Tax and Spend

I doubt that ending Saturday delivery will end subsidies for the Post Office.

Thomas Sowell explains why the CBO's budget estimates are always wrong.

"In a worldwide context, during the 20th century, economic central planning by governments — prophecy at the grandest level — led to so many bad consequences in countries around the world that even most socialist and Communist governments abandoned central planning by the end of that century.
The failures of governmental prophecies in so many different contexts cannot be blamed on stupidity. Most of the people who made these prophecies were far more educated than the average person, had far more information at their fingertips, and probably had higher IQs as well.
Their intellectual superiority to others may well have given them the confidence to venture into areas where no human being has what it takes to make prophecies, especially prophecies that lead to policies that override the plans and actions of millions of other human beings.
As John Stuart Mill said back in the 19th century, “even if a government were superior in intelligence and knowledge to any single individual in the nation, it must be inferior to all the individuals of the nation taken together.”"

This is Hayek's fatal flaw of central planning.

"People competing with each other, and being forced to make mutual accommodations with each other in the marketplace, are operating in a trial-and-error process. Human beings are going to make errors in any kind of economic or political system. The question is: Which kind of system punishes errors more quickly, and more effectively in terms of forcing errors to be corrected?"

That's not the only question. The other question is: who pays the price for the errors?

"A market economy with many competitors has incentives and constraints that are the opposite of those in a government monopoly."

A market economy has incentives and constraints that quickly punish errors which leads to correction, and the losses are localized around the actor who made the mistakes.

Boortz claims that federal debt interest payments will top $1 trillion in four years, but the link he gives is to the previous article. Here's what I find from the CBO:

"In CBO's most recent projections, which assume that current laws remain the same, annual deficits decline from the $1.3 trillion recorded in 2010, but the cumulative deficit from 2011 through 2020 exceeds $6.2 trillion. Borrowing to finance that deficit--in combination with an expected rise in interest rates--would lead to a fourfold increase in net interest payments over the next 10 years, from $197 billion in 2010 to $778 billion in 2020. As a percentage of GDP, net interest outlays would more than double during that period, rising from 1.4 percent to 3.4 percent."

That doesn't match Boortz's claim, but it's still insane.

Obama asks for higher taxes and smaller spending cuts to replace sequestration. Republicans quickly say no. They'll cave. The economy shrunk in Q4. It's going to shrink again in Q1. From an official point of view, we've entered a double-dip recession, and that will be officially announced, probably sometime in Q2. If Republicans resist Obama, he will blame them for the recession. They're going to use this as an excuse to raise taxes and avoid cutting spending, which is what they want to do anyway. They're resistance is political theater.