the executive responsible for the conference itself, he was subpoenaed to testify Monday for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and as expected, he took the Fifth and was quickly dismissed from the hearings. Perhaps it was the best legal move, but choosing silence over self-incrimination never plays very well in the press.

You want a real laugh? From Wikipedia, here is the mission statement of the General Services Administration:

The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. The GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. government offices, provides transportation and office space to federal employees, and develops government-wide cost-minimizing policies, and other management tasks.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, sometimes it is downright absurd.


Bonus: "I think I'm dumb...maybe I'm just happy"

Almost 200 Are Laid Off At The Hanford Vitrification Plant (Washington State)

Federal budget cuts were responsible for this mass layoff story. Here is The Bellingham Herald with the details:

Almost 200 construction workers have been laid off recently at the Hanford vitrification plant.

That brings the number of construction workers laid off to about 550 in the past five months.

While there has been some hiring of nonconstruction workers, including engineers and nuclear safety workers, the total employment on the project is now at about 2,725 workers.

That's down from about 3,000 in late January and a typical range of earlier of 3,200 to 3,400 workers, including construction and nonmanual workers.

The most recent round of layoffs was conducted with notices sent at the end of the last work week to 198 construction workers in a variety of crafts. They mostly are related to the Pretreatment and High Level Waste facilities.

"The craft work force is being aligned with current (vit plant) project priorities and resulting work plans," Bechtel National said in a statement.

The Department of Energy has instructed Bechtel National to propose a new baseline, or cost and schedule plan for the plant, based on priorities that start with meeting commitments to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to verify technical issues are resolved.

Next would be completing sections of the plant that will not process high-level radioactive waste. That includes the Low Level Waste Facility, the Analytical Laboratory and a group of about 20 support buildings. Construction on those three projects ranges from 63 percent to 78 percent complete.

The remaining resources would be focused first on the High Level Waste Facility and then on the Pretreatment Facility. At the High Level Waste Facility, engineering and construction should be completed as money allows.

At the Pretreatment Facility, Bechtel's instructions include completing engineering and work to reduce risks and technical issues, but construction is not mentioned.

Construction on those two buildings is about 40 percent complete.

In February the Obama administration proposed to Congress that the vit plant receive $690 million in fiscal 2013, down from $740 million this year. DOE plans had called for spending $970 million on the plant in fiscal 2013.

And so it goes.

GSA Chief Resigns After Throwing $800,000 Taxpayer Funded Party In Las Vegas

Maybe it isn't being repeated often enough so that the political appointee types in Washington are getting the message: America has a trillion dollar plus annual federal budget deficit that desperately needs trimming. Now is not the time to be blowing taxpayer money frivolously. Got it?

Well, apparently not. Here is the Atlantic Wire with the sordid details:

Martha Johnson, chief of the General Services Administration, and two of her top executives resigned today. You probably would too if you spent over $800,000 of taxpayer dollars on an extravagant "conference" off of the Las Vegas Strip. If you don't know the General Services Administration (GSA) was created to, in their words, "streamline the administrative work of the federal government" and it "oversees the business of the U.S. federal government." Somehow, Johnson and her crew parlayed those tenets into a "regional meeting" in Henderson, Nevada (having the discretion to not be at a hotel on The Strip--that's a modicum of modesty right?).

Thanks to an investigation and report from GSA Inspector General Brian D. Miller, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, we now know how Johnson and her team spent all that money. Here's how it breaks down (keep in mind that in 2010, according to Inspector Miller's report, the meal and incidental expenses allowance was $71 per day):

$31,000 on a "networking reception" that featured $19-per-person "American artisanal cheese display" and $7,000 in sushi

$3,200 on a session with a mind reader

$5,600 for in-room parties

$100,405.37 in employee travel costs to scout the event--meaning, these people returned to the Las Vegas area multiple times to visit hotels before settling on the fancy M Resort and Casino.

$3,700 for T-shirts

$2,800 in water bottles

$1,500 for "Boursin scalloped potato with Barolo wine-braised short ribs" and a $525 bartender fee for a cash bar.

Three officials spent almost $400 for rented tuxedos

$1,840 for vests for the 19 “regional ambassadors” and other employees

$146,527.05 was spent on catered food during the entire conference

$6,325 was spent on commemorative coins in velvet boxes to reward all participants for their work on stimulus projects (because a certificate and the $800,000 party they're at wouldn't do)

$75,000 for a “team-building” exercise — the goal was to build bicycles (which would later be donated to a Boys & Girls Clubs)

But, we felt this one deserves a special shoutout: "Another agency employee sought a discount on a $98 purse from the hotel gift shop. She received a $30 break," reported the AP. Because hey, when you're making it rain with $7,000 sushi, who has $98 dollars to spend on a tacky gift shop purse?

WTF? $3200 for a freakin' mind reader? Seriously?

The very first question I had when I read this story was to wonder was this idiot's background is and what she was doing before Obama appointed her to the job. Fortunately, the Washington Post had me covered. First up, here is what Martha Johnson had to say upon taking office:

In her resignation letter, Johnson acknowledged a “significant misstep” at the agency that manages real estate for the federal government. “Taxpayer dollars were squandered,” she wrote. At the start of her tenure in February 2010 she called ethics “a big issue for me.”

Okay, that's a really funny joke. What could possibly top that? Well, how about her resume:

Career History: Computer Sciences Corp., vice president of culture (2007 to 2008); SRA-Touchstone Consulting Group, director and vice president, (2004 to 2007); Council for Excellence in Government, vice president of leadership and performance, (2002 to 2004)

I swear, you really can't make this shit up. But I have an idea that might put a stop to this kind of garbage. Instead of just letting Johnson resign, stick her with the bill for the total cost of the conference. Then maybe the next asshole political appointee who takes her place might think twice before trying to so blatantly fuck over the taxpayers.

Addendum: This story has been ballooning pretty quickly. After I wrote the initial post, CNN posted this rather ridiculous update:

The same week that a report documented massive overspending at the General Services Administration, a video emerged Thursday showing an agency employee joking about the excess spending and saying he would never be investigated for it.

The video also mentions an awards program for employees that gave out $200,000 worth of taxpayer-funded iPods, electronics and gift cards to entry-level government employees.

"I buy everything your field office can't afford," raps the employee in the video. "I'll never be under OIG investigation."

OIG refers to the Office of the Inspector General, who originally looked into the GSA's spending on a 2010 training conference held in Las Vegas. His report found the federal agency spent $822,000 on the event, including $75,000 on team-building exercises, $6,000 on commemorative coins, and $6,000 on canteens, keychains, and T-shirts.

The revelations prompted GSA Administrator Martha Johnson to resign this week.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's office, which is investigating the excess spending, received the video from the inspector general and released it to the public on Thursday.

The video was the winning entry in an employee video contest at the 2010 conference. In handing out the award for the video, the deputy commissioner of the Public Building Service appears to mock oversight of the GSA.

The revelations about the GSA's overspending are prompting outrage among lawmakers who are furious about taxpayer money being wasted. The inspector general's staff briefed congressional investigators Wednesday, and a source familiar with the briefing told CNN they were "pretty astonished at the blatant misuse of funds."

As it turns out, they aren't the only ones.


Bonus: I'll bet Martha Johnson wishes she had taken Sheryl Crow's advice

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson Doesn't Understand Basic Economics

Sometimes, it is actually kind of amusing to observe well known figures who are completely immersed in the business-as-usual mindset as they flail about, trying to comprehend why things just don't seem to be working like they expect them to anymore. Take Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was interviewed on MSNBC the other day and just can't fathom why America's space program is quickly disintegrating into irrelevancy. The Raw Story has the details:

Popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on Monday lamented that American culture no longer had a culture of innovation that prized scientific and technological discoveries.

Tyson noted on MSNBC that space exploration no longer captured American’s attention like it previously had. He blamed the lack of public interest on the lack of advances in the space frontier.

“You don’t have to be the scientist or engineer,” he explained. “You could be a journalist, an artist, but you start doing more stories about the frontier and all of a sudden everybody participates in inventing a tomorrow.”

“It’s the invention of tomorrow that is absent in today’s modern American culture,” Tyson continued.

“Tomorrow was everywhere in the 1960s, wasn’t it? The World’s Fair was all about tomorrow. And who enables that tomorrow? It is the scientific and technological literacy of a nation that does it. It is those innovations that are the engines of the 21st century economy.”

He added that private companies could not lead the space frontier, because of unknown risks and other factors that were detrimental to business.

“That is why governments are the ones that do the big first steps.”

I guess the fact that America has rung up over $5 trillion in new federal debt just in the past four years in a desperate attempt to to keep its economy afloat, to say nothing of the long term demographic trends which spell disaster for our major entitlement programs, must have escaped Mr. deGrasse Tyson's attention. The money to continue advancing the space program is not there...nor will it ever be there again. This serves as yet another example of how no matter how smart or accomplished a person my be in one field, it does not mean they have any clue about how things work outside that field.

Tomorrow is being invented by today's modern American culture, all right, just not in the way that Mr. deGrasse Tyson or very many others are anticipating. Our steadfast unwillingness to face our dire energy predicament virtually guarantees that we will be facing total economic collapse, likely within the next 20 years. The "innovations of the 21st century" are going to be among those who are successfully able to figure out how to adjust their lifestyles to enable them to survive in a world that will be rapidly powering down.


Bonus: "Space City is one hour up the road from me...one hour away is about as close to the moon as anyone down here is ever gonna be"

War Pigs Porn: Pentagon Desperately Plays The Jobs Card While Trying To Avoid Budget Cuts

The Pentagon War Pigs know that they are starting to lose the battle in the court of public opinion. After two lost wars in one decade, it's about time that the average mope citizen woke up to the fact that the biggest reason their government is running trillion dollar plus annual budget deficits at a time in which programs that benefit Americans are being frozen if not slashed is because of the out-of-control, five-sided monster on the banks of the Potomac.

As I've stated repeatedly on this blog, America's level of defense war spending is absolutely insane. Including indirect costs, the total is approximate to what every other nation on earth spends on war. What's more, four of the next six nations in war spending, including Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, are currently aligned with the U.S. We could slash Pentagon spending by at least three-fourths and still be utterly safe from conventional military attack.

Now the Pentagon is playing the one political card it hopes will carry weight in these difficult economic times: the loss of jobs that would result if the budget cutting deal reached by Obama and the Republicans last year are allowed to take effect. Here is Reuters with the story:

The Pentagon said on Thursday it would expect hundreds of thousands of layoffs across the defense industry if lawmakers did not take action to avert an additional $500 billion in defense budget cuts that could take effect in January 2013.

Frank Kendall, the Defense Department's acting undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the cuts would force the Pentagon to break many hard-won contracts with industry, including a multibillion dollar deal with Boeing Co for development of a new refueling plane.

The Navy's contracts with Lockheed Martin Corp and Australia's Austal Ltd for littoral combat ships would also be vulnerable if the mandatory cuts, known as sequestration, took effect as planned, Kendall told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a confirmation hearing to stay in the job.

Kendall said the defense industry would face fairly deep cuts applied indiscriminately, rather than on a targeted basis, given the way the Budget Control Act was worded.

The Pentagon last month unveiled a budget proposal for fiscal 2013 that would begin to implement $487 billion in spending cuts that the White House and Congress agreed to make, spanning the next decade. If lawmakers did not come up with $1.2 trillion in other deficit-reducing measures, the Pentagon would have to cut its proposed funding by another $500 billion.

Kendall said there was a good chance that President Barack Obama would use a legal clause to exempt the personnel accounts from the cuts -- which would increase the burden that would fall on spending for new weapons, research and development programs and upgrades for older weapons.

"A lot of the work that we're done over the last couple of years to try to make more efficient acquisition decisions and get better contract structures would be broken," he said.

Kendall said the cuts would ripple through all tiers of the defense industry, hitting small and medium-sized businesses particularly hard.

He said some of the biggest companies in the sector had already approached him with concerns about having to provide advance notice of potential layoffs given the uncertainty caused by the current budget situation.

Conservatives like to bash so-called "welfare queens" every chance they get, even though the average person on welfare actually receives a tiny pittance compared to what is paid out to defense contractors every year. Right here in this article you can see who the biggest welfare queens of all really are. $487 billion in budget reductions over the next decade represents less than $50 billion per year, or put another way less than 10% of the Pentagon's current annual budget allocation. It's time to cut these fuckers off, whatever the costs to the economy.


Bonus: But of course

Converging Trends Porn: Few U.S. Cities Are Ready For Aging Baby Boomer Population

The realization that America faces a dire demographic crisis in the 21st century as the bulge in population known as the Baby Boomers reach retirement age is hardly new. It was most dramatically spelled out in the 2004 book, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future, by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns. So what has Spoiled Rotten Nation done to prepare itself in the eight years since Kotlikoff and Burns's dire warning? Jack shit, of course. And now, even the befuddled mainstream media is starting to notice, as shown by this article from USA Today:

Few communities have started to think long term about how to plan and redesign services for aging Baby Boomers as they move out of the workforce and into retirement.

Even more troubling, dwindling budgets in a tight economy have pushed communities to cut spending on delivering meals to the homebound and shuttling folks who can no longer drive to grocery stores and doctor's offices.

These cuts, advocates for older Americans say, are coming when the services are needed more than ever. And those needs will grow tremendously over the next two decades.

The nation's population of those 65 and older will double between 2000 and 2030, according to the federal Administration on Aging. That adds up to one out of every five Americans — 72.1 million people.

Just eight years from now, researchers say, a quarter of all Ohio's residents in half of the state's counties will be 60 or older. Arizona and Pennsylvania project that one in four of its residents will be over the age of 60 by 2020.

"The bottom line is, the Baby Boomers are hitting," Chuck Gehring of LifeCare Alliance, an agency serving seniors in central Ohio, told The Columbus Dispatch. "Are communities prepared for this? No."

The whole article is fairly lengthy and worth reading in its entirety, but I thought I would just jump right to the punch line:

"There are a lot of communities that recognize they need to do something but haven't done it yet," Sandy Markwood, the group's chief executive officer, told the Associated Press.

Some of the changes cities can make include offering training to help older people drive more safely, installing road signs that are easier to read or creating ride-share programs, said Jo Reed, who oversaw the latest survey.

The biggest reason why cities have made little progress is the economy.

Nearly 21,000 times last year, drivers for the Licking County Aging Program in Ohio took elderly residents in communities east of Columbus to medical appointments. The gasoline bill has more than doubled in the past four years, topping $7,000 a month.

Uh-oh...Houston (and everywhere else), we have a problem.

As the article explains in great detail, local communities all across the country are woefully unprepared to provide services to a rapidly aging population. Just like Kotlikoff and Burns warned years ago, government at all levels is having a very difficult time wrestling with this issue at a time when the ratio in the number of workers paying taxes to the number of retirees is quickly shrinking. But there was one very important factor they neglected to consider in their book that is dramatically illustrated by the section of the article I bolded above: the hugely negative economic impact of high energy costs.

Kotlikoff and Burns estimated that this problem would reach crisis proportions by around 2030. I think it is pretty clear, however, that their calculation is going to be off by at least a decade or so on the short end. Not only are governments at all levels under pressure from high energy costs, but young adults are finding it increasingly difficult even with a college education to land the kind of secure, good paying jobs that will allow them to pay taxes at a rate which will support the expensive programs for retirees. In the past four years, the federal government has papered over this crisis by increasing its annual deficit spending by nearly a trillion dollars per year. When we finally reach the point where it can no longer borrow such insane amounts of money, it is pretty obvious that the programs retirees are counting on to support them will quickly collapse.

Like other reality based prognosticators going all the way back to the 1970s, the warnings of Kotlikoff and Burns went largely ignored as Spoiled Rotten Nation covered its ears and continued partying like there was no tomorrow. Well, tomorrow is just about here, and there are going to be literally tens of millions of older Americans who are going to be very sorry that they didn't listen.


Bonus: "Live your life like there's no tomorrow...that's what they tell you, right? What they don't tell you is what to do when you're not dead tomorrow...that's when you've got problems"

Austerity Porn: Feds Consider Closing 60 Court Facilities In 29 States

Let's be clear about something right up front. Despite the deficit reduction deal agreed to by our great and glorious "leaders" this past summer, the federal government has yet to meaningfully reduce its spending. The total number of cuts to date scarcely even represent a rounding error on the deficit, let alone the overall budget. Keep that in mind as you read the excerpt from this story that appeared last week in Newsmax:

The federal government is considering closing dozens of courtrooms across the country, many located in small, rural communities, as part of an effort to cut costs.

The Associated Press obtained documents showing that 60 federal court facilities in 29 states could be on the chopping block. Most of the courtrooms are in buildings that house other federal agencies including in post offices and many are located in remote areas. Critics say closing them could make it more difficult for people to get to court proceedings.

Six of the 60 court sites that could be closed are located in Arkansas. Texas and Georgia have five courts each on the list of possible closures. Officials are even considering shuttering the location where judges hold federal court in Alaska's capital city, Juneau.

There are 674 federal courthouses and facilities around the country, according to David Sellers, a federal courts spokesman. The 60 sites being considered for closure do not have a resident judge. Instead, judges based in larger cities travel to these smaller locations as needed.

As I said, this action is NOT the result of actual budget cutting:

"The federal judiciary is going through an aggressive cost containment effort because the money Congress has provided for the operating expenses for the courts has been essentially frozen the last three years," Sellers said in an email.

That's right, the budget for the federal courts has been FROZEN, not cut. What that tells you is there is increasing cost pressure. What's more, that increasing cost pressure is likely due largely to increased energy costs as the salaries for federal employees have essentially also been frozen the past two years.

So what is going to happen when the federal government DOES finally have to start wielding the budgetary axe as the reality of our out-of-control deficit spending hits home? I don't think it really strains the imagination.


Bonus: A little courtroom humor

NASA's Slow Collapse Continues

I've written here before that one of the most glaring examples of America's decline is the sorry condition of its space program. Even as the dreamers like Newt Gingrich keep imagining moon bases and manned Mars missions, budgetary realities are making it quite obvious that those are nothing more than pipe dreams. The New York Times confirms this sad state of affairs yet again with a story it published on Monday about how funds are now drying up even for continuation of unmanned space probes:

Just as NASA is on the cusp of answering the most fascinating questions about Mars — is there, was there or could there be life there? — the money needed to provide the answers is about to be abruptly withdrawn, a victim of President Obama’s budget request for 2013, scientists say.

Two ambitious missions that NASA had hoped to launch to Mars, in 2016 and 2018, will be canceled. The first would have sent an orbiter to measure gases in the Martian atmosphere — methane in particular, since methane does not last long. Its presence could suggest that Martian microbes are busy at work emitting the gas (though other explanations are also possible).

The second, in 2018, would have set the stage to fulfill the longstanding desire of scientists to bring pieces of Mars back to Earth for close-up study with the full arsenal of instruments available in their laboratories. Now the prospect of bringing Martian rocks to Earth is likely pushed to the mid- or late 2020s, all because of budget cuts.

“The pipeline is being shut off, and that’s not what anyone wants,” said Bill Nye, executive director of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit group founded by Carl Sagan and others who wanted to foster interest in outer space. “We are closer than anyone has ever been to discovering life on another world.”

President Obama’s budget request for 2013 calls for cutting NASA’s robotic exploration of the solar system by 20 percent, to $1.2 billion, and the Mars program would be particularly hard hit. Already, NASA has withdrawn from a collaboration with the European Space Agency that would have launched the missions in 2016 and 2018, angering the Europeans and disappointing astrobiologists and planetary scientists.

What amazes me when I read stories like this is that the authors always treat the idea of budget cuts in a vacuum and never mention that there is a very good reason why they are happening. The longer term trend here should be painfully obvious...as America's economic power slowly erodes away, its space program is collapsing. That basic fact was driven home even more directly by this passage:

The sidelining of the Mars program is one of several depressing developments at NASA. The space shuttles will never fly again, and the agency’s reliance on Russian rockets to ferry astronauts to the space station is likely to be extended, because financing of commercial companies to take over that task has been limited. The James Webb Space Telescope, meant as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is delayed and over budget, now at least six years from being ready. The new heavy-lift rocket that is to take astronauts on faraway missions will not carry any astronauts until 2021. All of the big projects are slipping into the distant future.

Read: never. The trend could not be more clear, and yet the scientists remain completely oblivious to it:

In a letter sent March 5, a group of Mars scientists that provides feedback to NASA said it was “appalled” by the proposed budget cuts. “Among the many dire impacts, the cuts threaten the very existence of the Mars exploration program which has been one of the crown jewels of the agency’s planetary exploration,” wrote David J. Des Marais, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in California and chairman of the group.

Sorry to break this to you, Mr. Des Marais, but it is not only the Mars exploration program which is seeing its very existence threatened but the entire space program itself. Sadly, its ultimate demise is merely a matter time. Given that this trend dates back to the demise of the Apollo Program, is it REALLY that difficult to see?

On June 22nd of last year, in my post, "Fittingly, Voyager 1 Leaves the Solar System as the Last Space Shuttle Gets Ready to Launch," I summed it up this way:

Someday, a hundred years from now perhaps, tales will be told to young children around the evening campfire of a fanciful time when human beings actually walked upon the face of the moon. Sadly, those stories will likely be treated by those youngsters with the same sense of wonder and yet innate disbelief as the legends of the Greek gods of mythology are today.

Bonus: "The universe is shaped exactly like the Earth...if you go straight long enough, you end up where you were"

Federal Budget Deficit Rises With Payroll Tax Cut

I've written several times here at TDS warning about the dire state of the Social Security program and the reckless irresponsibility of President Hopey-Changey in cutting the payroll tax just to give the economy a short term boost and help his reelection chances. My previous writings on the subject are contained here:

Why We’re Screwed (Part 3): The Social Security “Trust Fund” is a Lie (July 13, 2011)

Social Security Blues: 2012 Shaping Up to Be a Third Consecutive Deficit Year (January 14, 2012)

Unfortunately, the lie about the supposed solvency of the Social Security program because trillions of dollars in payroll tax "surpluses" were allegedly squirreled away in the Social Security Trust Fund just won't die easily. If there really is all that money available in the fund, perhaps someone would care to explain away this story that appeared Tuesday in the USA Today:

The payroll tax cut recently enacted by Congress and signed by President Obama will increase the federal budget deficit this year, the Congressional Budget Office says.

What's more, the deficit is likely to be a little deeper than estimated in 2013 and 2014 as well.

The agency's latest report, which updates its forecast from January, shows a likely deficit this year of $1.2 trillion, rather than the $1.1 trillion originally projected. It shows the deficit declining to $1 trillion in 2013 and $953 billion in 2014, both a bit higher than January's forecasts.

Those gloomy figures are based on what CBO calls its "alternative fiscal scenario." Its basic projections are much rosier but are based on existing laws, rather than likely changes.

Because Congress and the White House are almost certain to extend expiring tax cuts and avoid Medicare payment cuts to doctors, for instance, the alternative scenario becomes more likely.

Most of the changes in the report are due to the extension of the 2-percentage-point payroll tax cut through the end of this year.

You really don't have to be a genius or a savant to figure out that if the Social Security trust fund really existed, then the payroll tax cut would not be adding to the current federal deficit. The sad fact is that your "leaders" used a quarter-century's worth of payroll tax surpluses to hide the true size of the federal deficit during that whole time period. Now the bill is on the table, and the diner has nothing in his pockets but lint and IOUs.


Bonus: "You just sat there taking everything you could get...you never dreamed that one day you might have to pay for it"

National Weather Service Facing A Proposed $39 Million Budget Cut

You would have to have been living under a very deeply buried rock not to notice that the weather in America has been increasingly volatile in recent years. The record breaking March tornado outbreak of last week drove that point home yet again. Unfortunately, it appears as though the agency charged with getting warnings out to the public of impending severe weather is about to take a hit to its budget. Here is a South Carolina television station with the details:

The National Weather Service is facing a different kind of storm.

It's not a hurricane or tornado, but instead a proposed budget cut of $39 million dollars. The government agency that issues daily forecasts, in addition to severe weather warnings, could have their budget cut by as much as four percent.

National Weather Service offices across the country, including the one in Charleston, have had to gradually cut back on travel over the last four or five years.

"It makes it difficult for conferences when we are trying to get technology and things going, but we cut back about 75 percent on travel, so we are pretty limited now in what we can do," said Frank Alsheimer, meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

"Fortunately, technology helps us in some respects in that with the use of things like webinars that we are producing over the Internet that we don't lose as much training as you would if we just took 75 percent off the top."

If the budget reduction is passed, Alsheimer said it's likely that there will be a delay in getting some new technology.

"One of the issues that will come up is the fact that these new technologies that we introduce help increase our lead times, help give the forecasters more tools to do a better and better service for the American people," said Alsheimer. "As these new technologies are delayed, it means we all have to wait for these improvements that we are expecting as years go by."

The budget cut proposal also includes cutting the number of information technology officers, across the country.

"Each forecast office has an ITO or information technology officer, which essentially helps us transition new data, new information to the forecasters to help make their decisions," said Alsheimer. "The thought is that a fair amount of that can be done remotely rather than on station. Whether that can be cleanly done remains to be seen."

Without an information technology officer at each office, he said there could be several issues.

"It will start from simply not being able to get technology installed as quickly in our office as to a worse case scenario where during a severe weather event, we have a failure and we don't have someone on site to correct that failure and we wind up not being able to perform our mission."

The mission at the National Weather Service is to protect life and property; a mission that could be challenged if the $39 million dollar budget cut is approved.

Like so many other similar reports recently, the real story here is that this is just the beginning. Right now, the federal government is merely trimming the fat around the edges as it takes its first tentative steps to address its massive budget imbalance. Much deeper cuts will be coming in the future, and when that happens the National Weather Service will slowly lose its ability to warn about the development of severe weather even as the climate grows increasingly volatile. As Americans, we have a hard time imagining there ever being less available technology servicing any aspect of our lives, but those days are rapidly approaching nonetheless.


Bonus: "It's strange how hard it rains now"