Now we begin to really pile up the debt for our grandkids:

President Barack Obama’s budget will lead to deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, the CBO estimated Friday.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said President Barack Obama’s budget would lead to annual deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion for the next decade.

The estimates are for larger deficits than the budget shortfalls expected by the White House.

Annual deficits under Obama’s budget plan would be about $976 billion from 2011 through 2020, according to a CBO analysis of Obama’s plan released Friday.

We need to freeze most of the federal budget and then begin gradually cutting spending. But do you get the sense that this is going to happen? No wonder there is the Tea Party protest movement. Something is really not right with the federal government.

It may feel good for some to blame this all on Obama. But the problem has been coming like a silent freight train for decades. Social Security and Medicare were structured wrong from the start. The pay-as-you-go structure of these programs is ill-suited for having a sudden wave of retirees like is coming as baby boomers begin retiring in mass.

Below is a chart I made in 2005 that shows where we have been headed. At this point I would say the red line is even steeper than that shown.

We need a Constitutional Amendment to limit the size of government as a percentage of GDP. And we need entirely new leadership in Washington, DC to tackle this spending problem.

For reference, below is a 2002 chart from the CBO that showed the projected size of just the federal government. You can see that we have known about this problem for a long time.

But, with real leadership, it is possible to reverse this trend. Just look at what New Zealand and Ireland did when they had good leadership.

Is this right?

Michelle Berry runs a day-care business out of her home in Flint, MI. She thought that she owned her own business, but Berry’s been told she is now a government employee and union member. It’s not voluntary. Suddenly, Berry and 40,000 other Michigan private day-care providers have learned that union dues are being taken out of the child-care subsidies the state sends them. The “union” is a creation of AFSCME, the government workers union, and the United Auto Workers.

This racket means big money to AFSCME, which runs the union, writes the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank.

And we all know where these forced unions dues will go: Straight to Democratic politicians. It’s a perfect racket, and sadly, its legal in Michigan. Any state where the Unions+Democrats gain too much power, you know the citizens there are in for a bad time.

Why doesn’t the federal government just force us all into a union? Then union dues can be taken straight from our paychecks and given to the Democrat Party. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!

In my last post I wrote: “The country’s #1 priority for the next decade should be to get our financial house in order - not coming up with extravagant new spending programs.” An article today shows why:

WASHINGTON – It’s bad enough that Greece’s debt problems have rattled global financial markets. In the world’s largest economic and military power, there’s a far more serious debt dilemma.

For the U.S., the crushing weight of its debt threatens to overwhelm everything the federal government does, even in the short-term, best-case financial scenario — a full recovery and a return to prerecession employment levels.

The government already has made so many promises to so many expanding “mandatory” programs. Just keeping these commitments, without major changes in taxing and spending, will lead to deficits that cannot be sustained.

Take Social Security, Medicare and other benefits. Add in interest payments on a national debt that now exceeds $12.3 trillion. It all will gobble up 80 percent of all federal revenues by 2020, government economist’s project.

That doesn’t leave room for much else. What’s left is the entire rest of the government, including military and homeland security spending, which has been protected and nurtured by the White House and Congress, regardless of the party in power.

Congress and successive presidents have waited so long to deal with these problems, that drastic measures are now the only options to fix things. The age to receive Social Security and Medicare need to be raised and reductions in the growth rate of benefits is needed. This can be done by increasing benefits each year by a little less than the inflation rate, rather than matching the inflation rate.

Of course if Social Security and Medicare had been converted into private savings accounts many decades ago, we would not be having any of these problems. On top of that, retirees would have a lot more income and could even retire earlier.

I have been warning about all of this for years. But in Chile, things will only be getting better because they converted to private accounts years ago.

Australia too converted to private accounts years ago - and this was done by the left-wing party. But in the US you can’t even bring the subject up without liberals going berserk.

In Singapore they have Medical Saving Accounts, and they work.

One sad thing is that Social Security was discussed as being in the form of private accounts way back at its founding in 1935. Just think what could have been. Instead of the country going broke, we would have trillions saved in private assets with no government obligations. Today’s unsustainable pay-as-you-go Social Security system would have never existed!

As I have so often said here since 2005, we should still convert Social Security and Medicare into private accounts. Here is how. It is never too late to begin. Just like if you run up a pile of debt, it is better to start paying it off now rather than waiting even longer. The process is painful either way - but at least when you address the core problem there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Update: I would now make one change to the reforms that I proposed in 2005. The private accounts should not be mandatory. This was a lesson learned during the recent health care reform debate. The federal government should not be demanding people buy health insurance or save money. But under the NoSpeedBumps reforms, the tax incentives are so strong, that surely over 99% of people would use the savings accounts and buy health insurance. Otherwise they would just be handing money they could have saved to the federal government in the form of income taxes (because the tax rate is flat whether you save the money or not.)

Just replace “Greece” with “the US” and you can see our current path:

The Greek government has spent too much for years. Markets became concerned about this in November after the newly elected Socialist government revealed that last year’s budget deficit was more than three times as large as previously estimated. The EU says Greece’s financial figures have been fudged for years.

With debt piling up to 113% of the economy, investors fear Greece won’t pay its debts, in the form of government bonds — or will need a lifeline from other EU countries to meet its 54 billion euro ($74 billion) borrowing needs this year.

Decades of irresponsible government have put us on the current trajectory. Program after program were put in place and structured in ways we cannot afford. Social Security, Medicare, the new Medicare drug program, Medicaid, and so on.

Barack Obama is perhaps, hopefully, at the tail end of this madness in spending. We surely can’t afford the health care bill he wants - and it looks like these new “reforms” will never be enacted anyway. The country’s #1 priority for the next decade should be to get our financial house in order - not coming up with extravagant new spending programs. This kind of reckless spending is so 20th century.

With government spending completely out of control, one likes to think of other presidencies to look for better management. Well, it wouldn’t be the prior president, George W. Bush, because he spent like a maniac. You would like to look back to Ronald Reagan and think he did the best job. But really, he was never able to slash government spending as he would have liked to have done. At best, he just for a time slowed the growth of government some.

But there was another president, uh-hum, a President Bill Clinton, that some say did the best job of all in recent years. Economist Arthur Laffer gave his view back in 2007:

“… he became more Reagan than Reagan the day afterwards. He lost the House, he lost the Senate, he lost the governorships, he lost the state legislatures. And then he became more Reagan than Reagan: He got Nafta through Congress, against the unions, against his own party. He reappointed Reagan’s Fed chairman twice. He signed welfare reform, that you actually have to look for a job to get welfare. He cut government spending as a share of GDP by 3.5 percentage points. No president ever has come anywhere near him on that. He had the biggest capital gains tax cut in our nation’s history in ‘97. He got rid of the retirement test on Social Security. This guy was a great president and I voted for him twice.”

I ran across a sane sentence in a New York Times editorial today:

America needs to shut the path to illegal entry and employment while opening smoother and more rational routes to legal immigration.

If we take this at face value, this would mean that the NYT’s editorial staff supports a secure southern border. And a secure southern border requires a high, multi-layer fence along nearly all of the southern border. Do they mean this? No way. So what do they mean? You know - hire a few more border agents, provide more aid of some type to Mexico to get people to want to stay there, or add a few more guest-worker programs. Right, like these things will have any impact on illegal immigration.

You can be sure that this NYTs editorial claiming they want to “shut the path to illegal entry” is all lip service. They would never support the steps needed to actually “shut the path to illegal entry”.

I recall the last mass amnesty reform in the 1980s. There were lots of claims then about how border security would be tightened. That turned out to be a complete joke as illegal immigration then dramatically increased over the southern border. I guess we are all just supposed to ignore this piece of history and plow ahead with this latest immigration reform.

All amnesty proposals should be opposed until the southern border is first secured. Actually, this was sort of agreed to at the end of the last Bush term. A program was put in place to build a fence - to first secure the border - but then this fence building program was gutted once the limelight went away. The American political class, Democrats and also establishment-Republicans, really don’t mind the open border. They ignore all of the problems that illegal immigration is leading to over time - like increased inequality, increased crime, massive new urban welfare-ghettos, educational decline, more demands for socialism, more congested highways, and charges of American racism as evidence mounts that 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos are not moving up economically.

It’s really bizarre that we let about 500,000 people sneak illegally into our country each year, and our elites believe that there are no problems with this. Imagine if you sat in an airport and watched 500,000 people (1370 per day) sneak into the country each year. Wouldn’t you think maybe something is wrong with the security system?

Does Mexico need the death penalty? They have not executed anyone in Mexico for a civilian crime since 1937. But consider this that happened today:

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen mowed down the family of a Mexican marine just hours after the military honored him as a national hero for losing his life during a raid that took down powerful drug kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva.

The brazen attack happened shortly before midnight Monday at the home of fallen marine Melquisedet Angulo in the town of Paraiso in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco, police said.

Hit men linked to Beltran Leyva’s cartel have a strong presence in the state and are believed to be behind the slayings of Angulo’s mother, his two siblings and his aunt, federal officials said Tuesday.

Murderers like this deserve the death penalty.

What is the view of ordinary Mexicans regarding the death penalty? It is as you might guess - they believe, like most Americans, that the worst of murderers should get what they deserve:

A large majority of people in several countries, including the United States and Mexico, support the death penalty, according to a poll by Ipsos-Public Affairs released by the Associated Press. 71 per cent of respondents in Mexico and 69 per cent in the U.S. back the idea of sentencing convicted murderers to death.

But would the death penalty really help reduce the number of murders in Mexico? Based on recent studies , it appears that the death penalty does indeed deter murderers.

Mexico not having a death penalty impacts us too in the US. A lack of a death penalty increases violent crime in Mexico, and this crime spills over into the US. And there is this too:

Mexico does not extradite to countries that are seeking the death penalty, and has successfully defended 400 Mexicans charged with a capital offence in the United States. This has in the past led to American fugitives crossing the border into Mexico in order to avoid the death penalty.

Update: Oddly, it is the Green Party in Mexico leading the charge to restore the death penalty (… something about the carbon footprint of murderers or something).

I wondered what yearly temperatures have been doing in the US. I was thinking that we should look at non-urban temperatures to get a better read since as cities grow they could surely artificially alter temperature readings (roads absorb heat, car and trucks emit heat, buildings block wind, etc.). This boy and his father did exactly this:

With the climate control meetings in Copenhagen going on, this got me to wondering how fast sea levels are expected to rise. After all, isn’t that the bottom line problem that is supposed to occur due to global warming? I have been hearing all week that the rich countries are going to cause the sea levels to rise, because of the melting ice near the poles, and the poor countries are going to get flooded as sea waters creep over their shores.

So with all the press coverage of the climate control event, you would expect indisputable data regarding rising sea levels. Well, hmm. This is from a 2007 interveiw with Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner:

I am a sea-level specialist. There are many good sea-level people in the world, but let’s put it this way: There’s no one who’s beaten me. I took my thesis in 1969, devoted to a large extent to the sea-level problem. From then on I have launched most of the new theories, in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. I was the one who understood the problem of the gravitational potential surface, the theory that it changes with time. I’m the one who studied the rotation of the Earth, how it affected the redistribution of the oceans’ masses. And so on.

… So, we have this 1 mm per year [rise in sea levels] up to 1930, by observation, and we have it by rotation recording. So we go with those two. They go up and down, but there’s no trend in it; it was up until 1930, and then down again. There’s no trend, absolutely no trend.

… Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their (IPCC’s) publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something, but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original data which they suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge.

So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences meeting in Moscow—I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!

Of course, you can find tons of articles that say the global sea level is rising steadily. It gets hard to know what to believe. Thousands of scientists are in group think mode regarding global warming. They are just convinced it is real and don’t want to hear anything that challenges this. So I don’t trust the scientist-activists.

Personally, I’m still trying to learn what is really going on. One thing I know is this: All of the claims that existing climate prediction models have certitude in predicting temperature and sea levels 100 years from now are crap. I think the most that can be said is that there is a possibility that significant global warming will occur. What I am trying to learn is - what is probability? We are dealing with probabilities here, not certitudes - regardless of what some scientists, politicians, and celebrities say.

While visiting Denmark, I wrote here about learning of the incredibly high taxes on cars there. They are so high that it was hard to believe. Below is more about this in the NY Times this week. Amazingly, the numbers in my blog post match exactly with the NYTs. (Huh - the NYTs must have stolen them from me. For all your accurate facts and figure, come to NoSpeedBumps.)

Is saving $40,000 at the showroom enough to get drivers behind the wheel of an electric car? With a program in the works to add easy access to charging stations, Denmark is about to find out. The country imposes a punitive tax of about 200% on new cars, so a vehicle that would cost $20,000 in the United States costs $60,000 here. For a quarter-century, electric cars have been exempt from that tax. But the models on the market were so limited in their capabilities that only 497 of them are registered in the entire country.

For all their potential, electric cars have always been the subject of more talk than action, and only a handful are on the road in Denmark. But now the biggest Danish power company is working with a Silicon Valley start-up in a $100 million effort to wire the country with charging poles as well as service stations that can change out batteries in minutes.

The government offers a minimum $40,000 tax break on each new electric car — and free parking in downtown Copenhagen. But even in Denmark, one of the most environmentally conscious nations in the world, skepticism abounds. It is not clear that car buyers can be persuaded to make the switch.

With this deal - who wouldn’t buy an electric car? I sure would.

Hat tip for this NYT’s article to Carpe Diem, a blog I read daily.

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn quit this week. The MSM reports this with no mention of what is surely a factor: her Mao comments. Did she quit on her own or was she pressured into quitting? Who knows? Don’t forget that Glenn Beck had a field day with Dunn’s Mao comments. Since Beck is on Fox News, this being the most watched news channel in the US, surely this made the Obama team worry about their image of being too far left.

I wrote a few weeks ago that she should be fired for not having enough sense to not refer to Mao as one of her favorite philosophers. Dunn claims that she was using irony and humor in her reference to Mao. When I watched the video, sure she had a little humor mixed in, but I took her as being oblivious to the notion that Mao (the world’s greatest mass murderer) could be quoted approvingly.

Some right-wing bloggers have tried to say she is a true Maoist, which is pretty silly. Actually, I can see how she could think it was okay to quote Mao as a person of wisdom. She may have taken some humanities classes in college where a Marxist professor, living in an academic cocoon, glossed over Mao’s atrocities and made Mao sound respectable and quote-worthy. Dunn, surely a lifelong lefty, perhaps never went back and re-evaluated this nonsense that she picked up in college. But of course this is all just speculation on my part.

Funny too that all of the media accounts of her quitting manage to mention her bashing of Fox News - but they mostly leave out the Mao flap that got so much attention from conservatives. I mean, she lasted less than a month after her speech quoting Mao was found. When reporting on her quitting, how could the media reports not even mention this controversy?