What Plans????

The title relates to that old saying that “ain’t it great when a plan comes together.” In this case though, the plan is falling apart big time with two different news items that came out this week, neither of which is “helpful” to President Obama and his administration.

The first is a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO’s report gives the bad news that the “unemployment figures” will remain above 8 percent for at least until 2014, but the real killer is that the “real” unemployment numbers are at 15 percent.

If you read my earlier report about the various “levels” of unemployment, you will remember that the news media reports on what is called the U3 unemployment numbers. Those are the ones reported that have been actively looking for work for the previous 4 weeks to the reported numbers. However, the U6 numbers goes well beyond to get to the actual number of people who are unemployed or underemployed and wishing to have better. Incidentally, that blog post is here:

http://ignoringthebarkingdogs.blogspot.com/2012/01/unemployment-figures-explained-and-more.html

With links in mind, here is a quote and a link from a FOX News report about the CBO report:

“The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.”

Now, the FOX News link:

http://nation.foxnews.com/unemployment/2012/02/16/new-cbo-report-decimates-obamanomics-real-unemployment-hits-15#ixzz1maHc95kK

And, a link to the CBO’s report:

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/127xx/doc12757/02-16-Unemployment.pdf

If that wasn’t enough bad news for President Obama, his Treasury Secretary just managed to heap more bad news on the long list of the President’s failures. While this article is primarily about entitlement programs, the same can be said for the entire economic mess. If he can’t fix entitlements, which liberals hold sacrosanct, how could he possibly fix the other parts of the economy? I know that some will say that the entitlements came about prior to his administration, but he isn’t addressing them at all.

Here is the article from the Washington Free Beacon as far as the text is concerned, but the link below the quoted article takes one to the article which includes two video clips.

“An Economy Built to Crash

By: Andrew Stiles

The Washington Free Beacon

February 16, 2012

President Obama described his fiscal year 2013 budget – the most expensive in United States history – as “a blueprint for an economy that is built to last.”

But even his Treasury Secretary does not agree with that assessment.

For the second year in row, Timothy Geithner admitted before the Senate Budget Committee that President Obama’s budget takes no action to meaningfully reform entitlement programs, putting us on an “unsustainable” fiscal course.

“Even if Congress were to enact this budget,” Geithner said, “we would still be left with–in the outer decades as millions of Americans retire–what are still unsustainable commitments in Medicare and Medicaid.

In fact, Geithner said the same thing about the president’s budget last year.

“With the president’s plan, even if Congress were to enact it, and even if Congress were to hold to it, we would still be left with a very large interest burden and unsustainable obligations over time,” Geithner said in 2011. “That’s why we’re having the debate.”

The Congressional Budget Office projects that federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid will comprise an increasingly large, and inherently unsustainable, share of the economy in the coming decades.”

http://freebeacon.com/geithner-admits-obamas-budget-unsustainable/

While the media is enthralled with a question posed by Stephanopoulos about whether states could pass laws regulating or outlawing contraception and the “straw man” issue that is, they willingly ignore the truth in regards to Obama and his economic mess. Then, one can add the willing negligence of the U.S. Senate leadership to ignore mandated law and not pass a budget for at least the last 1000 days.

For those that have forgotten, or perhaps just didn’t know, the Senate is controlled by the Democrats. Passing a budget does NOT require a 60 vote majority, but only a simple majority. President Obama’s budget for last year was voted on by the Senate and they voted it down with a margin of 97 – 0. Yep, not even the democrats wanted to vote for it. To top it all off, though, Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader, has stated that the Senate “won’t even vote on the President’s budget this year.”

I guess the Democratic Party leadership doesn’t want to “embarrass” the President.