Attn: Dr. Nan Hayworth, Member of Congress (R-NY-19)

The Austerity Myth: Federal Spending Up 5% This Year
By John Merline, Investor's Business Daily

When Republicans took control of the House in January, they pledged to make deep cuts in federal spending...

They lied.

...and in April they succeeded in getting a bill advertised as cutting $38 billion from fiscal 2011's budget.

Again... a lie.

Then in August, they pushed for a deal to cut another $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

More lies. (They're talking baseline budgeting, which institutionalizes spending increases without calling them spending increases. It's a rigged game with "more spending" always coming in as the "winner.")

But data released by the Treasury Department on Friday show that, so far, there hasn't been any spending cuts at all.

Of course not. I've been telling you this all along. We can no more trust the likes of John Boehner and Nan Hayworth than we can the likes of Barak Hussein Obama and Barney Franks.

In fact, in the first nine months of this year, federal spending was $120 billion higher than in the same period in 2010, the data show.

Bastards...

That's an increase of almost 5%.

This is not what we elected Republicans to achieve.

And deficits during this time were $23.5 billion higher.

Shame on John Boehner, Nan Hayworth, Mitch McConnell and all who refuse to draw a line in the sand in defense of fiscal sanity.

Overall state spending continued to climb right through the recession, when all money from state general funds and other funds, federal grants and state bonds is combined. Total state spending in 2010 was almost 10% higher than in 2008, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers' annual State Expenditure Report.

(And general fund spending - which makes up about 40% of total state spending - is expected to climb 5.2% this year and 2.6% next year, according to the association's latest survey.)

NASBO says that states were able to sustain spending growth through 2010 only because the federal government was pumping more money in via the $830 billion "stimulus," and that these funds are now all but exhausted.

Meanwhile, the claim that state and local government jobs have been severely cut is, at the very least, open to some debate.

"We know that the biggest problem that we've had in terms of unemployment over the last several months has not been in the private sector," President Obama said at a recent press briefing, "it's actually been layoffs of teachers and cops and firefighters."

Monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics do show that from Dec. 2007 - when the recession officially started - until the end of 2010, state and local governments shed 221,000 jobs. And they've cut another 234,000 jobs so far this year. But a separate annual survey from the Census Bureau shows that "full time equivalent" state and local employment climbed 200,000 between 2007 and 2010 (the latest year for which these Census data are available.)

The differences come from the methodologies used.

In any case, even using BLS data, the number of state and local government jobs has fallen just 2.3% since December 2007. That compares with a decline of 5.4% for private sector jobs.

While it's true that President Obama is the "captain" of this ship of state bearing full speed ahead towards the iceberg of economic disaster, Republicans such as John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and my own congresswoman - Dr. Nan Hayworth - are just as guilty because though they possess the power to stop what's happening... they refuse to use their power.

Worse... they lie. Again and again and again they lie.