Post by God's DebrisPrepare to cry in your beer next Tuesday.
http://online.wsj.com/
New income data from the Census Bureau, tabulated by former Census
income specialists at the nonpartisan economic consulting firm Sentier
Research, reveal that the three-and-a-half years of the Obama Presidency
have done enormous harm to middle-class households.
In January 2009, the month President Obama entered the Oval Office and
shortly before he signed his stimulus spending bill, median household
income was $54,983. By June 2012, it had tumbled to $50,964, adjusted
for inflation. (See the chart nearby.) That's $4,019 in lost real
income, a little less than a month's income every year.
http://online.wsj.com/
Whether or not Americans choose to believe him, there's no denying the
fiscal reality created by the rollout version of President Obama last
year, as detailed in the Congressional Budget Office report released
yesterday. For the second year in a row, fiscal 2010 will see a
trillion-dollar deficit—an estimated $1.35 trillion, or 9.2% of GDP,
which is down slightly from last year's post-World War II record of 9.9%.
The slow pace of economic recovery has contributed to a collapse in
revenues, down to 14.8% of GDP in 2009 and an estimated 14.9% this year.
That's well below the modern historical average of about 18.1%, and it
is a reminder that economic growth is the most important contributor to
smaller deficits. Had last year's "stimulus" worked half as well as the
White House advertised, these deficits wouldn't be as large.
But as the nearby chart shows, Mr. Obama's major contribution to
deficits has been a record spending spree. In 2007, before the
recession, federal expenditures reached $2.73 trillion. By 2009
expenditures had climbed to $3.52 trillion. In 2009 alone, overall
federal spending rose 18%, or $536 billion. Throw in a $65 billion
reduction in debt service costs due to low interest rates, and the
overall spending increase was 22%.
In one year.
CBO confirms that Democrats have taken federal spending to a new and
higher plateau: 24.7% of GDP in 2009, 24.1% this year, and back to an
estimated 24.3% in 2011. The modern historical average is about 20.5%,
and less than that if you exclude the Reagan defense buildup of the
1980s that helped to win the Cold War and let Bill Clinton reduce
defense spending to 3% of GDP in the 1990s.
This means that one of every four dollars produced by the sweat of
American private labor is now taxed and redistributed by 535 men and
women in Congress.
http://lauraingraham.com/b/America-under-ObamaCare,-Day-239:-Hospital-job-losses-increase/-413285077856810758.html
According to one hospital, layoffs of workers have already begun as a
result of the new law. Leaders of Memorial Hospital in South Bend,
Indiana, said that although "the economy sparked this problem...the
Obama Health Care Reform Act gave the hospital a one-two punch. While
more people may soon get more health coverage, Obama's plan cuts
reimbursement dollars for hospitals at a time administrators say they
could use them most."
Obamacare includes $575 billion in cuts to Medicare to pay for a
Medicaid expansion and a new entitlement program, which will provide
generous subsidies for middle-class Americans to buy insurance. The cuts
include slashes to hospitals' reimbursement rates.