I sincerely hope that all of the rascals that were stomping on the debt exclusion override are stomping equally hard on the Obama Administration about this bit of fiscal news. But, since this is the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts where people vote to continue paying instead of abolishing the income tax, seem to be O.K. with the increased sales tax and other fees, enjoy wasting valuable resources without regard for consequences, I suppose that sort of consistency is just too much to hope for; especially in light of the fact that Massachusetts went overwhelmingly for just this sort of give away by voting in favor of federal socialism. From Money.com
Interest Alone on Federal Debt: $4.8 Trillion
Monday, November 23, 2009 10:55 AM
By: Dan Weil Article Font Size
When you think about the government’s exploding debt burden, you probably don’t focus on interest payments.
But those payments will likely total $4.8 trillion over the next 10 years, amounting to more than half the government’s $9 trillion in debt.
Interest rates are near zero now, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s massive monetary stimulus. But at some point the Fed will have to reverse that easing.
“When interest rates rise, even a small amount, the interest payments go up a lot because of the size of the debt,” Charles Konigsberg, chief budget counsel of the Concord Coalition, told CNNMoney.com.
The $4.8 trillion interest-payment estimate made by the Congressional Budget Office assumes some interest rate appreciation. But if rates rise higher than its estimates, the dollar total will be higher.
The Obama administration has pledged to cut the budget deficit to 3 percent of GDP, down from 10 percent last year.
But that goal may be more fantasy than reality.
“Even under the president’s (2010) budget as evaluated by the CBO, we do not get anywhere close to that,” William Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNNMoney.com.
Mike Larson, an interest rate analyst at Weiss Research, puts it like this in Money and Markets newsletter: “We’re in hock as a nation like never before. Neither the administration nor Congress has any plan to change that fact. And both the actual and hidden costs of our debt are rising every day.”
Tony said:
Rick,
First, I worked on the campaign to abolish the state income tax last year. Second, what do you think the BTA is talking about when we said the $100.00 was a bogus number. We told you interest rates were going up.
--Rick said:
I also supported the campaign to abolish the state income tax, and anyone with even a semblence of a brain had to already know interest rate were going to go up at some point. There’s no way they can stay this low forever. To me, paying for the school was a small price to pay for a lesson that needed to be learned.
Maybe now people will wake up, realize how poorly their hard earned tax dollars have been handled, wasted and misused and move to incorporate Billerica as a city with a mayoral system of government. Maybe they will rise up and insist on reigning in the school committee and putting it back under the thumb of the town manager and the Board of Selectmen as a branch controlled by town administrators.
Here is where the Town Meeting can get the ball rolling by drafting and proposing changes to the by-laws or the town charter. Or the members can work with Msrrs. Donnelly and Greene to use Beacon Hill to garner whatever support for change may be needed to better control cost and to protect vital investments that are not easily made up when lost.
These various “amigo” and other cliques that have formed over decades are doing the town no good. They remind me of Scotland’s desire to keep to clans, which is why the suffered for so long and so brutally under the rule of the English. As Wallace said, liberty is for all; not just the English. So, let’s find a common path to that common cause.
Billerica is one town, and it should have one purpose – to grow prosperously. The means to that end must be worked out, they must be equitable, they must be ethical and they must be transparent. Additionally, that job must be undertaken with the idea of people of all persuasions working together, compromising as need be in order to reach the ultimate goal. People need to be inspired to return to the polls, not bullied or commanded how to vote once they get there.
The BTPA has the potential to inspire, but if you compared the results of the election and the arguments used to get those results with the BTPA power point presentation, I would think it clear that the reason the argument against didn’t work is because the rationale used came across as ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, sometimes arrogant and preachy and despite the use of graphs and other devices interpreted as disjointed and too narrow in focus. Many of the comments seemed to be more concerned with setting up good “ambushes” to weaken the other side more so than justifying the position of voting no.
These are not criticisms for the sake of being critical. The comments I am offering are intended to help strengthen your approach the next time some similar emergency comes up; and we all know that another emergency will eventually rear its ugly head. Now, you all can either sit back and be cynically reactive when the time comes, or you can look to be more proactive, and give creedence to your concerns, in smelling out the festering boils and doing what you can to lance them proactively when it counts. The choice is yours to make and I hope you choose well.
--Rick said:
Put aside my more lengthy comment for a second and re-read your own. Doesn’t it sound a bit angry, tantrum like and condescending? Remember, your side lost. My longer missive tries to explain why.
billericabta said:
just responding to what appeared to be comments by you that we are not complaining about other things going on in the world. If you had watch our show about the override, comments were made about DC. We have been active in the Tea party movement. We have been involved with CLT. I was first involved as a teenager with my father in passing prop2.5. I have a question for you. You have complained about the abuses that caused the debacle known as the PArker school, yet you voted to give them $34 million plus interest to build a new school without any promise that it won’t happen again, do you liken that to a parent who gives the keys to the car on prom night after their child just wrecked their own car drunk driving? Don’t forget this, we can not get any more money for elementary schools in Billerica for years to come. If we had done the 400 student school, we would be able to after the new 400 student school is completed. By doing what we did, we will be facing another override to make repairs to the other elementary schools unless we come up with something else. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?
--Rick said:
What I was trying to say was that the time to begin to build your case against the Parker was two years ago when y’all first heard about the 400 seat school for $20 million. That may have actually been stated, but between the minutes and everyone else’s recollection who cared to comment, there are now many interpretations to choose from. The reason there are many interpretations now is because that “fact” was not nailed down back then. It floated in the minutes, which everyone really understands are shorthand for an overall discussion similar to paraphrasing – you know, close enough but not close enough to prevent words from being misunderstood.
The point I was trying to make, and apparently am still trying to make is that in order to get to the finish line, you need to assure above all else an element of credibility if you intend to lead. Leadership doesn’t come by default, as you know. It is earned. I’ve served under many officers who weren’t worth the time of day as a leader and who couldn’t persuade a mushroom to grow in the most moist soil under the canopy of a rain forest. I’ve served under others who I would follow to hell because deep down, they exude credibility through honest, direct and straight-forward communication as well as the temporal proof they display as they function doing what comes naturally.
In the case of the Parker, in my opinion, your group failed on a number of fronts. I could have easily taken up your cause, but chose the opposite for a number of reasons, not the least of which was to demonstrate how fragmented the leadership in town is and how that fragmentation is actually causing damage that, in my view, is going to be intensely difficult to rectify. The Parker is just one example.
I suppose, in retrospect, what angered me the most was simply the arrogance I’ve encountered both on Topix and through reading blogs and opinion pieces. By arrogance, I mean that some people demand that they be taken as experts with the added capacity of an intellectual in demanding that their solution is the only solution. Everyone is either certifiably wrong or corrupt except them. The sad part is that a person such as this may in fact be correct, but s/he doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of convincing anyone with that attitude. His mouth opens, and within seconds the listener’s ears close and their brains nap until he’s done. All the bright and carefully thought out graphs in the world don’t matter at that point – they are just more malarky dressed up to hide subterfuge and contrivance from the perspective of most reasonably minded people. The failure of the BTPA was a failure to connect with the average person who wants to do what’s right and reasonable given the realities of the day.
I think where y’all went wrong was not keeping that person in mind; the average, reasonably minded concerned citizen. All things don’t revolve around wallets and pocketbooks. Sometimes, in fact, I believe most of the time politics revolves around issues of fairness and this Parker School debacle was loaded with fairness issues and considerations that, if grasped early on, could have been used to your advantage instead of the other way around. Let’s start with the basics and try to put yourself in the position of an average parent who simply wants to go off, earn a living, build a future for himself and his spouse and give his children a fighting start at success. In order to do any of those things, however, he must feel secure that when he sends his child to school that his child will be safe, secure and *properly* educated. The word proper is key.
When I was a young submarine sailor about to embark on a 9 month op to circumnavigate fast access channels under both polar caps in the even of war, I needed to know that my wife and my two boys had the care and support they would need to get by until I returned home. A father heading out to work isn’t quite as extreme, but the concept is still the same.
From a supporters viewpoint, in order to get support for a new school, one simply needs to demonstrate that there are bad guys and those bad guys are responsible for the unfairness and risk children have been put into. This isn’t imagined, not is it contrived. It simply is. However, were a group like the school committee decide to take advantage of this reasonable and rational state of being, it would be easy to accomplish by taking on the role of incompetents, uncaring, or misdirected well meaning people who need to be taught a lesson.
One way to instantly lose credibility is to be part of a group that states without equivocation that this problem was created by someone else, and that someone else *only* needs to be held accountable. Finger pointing is never attractive in a crisis albeit from the school committee, the finance committee, the planning board, or the BTPA. Silence about how we got here and what we need to do to get to a better place is also disastrous and unbecoming of a leader (the board of selectmen; and in particular, Mike Rosa – Lombardo got out of the mess he nearly created with his “snowball’s chance in hell” statement by getting in the “for” line and not having to actually vote for mixed use which separated him from Rosa and “the grumpies”). As an aside, I don’t think y’all appreciate how effective Jeff P is as a writer and as an advocate for change – not by the government, but by the private sector partnering with government to get more choice and freedom for out of the box options.
My goal, if I had one, was to focus people on the reality that nothing comes without consequences, but in Billerica, incompetence and deliberate deception on the part of government has somehow managed to thrive without being held to account. Does the School Committee allocate it’s own funds? Does it tell the town that it must have X and is the town, then, obligated to give them X dollars? Of course not; so, to say that the administrative and legislative branches of the town have no say and no power is obviously misleading at best. To say that once an omnibus bill is passed that nothing can be done to stem waste, fraud and abuse by the town administrator is pure fiction. Why do you suppose we have a town counsel on the payroll? Why do you suppose that the board of selectmen oversee emergency services, including the police department? And if the town administrator is the direct arm of the board of selectmen; how could they not know that fire department personnel were being used outside of the job description they were hired for to perform work that allowed an illegal and immoral state to exist in perpetuity – the months long failed alarm systems in schools. Lord only knows what else has been covered up or snuck in through a side door that could have cause or enhanced harm to children and others, because one gets the impression that no one truly cares about anything but themselves and their “turf”. That collectivist attitude must never be allowed to stand. So, while my Objectivist side screams at me: “you don’t believe in public education or taxation for anything other than the true purpose of government: protection of the nation, protection of individual rights and liberty and adjudication of disputes between parties were rights clash and each side has a reasonable dispute. Nothing else. Nada – stay out!”, I could not stay out.
First, it is evil for one party to force another to do anything against their will. So, to force someone to pay taxes to educate someone else’s child is simply wrong and an anathema to individual liberty just as denying the same child the opportunity to education would be. As Ben Franklin said, “the Constitution guarantees individuals the right to pursue their own happiness, but *they* have to catch it for *themselves*. By removing personal property in the form of unjust taxes, one is depriving everyone of free choice and free will and restricting liberty by force. The ends do not justify the means – evil is evil and an evil path can never achieve a just end. Look around and assess the “benefit” of public education/indoctrination for yourself. Public schools are great at teaching kids facts, figures and skills of all kinds, but with rare exception, they all fail at teaching a child how to love education; how to see it as a survival tool critical to a good, just and happy life, how to use their ability to think to find answers to complex questions about life, love and politics on their own without the garbage of others cluttering their view.
So far, I suppose you are saying, hell yeah! Why did you vote for the additional taxes, damn it! Well, the way my reality and reasoning capacity speaks to me is that very few things can be more evil than what I just described. Of course, everyone should be educated, but no one has a right to education just as no one has a right to health care. Teachers should be free to compete for good wages and good jobs at good schools, but none should expect a job as a consequence of a diploma. Parents should be free to send their children to a school of their choice so long as that school is within their means. If one parent gets up and goes off to work, plays by the rules, shouldn’t that parent be able to send his or her child to the best school he or she can afford? Why, then is one considered to have a right to the same choice when one refuses to get up, go to work, and earn the ability to help their child compete? Why is the person of lower moral character more entitled than the one who actually contributes in a non-parasitical way? With that as a back drop, why should one who is paying nearly twice the property tax as the average homeowner have to send their child to a hazardous and potentially toxic waste site without the capacity to alert people to a fire, let alone a delay in getting help in putting it out – asinine fire watch or not. If a person is paying that kind of tax penalty to compensate for those who pay no taxes, or those who purchase property and who are disconnected from the community in any way other than renting, legitimately or as a 40B slum lord, shouldn’t he or she at least be comforted by the fact that his or her child is seated in a safe, comfortable, building while he or she is at work? To force a child to attend a public school by stealing the property of his parents through governmental force is evil enough, but to require them to go to an unsafe and unsanitary location without the right to choose to go elsewhere is abominable. Objectivism is science and reality based. Nothing is black and white except in a perfect world and Billerica is far from perfect.
I hope this is mostly coherent. I am responding on the fly between stops as I move from one center to another to tie up loose ends so that I can enjoy a rare 4 day weekend. If you have further questions, please feel free to continue the discussion.