President Obama sent Congress a $3.8 trillion budget Monday for fiscal year 2011, pushing a plan that includes new jobs-creation programs but is projected to add nearly $1.3 trillion in deficit spending on top of the current year’s projected $1.6 trillion deficit.

According to the plan, the 2011 deficit of $1.267 trillion would fund nearly the entirety of the year’s discretionary spending, which is $1.415 trillion or 37 percent of the government’s total outlays. Mandatory spending on items such as entitlements and interest payments make up the rest.

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A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just nine percent (9%) think the freeze will reduce the deficit a lot.

Eighty-one percent (81%) disagree, including 42% who say it will have no impact. Another 39% say the freeze in nearly all areas except defense, national security, veterans affairs and entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will reduce the deficit a little.

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Democratic leaders were able to prevail on the politically volatile 60-39 vote only because Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts has yet to be seated. Republicans had insisted on a 60-vote, super-majority threshold to pass the measure. An earlier test vote succeeded on a 60-40 vote.

The measure would would put the government on track for a national debt of $14.3 trillion – about $45,000 for every American – and it served as a vivid reminder of the United States’ dire fiscal straits.

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President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all have agreed to the basic framework of the plan.

Their plan is clever but can be stopped if opponents of radical healthcare reform act quickly and focus on a core group of 23 Democratic Congressman. If just a few of these 23 Democrats are “flipped” and decide to oppose the bill, the whole Obama-Pelosi-Reid stratagem falls apart.

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Underscoring the problem, the Senate is poised to vote to raise the national debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion, just weeks after a $290 billion increase at the end of 2009. The debt currently stands at $12.322 trillion.

Less than a day after congressional Democrats and the White House reached a tentative deal to use an executive order that would establish a bipartisan commission to tackle the problem, the effort appeared to be on life support.

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“Yes, we can” was the rallying cheer. You were the game-changer after the Bush-Cheney fiasco. What happened? Today we just don’t see, or expect to see, any real change we can believe in. America is more polarized than under Bush’s GOP, dysfunctional as both parties tragically undermine our great nation.

There are many reasons future historians may rate your presidency average, or even a failure, at least based on the gap between the promise a year ago and the reality today, certainly for investors.

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Now what? It’s miles of bad road in any direction.

Democrats splintered on how to salvage the president’s top domestic initiative even before the results were official. Republicans said don’t bother: The election of state senator Scott Brown sent a message that the health care bill should be scrapped.

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But now, given the sudden prospect that Democratic Atty. Gen. Martha Coakley could lose to upstart state Sen. Scott Brown, Democrats in Washington are plotting how to save healthcare.

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Looks like the unions are getting their money’s worth — with a sweetheart deal worth billions.

For most American workers, beginning in 2013, if your health care insurance plan is worth more than $8,900 for an individual and $24,000 for a family, that plan will be hit with a 40% excise tax. While technically the tax falls on the insurer, virtually all economists agree that the cost will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Moreover, because the threshold for the tax is indexed to ordinary inflation rather than the higher rate of medical inflation, even if your plan doesn’t get hit today, it may well be taxed in the future.

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Blankfein was reminded by the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee, Phil Angelides, that hurricanes are “acts of God.” Financial crises are manmade. Yet Blankfein was backed up by Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, who said, “Somehow, we just missed … that home prices don’t go up forever.”

The Wall Street titans thus conceded they did not foresee the housing bubble ever bursting and they did not consider the possibility of a collapse in value of the sub-prime mortgage securities piled up on their books.

Read the Full Article at Patrick Buchanan