Good News: Government Raises Natl Debt $166B in One Day: More Than We Spent All of 2007

This is change from the Bush years?!?:

The nation's debt leapt $166 billion in a single day last week, the third-largest increase in U.S. history, and it comes at a time when Congress is balking over higher spending and debt has become a key policy battleground.
 
The one-day increase for June 30 totaled $165,931,038,264.30 - bigger than the entire annual deficit for fiscal year 2007 and larger than the $140 billion in savings the new health care bill will produce over its first 10 years. The figure works out to nearly $1,500 for every U.S. household, or more than 10 times the median daily household income.

To be fair, the government under Bush spent more than was spent on June 30 on two other days, but was Obama supposed to put an end to all of that?

Govahvanatah Pulled the Trigger: Lowers Most State Employees Down to Minimum Wage, Some Down to Nothing

Well, the Govahvanatah did it. He lowered most state employees to minimum wage and others down to zero. Of course, as I mentioned last time and Ed Morrissey reiterated, State Controller John Chiang will ignore the order from the governor:

The Schwarzenegger administration today ordered State Controller John Chiang to reduce state worker pay for July to the federal minimum allowed by law -- $7.25 an hour for most state workers.

The instructions from the Department of Personnel Administration exclude roughly 37,000 state workers in six bargaining units that recently came to tentative labor agreements with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Some employees, such as doctors and lawyers, would get no pay because federal exempts them from any minimum wage requirement. Managers, supervisors and others who don't get paid for working more than 40 hours per week would receive $455 per week until a budget deal got done.

This didn’t work the first time that he tried it, and it was written on the wall on the titantron in big, bold letters that the State Controller John Chiang was going to ignore the executive order. So, why do it? It looks like kabuki to me.

Boehner: We Need to Raise the Retirement Age to 70 & Other Things That'll Make Social Security Solvent| Update: Clyburn, Pelosi Twist Themselves Into Human Pretzel Rewriting Boehner's Statement

Yesterday, the House Minority Leader, John Boehner, said that we should be more like the French and raise our retirement age to 70, the point when one would be eligible for Social Security benefits:

A Republican-held Congress might look to raise the retirement age to 70, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) suggested Monday.

Boehner, the top Republican lawmaker in the House, said raising the retirement age by five years, indexing benefits to the rate of inflation and means-testing benefits would make the massive entitlement program more solvent.

We're all living a lot longer than anyone ever expected, Boehner said in a meeting with the editors of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. And I think that raising the retirement age — going out 20 years, so you're not affecting anyone close to retirement — and eventually getting the retirement age to 70 is a step that needs to be taken.

This makes perfect sense. With people living longer than we did when Social Security was started, it seems only logical that more money would have to be doled out for longer periods of time than the program was initially designed to would cause solvency problems. Also, with medical advancements, people are living better than they did and could work longer than previous generations could. That's only one of his ideas:

But Boehner also floated several other reforms to Social Security, paired with raising the retirement age, to make it more solvent. Boehner said benefits should be tied to increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) instead of wage inflation, and he suggested reducing or eliminating benefits to Americans with a substantial non-Social Security income while retired.

We just need to be honest with people, he said. I'm not suggesting it's going to be easy, but I think if we did those three things, you'd pretty well solve the problem.

Now, we all knew that the Democrats were going to jump on this like junkyard dogs on a steak bone. However, I expected some sort of "Why does the GOP hate old people?" type of talking points, but no, they threw a swerve on me with this one:

Democrats are slamming House Minority Leader John Boehner for reportedly saying the Social Security retirement age should be raised to pay for the Afghanistan war -- though Boehner's office vehemently denies he made that connection.....

"The House Republican Leader John Boehner and his GOP colleagues want to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70 and cut benefits in order to pay for George Bush's war and their failed policies of the past," House Democratic Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a written statement. "Democrats will not stand for this."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office put out a "fact sheet" accusing Boehner of wanting to "slash" Social Security not to stabilize the program, but to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan - though Iraq was not mentioned anywhere in the Tribune-Review article. 

I can't find anywhere in Boehner's comments regarding his idea of raising the retirement age that has anything to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. In other words, they're lying.

It’s Come to This: Schwarzenegger Threatens to Lower CA State Workers’ Wages to Minimum If State Budget Not Passed

Apparently, the Govahnatah is prepared to hit the nuclear button, if the Democratic-controlled California legislature fails to pass a budget this year:

After enduring more than a year of unpaid monthly furlough days, state workers could see their pay cut to minimum wage until Sacramento strikes a budget accord this summer, according to a memo from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration sent Wednesday.

This may end up being an empty threat, however, because the men that actually signs the checks for California’s state employees have gone on the record to saying that he will take that take it under advisement and refuse to follow that potential order. Still, this shows how dire the deficit situation is in California.

Governator Finds Fiscal Backbone; Uses Line-Item Veto to Cut $656M Democrats Refused to Cut

Schwarzenegger finds his fiscally responsible backbone and stands up to Democrats in the state legislature:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made additional cuts to child welfare programs, medical care for the poor and AIDS prevention efforts Tuesday as he signed an $85 billion compromise spending plan that he called "the good, the bad and the ugly."

Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto authority to save an additional $656 million that will let the state restore a reserve fund he says is needed for tough times.

While "child welfare programs, medical care for the poor and AIDS prevention efforts" are all well and good, they are not too big and need to be trimmed down, or the whole state government will fall into bankruptcy. It's about time, we saw Arnold return to what brought him to the dance in the first place, that is being fiscally responsible.