Author Topic: Government programs & regulations, spending, deficit, and budget process  (Read 492750 times)


DougMacG

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Government programs, reckless spending
« Reply #1551 on: May 01, 2024, 07:35:02 AM »
"Somalian-Americans" pulled off the greatest fraud known so far of all the Covid free money:  70 defendants, almost all Somalian, $250 million stolen.  Fed millions of meals to starving children - except they didn't.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/04/feeding-our-fraud-goes-to-trial.php
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This happened right under the nose of MN AG Keith Ellison who was too busy suing government to set climate policy to notice no meals were served by this historic fraud.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2024, 09:46:01 AM by DougMacG »

ccp

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" They are almost all Somali, I am sorry to say. By the same token, I believe that one of my Somali friends helped expose the fraud and assist in the investigation."

if considered a whistleblower then I believe entitled to something like 15% of recovered funds.

" Under the FCA, whistleblowers are typically entitled to between 15% and 30% of the amount the government recovers based on the information they provide. For 2022, the DOJ reported $2.2 billion in FCA judgments and settlements, of which $1.9 billion resulted from whistleblower complaints."


DougMacG

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Government programs, Spending IS the campaign
« Reply #1554 on: May 08, 2024, 07:16:16 AM »


Body-by-Guinness

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Biden Takes a Hit on Unemployment
« Reply #1556 on: May 09, 2024, 02:49:15 PM »
What’s that you say? Bidenomics doesn’t work and you have the stats to prove it?

https://www.westernjournal.com/weekly-jobless-claims-unexpectedly-shoot-worrisome-level/

Perhaps it’s time for an employment thread?

Body-by-Guinness

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National Debt Becoming the Largest Budget Line Item
« Reply #1557 on: May 09, 2024, 03:25:03 PM »
2nd post. Jeepers, if you spend more than you earn by a significant margin, at some point your interest payment subsumes all. Who knew, besides everyone with a modicum of fiscal integrity.

https://blog.independent.org/2024/04/16/interest-on-national-debt/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=interest-on-national-debt

Crafty_Dog

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No need for a new thread:  "Political Economics" will do nicely.  :-)

DougMacG

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Re: The Fed: Enablers of Budget Overspending & Associated Idiocy
« Reply #1559 on: May 10, 2024, 04:17:57 AM »
"The title sez it all"


  - Fed Chair J. Powell said, paraphrasing, we can't criticize Congress, they're our boss.

What a crock.  How can they give an honest, accurate assessment of what's happening without attacking excess spending?  It IS the problem.


DougMacG

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"There's nothing to cut from this budget" ??
« Reply #1561 on: May 16, 2024, 08:20:01 AM »
The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion has resulted in a massive increase in federal Medicaid improper payments, which soared from an estimated $14.4 billion in 2013 to $98.7 billion in 2021 as shown in this week’s Paragon Pic. The primary reason for the increase: millions of people were enrolled in Medicaid without proper eligibility reviews.

A poorly run Medicaid program harms the truly vulnerable by misallocating resources. Because of the ACA, Washington pays a much greater share of expenses for non-disabled, working-age enrollees than traditional Medicaid enrollees like low-income children, pregnant women, seniors, and individuals with disabilities. This ACA expansion elevated rate creates a large incentive for states to enroll people under the expansion criteria.

https://paragoninstitute.org/paragon-pic/the-affordable-care-acts-medicaid-expansion-caused-improper-payments-to-soar/

Body-by-Guinness

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Underwriting Permanent Dependency
« Reply #1562 on: May 21, 2024, 06:45:56 PM »
Homeless spending grows, so does the size of the homeless population. Only government program managers can’t see there’s something wrong with this set of circumstances:

Why Are Both Homelessness and Homelessness Spending Growing?
May 17, 2024
By CHRISTOPHER J. CALTON

Also published in The Orange County Register Fri. May 17, 2024   Show More »
Over the past decade, homelessness in California has been rising at alarming rates. California already topped the national list in 2014 when it had a homeless population of 114,000, but according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2023 Homelessness Assessment Report count, that number has grown to more than 180,000—nearly a 60 percent increase—and an astonishing two-thirds of these individuals are entirely unsheltered. In fact, with a total unsheltered population of 123,423, California is shamefully only about 10,000 shy of the other 49 states combined.

Yet California has spent a record $24 billion fighting homelessness over the past five years, according to a state audit published last month. In other words, the homeless population and homelessness spending have grown in tandem. How is this even possible?

The sad reality is that the current homelessness policy, known as Housing First, virtually guarantees an ever-ballooning homelessness budget, regardless of how effective it is in reducing the homeless population. This is because the measure of success under Housing First is not independent self-sufficiency, but in homeless persons becoming de facto wards of the state.

In 2013, the federal government adopted Housing First as its approach to homelessness, and California followed in 2016. This means that both state and federal homelessness grants are reserved exclusively for providers who comply with Housing First principles.

The Housing First philosophy contends that the most effective way to address homelessness is to offer people immediate, no-strings-attached housing. Service providers forfeit their grants if they make housing conditional on, say, sobriety or participation in treatment programs. In theory, supportive services are voluntary, but in practice they are almost non-existent.

Instead, California’s approach to Housing First entails little more than warehousing people in permanent-supportive housing (PSH) units. PSH residents are not classified as “homeless” for official counts, but they remain dependent on taxpayer support, which is paid out of the homelessness budget.

We did not always treat permanent dependency as the best-case scenario for homeless individuals. When the Clinton administration first established the continuum of care system for homelessness services in 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development explicitly stated that “the goal of the comprehensive homeless service system is to ensure that homeless individuals and families move from homelessness to self-sufficiency, housing, and independent living.”

When Sam Tsemberis, a clinical psychologist, conducted the first Housing First experiment in New York City, he altered the measure of success to “housing stability,” achieved not through self-sufficiency, but through perpetual subsidies. Tsemberis found that 88% of his clients remained stably housed, compared to 47% of patients in treatment-oriented programs. However, Tsemberis worked exclusively with people suffering from severe mental illnesses—those who would have been institutionalized in an earlier era—so it is reasonable that perpetually subsidized housing may have been the best possible outcome for this particular subset of the homeless population.

But should permanent dependency be the goal for all homeless persons? In FY 2022-2023, California spent $116 million on permanent-supportive housing for homeless youth. A policy that functionally treats homeless and at-risk children as lost causes is not only financially unsustainable, it’s downright inhumane.

A significant portion of homeless individuals suffer not from incurable mental illness, but from untreated substance-use disorder, and the overdose mortality rate of PSH residents is disturbingly high. But studies of crack-addicted homeless persons in drug-abstinent housing, work therapy, and day treatment programs found that upon completion, roughly half of the participants remained sober, housed and stably employed. Yes, “housing stability” was lower than Housing First experiments, but independent self-sufficiency is an unquestionably better outcome for those capable of achieving it.
We can accept that there will always be people who require permanent assistance, but state policy should not treat this assumption as universal. Even if we could end homelessness by permanently warehousing people, we should strive to do better.

But after following the Housing First playbook for nearly a decade, the results are clear: the more money we spend on this strategy, the faster the homelessness crisis grows.

 
CHRISTOPHER J. CALTON is the Research Fellow in Housing and Homelessness at the Independent Institute.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14931

DougMacG

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Biden Regulations Cost Americans $1.6 Trillion
« Reply #1563 on: May 31, 2024, 04:47:54 AM »
https://dailycaller.com/2024/05/30/report-details-regulations-biden-cost-average-americans/

Convicting your opponent of 34 pseudo felonies does make that fact go aeay.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2024, 04:58:24 AM by DougMacG »

ccp

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right!

"twice impeached"
"felon"
"threat to Democracy"
"evil"
"prince of darkness"

My response:

https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/middle-finger

As Trump just said our country is in "big trouble".

The resistance to the Democrat party is in full swing.
I only wish I was a billionaire.  I would flood the lower races with cash to counter the Left wing billionaires.

Crafty_Dog

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National Debt, public health threat
« Reply #1565 on: Today at 04:14:59 AM »
HT BBG
===============
Keep spending money you don’t have and soon you have to use money you do have to pay the interest on the money you didn’t have and hence borrowed. Keep on borrowing and eventually the money you do have services interest, elbowing aside other needs, like the health care you’ve promised to provide retirees et al:

The National Debt Is Becoming a Public Health Threat
The Beacon / by Craig Eyermann / May 31, 2024 at 5:23 PM
Over the past three years, the amount of interest the U.S. government has to pay on the national debt has become the fastest-growing category of government spending. It was already the second-largest government expenditure in 2024 and will soon become the largest.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimates that the growing burden of the interest paid on the national debt will account for 21% of the total expected growth in government spending over the next ten years.

The cost of paying interest on the national debt is not the only contributor to the growth of future government spending. The CFRB also projects that Medicare and other healthcare spending will account for 35% of the increase in the U.S. government’s spending growth. Social Security will account for another 28% of the anticipated increase. “Everything else” accounts for 16% of the projected government spending growth.

A public health problem

The very rapid growth of how much the U.S. government pays to borrow money to support its spending imposes more than a fiscal burden on Americans. It threatens their health.

In a recent article, the American Council on Science and Health’s Alex Berezow makes that argument, calling the U.S. national debt a “public health threat.” Here’s the crux of how he arrived at that position:

Though the national debt feels like an abstract academic concept, it isn’t. The debt itself can wreak economic havoc, a phenomenon known as “crowding out.” When the government needs to borrow money, it often gets that money from investors (in the form of government bonds like 10-year Treasury notes). But investor money is not unlimited. Other entities, like established businesses and startups, also need investor money. Competition for this money drives up the cost of borrowing that money—the interest rate. So, the more the government borrows, the higher the interest rate for everyone.

Simultaneously, every dollar invested in government debt is a dollar that cannot be invested elsewhere. That means businesses that need to borrow substantial amounts of money to finance major projects like expansion or research cannot do so because the borrowing costs are too high.

And that is precisely why the national debt is a public health threat. Biotech companies and the venture capitalists who invest in them are having difficulty raising money, and layoffs are plaguing the industry. Even large pharmaceutical companies, which many assume are swimming in cash, are cutting back. Bristol Myers Squibb is set to lay off about 6% of its workforce, some 2200 people.

To be sure, the national debt affects all industries, and the troubles facing the biotech and pharma industries cannot solely or even largely be blamed on the national debt. It is simply one factor among many. But it is a factor that the government can control—but chooses not to.

Over the next decade, 84% of the growth in federal government spending will be due to healthcare, Social Security, and interest payments. Without serious reform, the government will need to borrow yet more money to pay for these increased costs, exacerbating the aforementioned issues. Combined, this threatens to underfund basic services like Medicare as well as health innovation in America. Money problems inevitably lead to health problems.

A more direct way that burden will be imposed is through cuts to big government health care programs, like Medicare Advantage. The Biden administration is pushing through cuts to the popular program’s benefits that half of American seniors use for their health care. Those Americans will now face higher out-of-pocket costs because the government can’t afford to pay both public health benefits and the interest it owes to its creditors.

It’s important to recognize that politicians and bureaucrats have absolute control over how much money the U.S. government spends. Politicians are responsible for approving excessive spending that adds to the national debt. Bureaucrats are responsible for managing that spending, and their failure to do so prudently adds to the burden of the national debt.

Since the government can’t skip paying its creditors without defaulting on the national debt, more cuts to public health programs can be expected. What the Biden administration is doing with its cuts to Medicare is just the beginning.

The post The National Debt Is Becoming a Public Health Threat appeared first on The Beacon.

https://blog.independent.org/2024/05/31/national-debt-public-health-threat/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=national-debt-public-health-threat