Filed under: auto bailout, Barack Obama, Congress, Credit Crisis, DEBT, devaluation, Dictatorship, Dollar, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, Fascism, Great Depression, Greenback, hyperinflation, Inflation, main street, middle class, Military, Military Industrial Complex, obama, obama stimulus, Senate, spending bill, stimulus, Taxpayers, US Economy, Wall Street, wall street bailout
Senate sends $1.1 trillion spending bill to Obama
AP
December 13, 2009
The Senate on Sunday passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill with increased budgets for vast areas of the federal government, including health, education, law enforcement and veterans’ programs.
he more-than-1,000-page package, one of the last essential chores of Congress this year, passed 57-35 and now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.
The weekend action underlined the legislative crush faced by Congress as it tries to wind up the year. After the vote, the Senate immediately returned to the debate on health care legislation that has consumed its time and energy for weeks. Senate Democrats hope to reach a consensus in the coming days on Obama’s chief domestic priority.
The spending bill combines six of the 12 annual appropriation bills for the 2010 budget year that began Oct. 1. Obama has signed into law five others.
The final one, a $626 billion defense bill, will be used as the base bill for another catch-all package of measures that Congress must deal with in the coming days. Those include action to raise the $12.1 trillion debt ceiling and proposals to stimulate the job market.
The spending bill passed Sunday includes $447 billion for departments’ operating budgets and about $650 billion in mandatory payments for federal benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Those programs under immediate control of Congress would see increases of about 10 percent.
The FBI gets $7.9 billion, a $680 million increase over 2009; the Veterans Health Administration budget goes from $41 billion to $45.1 billion; and the National Institutes of Health receives $31 billion, a $692 million increase.
All but three Democrats voted for the bill, while all but three Republicans opposed it. Democrats said the spending was critical to meet the needs of a recession-battered economy. “Every bill that is passed, every project that is funded and every job that is created helps America take another step forward on the road of economic recovery,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said after the vote.
Republicans decried what they called out-of control spending and pointed to an estimated $3.9 billion in the bill for more than 5,000 local projects sought by individual lawmakers from both parties.
The Citizens Against Government Waste said those projects included construction of a county farmer’s market in Kentucky, renovation of a historic theater in New York and restoration of a mill in Rhode Island.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of such projects, said it was “shameful” that so many had found their way into the legislation. Most Americans, he said, were watching football and not the Senate debate, adding, “If they knew what we are about to pass ….”
The legislation also contains numerous items not directly related to spending. It provides help for auto dealers facing closure, ends a ban on funding by the District of Columbia government for abortions and allows the district to permit medical marijuana, lets Amtrak passengers carry unloaded handguns in their checked baggage and permits detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to be transferred to the United States to stand trial, but not to be released.
The bill also approves a 2 percent pay increase for federal workers.
With the Senate concentrating on health care, attention on the upcoming jobs plan shifts to the House.
The defense bill that will be the basis for the package normally enjoys wide bipartisan support, but Republicans, and some fiscally conservative Democrats, are unhappy with the prospect of another jolt of deficit-swelling spending.
Congress must soon raise the debt ceiling, now at $12.1 trillion, so the Treasury can continue to borrow, and Democratic leaders are eyeing a new figure close to $14 trillion, pushing the issue past next November’s election.
But a bipartisan group in the Senate says a higher ceiling should be tied to creation of a task force on deficit reduction, and House Democratic moderates say their votes could depend on winning a “pay-as-you-go” law requiring that new tax cuts or spending programs don’t add to the deficit.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on CNN’s “State of the Union,” favored a deficit task force. He said he didn’t “see how this process where everybody kind of lards on is going to actually ever come to an end unless we finally have the discipline to do a straight up-or-down vote across the board on revenues and spending cuts.”
Proposals to put people back to work include tax breaks for new company hires, small business tax breaks, public works spending and federal aid to states.
Congress is also likely to extend measures, included in the $787 billion stimulus act last February, that provide jobless payments and health insurance subsidies for the unemployed.
Filed under: 2008 Election, auto bailout, bailout, bank bailout, Barack Obama, Bear Stearns, bernanke, brad sherman, bush, campaign for liberty, cash for clunkers, Congress, Credit Crisis, DEBT, devaluation, Dictatorship, Dollar, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, Fascism, fearmongering, George Bush, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Greenback, House, housing market, hyperinflation, Inflation, jim kramer, main street, Martial Law, Media Manipulation, middle class, Military Industrial Complex, obama, obama stimulus, Paulson, real estate, Ron Paul, Senate, spending bill, stimulus, Stock Market, subprime, subprime lending, subprime mortgage bubble, Taxpayers, US Economy, US Treasury, Wall Street, wall street bailout, War On Terror
Houses Passes $1.1 Trillion Spending Bill
Antiwar.com
December 10, 2009
There was a time when the federal government’s annual budget was submitted by the president and decided by the Congress in a relatively straightforward fashion. A time when it wasn’t so difficult to figure out what the government spent taxpayers’ money on.
But this is, or soon will be, 2010, and President Obama’s promises of transparency aside, the new way of doing things in the perpetual wartime economy is to pass bulky spending bills filled with anything and everything Congressmen want on an accelerated schedule, every few months.
In today’s example, a 1088 page $1.1 trillion “compromise” spending bill passed through the House of Representatives in a 221-202 vote along partisan lines. The bill covers everything from veteran’s benefits to arbitration for car dealers and, of course, a hefty raise in the foreign aid budget.
The latest massive spending bill comes less than two months after the White House signed a $680 billion “Defense Spending Bill,” which included hate crimes legislation provisions and restarted military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
That bill itself came just a few months after a $106 billion “emergency” war spending bill, which included a number of “pet projects,” including the so-called Cash for Clunkers program that subsidized new car purchases in return for a promise to destroy what were in many cases serviceable used cars.
Which of course came not long after the $787 billion “stimulus bill” aimed at hurling enough money at assorted government programs that the economy would improve.
When President Obama took office, he promised a more transparent budget, particularly with promises to stop requesting “emergency” war spending bills to pay for what are now several year old wars.
This promise, like so many others, will likely be ignored, as the defense budgets have projected a more rapid pullout from Iraq and did not include last week’s massive escalation of the Afghan War, itself a $30 billion addition to the annual cost. Instead, America seems poised to continue the new way of doing things, piecemeal spending bills which provide ample opportunity to include the trendy projects that Congress craves and the unclear picture of the overall cost of war that keeps the voter largely in the dark about how much the nation’s assorted adventures really cost.
Look Who got the economy wrong and why are they still in charge
noworldsystem.com 