Our fearless fiscal warrior went on television yesteray to declare that our country will go bankrupt if he doesn't get his health care "reform" bill passed.  Via ABC News:

The president said that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid are on an “unsustainable” trajectory and if there is no action taken to bring them down, “the federal government will go bankrupt.”

“This actually provides us the best chance of starting to bend the cost curve on the government expenditures in Medicare and Medicaid,” Obama said.

Obama told Gibson that anybody who says they are concerned about the rising deficit or worried about tax increases in the future has to support this health care bill.

A few things here.

1) Congratulations on admitting to a keen grasp of the obvious.  Anyone and everyone with a lick of common sense and the ability to read a financial report has pointed out that there is absolutely no way under the sun that the federal government will be able to continue to provide all the wonderful entitlement benefits that liberals have saddled us with without, eventually, going broke.

2) You lose any credit you might have gained for recognizing our financial strait when you proclaim that the only way to fix our problem is to "bend the cost curve" by creating yet another entitlement.  read more »

While what divides American political conservatives from communists could (and I suppose does) fill volumes, we do have something in common with the Chinese communists.

We both think the US government is spending too much money.

From Deroy Murdock's column today:

In one of today’s richest ironies, America’s fiscal health -- such as it is -- hinges on the generosity of the Chinese Communist Party. Annoying Beijing’s mandarins could prompt them to skip our Treasury auctions. If China stops lending the Treasury money to underwrite Uncle Sam’s spendaholism, the Federal Reserve will need to print even more dollars to nudge the day of reckoning back over the horizon.

The Chinese have urged Washington to stop spending and printing so much money, lest inflation turn China’s $800.5 billion in Treasuries into a giant misfortune cookie. Chinese officials have grown increasingly vocal -- and decreasingly diplomatic -- in asking the US government to start practicing fiscal discipline.

“If they [the Fed] keep printing money to buy bonds, it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard,” predicts Chen Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress...

You gotta' love it.

I guess this goes to prove that, when it's YOUR money that's on the line, (in this case, theirs), you tend to have a little more common sense...as opposed to when you operate on OPM, (like our government).  read more »

Proving that Friday's are usually the best days for "real" news from DC (because fewer people are paying attention), the White House released its updated estimate of just how much further in the red Obama's spending plans will put the country over the next ten years.  The number is staggering...but really just an admission that everyone else was right a few months ago when they said Obama was being way too optimistic about the fiscal impact of his policies.

From the Washington Post:

The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama's policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday, bringing their long-term budget forecast in line with independent estimates.

The new projections add approximately $2 trillion to budget deficits through 2019. Earlier this year, the administration had predicted that Obama's policies would require the government to spend $7.108 trillion more than it collects in tax revenue over the next decade.

And of course, they released this little tidbit on Friday...the day before he skipped town to go on vacation.  read more »

I read a lot of news, and I don't get to talk about it all. So I'd like to start a weekly segment here that I'm going to call the Saturday Summary, a look back at the news I found newsworthy over the past week or so (some links may be older than a week).

The Obama Administration is blocking American efforts to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, while paying the Brazilians to do it themselves. Meanwhile, China, India and Russia are doing it without our help.

Contrary to the common belief, the US manufacturing sector is doing better than ever, accounting for 25% of global manufacturing value-added (compared to 10.6% for the Chinese).

The US currently has 130,000 troops in Iraq and 68,000 in Afghanistan. But most anti-war rhetoric ended in January with Obama's inauguration. To her credit, Cindy Sheehan is still at it, she's just being ignored by the left.

High prices in health care aren't as high as they seem. Medical insurance seems to act more like a union looking for bargaining power than as actual insurance.

Canadians are regularly coming to the US for health care, both paying out-of-pocket for it and getting the Canadian government to pay for it. A lot of people are asking where Americans will go once Obamacare is law, but I also wonder, where will the Canadians go?  read more »