Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, June 5, 2009

The GOP budget cut

by Jay McDonough

There's, no doubt, some wasteful spending in the federal budget.  That's just the nature of the beast.  But this "We're so outraged
at government wasteful spending" shtick the GOP has got going is just a
big joke.  Try this:  Ask them, specifically, what they would cut and
how much it would save. 

You'll end up with something as stupid as this:

Responding
to a challenge from President Obama, House Republican leaders on
Thursday unveiled a plan to slice $375 billion out of the federal
budget over the next five years. The proposal seeks to accomplish this
by capping non-defense spending at the rate of inflation and requiring
that any bailout money repaid to the Treasury be dedicated to deficit
reduction.

Aside
from those two big-ticket items, House GOP leaders came up with less
than $25 billion in actual program reductions and terminations over the
next five years, or about $5 billion in cuts per annum -- less than a
third of the $17 billion in program reductions and terminations that
Obama has proposed for the fiscal year that begins in October. (Link)

Now,
keep in mind, the FY2010 budget is $3.5T.  The Republicans spent two
months working on their big budget proposal and came up with savings of
$375B or 0.66%. 

Now, if you really want to get into the weeds here -
the $375B budget cut the Republicans proposed two primary ways to trim
the budget.  The first was to cap discretionary spending at the
inflation rate.  Now, that might be the smart thing to do for some line
items, but stupid to do across the board.  Which is what the GOP
proposed.  Without any specific detail the $317B forecasted to come
from these cuts will never get through Congress.

The second part
of the GOP proposal calls for using repaid TARP funding to pay down the
deficit.  Nice try guys, but that's already in the budget the Obama
Administration sent to Congress.  That's $45B the Republicans can't
claim for their budget reduction.

That leaves a grand total of $23B over five years, or about $5B in savings per year.  That amounts to 0.14% savings per year.

What a joke.



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