California Budget Deficit Has Swelled to $16 Billion - We Know How To Cut That Amount In One Year!

According to California Governor Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown, the budget deficit for the State is going to hit $16 Billion. 

We offer a few simple ways to cut that amount to $0 (or be in the positive) in just ONE year.

Being budget conscious is not rocket science.

Wake Up America

Illegal alien friendly - CA Governor, Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown

California's budget deficit has swelled to a projected $16 billion -- much larger than had been predicted just months ago -- and will force severe cuts to schools and public safety if voters fail to approve tax increases in November, Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday.

The Democratic governor said the shortfall grew from $9.2 billion in January in part because tax collections have not come in as high as expected and the economy isn't growing as fast as hoped for. The deficit has also risen because lawsuits and federal requirements have blocked billions of dollars in state cuts.  

"This means we will have to go much farther and make cuts far greater than I asked for at the beginning of the year," Brown said in an online video. "But we can't fill this hole with cuts alone without doing severe damage to our schools. That's why I'm bypassing the gridlock and asking you, the people of California, to approve a plan that avoids cuts to schools and public safety."

Brown did not release details of the newly calculated deficit Saturday, but he is expected to lay out a revised spending plan Monday. The new plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 hinges in large part on voters approving higher taxes.

The governor has said those tax increases are needed to help pull the state out of a crippling decade shaped by the collapse of the housing market and recession. Without them, he warned, public schools and colleges, and public safety, will suffer deeper cuts.

"What I'm proposing is not a panacea, but it goes a long way toward cleaning up the state's budget mess," Brown said.Read full article here

Here are our suggestions to fixing this problem in ONE year:

• Stop Supporting Illegal Aliens. 
• According to Robert Longley, US Government reporter for About.com "In hosting America's largest population of illegal immigrants, California bears a huge cost to provide basic human services for this fast growing, low-income segment of its population. A new study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) examines the costs of education, health care and incarceration of illegal aliens, and concludes that the costs to Californians is $10.5 billion per year."

• Tax Marijuana 
• It is estimated that if marijuana sales were properly taxed on a state level, a minimum of $1.5 Billion would be added to the State's coffers.

• Release all California inmates who are serving time for "marijuana possession only" sentences -even 3rd strike offenders.
• Approximately 60,000 inmates are serving time for marijuana offenses at a cost of $1.2 Billion per year

•  Stop arresting and prosecuting marijuana cases which net less than 1 pound in possession.
• Taxpayers annually spend between $7.5 billion and $10 billion arresting and prosecuting individuals for marijuana violations. Almost 90 percent of these arrests are for marijuana possession only. Let's assume we use a figure of just 50% of the lower amount to reduce. That comes to $3.75 Billion.

According to our figures that totals $17 Billion and change of taxpayer money the misguided State of California is wasting annually. Apply that to their deficit and Caleeforneeans are bucks up by year's end and rolling in it  from then on out.

That was easy wasn't it? 

Give us a few more minutes and we'll find another $50 Billion or so the corrupt pols in CA are wasting.

Obama's Cost Estimate For Health Insurance Aid Rises By $111B

Buried deep in Obama's budget was an increase of ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN BILLION DOLLARS for his health care insurance aid program that they tried to slip in without notice. When questioned about it, Barry O's inept administration officials tried to explain away the increase as "..budget technicalities and that there are no significant changes in the program."

Since when did $111,000,000,000 of your tax payer money become "NOT significant?"

Wake Up America! 

Cost estimates for a key part of President Obama's health care overhaul law have ballooned by $111 billion from last year's budget, and a senior Republican lawmaker on Friday demanded an explanation. 

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., wants to know by Monday why the estimated ten-year cost of helping millions of middle-class Americans buy health insurance has jumped by about 30 percent. 

Administration officials say the explanation lies in budget technicalities and that there are no significant changes in the program. 

The revised numbers, buried deep in the president's budget, stumped lawmakers and some administration officials for most of the week. At a congressional hearing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is in charge of carrying out the health care law, indicated she was unaware of the changes. 

At issue are subsidies that will be provided under the health care law to help middle class people buy private coverage in new state insurance markets that will open for business in 2014. 

Last year's budget estimated the cost of the aid to be $367 billion from 2014-2011. This year's budget puts it at $478 billion over the same time period. 

"This staggering increase ... cannot be explained by legislative changes or new economic assumptions, and therefore must reflect substantial changes in underlying assumptions regarding the program's ... costs," Camp wrote Friday in a letter to Sebelius and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. 

Republicans say they're concerned that either the estimated cost of the insurance has gone up, or that the administration has determined many more people will be losing employer coverage and going into the new government-subsidized markets, which will be called exchanges. 

Administration officials say the big increase from last year's estimates is no cause for alarm and that the administration is not forecasting an erosion of employer coverage or higher insurance costs. 

About two-thirds of the increase is due to effects of newly signed legislation that raises costs for one part of the health care law, but still saves the government money overall. The rest is due to technical changes in Treasury assumptions about such matters as the distribution of income in America. 

"The estimates do not assume changes in what exchanges look like, the cost of insurance, or the number of Americans who will get their insurance in this new marketplace," Treasury spokeswoman Sabrina Siddiqui said in a statement Friday. 

That explanation has drawn skepticism from Ways and Means Committee Republican staff members.

Fox News

Former US Comptroller General David Walker: US Will Look Like Greece in 2 Years

In two years, the U.S. economy will resemble that of Greece when the debt crisis began there, says David M. Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General and current CEO of the Comeback America Initiative.

The United States has never carried so much debt as it does today ever save during World War II, when such hefty borrowing and spending was needed to halt a devastatingly widespread war.

The United States, Walker tells the Worcester Economic Club, ranks 28th out of 34 countries in terms of fiscal responsibility, with the debt-heavy Greece coming in at last place.

"We’re about two years away from where Greece was when it had its debt crisis," Walker says, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

"The fact of the matter is government is not the engine of growth, innovation and job creation," Walker says, adding "spending is a bipartisan problem" that has gotten out of control in the last decade.

While federal spending was 2 percent of the gross domestic product in 1800, it hit 23.8 percent in 2011 and is on track to hit 36.8 by 2040, according to Walker.

Furthermore the U.S. spends double per person what other industrialized nations do on healthcare and education, while military spending should not be immune to budget cuts either.

"We can, we must and we will reduce defense spending," Walkers says.

President Barack Obama sent a $3.8 trillion budget proposal to Congress recently, and Republicans have pointed out that while the president is quick to hike taxes on the wealthy, he's not so quick to cut spending, which the country really needs.

"Instead of leading the effort to bring down our debt and make tough choices, the president is proposing that we spend more and more," says Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington state, according to CNN.

"All his wasteful spending puts us deeper in debt to China. All his tax hikes would destroy jobs and make it tougher to compete with China."

Money News

Great Graphic Showing National Debt as a Household Budget

 

America's ever-growing debt crisis is in the trillions -- more than $14 trillion, give or take a few billion.

That's a lot of zeros, numbers so large they're sure to make Americans numb when trying to get their arms around what it means to them.

But what would the federal debt crisis look like if you set it up as a household budget?

A heck of a lot simpler, according to new figures from one Tea Party group, which estimates the government "household" spends nearly twice as much as it takes in every year, has a credit card bill nearly seven times annual income and cuts back less than 2 percent of that spending in an effort to control the debt.

"We had discussed about how any citizen needs to understand what the proposed cuts mean," said Laurie Newsom, president of the Gainesville, Fla., Tea Party. "One of our members had figured it out and put it in terms of a household budget. If you ran a household with these numbers, you would see that it's simply not enough."

The group looked at some key figures, mainly tax revenue, the current federal budget, debt and budget cuts, and divided each figure by $100 million, in an effort to break it down into simple terms that most Americans can comprehend. The group posted its findings online and came up with a household with an average family income of $21,700. But that "family" spent nearly twice that -- $38,200 -- and has an existing credit card balance of a whopping $142,710.

"Everyone tries to keep things extremely simple for these things meant for general public consumption and of course there's a give-and-take with that," said Seth Rabinowitz, a partner with Silicon Associates, an economics-focused management consulting firm based in California. "I would make it clearer for the layman.They used the line 'Money the family spent'...but really that means, 'Money the family spent (last year and intends to spend this year again).' "

"However, when you remove those eight zeros, the $385 spending cuts obviously aren't even visible. They don't even make a dent," he said.

The bottom line, according to Newsom: "Cuts won't take care of it. You need business growth, which we wouldn't have in a regulatory environment."

Article by Perry Chiaramonte, Fox News