What the Budget Means to You

President Barack Obama released his 2010 Fiscal Year budget yesterday, and the numbers don't look good. Here's a crossection of stats about this budget bill:

• A $3.55 trillion budget plan for 2010, with additional immediate changes that would push spending to $3.94 trillion in the current year. Total Expenditures: $7.49 trillion.
• A projected deficit of $1.75 trillion for 2010, projected to be reduced to $1.17 trillion next year and tapering to $533 billion in 2012. This would still be $78 billion more than last year's record-breaking deficit of $455 billion.
• The $1.75 trillion deficit would be 12.3% of America's GDP. This is the second highest percentage for a deficit ever behind the post WWII 21.5% in 1945.

Where will the deficit reduction after this drastic run-up come from? Here are a few sources (all are currently in the budget except for raising the maximum tax rate):

• Taxpayers in the current top tax bracket of 35 percent would see their tax deduction for every $1 given to charity drop from 35 cents to 28 cents.
• $636 billion will come from a hike in the capital gains tax, the elimination of itemized deductions and expired tax cuts for people making over $250,00 a year.
• The President has also stated his desire to raise the top tax rate to 39.6% from the current 35%, although this is not currently in the budget.
• Taxing carried interest (the primary source of income for the manager in private equity and hedge funds).
• A number of taxes and the repealing of deductions for various energy production costs, mostly related to petroleum and natural gas drilling.

What does this all mean to you? Perhaps the most shocking numbers are the simplest math. Taking into account only the $3.55 trillion for 2010, with a US population is 304,059,724, a little more than a third of which filed returns (138,893,908), here's the math for the 2010 $3.55 trillion:

• $11,833 spent per American
• $25,573 spent per taxpayer (Unfortunately, this assumes all return filers are taxpayers and not just return recipients, which is not the case. Some estimates have the amount of actual taxpayers only about 60% of that number.)

It's a lot of math, and reading this post most likely made you a bit drowsy. But it's important. We're about to embark on one of the most massive spending plans in American history at a time when our industry is faltering, credit is impossible to secure and homes continue to be forclosed upon at an alarming rate. But this budget doesn't just include money for more bailouts and partial government takeovers- more than $600 billion is earmarked for a fund that will be used to begin a changeover to universal healthcare, and the budget also anticipates revenues from a CO2 cap-and-trade program that is only in the concept phase.

This budget is not what we need. It imposes taxes or allows to expire tax cuts on industry that contributes to the GDP in important ways while socking away money for socialized medicine. Cap-and-trade is not the best way to work toward reducing industrial emissions, the rise in capital gains tax discourages profits for businesses and it doesn't seem to me that reducing the tax deduction for charitable contributions is ever a good idea.

I will not pretend to suggest that the Republicans haven't recently "found" their love for fiscal conservativism partially in opposition to President Obama's policies, nor did they protest as George W. Bush racked up deficits during his presidency. But this massive increase in the national deficit is too great a risk for too little reward and the Republicans are right to stand against it. In a era where we all should be spending less and saving more, the government should be leading by example, not exhibiting reckless spending.

The party's over, it's time to tighten the belt and we all need to stop before we spend ourselves into a depression exacerbated by increasing foreign-held debts and ask if throwing money at the problem is going to work. It's not- we need a new solution.

Sources: Reuters, ABCNews, Breitbart, Telegraph

Lent

Just Give It Up (from Firstthings.com)
By David Mills
Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 9:07 AM

Our eldest, then about two years old, one day announced “I want . . .” but did not finish the sentence. My wife and I waited for her to tell us what she wanted — to be picked up and rocked? a cup of milk? her stuffed bear? — but again she said only “I want” and let her voice trail off. She said it a third time, still sounding equally unsure about what she wanted. And then, with a look of enlightenment on her face, said in a loud, firm voice, “I want!”

There, I thought, was the fallen human condition expressed. We are creatures of ravenous, indiscriminate desire. We want this and we want that, but most of all, We Want.

Hence the value of Lent, which begins today, and of an old discipline that seems, even among Catholics, to be now somewhat neglected: the traditional discipline of giving things up for Lent. Bookish people being as fallen as anyone else, we might take a brief break from the pressing issues and interesting intellectual questions to reflect on the value of this discipline. Giving things up for Lent has, in my experience, two obvious benefits.

The first is that you very quickly find out how much a hold the world has on you. This is a lesson to which the Christian will give intellectual assent, but few of us really see what it means. We like to think of ourselves being happy to give up anything for the Lord just like that, with a snap of our fingers, even our lives, but most of us find it hard to give up something that really doesn’t matter. You dream of standing up to the lions in the coliseum, and find yourself snapping at the waitress because the restaurant is out of your favorite dessert.

We are not in shape, and we are also delusional. Spiritually, we’re like the pot-bellied middle-aged guy in the speedo swimsuit at the beach, who is just shocked that the twenty-year-old girls in bikinis are not hanging all over him and cooing. He would have a better idea why were he to hit the gym.

I gave up coffee one Lent. I thought I could handle it. I wanted to feel the pinch, but I didn’t expect (or want) to feel walloped with a bat instead. I gave it up, and I found that I really missed it.

For one thing, I soon realized that I didn’t like coffee only for the taste, or for the caffeine, but for the rituals, of getting up from my desk and wandering to the faculty lounge to get another cup, of chatting with the colleagues on the way, of wandering back to my office to settle in again after a pleasant break. It just didn’t feel right, not getting up for coffee.

And there was the caffeine, or the sudden lack of it. For maybe three weeks I found myself with a sudden craving for Classic Coke, something I rarely drink, and getting up from my desk to walk across the seminary quad to the soda machine in another building, even when it was pouring rain, and I did so without the slightest idea why. Then I realized I’d only found, through some subconscious sense, a substitute source of an addictive drug and was happy to risk illness to get it.

The second benefit of giving things up for Lent is that you also find, at the end of Lent, how good are the things God has given you. The things you’ve given up come to you afresh, almost as if you’d never enjoyed them before. When you can have them any time you want, and do have them any time you want, you don’t enjoy them as God meant them to be enjoyed. At least I don’t.

I sat down at breakfast on Easter morning—we’d gone to the Vigil the night before, so that I really was breaking my fast at breakfast — and drank a big cup of very strong coffee. And it was really, really, really good. I haven’t enjoyed coffee that much for years, decades even. I suddenly had some idea how heroin addicts feel.

Now, after that Lent, I drink much more tea than coffee, but every coffee I have is a treat. It’s a far greater pleasure now, coffee is, than it was when I knocked the stuff down all day.

That’s one of my experiences with the discipline of giving things up for Lent. I learned something about myself, and not just how much a hold the world had on me but my subconscious ability to satisfy my worldly cravings even when I didn’t realize I was doing so. And I learned something also about the pleasures God has given us, which really are great pleasures, until we take them for granted because we have so much of them.

Even bookish types are addicted to the world’s pleasures, and perhaps more deeply so because we believe our tastes intellectual and refined. So just give up something. Almost anything will do, because once you give it up, you’ll want it. Start small, but start.