Tax and Spend

David Stockman slams Congress for its phony appropriation process.

"And one that was of its own making at that. After all, we are already 75 days into the new fiscal year, yet Congress had not yet passed a single appropriations bill.  So once again it had set itself up for the usual midnight scramble behind closed doors where the pork barrel overflows and sundry K-street lobbies stick-up the joint and then demand immediate passage—–sight unseen—–in the name of keeping the Washington Monument open on the morrow."

Exactly.

"Yes, this game has been going on for years. But the fact that the nation’s leading financial newspaper was witless enough to describe it as a “success” is something comparatively new. What has happened is that the deafening clamor from the Wall Street casino for endless winnings has subordinated all else. Even a brief government shutdown is now verboten——-not because it would have any deleterious effect in the real world where virtually 80% of domestic operations are exempted under the “health and safety” clause, anyway. No, the purported danger is that it might prompt a panicked sell-off in the stock market."

Stockman should run for president.

"Rosy Scenario as now embedded in the CBO projections, of course, will never materialize. CBO is currently projecting, with no embarrassment at all, that the US will go without a recession between 2009 and 2024; that 16 million new jobs will be created over the next ten years compared to 3 million during the last decade; that real GDP will grow at better than a 3% rate until we hit permanent full-employment compared to just 1.7% per year since the turn of the century; and that wages and salaries will grow at a 5.3% rate during the next decade compared to 3% during the prior 10 years. And that’s just a smidgeon of the unwarranted optimism built into Washington’s fiscal projections."

That's been going on forever.

France's Holland's 75 percent supertax to expire after damaging the country.

The IRS has managed to frustrate the investigation into its harassment of conservatives, but there's no question about the harassment.