Unions
Tyrant Rex Obama Assaults Freedom of The Press and Targets — AP — Fox News Reporters Rosen and Others — Videos
Chris Hedges: Monitoring of AP Phones a “Terrifying” Step in State Assault on Press Freedom
Obama Worse Than Nixon? Pentagon Papers Attorney Decries AP Phone Probe, Julian Assange Persecution
Bernstein Unloads on White House for AP Scandal
DOJ Probes AP Phone Records – TheBlazeTV – The Glenn Beck Radio Program – 2013.05.14
Eric Holder On AP Phone Records Seizure The Leak Put The American People At Risk
AP Reporter Questions Carney on DOJ AP Scandal: ‘Doesn’t Responsibility Rest With The President?
Judge Andrew Napolitano on the DOJ vs AP
Fox News On James Rosen Targeting
Fox News Targeted By DOJ FNC Reporter Effectively Accused Of A Crime Megyn Kelly
Brit Hume: Chilling Search Of Fox Reporter Shows DOJ Treats News Gathering As Crime
DOJ Targeted Fox Reporter for Espionage
Fox News Targeted By DOJ – Free Press Is Now Under Attack By The Obama Admin – Wake Up America
Judge Napolitano To Shep: Rosen Committed ‘No Crime,’ ‘Absolutely Protected By 1st Amendment’
Report: DOJ seized multiple White House, Fox News records in Rosen ‘investigation’
Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department’s secretive and sketchy gathering of two months’ worth of Associated Press editors and journalists’ phone records is unfortunately a far cry from a the only freedom-of-the-press-stifling incident coming out of this administration. In 2010, the DOJ also spied on Fox News’ Washington correspondent James Rosen as a supposed co-conspirator in an espionage case for the oh-so-heinous crime of cultivating a State Department source — a.k.a., doing what D.C. journalists regularly and rightly do.
A new report from the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, however, reveals more details on the case, and it appears that their specific targeting of James Rosen does not quite cover the extent of the DOJ’s lack of scrupulousness:
The Obama Justice Department has seized the phone records of numbers that are associated with White House staffers and, apparently, with Fox News reporters, according to a document filed on October 13, 2011, in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter. Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted).
In all, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers. In the filing that included the new information, the last four digits of each telephone line targeted by the Obama Administration are redacted. Two of the numbers begin with area code 202 and the exchange 456, which, according to current and former Administration officials, are used exclusively by the White House. (The phone number for the White House switchboard is (202) 456-1414.)
At least five other numbers targeted by the government include the area code 202 and the exchange 824. The phone number for the Fox News Washington bureau, which is publicly available, is (202) 824-0001. Rosen’s work phone number at Fox News begins with the same area code and exchange.
So, it looks like the DOJ had not ‘merely’ been sticking their big, fat nose into Rosen’s personal and professional e-mails/calls/comings and goings, but just higgledy-piggledy been nabbing up records that may-or-may-not have been associated with the ‘case’ — including five separate Fox News phone numbers — all in the attempt to somehow involve investigative reporting in a probe of potentially criminal behavior? Wow, guys. Really crack team you got there. Bang-up job on protecting and respecting the First Amendment, and all that.
The White House Correspondents’ Association, as you might imagine, is getting somewhat concerned about all of the targeting of the press coming out of this administration, because this is quickly turning into a dangerous-looking pattern:
The White House Correspondents’ Association said Tuesday that two recent cases in which the Obama administration went after reporters’ phone and email records show the government may be getting “far too aggressive” in tracking journalists. …
Though no charges were brought against Rosen, the White House Correspondents’ Association said no journalist should even face that threat for doing their jobs.
“Reporters should never be threatened with prosecution for the simple act of doing their jobs,” the WHCA said in a statement Tuesday. “The problem is that in two recent cases, one involving Fox News’ James Rosen and the other focused on the Associated Press, serious questions have been raised about whether our government has gotten far too aggressive in its monitoring of reporters’ movements, phone records, and even personal email.”
Washington Times Writer: Fox News Scandal Goes ‘Much Deeper,’ W.H. Sitting on Something Top Obama Aides ‘Terrified’ About
Jason Howerton
Washington Times columnist and Drudge Report editor Joseph Curl on Monday said the Obama administration’s developing scandal involving the monitoring of Fox News reporter James Rosen’s email accounts goes “much deeper.”
Citing a “CIA source,” Curl claimed via his official Twitter account that the Fox News scandal was the “4th Shoe” and the White House is sitting on “something” that has top White House aides “terrified.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Citizens United Supreme Court Decision Increases Freedom of Speech and Stops Government From Censoring Speech — Videos
“If freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
~George Washington
Obama Criticizes Supreme Court in State of the Union Address, Justice Alito Shakes His Head in
The Other IRS Scandal
Campaign Cash: The Independent Fundraising Gold Rush Since Citizens United Ruling
Political Fundraising Post-Citizens United
Bill Moyers Essay: The High Price of ‘Free’ Speech
Are Super PACs Living Up to Supreme Court’s Intentions?
Citizens United (Hillary: the Movie) v. Federal Election Commission
What You Probably Haven’t Heard About Citizens United
What Citizens United Didn’t Say
3 Reasons Not To Sweat The “Citizens United” SCOTUS Ruling
Citizens United and Free Speech
Judge Napolitano on State of the Union Address – Obama Should Apologize to Supreme Court
Is It Just Corporate Free Speech?
Free Speech? Citizens United v FEC Revisited
Obama’s SOTU Citizens United LIE explained
Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission- With Credits
Citizens United vs. FEC: How Did It Happen?
On Anniversary of Citizens United Ruling, Common Cause Calls for Investigation of Scalia and Thomas
Justice Scalia on Citizens United (C-SPAN)
Campaign Finance: Lawyers’ Citizens United v. FEC U.S. Supreme Court Arguments (2009)
Citizens United and the role of the Supreme Court
Obama Alleged IRS Political Targeting Outrageous
Background Articles and Videos
A First Amendment Analysis of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – Part 1 of 3
A First Amendment Analysis of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – Part 2 of 3
A First Amendment Analysis of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – Part 3 of 3
Citizens United; Hillary the Movie Trailer
Hillary the Movie Trailer 2
Citizens United and Campaign Finance Reform
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
The Skyrocketing U.S. National Debt and Unfunded Liabilities For Medicare and Social Security — Videos
U.S. Debt Clock
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
What Are the Dangers of Too Much Debt?
Economy Is Still Americans’ Top Concern
http://www.gallup.com/poll/146708/americans-worries-economy-budget-top-issues.aspx
Most Important Problem
http://www.gallup.com/poll/146708/americans-worries-economy-budget-top-issues.aspx
Democrats Split On How To Deal With Nation’s Debt, Key Leaders Come Out Against Spending Cuts
Chairman Hensarling Opening Statement at Hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke
Chairman Hensarling’s Opening Statement at Hearing with FHFA Director Edward J. DeMarco
US Debt A Threat To National Security
U.S. National Debt Documentary Part 1
U.S. National Debt Documentary Part 2
U.S. National Debt Documentary Part 3
U.S. National Debt Documentary Part 4
U.S. National Debt Documentary Part 5
U.S. National Debt Documentary Part 6
‘US hides real debt, in worse shape than Greece’
Does Government Have a Revenue or Spending Problem?
What If the National Debt Were Your Debt?
How Big Is the U.S. Debt?
Funding Government by the Minute
Why Not Print More Money?
Yaron Answers: Can The U.S. Go Bankrupt?
US Debt Crisis – Perfectly Explained
Deficits, Debts and Unfunded Liabilities: The Consequences of Excessive Government Spending
Capitalism Without Guilt – Yaron Brook on morals of capitalism.
The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023
Economic growth will remain slow this year, CBO anticipates, as gradual improvement in many of the forces that drive the economy is offset by the effects of budgetary changes that are scheduled to occur under current law. After this year, economic growth will speed up, CBO projects, causing the unemployment rate to decline and inflation and interest rates to eventually rise from their current low levels. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate is expected to remain above 7½ percent through next year; if that happens, 2014 will be the sixth consecutive year with unemployment exceeding 7½ percent of the labor force—the longest such period in the past 70 years.
If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $845 billion, or 5.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), its smallest size since 2008. In CBO’s baseline projections, deficits continue to shrink over the next few years, falling to 2.4 percent of GDP by 2015. Deficits are projected to increase later in the coming decade, however, because of the pressures of an aging population, rising health care costs, an expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance, and growing interest payments on federal debt. As a result, federal debt held by the public is projected to remain historically high relative to the size of the economy for the next decade. By 2023, if current laws remain in place, debt will equal 77 percent of GDP and be on an upward path, CBO projects (see figure below).
Such high and rising debt would have serious negative consequences: When interest rates rose to more normal levels, federal spending on interest payments would increase substantially. Moreover, because federal borrowing reduces national saving, the capital stock would be smaller and total wages would be lower than they would be if the debt was reduced. In addition, lawmakers would have less flexibility than they might ordinarily to use tax and spending policies to respond to unexpected challenges. Finally, such a large debt would increase the risk of a fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose so much confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget that the government would be unable to borrow at affordable rates.
Under Current Law, Federal Debt Will Stay at Historically High Levels Relative to GDP
The federal budget deficit, which shrank as a percentage of GDP for the third year in a row in 2012, will fall again in 2013, if current laws remain the same. At an estimated $845 billion, the 2013 imbalance would be the first deficit in five years below $1 trillion; and at 5.3 percent of GDP, it would be only about half as large, relative to the size of the economy, as the deficit was in 2009. Nevertheless, if the laws that govern taxes and spending do not change, federal debt held by the public will reach 76 percent of GDP by the end of this fiscal year, the largest percentage since 1950.
With revenues expected to rise more rapidly than spending in the next few years under current law, the deficit is projected to dip as low as 2.4 percent of GDP by 2015. In later years, however, projected deficits rise steadily, reaching almost 4 percent of GDP in 2023. For the 2014–2023 period, deficits in CBO’s baseline projections total $7.0 trillion. With such deficits, federal debt would remain above 73 percent of GDP—far higher than the 39 percent average seen over the past four decades. (As recently as the end of 2007, federal debt equaled just 36 percent of GDP.) Moreover, debt would be increasing relative to the size of the economy in the second half of the decade.
Those projections are not CBO’s predictions of future outcomes. As specified in law, CBO’s baseline projections are constructed under the assumption that current laws generally remain unchanged, so that they can serve as a benchmark against which potential changes in law can be measured.
Revenues
Federal revenues will increase by roughly 25 percent between 2013 and 2015 under current law, CBO projects. That increase is expected to result from a rise in income because of the growing economy, from policy changes that are scheduled to take effect during that period, and from policy changes that have already taken effect but whose full impact on revenues will not be felt until after this year (such as the recent increase in tax rates on income above certain thresholds).
As a result of those factors, revenues are projected to grow from 15.8 percent of GDP in 2012 to 19.1 percent of GDP in 2015—compared with an average of 17.9 percent of GDP over the past 40 years. Under current law, revenues will remain at roughly 19 percent of GDP from 2015 through 2023, CBO estimates.
Outlays
In CBO’s baseline projections, federal spending rises over the next few years in dollar terms but falls relative to the size of the economy. During those years, the growth of spending will be restrained both by the strengthening economy (as spending for programs such as unemployment compensation drops) and by provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (Public Law 112-25). Although outlays are projected to decline from 22.8 percent of GDP in 2012 to 21.5 percent by 2017, they will still exceed their 40-year average of 21.0 percent. (Outlays peaked at 25.2 percent of GDP in 2009 but have fallen relative to GDP in the past few years.)
After 2017, if current laws remain in place, outlays will start growing again as a percentage of GDP. The aging of the population, increasing health care costs, and a significant expansion of eligibility for federal subsidies for health insurance will substantially boost spending for Social Security and for major health care programs relative to the size of the economy. At the same time, rising interest rates will significantly increase the government’s debt-service costs. In CBO’s baseline, outlays reach about 23 percent of GDP in 2023 and are on an upward trajectory.
Changes from CBO’s Previous Projections
The deficits projected in CBO’s current baseline are significantly larger than the ones in CBO’s baseline of August 2012. At that time, CBO projected deficits totaling $2.3 trillion for the 2013–2022 period; in the current baseline, the total deficit for that period has risen by $4.6 trillion. That increase stems chiefly from the enactment of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (P.L. 112-240), which made changes to tax and spending laws that will boost deficits by a total of $4.0 trillion (excluding debt-service costs) between 2013 and 2022, according to estimates by CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. CBO’s updated baseline also takes into account other legislative actions since August, as well as a new economic forecast and some technical revisions to its projections.
Looming Policy Decisions May Have a Substantial Effect on the Budget Outlook
Current law leaves many key budget issues unresolved, and this year, lawmakers will face three significant budgetary deadlines:
- Automatic reductions in spending are scheduled to be implemented at the beginning of March; when that happens, funding for many government activities will be reduced by 5 percent or more.
- The continuing resolution that currently provides operational funding for much of the government will expire in late March. If no additional appropriations are provided by then, nonessential functions of the government will have to cease operations.
- A statutory limit on federal debt, which was temporarily removed, will take effect again in mid-May. The Treasury will be able to continue borrowing for a short time after that by using what are known as extraordinary measures. But to avoid a default on the government’s obligations, the debt limit will need to be adjusted before those measures are exhausted later in the year.
Budgetary outcomes will also be affected by decisions about whether to continue certain policies that have been in effect in recent years. Such policies could be continued, for example, by extending some tax provisions that are scheduled to expire (and that have routinely been extended in the past) or by preventing the 25 percent cut in Medicare’s payment rates for physicians that is due to occur in 2014. If, for instance, lawmakers eliminated the automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect in March (but left in place the original caps on discretionary funding set by the Budget Control Act), prevented the sharp reduction in Medicare’s payment rates for physicians, and extended the tax provisions that are scheduled to expire at the end of calendar year 2013 (or, in some cases, in later years), budget deficits would be substantially larger over the coming decade than in CBO’s baseline projections. With those changes, and no offsetting reductions in deficits, debt held by the public would rise to 87 percent of GDP by the end of 2023 rather than to 77 percent.
In addition to those decisions, lawmakers will continue to face the longer-term budgetary issues posed by the substantial federal debt and by the implications of rising health care costs and the aging of the population.
Economic Growth Is Likely to Be Slow in 2013 and Pick Up in Later Years
The U.S. economy expanded modestly in calendar year 2012, continuing the slow recovery seen since the recession ended in mid-2009. Although economic growth is expected to remain slow again this year, CBO anticipates that underlying factors in the economy will spur a more rapid expansion beginning next year.
Even so, under the fiscal policies embodied in current law, output is expected to remain below its potential (or maximum sustainable) level until 2017 (see figure below). By CBO’s estimates, in the fourth quarter of 2012, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP was about 5½ percent below its potential level. That gap was only modestly smaller than the gap between actual and potential GDP that existed at the end of the recession because the growth of output since then has been only slightly greater than the growth of potential output. With such a large gap between actual and potential GDP persisting for so long, CBO projects that the total loss of output, relative to the economy’s potential, between 2007 and 2017 will be equivalent to nearly half of the output that the United States produced last year.
The Economic Outlook for 2013
CBO expects that economic activity will expand slowly this year, with real GDP growing by just 1.4 percent. That slow growth reflects a combination of ongoing improvement in underlying economic factors and fiscal tightening that has already begun or is scheduled to occur—including the expiration of a 2 percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax, an increase in tax rates on income above certain thresholds, and scheduled automatic reductions in federal spending. That subdued economic growth will limit businesses’ need to hire additional workers, thereby causing the unemployment rate to stay near 8 percent this year, CBO projects. The rate of inflation and interest rates are projected to remain low.
The Economic Outlook for 2014 to 2018
After the economy adjusts this year to the fiscal tightening inherent in current law, underlying economic factors will lead to more rapid growth, CBO projects—3.4 percent in 2014 and an average of 3.6 percent a year from 2015 through 2018. In particular, CBO expects that the effects of the housing and financial crisis will continue to fade and that an upswing in housing construction (though from a very low level), rising real estate and stock prices, and increasing availability of credit will help to spur a virtuous cycle of faster growth in employment, income, consumer spending, and business investment over the next few years.
Nevertheless, under current law, CBO expects the unemployment rate to remain high—above 7½ percent through 2014—before falling to 5½ percent at the end of 2017. The rate of inflation is projected to rise slowly after this year: CBO estimates that the annual increase in the price index for personal consumption expenditures will reach about 2 percent in 2015. The interest rate on 3 month Treasury bills—which has hovered near zero for the past several years—is expected to climb to 4 percent by the end of 2017, and the rate on 10-year Treasury notes is projected to rise from 2.1 percent in 2013 to 5.2 percent in 2017.
The Economic Outlook for 2019 to 2023
For the second half of the coming decade, CBO does not attempt to predict the cyclical ups and downs of the economy; rather, CBO assumes that GDP will stay at its maximum sustainable level. On that basis, CBO projects that both actual and potential real GDP will grow at an average rate of 2¼ percent a year between 2019 and 2023. That pace is much slower than the average growth rate of potential GDP since 1950. The main reason is that the growth of the labor force will slow down because of the retirement of the baby boomers and an end to the long-standing increase in women’s participation in the labor force. CBO also projects that the unemployment rate will fall to 5.2 percent by 2023 and that inflation and interest rates will stay at about their 2018 levels throughout the 2019–2023 period.
Updated February 5, 2013, to correct an error in note “a” to Table 1-7.
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43907
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Employment Level Still 3 Million Jobs Less Then Peak Level in November 2007 Plus Short 9 Million Jobs For Population Growth in Last 65 Months — 12 Million Job Shortage — Stagflation — DOW hits 15000, NASDAQ hits 12 year high — Buy Low–Sell High — Sell Your U.S. Bonds and Stocks Now — Videos
DOW hits 15000, NASDAQ hits 12 year high
May 3rd 2013 CNBC Stock Market Squawk Box (April Jobs Report)
Jobless Rate Falls to Four-Year Low, and More
Jobs Pop, Unemployment Rate Drops
Data extracted on: May 3, 2013 (11:51:32 AM)
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
Employment Level
143,579,000
Series Id: LNS12000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Employment Level
Labor force status: Employed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 136559(1) | 136598 | 136701 | 137270 | 136630 | 136940 | 136531 | 136662 | 136893 | 137088 | 137322 | 137614 | |
| 2001 | 137778 | 137612 | 137783 | 137299 | 137092 | 136873 | 137071 | 136241 | 136846 | 136392 | 136238 | 136047 | |
| 2002 | 135701 | 136438 | 136177 | 136126 | 136539 | 136415 | 136413 | 136705 | 137302 | 137008 | 136521 | 136426 | |
| 2003 | 137417(1) | 137482 | 137434 | 137633 | 137544 | 137790 | 137474 | 137549 | 137609 | 137984 | 138424 | 138411 | |
| 2004 | 138472(1) | 138542 | 138453 | 138680 | 138852 | 139174 | 139556 | 139573 | 139487 | 139732 | 140231 | 140125 | |
| 2005 | 140245(1) | 140385 | 140654 | 141254 | 141609 | 141714 | 142026 | 142434 | 142401 | 142548 | 142499 | 142752 | |
| 2006 | 143150(1) | 143457 | 143741 | 143761 | 144089 | 144353 | 144202 | 144625 | 144815 | 145314 | 145534 | 145970 | |
| 2007 | 146028(1) | 146057 | 146320 | 145586 | 145903 | 146063 | 145905 | 145682 | 146244 | 145946 | 146595 | 146273 | |
| 2008 | 146378(1) | 146156 | 146086 | 146132 | 145908 | 145737 | 145532 | 145203 | 145076 | 144802 | 144100 | 143369 | |
| 2009 | 142153(1) | 141644 | 140721 | 140652 | 140250 | 140005 | 139898 | 139481 | 138810 | 138421 | 138665 | 138025 | |
| 2010 | 138439(1) | 138624 | 138767 | 139296 | 139255 | 139148 | 139167 | 139405 | 139388 | 139097 | 139046 | 139295 | |
| 2011 | 139253(1) | 139471 | 139643 | 139606 | 139681 | 139405 | 139509 | 139870 | 140164 | 140314 | 140771 | 140896 | |
| 2012 | 141608(1) | 142019 | 142020 | 141934 | 142302 | 142448 | 142250 | 142164 | 142974 | 143328 | 143277 | 143305 | |
| 2013 | 143322(1) | 143492 | 143286 | 143579 | |||||||||
| 1 : Data affected by changes in population controls. | |||||||||||||
Civilian Labor Force Level
155,238,000
Series Id: LNS11000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level
Labor force status: Civilian labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 142267(1) | 142456 | 142434 | 142751 | 142388 | 142591 | 142278 | 142514 | 142518 | 142622 | 142962 | 143248 | |
| 2001 | 143800 | 143701 | 143924 | 143569 | 143318 | 143357 | 143654 | 143284 | 143989 | 144086 | 144240 | 144305 | |
| 2002 | 143883 | 144653 | 144481 | 144725 | 144938 | 144808 | 144803 | 145009 | 145552 | 145314 | 145041 | 145066 | |
| 2003 | 145937(1) | 146100 | 146022 | 146474 | 146500 | 147056 | 146485 | 146445 | 146530 | 146716 | 147000 | 146729 | |
| 2004 | 146842(1) | 146709 | 146944 | 146850 | 147065 | 147460 | 147692 | 147564 | 147415 | 147793 | 148162 | 148059 | |
| 2005 | 148029(1) | 148364 | 148391 | 148926 | 149261 | 149238 | 149432 | 149779 | 149954 | 150001 | 150065 | 150030 | |
| 2006 | 150214(1) | 150641 | 150813 | 150881 | 151069 | 151354 | 151377 | 151716 | 151662 | 152041 | 152406 | 152732 | |
| 2007 | 153144(1) | 152983 | 153051 | 152435 | 152670 | 153041 | 153054 | 152749 | 153414 | 153183 | 153835 | 153918 | |
| 2008 | 154063(1) | 153653 | 153908 | 153769 | 154303 | 154313 | 154469 | 154641 | 154570 | 154876 | 154639 | 154655 | |
| 2009 | 154232(1) | 154526 | 154142 | 154479 | 154742 | 154710 | 154505 | 154300 | 153815 | 153804 | 153887 | 153120 | |
| 2010 | 153455(1) | 153702 | 153960 | 154577 | 154110 | 153623 | 153709 | 154078 | 153966 | 153681 | 154140 | 153649 | |
| 2011 | 153244(1) | 153269 | 153358 | 153478 | 153552 | 153369 | 153325 | 153707 | 154074 | 154010 | 154096 | 153945 | |
| 2012 | 154356(1) | 154825 | 154707 | 154451 | 154998 | 155149 | 154995 | 154647 | 155056 | 155576 | 155319 | 155511 | |
| 2013 | 155654(1) | 155524 | 155028 | 155238 | |||||||||
| 1 : Data affected by changes in population controls. | |||||||||||||
Labor Force Participation Rate
63.3%
Series Id: LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 67.3 | 67.3 | 67.3 | 67.3 | 67.1 | 67.1 | 66.9 | 66.9 | 66.9 | 66.8 | 66.9 | 67.0 | |
| 2001 | 67.2 | 67.1 | 67.2 | 66.9 | 66.7 | 66.7 | 66.8 | 66.5 | 66.8 | 66.7 | 66.7 | 66.7 | |
| 2002 | 66.5 | 66.8 | 66.6 | 66.7 | 66.7 | 66.6 | 66.5 | 66.6 | 66.7 | 66.6 | 66.4 | 66.3 | |
| 2003 | 66.4 | 66.4 | 66.3 | 66.4 | 66.4 | 66.5 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 65.9 | |
| 2004 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 65.9 | 66.0 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 65.8 | 65.9 | 66.0 | 65.9 | |
| 2005 | 65.8 | 65.9 | 65.9 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 66.0 | |
| 2006 | 66.0 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.3 | 66.4 | |
| 2007 | 66.4 | 66.3 | 66.2 | 65.9 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 65.8 | 66.0 | 65.8 | 66.0 | 66.0 | |
| 2008 | 66.2 | 66.0 | 66.1 | 65.9 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 65.9 | 65.8 | |
| 2009 | 65.7 | 65.8 | 65.6 | 65.7 | 65.7 | 65.7 | 65.5 | 65.4 | 65.1 | 65.0 | 65.0 | 64.6 | |
| 2010 | 64.8 | 64.9 | 64.9 | 65.1 | 64.9 | 64.6 | 64.6 | 64.7 | 64.6 | 64.4 | 64.6 | 64.3 | |
| 2011 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.0 | 64.0 | 64.1 | 64.2 | 64.1 | 64.1 | 64.0 | |
| 2012 | 63.7 | 63.9 | 63.8 | 63.6 | 63.8 | 63.8 | 63.7 | 63.5 | 63.6 | 63.8 | 63.6 | 63.6 | |
| 2013 | 63.6 | 63.5 | 63.3 | 63.3 |
Unemployment Level
11,659,000
Series Id: LNS13000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Level
Labor force status: Unemployed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 5708 | 5858 | 5733 | 5481 | 5758 | 5651 | 5747 | 5853 | 5625 | 5534 | 5639 | 5634 | |
| 2001 | 6023 | 6089 | 6141 | 6271 | 6226 | 6484 | 6583 | 7042 | 7142 | 7694 | 8003 | 8258 | |
| 2002 | 8182 | 8215 | 8304 | 8599 | 8399 | 8393 | 8390 | 8304 | 8251 | 8307 | 8520 | 8640 | |
| 2003 | 8520 | 8618 | 8588 | 8842 | 8957 | 9266 | 9011 | 8896 | 8921 | 8732 | 8576 | 8317 | |
| 2004 | 8370 | 8167 | 8491 | 8170 | 8212 | 8286 | 8136 | 7990 | 7927 | 8061 | 7932 | 7934 | |
| 2005 | 7784 | 7980 | 7737 | 7672 | 7651 | 7524 | 7406 | 7345 | 7553 | 7453 | 7566 | 7279 | |
| 2006 | 7064 | 7184 | 7072 | 7120 | 6980 | 7001 | 7175 | 7091 | 6847 | 6727 | 6872 | 6762 | |
| 2007 | 7116 | 6927 | 6731 | 6850 | 6766 | 6979 | 7149 | 7067 | 7170 | 7237 | 7240 | 7645 | |
| 2008 | 7685 | 7497 | 7822 | 7637 | 8395 | 8575 | 8937 | 9438 | 9494 | 10074 | 10538 | 11286 | |
| 2009 | 12079 | 12881 | 13421 | 13826 | 14492 | 14705 | 14607 | 14819 | 15005 | 15382 | 15223 | 15095 | |
| 2010 | 15016 | 15078 | 15192 | 15281 | 14856 | 14475 | 14542 | 14673 | 14577 | 14584 | 15094 | 14354 | |
| 2011 | 13992 | 13798 | 13716 | 13872 | 13871 | 13964 | 13817 | 13837 | 13910 | 13696 | 13325 | 13049 | |
| 2012 | 12748 | 12806 | 12686 | 12518 | 12695 | 12701 | 12745 | 12483 | 12082 | 12248 | 12042 | 12206 | |
| 2013 | 12332 | 12032 | 11742 | 11659 |
Unemployment Rate U-3
7.5%
Series Id: LNS14000000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Rate
Labor force status: Unemployment rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 3.8 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | |
| 2001 | 4.2 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.3 | 5.5 | 5.7 | |
| 2002 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 6.0 | |
| 2003 | 5.8 | 5.9 | 5.9 | 6.0 | 6.1 | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.0 | 5.8 | 5.7 | |
| 2004 | 5.7 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | |
| 2005 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.2 | 5.2 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | |
| 2006 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | |
| 2007 | 4.6 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 5.0 | |
| 2008 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.4 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.5 | 6.8 | 7.3 | |
| 2009 | 7.8 | 8.3 | 8.7 | 9.0 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.8 | 10.0 | 9.9 | 9.9 | |
| 2010 | 9.8 | 9.8 | 9.9 | 9.9 | 9.6 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.8 | 9.3 | |
| 2011 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 8.9 | 8.6 | 8.5 | |
| 2012 | 8.3 | 8.3 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 7.8 | 7.9 | 7.8 | 7.8 | |
| 2013 | 7.9 | 7.7 | 7.6 | 7.5 |
16-19 Years (Teenage) Unemployment Rate
24.1%
Series Id: LNS14000012
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Rate – 16-19 yrs.
Labor force status: Unemployment rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 to 19 years
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 12.7 | 13.8 | 13.3 | 12.6 | 12.8 | 12.3 | 13.4 | 14.0 | 13.0 | 12.8 | 13.0 | 13.2 | |
| 2001 | 13.8 | 13.7 | 13.8 | 13.9 | 13.4 | 14.2 | 14.4 | 15.6 | 15.2 | 16.0 | 15.9 | 17.0 | |
| 2002 | 16.5 | 16.0 | 16.6 | 16.7 | 16.6 | 16.7 | 16.8 | 17.0 | 16.3 | 15.1 | 17.1 | 16.9 | |
| 2003 | 17.2 | 17.2 | 17.8 | 17.7 | 17.9 | 19.0 | 18.2 | 16.6 | 17.6 | 17.2 | 15.7 | 16.2 | |
| 2004 | 17.0 | 16.5 | 16.8 | 16.6 | 17.1 | 17.0 | 17.8 | 16.7 | 16.6 | 17.4 | 16.4 | 17.6 | |
| 2005 | 16.2 | 17.5 | 17.1 | 17.8 | 17.8 | 16.3 | 16.1 | 16.1 | 15.5 | 16.1 | 17.0 | 14.9 | |
| 2006 | 15.1 | 15.3 | 16.1 | 14.6 | 14.0 | 15.8 | 15.9 | 16.0 | 16.3 | 15.2 | 14.8 | 14.6 | |
| 2007 | 14.8 | 14.9 | 14.9 | 15.9 | 15.9 | 16.3 | 15.3 | 15.9 | 15.9 | 15.4 | 16.2 | 16.8 | |
| 2008 | 17.8 | 16.6 | 16.1 | 15.9 | 19.0 | 19.2 | 20.7 | 18.6 | 19.1 | 20.0 | 20.3 | 20.5 | |
| 2009 | 20.7 | 22.2 | 22.2 | 22.2 | 23.4 | 24.7 | 24.3 | 25.0 | 25.9 | 27.1 | 26.9 | 26.6 | |
| 2010 | 26.0 | 25.4 | 26.2 | 25.5 | 26.6 | 26.0 | 26.0 | 25.7 | 25.8 | 27.2 | 24.6 | 25.1 | |
| 2011 | 25.5 | 24.0 | 24.4 | 24.7 | 24.0 | 24.7 | 24.9 | 25.2 | 24.4 | 24.1 | 23.9 | 22.9 | |
| 2012 | 23.4 | 23.7 | 25.0 | 24.9 | 24.4 | 23.7 | 23.9 | 24.5 | 23.7 | 23.7 | 23.6 | 23.5 | |
| 2013 | 23.4 | 25.1 | 24.2 | 24.1 |
Average Weeks Unemployed
36.5%
Series Id: LNS13008275
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Average Weeks Unemployed
Labor force status: Unemployed
Type of data: Number of weeks
Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 13.1 | 12.6 | 12.7 | 12.4 | 12.6 | 12.3 | 13.4 | 12.9 | 12.2 | 12.7 | 12.4 | 12.5 | |
| 2001 | 12.7 | 12.8 | 12.8 | 12.4 | 12.1 | 12.7 | 12.9 | 13.3 | 13.2 | 13.3 | 14.3 | 14.5 | |
| 2002 | 14.7 | 15.0 | 15.4 | 16.3 | 16.8 | 16.9 | 16.9 | 16.5 | 17.6 | 17.8 | 17.6 | 18.5 | |
| 2003 | 18.5 | 18.5 | 18.1 | 19.4 | 19.0 | 19.9 | 19.7 | 19.2 | 19.5 | 19.3 | 19.9 | 19.8 | |
| 2004 | 19.9 | 20.1 | 19.8 | 19.6 | 19.8 | 20.5 | 18.8 | 18.8 | 19.4 | 19.5 | 19.7 | 19.4 | |
| 2005 | 19.5 | 19.1 | 19.5 | 19.6 | 18.6 | 17.9 | 17.6 | 18.4 | 17.9 | 17.9 | 17.5 | 17.5 | |
| 2006 | 16.9 | 17.8 | 17.1 | 16.7 | 17.1 | 16.6 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 16.3 | 16.2 | 16.1 | |
| 2007 | 16.3 | 16.7 | 17.8 | 16.9 | 16.6 | 16.5 | 17.2 | 17.0 | 16.3 | 17.0 | 17.3 | 16.6 | |
| 2008 | 17.5 | 16.9 | 16.5 | 16.9 | 16.6 | 17.1 | 17.0 | 17.7 | 18.6 | 19.9 | 18.9 | 19.9 | |
| 2009 | 19.8 | 20.1 | 20.9 | 21.6 | 22.4 | 23.9 | 25.1 | 25.3 | 26.7 | 27.4 | 29.0 | 29.7 | |
| 2010 | 30.4 | 29.8 | 31.6 | 33.2 | 33.9 | 34.4 | 33.8 | 33.6 | 33.4 | 34.0 | 34.1 | 34.8 | |
| 2011 | 37.3 | 37.4 | 39.2 | 38.6 | 39.5 | 39.6 | 40.4 | 40.3 | 40.4 | 38.9 | 40.7 | 40.7 | |
| 2012 | 40.2 | 39.9 | 39.5 | 39.1 | 39.6 | 39.7 | 38.8 | 39.3 | 39.6 | 39.9 | 39.7 | 38.1 | |
| 2013 | 35.3 | 36.9 | 37.1 | 36.5 |
Unemployment Level New Entrants
1,280,000
Series Id: LNS13023569
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Level – New Entrants
Labor force status: Unemployed
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Unemployed entrant status: New entrants
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 394 | 420 | 429 | 406 | 466 | 427 | 433 | 499 | 415 | 402 | 419 | 490 | |
| 2001 | 444 | 396 | 378 | 457 | 468 | 467 | 448 | 485 | 473 | 481 | 495 | 515 | |
| 2002 | 484 | 507 | 538 | 527 | 497 | 549 | 545 | 612 | 536 | 479 | 591 | 535 | |
| 2003 | 599 | 584 | 630 | 635 | 630 | 661 | 669 | 652 | 686 | 636 | 593 | 693 | |
| 2004 | 676 | 666 | 631 | 652 | 718 | 649 | 702 | 704 | 695 | 734 | 700 | 702 | |
| 2005 | 621 | 753 | 712 | 764 | 710 | 650 | 630 | 626 | 607 | 638 | 673 | 633 | |
| 2006 | 616 | 711 | 636 | 591 | 517 | 646 | 639 | 646 | 612 | 572 | 591 | 586 | |
| 2007 | 622 | 599 | 615 | 620 | 530 | 640 | 602 | 588 | 668 | 696 | 678 | 679 | |
| 2008 | 677 | 656 | 704 | 625 | 797 | 786 | 835 | 821 | 815 | 819 | 763 | 803 | |
| 2009 | 779 | 999 | 874 | 901 | 965 | 1002 | 1004 | 1085 | 1150 | 1100 | 1326 | 1240 | |
| 2010 | 1199 | 1192 | 1155 | 1188 | 1201 | 1170 | 1207 | 1279 | 1211 | 1277 | 1272 | 1308 | |
| 2011 | 1352 | 1289 | 1308 | 1301 | 1220 | 1231 | 1278 | 1260 | 1370 | 1289 | 1271 | 1286 | |
| 2012 | 1258 | 1382 | 1421 | 1362 | 1347 | 1316 | 1299 | 1268 | 1253 | 1302 | 1326 | 1291 | |
| 2013 | 1287 | 1279 | 1316 | 1280 |
Not in Labor Force, Search For Work and Available
2,347,000
Series Id: LNU05026642
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Not in Labor Force, Searched For Work and Available
Labor force status: Not in labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Job desires/not in labor force: Want a job now
Reasons not in labor force: Available to work now
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 1207 | 1281 | 1219 | 1216 | 1113 | 1142 | 1172 | 1097 | 1166 | 1044 | 1100 | 1125 | 1157 |
| 2001 | 1295 | 1337 | 1109 | 1131 | 1157 | 1170 | 1232 | 1364 | 1335 | 1398 | 1331 | 1330 | 1266 |
| 2002 | 1532 | 1423 | 1358 | 1397 | 1467 | 1380 | 1507 | 1456 | 1501 | 1416 | 1401 | 1432 | 1439 |
| 2003 | 1598 | 1590 | 1577 | 1399 | 1428 | 1468 | 1566 | 1665 | 1544 | 1586 | 1473 | 1483 | 1531 |
| 2004 | 1670 | 1691 | 1643 | 1526 | 1533 | 1492 | 1557 | 1587 | 1561 | 1647 | 1517 | 1463 | 1574 |
| 2005 | 1804 | 1673 | 1588 | 1511 | 1428 | 1583 | 1516 | 1583 | 1438 | 1414 | 1415 | 1589 | 1545 |
| 2006 | 1644 | 1471 | 1468 | 1310 | 1388 | 1584 | 1522 | 1592 | 1299 | 1478 | 1366 | 1252 | 1448 |
| 2007 | 1577 | 1451 | 1385 | 1391 | 1406 | 1454 | 1376 | 1365 | 1268 | 1364 | 1363 | 1344 | 1395 |
| 2008 | 1729 | 1585 | 1352 | 1414 | 1416 | 1558 | 1573 | 1640 | 1604 | 1637 | 1947 | 1908 | 1614 |
| 2009 | 2130 | 2051 | 2106 | 2089 | 2210 | 2176 | 2282 | 2270 | 2219 | 2373 | 2323 | 2486 | 2226 |
| 2010 | 2539 | 2527 | 2255 | 2432 | 2223 | 2591 | 2622 | 2370 | 2548 | 2602 | 2531 | 2609 | 2487 |
| 2011 | 2800 | 2730 | 2434 | 2466 | 2206 | 2680 | 2785 | 2575 | 2511 | 2555 | 2591 | 2540 | 2573 |
| 2012 | 2809 | 2608 | 2352 | 2363 | 2423 | 2483 | 2529 | 2561 | 2517 | 2433 | 2505 | 2614 | 2516 |
| 2013 | 2443 | 2588 | 2326 | 2347 |
Not in Labor Force, Searched for Work and Available,
Discouraged Reasons For Not Currently Looking
835,000
Series Id: LNU05026645
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Not in Labor Force, Searched For Work and Available, Discouraged Reasons For Not Currently Looking
Labor force status: Not in labor force
Type of data: Number in thousands
Age: 16 years and over
Job desires/not in labor force: Want a job now
Reasons not in labor force: Discouragement over job prospects (Persons who believe no job is available.)
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 236 | 267 | 258 | 331 | 280 | 309 | 266 | 203 | 253 | 232 | 236 | 269 | 262 |
| 2001 | 301 | 287 | 349 | 349 | 328 | 294 | 310 | 337 | 285 | 331 | 328 | 348 | 321 |
| 2002 | 328 | 375 | 330 | 320 | 414 | 342 | 405 | 378 | 392 | 359 | 385 | 403 | 369 |
| 2003 | 449 | 450 | 474 | 437 | 482 | 478 | 470 | 503 | 388 | 462 | 457 | 433 | 457 |
| 2004 | 432 | 484 | 514 | 492 | 476 | 478 | 504 | 534 | 412 | 429 | 392 | 442 | 466 |
| 2005 | 515 | 485 | 480 | 393 | 392 | 476 | 499 | 384 | 362 | 392 | 404 | 451 | 436 |
| 2006 | 396 | 386 | 451 | 381 | 323 | 481 | 428 | 448 | 325 | 331 | 349 | 274 | 381 |
| 2007 | 442 | 375 | 381 | 399 | 368 | 401 | 367 | 392 | 276 | 320 | 349 | 363 | 369 |
| 2008 | 467 | 396 | 401 | 412 | 400 | 420 | 461 | 381 | 467 | 484 | 608 | 642 | 462 |
| 2009 | 734 | 731 | 685 | 740 | 792 | 793 | 796 | 758 | 706 | 808 | 861 | 929 | 778 |
| 2010 | 1065 | 1204 | 994 | 1197 | 1083 | 1207 | 1185 | 1110 | 1209 | 1219 | 1282 | 1318 | 1173 |
| 2011 | 993 | 1020 | 921 | 989 | 822 | 982 | 1119 | 977 | 1037 | 967 | 1096 | 945 | 989 |
| 2012 | 1059 | 1006 | 865 | 968 | 830 | 821 | 852 | 844 | 802 | 813 | 979 | 1068 | 909 |
| 2013 | 804 | 885 | 803 | 835 |
Total Unemployment Rate U-6
13.9%
Series Id: LNS13327709
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (seas) Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus marg attached
| 2000 | 7.1 | 7.2 | 7.1 | 6.9 | 7.1 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.1 | 7.0 | 6.8 | 7.1 | 6.9 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 7.3 | 7.4 | 7.3 | 7.4 | 7.5 | 7.9 | 7.8 | 8.1 | 8.7 | 9.3 | 9.4 | 9.6 | |
| 2002 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.4 | 9.7 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.7 | 9.8 | |
| 2003 | 10.0 | 10.2 | 10.0 | 10.2 | 10.1 | 10.3 | 10.3 | 10.1 | 10.4 | 10.2 | 10.0 | 9.8 | |
| 2004 | 9.9 | 9.7 | 10.0 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.4 | 9.4 | 9.7 | 9.4 | 9.2 | |
| 2005 | 9.3 | 9.3 | 9.1 | 8.9 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 8.8 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 8.7 | 8.7 | 8.6 | |
| 2006 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 8.2 | 8.4 | 8.5 | 8.4 | 8.0 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 7.9 | |
| 2007 | 8.4 | 8.2 | 8.0 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.3 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.8 | |
| 2008 | 9.2 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.2 | 9.7 | 10.1 | 10.5 | 10.8 | 11.0 | 11.8 | 12.6 | 13.6 | |
| 2009 | 14.2 | 15.1 | 15.7 | 15.9 | 16.4 | 16.5 | 16.5 | 16.7 | 16.7 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 17.1 | |
| 2010 | 16.7 | 17.0 | 17.0 | 17.1 | 16.6 | 16.5 | 16.5 | 16.5 | 16.8 | 16.7 | 16.9 | 16.6 | |
| 2011 | 16.2 | 16.0 | 15.8 | 16.0 | 15.8 | 16.1 | 16.0 | 16.1 | 16.3 | 16.0 | 15.5 | 15.2 | |
| 2012 | 15.1 | 15.0 | 14.5 | 14.5 | 14.8 | 14.8 | 14.9 | 14.7 | 14.7 | 14.5 | 14.4 | 14.4 | |
| 2013 | 14.4 | 14.3 | 13.8 | 13.9 |
Background Articles and Videos
Employment Situation Summary
Transmission of material in this release is embargoed USDL-13-0785
until 8:30 a.m. (EDT) Friday, May 3, 2013
Technical information:
Household data: (202) 691-6378 * cpsinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/cps
Establishment data: (202) 691-6555 * cesinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/ces
Media contact: (202) 691-5902 * PressOffice@bls.gov
THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION -- APRIL 2013
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 165,000 in April, and the unemployment
rate was little changed at 7.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services,
food services and drinking places, retail trade, and health care.
Household Survey Data
The unemployment rate, at 7.5 percent, changed little in April but has
declined by 0.4 percentage point since January. The number of unemployed
persons, at 11.7 million, was also little changed over the month; however,
unemployment has decreased by 673,000 since January. (See table A-1.)
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for adult women
(6.7 percent) declined in April, while the rates for adult men (7.1
percent), teenagers (24.1 percent), whites (6.7 percent), blacks (13.2
percent), and Hispanics (9.0 percent) showed little or no change. The
jobless rate for Asians was 5.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted),
little changed from a year earlier. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
In April, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27
weeks or more) declined by 258,000 to 4.4 million; their share of the
unemployed declined by 2.2 percentage points to 37.4 percent. Over the
past 12 months, the number of long-term unemployed has decreased by
687,000, and their share has declined by 3.1 percentage points. (See
table A-12.)
The civilian labor force participation rate was 63.3 percent in April,
unchanged over the month but down from 63.6 percent in January. The
employment-population ratio, 58.6 percent, was about unchanged over
the month and has shown little movement, on net, over the past year.
(See table A-1.)
In April, the number of persons employed part time for economic
reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers)
increased by 278,000 to 7.9 million, largely offsetting a decrease in
March. These individuals were working part time because their hours
had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
(See table A-8.)
In April, 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor
force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not
seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force,
wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime
in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because
they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
(See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 835,000 discouraged workers
in April, down by 133,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not
seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently
looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.
The remaining 1.5 million persons marginally attached to the labor
force in April had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the
survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.
(See table A-16.)
Establishment Survey Data
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 165,000 in April, with
job gains in professional and business services, food services and
drinking places, retail trade, and health care. Over the prior 12
months, employment growth averaged 169,000 per month. (See table B-1.)
Professional and business services added 73,000 jobs in April and has
added 587,000 jobs over the past year. In April, employment rose in
temporary help services (+31,000), professional and technical services
(+23,000), and management of companies (+7,000).
Within leisure and hospitality, employment in food services and
drinking places rose by 38,000 over the month. Job growth in the food
services industry averaged 25,000 per month over the prior 12 months.
Retail trade employment increased by 29,000 in April. The industry
added an average of 21,000 jobs per month over the prior 12 months. In
April, job growth occurred in general merchandise stores (+15,000) and
in health and personal care stores (+5,000).
Health care added 19,000 jobs in April. Within the industry, employment
rose in ambulatory health care services (+14,000). Over the prior 12
months, job growth in health care averaged 24,000 per month. In April,
employment also continued its upward trend in social assistance (+7,000).
Employment changed little over the month in construction, with small
offsetting movements in the residential and nonresidential components.
Construction gained an average of 27,000 jobs per month over the prior
6 months. Manufacturing employment was unchanged in April.
Employment in other major industries, including mining and logging,
wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, financial activities,
and government, showed little change over the month.
The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls
decreased by 0.2 hour in April to 34.4 hours. Within manufacturing,
the workweek decreased by 0.1 hour to 40.7 hours, and overtime declined
by 0.1 hour to 3.3 hours. The average workweek for production and
nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 0.1
hour to 33.7 hours. (See tables B-2 and B-7.)
In April, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm
payrolls rose by 4 cents to $23.87. Over the year, average hourly
earnings have risen by 45 cents, or 1.9 percent. In April, average
hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory
employees edged up by 2 cents to $20.06. (See tables B-3 and B-8.)
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for February was
revised from +268,000 to +332,000, and the change for March was
revised from +88,000 to +138,000. With these revisions, employment
gains in February and March combined were 114,000 higher than
previously reported.
____________
The Employment Situation for May is scheduled to be released on
Friday, June 7, 2013, at 8:30 a.m. (EDT).
- Employment Situation Summary Table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted
- Employment Situation Summary Table B. Establishment data, seasonally adjusted
- Employment Situation Frequently Asked Questions
- Employment Situation Technical Note
- Table A-1. Employment status of the civilian population by sex and age
- Table A-2. Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age
- Table A-3. Employment status of the Hispanic or Latino population by sex and age
- Table A-4. Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment
- Table A-5. Employment status of the civilian population 18 years and over by veteran status, period of service, and sex, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-6. Employment status of the civilian population by sex, age, and disability status, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-7. Employment status of the civilian population by nativity and sex, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-8. Employed persons by class of worker and part-time status
- Table A-9. Selected employment indicators
- Table A-10. Selected unemployment indicators, seasonally adjusted
- Table A-11. Unemployed persons by reason for unemployment
- Table A-12. Unemployed persons by duration of unemployment
- Table A-13. Employed and unemployed persons by occupation, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-14. Unemployed persons by industry and class of worker, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization
- Table A-16. Persons not in the labor force and multiple jobholders by sex, not seasonally adjusted
- Table B-1. Employees on nonfarm payrolls by industry sector and selected industry detail
- Table B-2. Average weekly hours and overtime of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-3. Average hourly and weekly earnings of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-4. Indexes of aggregate weekly hours and payrolls for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-5. Employment of women on nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-6. Employment of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Table B-7. Average weekly hours and overtime of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Table B-8. Average hourly and weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Table B-9. Indexes of aggregate weekly hours and payrolls for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Access to historical data for the “A” tables of the Employment Situation Release
- Access to historical data for the “B” tables of the Employment Situation Release
- HTML version of the entire news release
Employment Situation Summary Table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted
CategoryApr.
2012Feb.
2013Mar.
2013Apr.
2013Change from:
Mar.
2013-
Apr.
2013Employment status Civilian noninstitutional population242,784244,828244,995245,175180Civilian labor force154,451155,524155,028155,238210Participation rate63.663.563.363.30.0Employed141,934143,492143,286143,579293Employment-population ratio58.558.658.558.60.1Unemployed12,51812,03211,74211,659-83Unemployment rate8.17.77.67.5-0.1Not in labor force88,33289,30489,96789,936-31 Unemployment rates Total, 16 years and over8.17.77.67.5-0.1Adult men (20 years and over)7.57.16.97.10.2Adult women (20 years and over)7.47.07.06.7-0.3Teenagers (16 to 19 years)24.925.124.224.1-0.1White7.46.86.76.70.0Black or African American13.113.813.313.2-0.1Asian (not seasonally adjusted)5.26.15.05.1-Hispanic or Latino ethnicity10.39.69.29.0-0.2 Total, 25 years and over6.86.36.26.1-0.1Less than a high school diploma12.511.211.111.60.5High school graduates, no college7.97.97.67.4-0.2Some college or associate degree7.56.76.46.40.0Bachelor’s degree and higher4.03.83.83.90.1 Reason for unemployment Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs6,8806,5226,3296,41081Job leavers989956986864-122Reentrants3,3363,3403,1763,151-25New entrants1,3621,2791,3161,280-36 Duration of unemployment Less than 5 weeks2,5672,6672,4642,474105 to 14 weeks2,8412,7822,8382,8481015 to 26 weeks1,9841,6951,7371,96723027 weeks and over5,0404,7974,6114,353-258 Employed persons at work part time Part time for economic reasons7,8967,9887,6387,916278Slack work or business conditions5,2105,1364,9065,129223Could only find part-time work2,3932,5782,5762,527-49Part time for noneconomic reasons18,86818,90818,74518,908163 Persons not in the labor force (not seasonally adjusted) Marginally attached to the labor force2,3632,5882,3262,347-Discouraged workers968885803835– Over-the-month changes are not displayed for not seasonally adjusted data.
NOTE: Persons whose ethnicity is identified as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race. Detail for the seasonally adjusted data shown in this table will not necessarily add to totals because of the independent seasonal adjustment of the various series. Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of January data.
Employment Situation Summary Table B. Establishment data, seasonally adjusted
| Category | Apr. 2012 |
Feb. 2013 |
Mar. 2013(p) |
Apr. 2013(p) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EMPLOYMENT BY SELECTED INDUSTRY (Over-the-month change, in thousands) |
||||
| Total nonfarm | 112 | 332 | 138 | 165 |
| Total private | 120 | 319 | 154 | 176 |
| Goods-producing | 6 | 75 | 15 | -9 |
| Mining and logging | 0 | 4 | 0 | -3 |
| Construction | -4 | 48 | 13 | -6 |
| Manufacturing | 10 | 23 | 2 | 0 |
| Durable goods(1) | 8 | 12 | 7 | 1 |
| Motor vehicles and parts | 1.0 | 6.4 | 4.1 | 2.4 |
| Nondurable goods | 2 | 11 | -5 | -1 |
| Private service-providing(1) | 114 | 244 | 139 | 185 |
| Wholesale trade | 13.2 | 4.7 | 2.9 | 4.1 |
| Retail trade | 30.4 | 25.8 | -3.9 | 29.3 |
| Transportation and warehousing | -15.1 | -5.3 | -6.7 | 4.2 |
| Information | 0 | 18 | 2 | -9 |
| Financial activities | 5 | 15 | 5 | 9 |
| Professional and business services(1) | 45 | 93 | 64 | 73 |
| Temporary help services | 14.7 | 27.5 | 25.5 | 30.8 |
| Education and health services(1) | 22 | 31 | 46 | 28 |
| Health care and social assistance | 20.7 | 37.0 | 26.5 | 26.1 |
| Leisure and hospitality | 14 | 63 | 38 | 43 |
| Other services | 0 | -1 | -8 | 4 |
| Government | -8 | 13 | -16 | -11 |
| WOMEN AND PRODUCTION AND NONSUPERVISORY EMPLOYEES(2) AS A PERCENT OF ALL EMPLOYEES |
||||
| Total nonfarm women employees | 49.4 | 49.3 | 49.3 | 49.3 |
| Total private women employees | 47.8 | 47.8 | 47.8 | 47.9 |
| Total private production and nonsupervisory employees | 82.6 | 82.6 | 82.6 | 82.6 |
| HOURS AND EARNINGS ALL EMPLOYEES |
||||
| Total private | ||||
| Average weekly hours | 34.5 | 34.5 | 34.6 | 34.4 |
| Average hourly earnings | $23.42 | $23.82 | $23.83 | $23.87 |
| Average weekly earnings | $807.99 | $821.79 | $824.52 | $821.13 |
| Index of aggregate weekly hours (2007=100)(3) | 96.3 | 97.9 | 98.3 | 97.9 |
| Over-the-month percent change | 0.1 | 0.5 | 0.4 | -0.4 |
| Index of aggregate weekly payrolls (2007=100)(4) | 107.6 | 111.2 | 111.7 | 111.5 |
| Over-the-month percent change | 0.2 | 0.7 | 0.4 | -0.2 |
| HOURS AND EARNINGS PRODUCTION AND NONSUPERVISORY EMPLOYEES |
||||
| Total private | ||||
| Average weekly hours | 33.7 | 33.8 | 33.8 | 33.7 |
| Average hourly earnings | $19.72 | $20.03 | $20.04 | $20.06 |
| Average weekly earnings | $664.56 | $677.01 | $677.35 | $676.02 |
| Index of aggregate weekly hours (2002=100)(3) | 103.6 | 105.6 | 105.7 | 105.5 |
| Over-the-month percent change | 0.1 | 0.9 | 0.1 | -0.2 |
| Index of aggregate weekly payrolls (2002=100)(4) | 136.4 | 141.2 | 141.4 | 141.3 |
| Over-the-month percent change | 0.3 | 1.1 | 0.1 | -0.1 |
| DIFFUSION INDEX(5) (Over 1-month span) |
||||
| Total private (266 industries) | 58.3 | 61.7 | 56.2 | 53.9 |
| Manufacturing (81 industries) | 54.9 | 56.8 | 51.9 | 44.4 |
| Footnotes (1) Includes other industries, not shown separately. (2) Data relate to production employees in mining and logging and manufacturing, construction employees in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in the service-providing industries. (3) The indexes of aggregate weekly hours are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate hours by the corresponding annual average aggregate hours. (4) The indexes of aggregate weekly payrolls are calculated by dividing the current month’s estimates of aggregate weekly payrolls by the corresponding annual average aggregate weekly payrolls. (5) Figures are the percent of industries with employment increasing plus one-half of the industries with unchanged employment, where 50 percent indicates an equal balance between industries with increasing and decreasing employment. (p) Preliminary |
||||
Radical Islamic Jihadist Terrorists — Democrats in Denial — Americans Buying Ammunitions and Guns — Videos
Are there radical Islamic terror camps in North America? Apparently there are dozens author says
Radical Jihadists Training On U.S. Soil – Behind Enemy Lines – Wake Up America!!!
Glenn Beck – The Project Part 1
Glenn Beck – The Project Part 2
The Third Jihad – Radical Islam’s Vision for America
Beslan: 5 years on
Dispatches – Beslan (2006)
The school siege at Beslan was the bloodiest act of terrorism ever to take place on Russian soil. Yet beyond this horrible truth remain many unanswered questions. There is no agreement on who the terrorists were. How many they numbered? Where they came from? How they got to Beslan? What they wanted? Whether they were all killed or captured? And just how the siege which began on September 1 2004, ended so catastrophically?
This Dispatches special uses testimony from eyewitnesses, survivors and security services. This is combined with video and audio archive footage presents the fullest account of what happened at Beslan.
The film examines the background to the events of Beslan. It also looks at the Russian state’s reaction to the atrocity and the motivation of the hostage-takers. Beslan School Siege also documents how a small town is coming to terms with the loss of its children.
Jihad: Slaughter of the Innocents – Beslan (Беслан) Part 1
Jihad: Slaughter of the Innocents – Beslan (Беслан) Part 2
Jihad: Slaughter of the Innocents – Beslan (Беслан) Part 3
Jihad: Slaughter of the Innocents – Beslan (Беслан) Part 4
Jihad: Slaughter of the Innocents – Beslan (Беслан) Part 5
Glenn Beck U.S. Denial of Islamic Jihad Threat, Beslan School Massacre 4-26-13
Glenn Beck The Story of Beslan
Glenn Beck Beslan, Terror, and Chechnya
Glenn Beck Experts on Beslan
Background Articles and Videos
Terrorism & Jihad: An Islamic Perspective – Dr. Zakir Naik
Stephen Coughlin, Part 1: Lectures on National Security & Counterterror Analysis (Introduction)
Stephen Coughlin, Part 2: Understanding the War on Terror Through Islamic Law
Stephen Coughlin, Part 3: Abrogation & the ‘Milestones’ Process
Stephen Coughlin, Part 4: Muslim Brotherhood, Arab Spring & the ‘Milestones’ Process
Stephen Coughlin, Part 5: The Role of the OIC in Enforcing Islamic Law
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Steve Emerson–American Jihad: The Terrorist Living Among Us–Videos
Robert Spencer–Stealth Jihad–Videos
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An Affront and Threat To The American People–The Ground Zero Mosque–Remembering 9/11 and The Unknown Falling Man
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The Coming U.S. Stock and Bond Market Crash of 2013-2014 — The Stock and Bond Big Bubble Burst — Central Banks Buying Gold! — Videos
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Marc Faber ‘We Are in the End Game Part 2
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LIFE HIDDEN TRUTH 2013 GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS
Billionaires Dumping Stocks, Economist Knows Why
Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast.
Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of “disappointing performance” in dyed-in-the-wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods.
In the latest filing for Buffett’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in “consumer product stocks” by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in California-based computer parts supplier Intel.
With 70% of the U.S. economy dependent on consumer spending, Buffett’s apparent lack of faith in these companies’ future prospects is worrisome.
Unfortunately Buffett isn’t alone.
Fellow billionaire John Paulson, who made a fortune betting on the subprime mortgage meltdown, is clearing out of U.S. stocks too. During the second quarter of the year, Paulson’s hedge fund, Paulson & Co., dumped 14 million shares of JPMorgan Chase. The fund also dumped its entire position in discount retailer Family Dollar and consumer-goods maker Sara Lee.
Finally, billionaire George Soros recently sold nearly all of his bank stocks, including shares of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. Between the three banks, Soros sold more than a million shares.
So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of U.S. companies?
After all, the stock market is still in the midst of its historic rally. Real estate prices have finally leveled off, and for the first time in five years are actually rising in many locations. And the unemployment rate seems to have stabilized.
It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward a massive market correction, as much as 90%.
One such person publishing this research is Robert Wiedemer, an esteemed economist and author of the New York Times best-selling book Aftershock.
Editor’s Note: Wiedemer Gives Proof for His Dire Predictions in This Shocking Interview.
Before you dismiss the possibility of a 90% drop in the stock market as unrealistic, consider Wiedemer’s credentials.
In 2006, Wiedemer and a team of economists accurately predicted the collapse of the U.S. housing market, equity markets, and consumer spending that almost sank the United States. They published their research in the book America’s Bubble Economy.
The book quickly grabbed headlines for its accuracy in predicting what many thought would never happen, and quickly established Wiedemer as a trusted voice.
A columnist at Dow Jones said the book was “one of those rare finds that not only predicted the subprime credit meltdown well in advance, it offered Main Street investors a winning strategy that helped avoid the forty percent losses that followed . . .”
The chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor’s said that Wiedemer’s track record “demands our attention.”
And finally, the former CFO of Goldman Sachs said Wiedemer’s “prescience in (his) first book lends credence to the new warnings. This book deserves our attention.”
In the interview for his latest blockbuster Aftershock, Wiedemer says the 90% drop in the stock market is “a worst-case scenario,” and the host quickly challenged this claim.
Wiedemer calmly laid out a clear explanation of why a large drop of some sort is a virtual certainty.
It starts with the reckless strategy of the Federal Reserve to print a massive amount of money out of thin air in an attempt to stimulate the economy.
“These funds haven’t made it into the markets and the economy yet. But it is a mathematical certainty that once the dam breaks, and this money passes through the reserves and hits the markets, inflation will surge,” said Wiedemer.
“Once you hit 10% inflation, 10-year Treasury bonds lose about half their value. And by 20%, any value is all but gone. Interest rates will increase dramatically at this point, and that will cause real estate values to collapse. And the stock market will collapse as a consequence of these other problems.”
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.moneynews.com/MKTNews/billionaires-dump-economist-stock/2012/08/29/id/450265?PROMO_CODE=110D8-1&utm_source=taboola#ixzz2RhO2R5ey
Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!
2.5% First Quarter 2013 Real Annual Growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — Stagflation — Government GDP Calculation of Investment To Include Intangibles R&D — Videos
Ken Langone: Regulation Biggest Issue Hurting U.S. Economy
April 26 (Bloomberg) — Ken Langone, founder & CEO at Invemed Associates, talks with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker and Sara Eisen about first-quarter U.S. GDP, the impact of regulations and the anti-business stance of the Obama Administration. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “Market Makers.”
Peter Schiff We re in Depression, Dollar Crisis Coming
[
GDP Propaganda Exposed
Data shift to lift US economy 3%
By Robin Harding in Washington
The US economy will officially become 3 per cent bigger in July as part of a shake-up that will see government statistics take into account 21st century components such as film royalties and spending on research and development.
Billions of dollars of intangible assets will enter the gross domestic product of the world’s largest economy in a revision aimed at capturing the changing nature of US output.
Brent Moulton, who manages the national accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, told the Financial Times that the update was the biggest since computer software was added to the accounts in 1999.
“We are carrying these major changes all the way back in time – which for us means to 1929 – so we are essentially rewriting economic history,” said Mr Moulton.
The changes will affect everything from the measured GDP of different US states to the stability of the inflation measure targeted by the Federal Reserve. They will force economists to revisit policy debates about everything from corporate profits to the causes of economic growth.
The revision, equivalent to adding a country as big as Belgium to the estimated size of the world economy, will make the US one of the first adopters of a new international standard for GDP accounting.
“We’re capitalising research and development and also this category referred to as entertainment, literary and artistic originals, which would be things like motion picture originals, long-lasting television programmes, books and sound recordings,” said Mr Moulton.
At present, R&D counts as a cost of doing business, so the final output of Apple iPads is included in GDP but the research done to create them is not. R&D will now count as an investment, adding a bit more than 2 per cent to the measured size of the economy.
GDP will soar in small states that host a lot of military R&D, but barely change in others, widening measured income gaps across the US. R&D is expected to boost the GDP of New Mexico by 10 per cent and Maryland by 6 per cent while Louisiana will see an increase of just 0.6 per cent.
Creative works are expected to add a further 0.5 per cent to the overall size of the US economy. Around one-third of that will come from movies, one-third from TV programmes, and one-third from books, music and theatre.
Deficits in defined benefit pension schemes will also be included because what companies have promised to pay out will be measured, rather than the cash they pay into plans.
“We will now show a liability for underfunded plans, which particularly has large ramifications for the government sector, where both at the state level and the federal level we have large underfunded plans,” said Mr Moulton.
The changes are in addition to a comprehensive revision of the national accounts that takes place every five years based on an economic census of nearly 4m US businesses.
Steve Landefeld, BEA director, said it was hard to predict the overall outcome given the mixture of new methodology and data updates. “What’s going to happen when you mix it with the new source data from the economic census . . . I don’t know,” he said.
But he said the revisions were unlikely to alter the picture of what has happened to the economy in recent years. “I wouldn’t be looking for large changes in trends or cycles.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/52d23fa6-aa98-11e2-bc0d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Rb5G6QBg
US GDP Will Be Revised Higher By $500 Billion Following Addition Of “Intangibles” To Economy
Submitted by Tyler Durden
Those who have been following the US debt to GDP ratio now that the US officially does not have a debt ceiling indefinitely, may have had the occasional panic attack seeing how this country’s leverage ratio is rapidly approaching that of a Troika case study of a PIIG in complete failure. And at 107% debt/GDP no explanations are necessary. Luckily, the official gatekeepers of America’s economic growth (with decimal point precision), the Bureau of Economic Analysis have a plan on how to make the US economy, which is now growing at an abysmal 1.5% annualized pace, or about 5 times slower than US debt growing at 7.5% annually, catch up: magically make up a number out of thin air, and add it to the total. And it literally is out of thin air: according to the FT the addition will constitute of a one-time addition of intangibles, amounting to 3% of total US GDP, or more than the size of Belgium at $500 billion, to the US economy.
The US economy will officially become 3 per cent bigger in July as part of a shake-up that will see government statistics take into account 21st century components such as film royalties and spending on research and development.
Billions of dollars of intangible assets will enter the gross domestic product of the world’s largest economy in a revision aimed at capturing the changing nature of US output.
Brent Moulton, who manages the national accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, told the Financial Times that the update was the biggest since computer software was added to the accounts in 1999.
“We are carrying these major changes all the way back in time – which for us means to 1929 – so we are essentially rewriting economic history,” said Mr Moulton.
What exactly will constitute GDP growth going forward? In a word, intangibles: films, books, magazines and iTunes songs.
“We’re capitalising research and development and also this category referred to as entertainment, literary and artistic originals, which would be things like motion picture originals, long-lasting television programmes, books and sound recordings,” said Mr Moulton.
At present, R&D counts as a cost of doing business, so the final output of Apple iPads is included in GDP but the research done to create them is not. R&D will now count as an investment, adding a bit more than 2 per cent to the measured size of the economy.
Nothing like adding intangibles in the fluid, ever-changing definition of what constitutes an economy.
Naturally, the only reason for this artificial “boost” to the US economy which apparently can be any old arbitrary number agreed upon by a few accountants, and which always goes up post revision, never down, is to make US debt/GDP under 100% once again, if only very briefly. Surely a few months later something else can be “added” to GDP making the US economy appear better than it is once more.
Finally, all of the above is a distraction for idiots.
As most people should know by know (this logically excludes economists), the only factor leading to economic “growth” is the expansion of liabilities of the financial system, whereby new credit (in a healthy environment, not one centrally-planned by several Princeton real-world rejects, where the central bank is forced to create all credit expansion with money that never leaves the banks and the capital markets closed loop) creates new money, creates demand for products and services, and circulates in the economy.
This can be seen in the chart below which shows the nearly perfect correlation between total bank liabilities in the US, as per the Fed’s Flow Of Funds report, and total US GDP.
Bottom line: the BEA can capitalize air consumption if it thinks it will make US GDP soar, but unless new credit and bank liabilities are created not due to forced supply but demand, and unless the private financial sector is finally willing to start lending money (which for the entire duration of QE it has not) US growth will stall and then proceed to decline.
Case in point: total US commerical bank loans are still lower than they were the day Lehman filed.
In other words, all the GDP “growth” since the Lehman failure has come on the back of money “created” by the Fed.
And there are still those who think the Fed will ever unwind…
* See the navigation bar at the right side of the news release text for links to data tables,
contact personnel and their telephone numbers, and supplementary materials.
| Lisa S. Mataloni: | (202) 606-5304 | (GDP) | gdpniwd@bea.gov |
| Recorded message: | (202) 606-5306 | ||
| Jeannine Aversa: | (202) 606-2649 | (News Media) |
Gross Domestic Product, First Quarter 2013 (advance estimate)
Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property
located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013 (that
is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the
Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 0.4 percent.
The Bureau emphasized that the first-quarter advance estimate released today is based on source
data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see the box on page 3 and
"Comparisons of Revisions to GDP" on page 5). The "second" estimate for the first quarter, based on
more complete data, will be released on May 30, 2013.
The increase in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from
personal consumption expenditures (PCE), private inventory investment, exports, residential investment,
and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by negative contributions from federal
government spending and state and local government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the
calculation of GDP, increased.
BOX_______________________
Comprehensive Revision of the National Income and Product Accounts
BEA plans to release the results of the 14th comprehensive (or benchmark) revision of the national
income and product accounts (NIPAs) in conjunction with the second quarter 2013 "advance" estimate
on July 31, 2013. More information on the revision is available on BEA’s Web site at
www.bea.gov/gdp-revisions, including a link to an article in the March 2013 issue of the Survey of
Current Business that discusses the upcoming changes in definitions and presentations, including
capitalizing spending on research and development and on entertainment originals and measuring
transactions of defined benefit pension plans on an accrual accounting basis. An article in the May
Survey will describe changes in statistical methods, and an article in the September Survey will describe
the estimates in detail. Revised NIPA table stubs and news release stubs will be available in June.
FOOTNOTE___________________
Quarterly estimates are expressed at seasonally adjusted annual rates, unless otherwise
specified. Quarter-to-quarter dollar changes are differences between these published estimates. Percent
changes are calculated from unrounded data and are annualized. "Real" estimates are in chained (2005)
dollars. Price indexes are chain-type measures.
This news release is available on www.bea.gov along with the Technical Note and highlights related to this release.
___________________________
The acceleration in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected an upturn in private
inventory investment, an acceleration in PCE, an upturn in exports, and a smaller decrease in federal
government spending that were partly offset by an upturn in imports and a deceleration in nonresidential
fixed investment.
Motor vehicle output added 0.24 percentage point to the first-quarter change in real GDP after
adding 0.18 percentage point to the fourth-quarter change. Final sales of computers subtracted 0.01
percentage point from the first-quarter change in real GDP after adding 0.10 percentage point to the
fourth-quarter change.
The price index for gross domestic purchases, which measures prices paid by U.S. residents,
increased 1.1 percent in the first quarter, compared with an increase of 1.6 percent in the fourth.
Excluding food and energy prices, the price index for gross domestic purchases increased 1.3 percent in
the first quarter, compared with an increase of 1.2 percent in the fourth.
Real personal consumption expenditures increased 3.2 percent in the first quarter, compared with
an increase of 1.8 percent in the fourth. Durable goods increased 8.1 percent, compared with an increase
of 13.6 percent. Nondurable goods increased 1.0 percent, compared with an increase of 0.1 percent.
Services increased 3.1 percent, compared with an increase of 0.6 percent.
Real nonresidential fixed investment increased 2.1 percent in the first quarter, compared with an
increase of 13.2 percent in the fourth. Nonresidential structures decreased 0.3 percent, in contrast to an
increase of 16.7 percent. Equipment and software increased 3.0 percent, compared with an increase of
11.8 percent. Real residential fixed investment increased 12.6 percent, compared with an increase of
17.6 percent.
Real exports of goods and services increased 2.9 percent in the first quarter, in contrast to a
decrease of 2.8 percent in the fourth. Real imports of goods and services increased 5.4 percent, in
contrast to a decrease of 4.2 percent.
Real federal government consumption expenditures and gross investment decreased 8.4 percent
in the first quarter, compared with a decrease of 14.8 percent in the fourth. National defense decreased
11.5 percent, compared with a decrease of 22.1 percent. Nondefense decreased 2.0 percent, in contrast
to an increase of 1.7 percent. Real state and local government consumption expenditures and gross
investment decreased 1.2 percent, compared with a decrease of 1.5 percent.
The change in real private inventories added 1.03 percentage points to the first-quarter change in
real GDP after subtracting 1.52 percentage points from the fourth-quarter change. Private businesses
increased inventories $50.3 billion in the first quarter, following increases of $13.3 billion in the fourth
quarter and $60.3 billion in the third.
Real final sales of domestic product -- GDP less change in private inventories -- increased 1.5
percent in the first quarter, compared with an increase of 1.9 percent in the fourth.
Gross domestic purchases
Real gross domestic purchases -- purchases by U.S. residents of goods and services wherever
produced -- increased 2.9 percent in the first quarter; it was unchanged in the fourth quarter.
Disposition of personal income
Current-dollar personal income decreased $109.1 billion (3.2 percent) in the first quarter, in
contrast to an increase of $262.3 billion (8.1 percent) in the fourth. The downturn in personal income
primarily reflected a sharp downturn in personal dividend income and a sharp acceleration in
contributions for government social insurance -- a subtraction in the calculation of personal income.
Fourth-quarter personal dividend income was boosted by the payment of accelerated and special
dividends. The acceleration in contributions for government social insurance in the first quarter resulted
from the expiration of the "payroll tax holiday."
Personal current taxes increased $27.2 billion in the first quarter, compared with an increase of
$34.3 billion in the fourth.
Disposable personal income decreased $136.3 billion (4.4 percent) in the first quarter, in contrast
to an increase of $228.0 billion (7.9 percent) in the fourth. Real disposable personal income decreased
5.3 percent, in contrast to an increase of 6.2 percent.
Personal outlays increased $116.3 billion (4.1 percent) in the first quarter, compared with an
increase of $97.0 billion (3.4 percent) in the fourth. Personal saving -- disposable personal income less
personal outlays -- was $313.3 billion in the first quarter, compared with $566.0 billion in the fourth.
The personal saving rate -- personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income -- was
2.6 percent in the first quarter, compared with 4.7 percent in the fourth. For a comparison of personal
saving in BEA’s national income and product accounts with personal saving in the Federal Reserve
Board’s flow of funds accounts and data on changes in net worth, go to
www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/Nipa-Frb.asp.
Current-dollar GDP
Current-dollar GDP -- the market value of the nation's output of goods and services -- increased
3.7 percent, or $146.1 billion, in the first quarter to a level of $16,010.2 billion. In the fourth quarter,
current-dollar GDP increased 1.3 percent, or $53.1 billion.
BOX_____________________
Information on the assumptions used for unavailable source data is provided in a technical note
that is posted with the news release on BEA's Web site. Within a few days after the release, a detailed
"Key Source Data and Assumptions" file is posted on the Web site. In the middle of each month, an
analysis of the current quarterly estimate of GDP and related series is made available on the Web site;
click on Survey of Current Business, "GDP and the Economy." For information on revisions, see
"Revisions to GDP, GDI, and Their Major Components."
________________________
BEA's national, international, regional, and industry estimates; the Survey of Current Business;
and BEA news releases are available without charge on BEA's Web site at www.bea.gov. By visiting the
site, you can also subscribe to receive free e-mail summaries of BEA releases and announcements.
* * *
Next release -- May 30, 2013, at 8:30 A.M. EDT for:
Gross Domestic Product: First Quarter 2013 (Second Estimate)
Corporate Profits: First Quarter 2013 (Preliminary Estimate)
Comparisons of Revisions to GDP
Quarterly estimates of GDP are released on the following schedule: the "advance" estimate, based on
source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency, is released near the end of the
first month after the end of the quarter; as more detailed and more comprehensive data become available,
the "second" and "third" estimates are released near the end of the second and third months, respectively.
The "latest"” estimate reflects the results of both annual and comprehensive revisions.
Annual revisions, which generally cover the quarters of the 3 most recent calendar years, are usually carried
out each summer and incorporate newly available major annual source data. Comprehensive (or benchmark)
revisions are carried out at about 5-year intervals and incorporate major periodic source data, as well as
improvements in concepts and methods that update the accounts to portray more accurately the evolving U.S.
economy.
The table below shows comparisons of the revisions between quarterly percent changes of current-dollar
and of real GDP for the different vintages of the estimates. From the advance estimate to the second estimate (one
month later), the average revision to real GDP without regard to sign is 0.5 percentage point, while from the
advance estimate to the third estimate (two months later), it is 0.6 percentage point. From the advance estimate to
the latest estimate, the average revision without regard to sign is 1.3 percentage points. The average revision
(with regard to sign) from the advance estimate to the latest estimate is 0.2 percentage point, which is larger
than the average revisions from the advance estimate to the second or to the third estimates. The larger average
revisions to the latest estimate reflect the fact that comprehensive revisions include major improvements, such as
the incorporation of BEA’s latest benchmark input-output accounts. The quarterly estimates correctly indicate the
direction of change of real GDP 97 percent of the time, correctly indicate whether GDP is accelerating or
decelerating 72 percent of the time, and correctly indicate whether real GDP growth is above, near, or below trend
growth more than four-fifths of the time.
Revisions Between Quarterly Percent Changes of GDP: Vintage Comparisons
[Annual rates]
Vintages Average Average without Standard deviation of
compared regard to sign revisions without
regard to sign
____________________________________________________Current-dollar GDP_______________________________________________
Advance to second.................... 0.2 0.6 0.4
Advance to third..................... .1 .7 .4
Second to third...................... .0 .3 .2
Advance to latest.................... .3 1.2 1.0
________________________________________________________Real GDP_____________________________________________________
Advance to second.................... 0.1 0.5 0.4
Advance to third..................... .1 .6 .5
Second to third...................... .0 .2 .2
Advance to latest.................... .2 1.3 1.0
NOTE. These comparisons are based on the period from 1983 through 2009.
Murray Rothbard: Six Stages of the Libertarian Movement — Videos
Murray Rothbard: Six Stages of the Libertarian Movement
Libertarianism | Murray N. Rothbard
The Future of Austrian Economics | Murray N. Rothbard
Lew Rockwell and Tom Woods discuss Rothbard and the Koch Brothers
Lew Rockwell.com Podcast #20 – Memories of Murray
Murray Rothbard Gives a Tribute to Ludwig von Mises
Police State In Boston–What’s Next? Martial Law: Obama’s National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order To Declare Martial Law In Time of Peace — Videos
Police perform house-to-house raids in Watertown MA ripping innocent families from their homes
On Friday, April 19, 2013, during a manhunt for a bombing suspect, police and federal agents spent the day storming people’s homes and performing illegal searches. While it was unclear initially if the home searches were voluntary, it is now crystal clear that they were absolutely NOT voluntary. Police were filmed ripping people from their homes at gunpoint, marching the residents out with their hands raised in submission, and then storming the homes to perform their illegal searches.
Shocking Footage: Americans Ordered Out Of Homes At Gunpoint By SWAT teams
This is what martial law in the US looks like
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
April 22, 2013
Shocking footage has emerged from Friday’s lockdown in Boston, where police, federal agents, national guard troops and SWAT teams enforced door to door searches of everyone’s home within twenty blocks as the entire city was placed under orders to stay off the streets.
The video, shot by a resident from their own house across the street, shows police barking orders at men and women as they order them at gunpoint to identify themselves, put their hands on their heads, and get out of their own home. They are then ordered to run down the street to be further frisked by police as scores of armed militarized cops look on.
The scenes look like something out of a disaster movie, with the backdrop of suburban America juxtaposed with what is essentially martial law playing out in full daylight.
The story floated in the mainstream media that the door to door searches were conducted with the voluntary consent of the residents of Watertown is clearly false. 9000+ Police locked down an entire city and went in with full force, with armored vehicles and combat gear, all to search for an injured 19 year old kid who turned out to be cowering in someone’s back yard.
While armies of police roamed around people’s homes and private property, Public transportation was shut down, businesses were forced to close, and a no-fly zone was enacted over Boston in an unprecedented show of force.
At this point, as military helicopters buzzed over neighborhoods, the Fourth Amendment had ceased to exist in Boston, which quickly resembled a war zone.
The compliant mainstream media reported on the activity without alarm or question. Katy Waldman of Slate wrote an article claiming that under dire circumstances police can suspend 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable searches:
In exigent circumstances, or emergency situations, police can conduct warrantless searches to protect public safety. This exception to the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause requirement normally addresses situations of “hot pursuit,” in which an escaping suspect is tracked to a private home. But it might also apply to the events unfolding in Boston if further harm or injury might be supposed to occur in the time it takes to secure a warrant.
This activity, once again, sets a shocking precedent. Police and military are training in these circumstances every single day of the year. They are fully acclimatized to the process, as if it is completely normal. They do not hesitate in carrying out such orders, which are now being implemented whenever the authorities deem a situation to be an emergency.
This is what fully fledged martial law in America looks like.
http://www.infowars.com/shocking-footage-americans-ordered-out-of-homes-at-gunpoint-by-swat-teams/
Has Watertown Made Warrantless Searches The ‘New Normal’?
April 25, 2013
By Bob Parks
The whole notion of the police “manhunt” is not a new American phenomenon. Cops chase bad guys, cops corner bad guys. Sometimes the bad guys give up quietly, sometimes they go down in a blaze of glory. But we’ve always had rules of engagement when it came to law enforcement interaction with the general public.
It appears all that got thrown out the window in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror bombing and the subsequent police chase in Cambridge, Massachusetts that came to a screeching halt in Watertown.
Seemingly, for the first time in the United States, we witnessed paramilitary-garbed law enforcement personnel forcing residents out of their homes at gunpoint. In some cases, the language used by law enforcement was menacing.
Because of the hysteria that comes after any terror event, the American people wanted the perpetrators caught and, in doing so, appeared to have allowed their rights against unlawful search and seizure to not be suspended, but removed.
How many times have we watched cop dramas on television where the police had a pretty good idea of where the bad guys were, but as they weren’t sure, came to the door and asked permission to come inside to “have a look around”? The only time they ever bashed a door in is when they absolutely knew the bad guys were there. If there was ever any doubt, they’d have to wait… for a court order from a judge.
That did not happen here.
The police came to people’s homes, ordered them to leave immediately at the point of a gun in some cases, and then entered their place of residence. It’s never “consensual” when the person asking you for something has a gun in his hand. “Probable cause” is convenient, but in this case, very arbitrary.
Again, I understand this was the culmination of a horrific event, but let’s say instead of the Thursday evening car chase racing through the streets and winding up in Watertown, it went up Route 9 and ended in very upscale Newton?
Do you think armed police would, under the authority of the governor of Massachusetts and the federal government, put an assault rifle nozzle in the face of a potential wealthy political donor? Would those policemen force the family of the elite into the streets while they entered a home that is worth 20 of their salaries combined?
If it weren’t a middle class area like Watertown, would you really see a politician ordering law enforcement to forcibly enter and search homes on the upper west side of Manhattan or Georgetown or Beverly Hills? Would this happen to a celebrity in his home or, heaven forbid, a congressman?
When citizens are searched by pat-down, rousted out of their homes, and we end up thanking the police with blind understanding, the government has essentially found an acceptable means to take more of our rights away without even one politician having to cast a vote.
These past events in Watertown have set a precedent.
The police can now enter our homes anytime they want. It just requires a verbal massaging of the circumstance. After all, who ever heard of “shelter-in-place” before Friday, April 19, 2013?
If the government can order us to stay in our homes, it looks like it can throw us out of them any time it wants… at the point of a gun.
http://cnsnews.com/blog/bob-parks/has-watertown-made-warrantless-searches-new-normal
Systematic House-to-House Raids in Locked-Down Watertown, Massachusetts
Police and FBI Comb Watertown for Bombing Suspect
Boston Bombing: Watertown Operation: SWAT team secures houses searching for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Boston Door To Door Searches – Raw Video
Raid on Boston bombing suspect captured on film
Obama signs Executive Order NDRP Martial Law – Hannity Full News Clip Fox News (Mar 19, 2012)
Alex Jones – Obama’s New America with Martial Law
President Obama recently signed an Executive Order giving him the power to implement martial law in the US. The National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order will give Obama the power to seize the countries resources in a time of crisis or peace. This includes resources ranging from livestock to sources of energy and water.
Many critics of the Obama Administration believe this is another effort at power grab, but others argue that EO update is irrelevant. Alex Jones, host of The Alex Jones Show, joins RT with his take on the EO.
Obama Signs NDAA Martial Law in America 2012
Obama Signs NDAA Martial Law ∞ Justifying why U have no Rights ? Ron Paul Rohbs new channel
The Final Loss of Freedom in America NDAA.
Scary New NDAA Bill Passed
Executive Order — National Defense Resources Preparedness
EXECUTIVE ORDER
NATIONAL DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended (50 U.S.C. App. 2061 et seq.), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, and as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, it is hereby ordered as follows:
PART I – PURPOSE, POLICY, AND IMPLEMENTATION
Section 101. Purpose. This order delegates authorities and addresses national defense resource policies and programs under the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended (the “Act”).
Sec. 102. Policy. The United States must have an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency. The domestic industrial and technological base is the foundation for national defense preparedness. The authorities provided in the Act shall be used to strengthen this base and to ensure it is capable of responding to the national defense needs of the United States.
Sec. 103. General Functions. Executive departments and agencies (agencies) responsible for plans and programs relating to national defense (as defined in section 801(j) of this order), or for resources and services needed to support such plans and programs, shall:
(a) identify requirements for the full spectrum of emergencies, including essential military and civilian demand;
(b) assess on an ongoing basis the capability of the domestic industrial and technological base to satisfy requirements in peacetime and times of national emergency, specifically evaluating the availability of the most critical resource and production sources, including subcontractors and suppliers, materials, skilled labor, and professional and technical personnel;
(c) be prepared, in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements;
(d) improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the domestic industrial base to support national defense requirements; and
(e) foster cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors for research and development and for acquisition of materials, services, components, and equipment to enhance industrial base efficiency and responsiveness.
Sec. 104. Implementation. (a) The National Security Council and Homeland Security Council, in conjunction with the National Economic Council, shall serve as the integrated policymaking forum for consideration and formulation of national defense resource preparedness policy and shall make recommendations to the President on the use of authorities under the Act.
(b) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall:
(1) advise the President on issues of national defense resource preparedness and on the use of the authorities and functions delegated by this order;
(2) provide for the central coordination of the plans and programs incident to authorities and functions delegated under this order, and provide guidance to agencies assigned functions under this order, developed in consultation with such agencies; and
(3) report to the President periodically concerning all program activities conducted pursuant to this order.
(c) The Defense Production Act Committee, described in section 701 of this order, shall:
(1) in a manner consistent with section 2(b) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2062(b), advise the President through the Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy on the effective use of the authorities under the Act; and
(2) prepare and coordinate an annual report to the Congress pursuant to section 722(d) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2171(d).
(d) The Secretary of Commerce, in cooperation with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and other agencies, shall:
(1) analyze potential effects of national emergencies on actual production capability, taking into account the entire production system, including shortages of resources, and develop recommended preparedness measures to strengthen capabilities for production increases in national emergencies; and
(2) perform industry analyses to assess capabilities of the industrial base to support the national defense, and develop policy recommendations to improve the international competitiveness of specific domestic industries and their abilities to meet national defense program needs.
PART II - PRIORITIES AND ALLOCATIONS
Sec. 201. Priorities and Allocations Authorities. (a) The authority of the President conferred by section 101 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071, to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense, is delegated to the following agency heads:
(1) the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer;
(2) the Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy;
(3) the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;
(4) the Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation;
(5) the Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and
(6) the Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.
(b) The Secretary of each agency delegated authority under subsection (a) of this section (resource departments) shall plan for and issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources and establish standards and procedures by which the authority shall be used to promote the national defense, under both emergency and non-emergency conditions. Each Secretary shall authorize the heads of other agencies, as appropriate, to place priority ratings on contracts and orders for materials, services, and facilities needed in support of programs approved under section 202 of this order.
(c) Each resource department shall act, as necessary and appropriate, upon requests for special priorities assistance, as defined by section 801(l) of this order, in a time frame consistent with the urgency of the need at hand. In situations where there are competing program requirements for limited resources, the resource department shall consult with the Secretary who made the required determination under section 202 of this order. Such Secretary shall coordinate with and identify for the resource department which program requirements to prioritize on the basis of operational urgency. In situations involving more than one Secretary making such a required determination under section 202 of this order, the Secretaries shall coordinate with and identify for the resource department which program requirements should receive priority on the basis of operational urgency.
(d) If agreement cannot be reached between two such Secretaries, then the issue shall be referred to the President through the Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor and the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.
(e) The Secretary of each resource department, when necessary, shall make the finding required under section 101(b) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071(b). This finding shall be submitted for the President’s approval through the Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor and the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. Upon such approval, the Secretary of the resource department that made the finding may use the authority of section 101(a) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071(a), to control the general distribution of any material (including applicable services) in the civilian market.
Sec. 202. Determinations. Except as provided in section 201(e) of this order, the authority delegated by section 201 of this order may be used only to support programs that have been determined in writing as necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense:
(a) by the Secretary of Defense with respect to military production and construction, military assistance to foreign nations, military use of civil transportation, stockpiles managed by the Department of Defense, space, and directly related activities;
(b) by the Secretary of Energy with respect to energy production and construction, distribution and use, and directly related activities; and
(c) by the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to all other national defense programs, including civil defense and continuity of Government.
Sec. 203. Maximizing Domestic Energy Supplies. The authorities of the President under section 101(c)(1) (2) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071(c)(1) (2), are delegated to the Secretary of Commerce, with the exception that the authority to make findings that materials (including equipment), services, and facilities are critical and essential, as described in section 101(c)(2)(A) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071(c)(2)(A), is delegated to the Secretary of Energy.
Sec. 204. Chemical and Biological Warfare. The authority of the President conferred by section 104(b) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2074(b), is delegated to the Secretary of Defense. This authority may not be further delegated by the Secretary.
PART III – EXPANSION OF PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY AND SUPPLY
Sec. 301. Loan Guarantees. (a) To reduce current or projected shortfalls of resources, critical technology items, or materials essential for the national defense, the head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense, as defined in section 801(h) of this order, is authorized pursuant to section 301 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2091, to guarantee loans by private institutions.
(b) Each guaranteeing agency is designated and authorized to: (1) act as fiscal agent in the making of its own guarantee contracts and in otherwise carrying out the purposes of section 301 of the Act; and (2) contract with any Federal Reserve Bank to assist the agency in serving as fiscal agent.
(c) Terms and conditions of guarantees under this authority shall be determined in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The guaranteeing agency is authorized, following such consultation, to prescribe: (1) either specifically or by maximum limits or otherwise, rates of interest, guarantee and commitment fees, and other charges which may be made in connection with such guarantee contracts; and (2) regulations governing the forms and procedures (which shall be uniform to the extent practicable) to be utilized in connection therewith.
Sec. 302. Loans. To reduce current or projected shortfalls of resources, critical technology items, or materials essential for the national defense, the head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority of the President under section 302 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2092, to make loans thereunder. Terms and conditions of loans under this authority shall be determined in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of OMB.
Sec. 303. Additional Authorities. (a) To create, maintain, protect, expand, or restore domestic industrial base capabilities essential for the national defense, the head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority of the President under section 303 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093, to make provision for purchases of, or commitments to purchase, an industrial resource or a critical technology item for Government use or resale, and to make provision for the development of production capabilities, and for the increased use of emerging technologies in security program applications, and to enable rapid transition of emerging technologies.
(b) Materials acquired under section 303 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093, that exceed the needs of the programs under the Act may be transferred to the National Defense Stockpile, if, in the judgment of the Secretary of Defense as the National Defense Stockpile Manager, such transfers are in the public interest.
Sec. 304. Subsidy Payments. To ensure the supply of raw or nonprocessed materials from high cost sources, or to ensure maximum production or supply in any area at stable prices of any materials in light of a temporary increase in transportation cost, the head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority of the President under section 303(c) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093(c), to make subsidy payments, after consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of OMB.
Sec. 305. Determinations and Findings. (a) Pursuant to budget authority provided by an appropriations act in advance for credit assistance under section 301 or 302 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2091, 2092, and consistent with the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, as amended (FCRA), 2 U.S.C. 661 et seq., the head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority to make the determinations set forth in sections 301(a)(2) and 302(b)(2) of the Act, in consultation with the Secretary making the required determination under section 202 of this order; provided, that such determinations shall be made after due consideration of the provisions of OMB Circular A 129 and the credit subsidy score for the relevant loan or loan guarantee as approved by OMB pursuant to FCRA.
(b) Other than any determination by the President under section 303(a)(7)(b) of the Act, the head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority to make the required determinations, judgments, certifications, findings, and notifications defined under section 303 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093, in consultation with the Secretary making the required determination under section 202 of this order.
Sec. 306. Strategic and Critical Materials. The Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of the Interior in consultation with the Secretary of Defense as the National Defense Stockpile Manager, are each delegated the authority of the President under section 303(a)(1)(B) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093(a)(1)(B), to encourage the exploration, development, and mining of strategic and critical materials and other materials.
Sec. 307. Substitutes. The head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority of the President under section 303(g) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093(g), to make provision for the development of substitutes for strategic and critical materials, critical components, critical technology items, and other resources to aid the national defense.
Sec. 308. Government-Owned Equipment. The head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority of the President under section 303(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093(e), to:
(a) procure and install additional equipment, facilities, processes, or improvements to plants, factories, and other industrial facilities owned by the Federal Government and to procure and install Government owned equipment in plants, factories, or other industrial facilities owned by private persons;
(b) provide for the modification or expansion of privately owned facilities, including the modification or improvement of production processes, when taking actions under sections 301, 302, or 303 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2091, 2092, 2093; and
(c) sell or otherwise transfer equipment owned by the Federal Government and installed under section 303(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2093(e), to the owners of such plants, factories, or other industrial facilities.
Sec. 309. Defense Production Act Fund. The Secretary of Defense is designated the Defense Production Act Fund Manager, in accordance with section 304(f) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2094(f), and shall carry out the duties specified in section 304 of the Act, in consultation with the agency heads having approved, and appropriated funds for, projects under title III of the Act.
Sec. 310. Critical Items. The head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority of the President under section 107(b)(1) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2077(b)(1), to take appropriate action to ensure that critical components, critical technology items, essential materials, and industrial resources are available from reliable sources when needed to meet defense requirements during peacetime, graduated mobilization, and national emergency. Appropriate action may include restricting contract solicitations to reliable sources, restricting contract solicitations to domestic sources (pursuant to statutory authority), stockpiling critical components, and developing substitutes for critical components or critical technology items.
Sec. 311. Strengthening Domestic Capability. The head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense is delegated the authority of the President under section 107(a) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2077(a), to utilize the authority of title III of the Act or any other provision of law to provide appropriate incentives to develop, maintain, modernize, restore, and expand the productive capacities of domestic sources for critical components, critical technology items, materials, and industrial resources essential for the execution of the national security strategy of the United States.
Sec. 312. Modernization of Equipment. The head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense, in accordance with section 108(b) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2078(b), may utilize the authority of title III of the Act to guarantee the purchase or lease of advance manufacturing equipment, and any related services with respect to any such equipment for purposes of the Act. In considering title III projects, the head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense shall provide a strong preference for proposals submitted by a small business supplier or subcontractor in accordance with section 108(b)(2) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2078(b)(2).
PART IV - VOLUNTARY AGREEMENTS AND ADVISORY COMMITTEES
Sec. 401. Delegations. The authority of the President under sections 708(c) and (d) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2158(c), (d), is delegated to the heads of agencies otherwise delegated authority under this order. The status of the use of such delegations shall be furnished to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Sec. 402. Advisory Committees. The authority of the President under section 708(d) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2158(d), and delegated in section 401 of this order (relating to establishment of advisory committees) shall be exercised only after consultation with, and in accordance with, guidelines and procedures established by the Administrator of General Services.
Sec. 403. Regulations. The Secretary of Homeland Security, after approval of the Attorney General, and after consultation by the Attorney General with the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, shall promulgate rules pursuant to section 708(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2158(e), incorporating standards and procedures by which voluntary agreements and plans of action may be developed and carried out. Such rules may be adopted by other agencies to fulfill the rulemaking requirement of section 708(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2158(e).
PART V - EMPLOYMENT OF PERSONNEL
Sec. 501. National Defense Executive Reserve. (a) In accordance with section 710(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(e), there is established in the executive branch a National Defense Executive Reserve (NDER) composed of persons of recognized expertise from various segments of the private sector and from Government (except full time Federal employees) for training for employment in executive positions in the Federal Government in the event of a national defense emergency.
(b) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall issue necessary guidance for the NDER program, including appropriate guidance for establishment, recruitment, training, monitoring, and activation of NDER units and shall be responsible for the overall coordination of the NDER program. The authority of the President under section 710(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(e), to determine periods of national defense emergency is delegated to the Secretary of Homeland Security.
(c) The head of any agency may implement section 501(a) of this order with respect to NDER operations in such agency.
(d) The head of each agency with an NDER unit may exercise the authority under section 703 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2153, to employ civilian personnel when activating all or a part of its NDER unit. The exercise of this authority shall be subject to the provisions of sections 501(e) and (f) of this order and shall not be redelegated.
(e) The head of an agency may activate an NDER unit, in whole or in part, upon the written determination of the Secretary of Homeland Security that an emergency affecting the national defense exists and that the activation of the unit is necessary to carry out the emergency program functions of the agency.
(f) Prior to activating the NDER unit, the head of the agency shall notify, in writing, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism of the impending activation.
Sec. 502. Consultants. The head of each agency otherwise delegated functions under this order is delegated the authority of the President under sections 710(b) and (c) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(b), (c), to employ persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants, or organizations. The authority delegated by this section may not be redelegated.
PART VI - LABOR REQUIREMENTS
Sec. 601. Secretary of Labor. (a) The Secretary of Labor, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of other agencies, as deemed appropriate by the Secretary of Labor, shall:
(1) collect and maintain data necessary to make a continuing appraisal of the Nation’s workforce needs for purposes of national defense;
(2) upon request by the Director of Selective Service, and in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, assist the Director of Selective Service in development of policies regulating the induction and deferment of persons for duty in the armed services;
(3) upon request from the head of an agency with authority under this order, consult with that agency with respect to: (i) the effect of contemplated actions on labor demand and utilization; (ii) the relation of labor demand to materials and facilities requirements; and (iii) such other matters as will assist in making the exercise of priority and allocations functions consistent with effective utilization and distribution of labor;
(4) upon request from the head of an agency with authority under this order: (i) formulate plans, programs, and policies for meeting the labor requirements of actions to be taken for national defense purposes; and (ii) estimate training needs to help address national defense requirements and promote necessary and appropriate training programs; and
(5) develop and implement an effective labor management relations policy to support the activities and programs under this order, with the cooperation of other agencies as deemed appropriate by the Secretary of Labor, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the National Mediation Board, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.
(b) All agencies shall cooperate with the Secretary of Labor, upon request, for the purposes of this section, to the extent permitted by law.
PART VII - DEFENSE PRODUCTION ACT COMMITTEE
Sec. 701. The Defense Production Act Committee. (a) The Defense Production Act Committee (Committee) shall be composed of the following members, in accordance with section 722(b) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2171(b):
(1) The Secretary of State;
(2) The Secretary of the Treasury;
(3) The Secretary of Defense;
(4) The Attorney General;
(5) The Secretary of the Interior;
(6) The Secretary of Agriculture;
(7) The Secretary of Commerce;
(8) The Secretary of Labor;
(9) The Secretary of Health and Human Services;
(10) The Secretary of Transportation;
(11) The Secretary of Energy;
(12) The Secretary of Homeland Security;
(13) The Director of National Intelligence;
(14) The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency;
(15) The Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers;
(16) The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and
(17) The Administrator of General Services.
(b) The Director of OMB and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall be invited to participate in all Committee meetings and activities in an advisory role. The Chairperson, as designated by the President pursuant to section 722 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2171, may invite the heads of other agencies or offices to participate in Committee meetings and activities in an advisory role, as appropriate.
Sec. 702. Offsets. The Secretary of Commerce shall prepare and submit to the Congress the annual report required by section 723 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2172, in consultation with the Secretaries of State, the Treasury, Defense, and Labor, the United States Trade Representative, the Director of National Intelligence, and the heads of other agencies as appropriate. The heads of agencies shall provide the Secretary of Commerce with such information as may be necessary for the effective performance of this function.
PART VIII - GENERAL PROVISIONS
Sec. 801. Definitions. In addition to the definitions in section 702 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2152, the following definitions apply throughout this order:
(a) “Civil transportation” includes movement of persons and property by all modes of transportation in interstate, intrastate, or foreign commerce within the United States, its territories and possessions, and the District of Columbia, and related public storage and warehousing, ports, services, equipment and facilities, such as transportation carrier shop and repair facilities. “Civil transportation” also shall include direction, control, and coordination of civil transportation capacity regardless of ownership. “Civil transportation” shall not include transportation owned or controlled by the Department of Defense, use of petroleum and gas pipelines, and coal slurry pipelines used only to supply energy production facilities directly.
(b) “Energy” means all forms of energy including petroleum, gas (both natural and manufactured), electricity, solid fuels (including all forms of coal, coke, coal chemicals, coal liquification, and coal gasification), solar, wind, other types of renewable energy, atomic energy, and the production, conservation, use, control, and distribution (including pipelines) of all of these forms of energy.
(c) “Farm equipment” means equipment, machinery, and repair parts manufactured for use on farms in connection with the production or preparation for market use of food resources.
(d) “Fertilizer” means any product or combination of products that contain one or more of the elements nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium for use as a plant nutrient.
(e) “Food resources” means all commodities and products, (simple, mixed, or compound), or complements to such commodities or products, that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals, irrespective of other uses to which such commodities or products may be put, at all stages of processing from the raw commodity to the products thereof in vendible form for human or animal consumption. “Food resources” also means potable water packaged in commercially marketable containers, all starches, sugars, vegetable and animal or marine fats and oils, seed, cotton, hemp, and flax fiber, but does not mean any such material after it loses its identity as an agricultural commodity or agricultural product.
(f) “Food resource facilities” means plants, machinery, vehicles (including on farm), and other facilities required for the production, processing, distribution, and storage (including cold storage) of food resources, and for the domestic distribution of farm equipment and fertilizer (excluding transportation thereof).
(g) “Functions” include powers, duties, authority, responsibilities, and discretion.
(h) “Head of each agency engaged in procurement for the national defense” means the heads of the Departments of State, Justice, the Interior, and Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the General Services Administration, and all other agencies with authority delegated under section 201 of this order.
(i) “Health resources” means drugs, biological products, medical devices, materials, facilities, health supplies, services and equipment required to diagnose, mitigate or prevent the impairment of, improve, treat, cure, or restore the physical or mental health conditions of the population.
(j) “National defense” means programs for military and energy production or construction, military or critical infrastructure assistance to any foreign nation, homeland security, stockpiling, space, and any directly related activity. Such term includes emergency preparedness activities conducted pursuant to title VI of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. 5195 et seq., and critical infrastructure protection and restoration.
(k) “Offsets” means compensation practices required as a condition of purchase in either government to government or commercial sales of defense articles and/or defense services as defined by the Arms Export Control Act, 22 U.S.C. 2751 et seq., and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, 22 C.F.R. 120.1 130.17.
(l) “Special priorities assistance” means action by resource departments to assist with expediting deliveries, placing rated orders, locating suppliers, resolving production or delivery conflicts between various rated orders, addressing problems that arise in the fulfillment of a rated order or other action authorized by a delegated agency, and determining the validity of rated orders.
(m) “Strategic and critical materials” means materials (including energy) that (1) would be needed to supply the military, industrial, and essential civilian needs of the United States during a national emergency, and (2) are not found or produced in the United States in sufficient quantities to meet such need and are vulnerable to the termination or reduction of the availability of the material.
(n) “Water resources” means all usable water, from all sources, within the jurisdiction of the United States, that can be managed, controlled, and allocated to meet emergency requirements, except “water resources” does not include usable water that qualifies as “food resources.”
Sec. 802. General. (a) Except as otherwise provided in section 802(c) of this order, the authorities vested in the President by title VII of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2151 et seq., are delegated to the head of each agency in carrying out the delegated authorities under the Act and this order, by the Secretary of Labor in carrying out part VI of this order, and by the Secretary of the Treasury in exercising the functions assigned in Executive Order 11858, as amended.
(b) The authorities that may be exercised and performed pursuant to section 802(a) of this order shall include:
(1) the power to redelegate authorities, and to authorize the successive redelegation of authorities to agencies, officers, and employees of the Government; and
(2) the power of subpoena under section 705 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2155, with respect to (i) authorities delegated in parts II, III, and section 702 of this order, and (ii) the functions assigned to the Secretary of the Treasury in Executive Order 11858, as amended, provided that the subpoena power referenced in subsections (i) and (ii) shall be utilized only after the scope and purpose of the investigation, inspection, or inquiry to which the subpoena relates have been defined either by the appropriate officer identified in section 802(a) of this order or by such other person or persons as the officer shall designate.
(c) Excluded from the authorities delegated by section 802(a) of this order are authorities delegated by parts IV and V of this order, authorities in section 721 and 722 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2170 2171, and the authority with respect to fixing compensation under section 703 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2153.
Sec. 803. Authority. (a) Executive Order 12919 of June 3, 1994, and sections 401(3) (4) of Executive Order 12656 of November 18, 1988, are revoked. All other previously issued orders, regulations, rulings, certificates, directives, and other actions relating to any function affected by this order shall remain in effect except as they are inconsistent with this order or are subsequently amended or revoked under proper authority. Nothing in this order shall affect the validity or force of anything done under previous delegations or other assignment of authority under the Act.
(b) Nothing in this order shall affect the authorities assigned under Executive Order 11858 of May 7, 1975, as amended, except as provided in section 802 of this order.
(c) Nothing in this order shall affect the authorities assigned under Executive Order 12472 of April 3, 1984, as amended.
Sec. 804. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect functions of the Director of OMB relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE,
March 16, 2012.
Senate Defeats Obama’s Gun Grabbing Agenda — Videos
Obama’s Emotional Speech On Gun Control Vote FAIL Senate rejects expanded gun background checks
OBAMA’S & THE MSM’S PUSH FOR GUN CONTROL LOSES STEAM
04/17/13 Ted Cruz Speaks about new gun control amendments
Rand Paul: We Will Filibuster Any Gun Control Bills – Hannity 3/28/2013
Obama Has Been Planning Gun Control For A Long Time
Penn & Teller Bullshit! – Gun Control -
FEAR & LOADING in US: GUN SALES sky ROCKET as fears of TOUGHER GOVT’ GUN control RISE! [GUN-WARS]
Why Switzerland Has The Lowest Crime Rate In The World
Pro-gun rallies held across US
Ted Nugent Exposes Gun Trafficker General Eric Holder
National Instant Criminal Background Check System Overview
When buying a firearm, background checks are processed via the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). This is a great overview of the NICS process.
FBI NICS at NRA Convention
FBI: National Instant Criminal Background Check System [1998]
Gun Background Checks: How the System is Still Broken
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
Richard Feldman — Ricochet: Confessions of A Gun Lobbyist — Videos
Cuomo, Cars, and Culture: How Gun Violence is More Than Mental
Michael Shank discusses gun violence and gun legislation with Richard Feldman who is President of the Independent Firearm Owners Association and the author of the book “Ricochet, Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist.” Shank discusses how background checks and bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, online sales, and gun show loopholes won’t be sufficient to end gun violence. Shank identifies New York State’s leadership on gun violence prevention and draws an analogy to automobile safety training, licensing, permitting, registering and insuring. Shank finishes by identifying the multi-faceted nature of gun violence (poverty, inequality, lead), highlighting how mental illness is inappropriately scapegoated (given its marginal influence in total gun deaths), and assessing the limited scope of Congressional commitment to comprehensive legislation. Video courtesy of CCTV.
NRA Rep. Feldman to Piers Morgan: If we didn’t have Guns Who would you have turned to
Soledad O’Brien Takes On Gun Advocate Over Assault Weapons Ban
Richard Feldman on NRA and Gun Lobbying
Richard Feldman from “Gun Fight” – directed by Barbara Kopple
Richard Feldman was NRA’s regional political director in the Northeast. He’s currently featured in “Gun Fight” about how he broke ranks with the NRA and started his own gun owners organization. Barbara Kopple’s documentary will soon air on HBO. Feldman sits down with Joe Corey to talk about his involvement in the movie and indoor shrimp farming
Richard Feldman appearing on D.L. Hughley’s show
The Guns And Weed Lobbyist, Richard Feldman, Esq. – Anarchy Gumbo Podcast
Background Articles and Videos
Rand Paul Discusses Gun Control, Immigration Reform, and Boston Bombing – Glenn Beck 4/18/2013
Piers Morgan BULLIES Gun Right Advocate John Lott Live on TV: ‘I Suggest You Keep Quiet’
Politics of Gun Control, Part 1: NRA, Congress and America’s Social Capital
Politics of Gun Control, Part 2: NRA, Congress and America’s Social Capital
Second Amendment Activist Nikki Goeser and Author John Lott
Feldman The Appeaser
I noticed Uncle linked to this piece in the Seattle PI. It’s worthwhile to remind everyone exactly who Richard Feldman is. As it mentions at the end of the article, Feldman “became too close to ‘the enemy’ and was sacked as a lobbyist.” Feldman was canned because he was more interested in cutting deals with anti-gunners, and seeking out media attention than he was fighting for gun rights.
Now, before anyone goes “But Sebastian, you always say that sometimes you have to make a deal?” That’s true, but there’s a difference between brokering a deal that makes something that would be really bad a bit less awful, which sometimes you have to do, and actively trying to make deals you don’t need to with the anti-gunners and hope they go away happy. We all know that won’t work. Feldman is the latter type.
It’s worthwhile to remember why he was forced to resign from his position at American Shooting Sport Council. After a series of disastrous appeasements of the Clinton Administration, Feldman became an advocate for settling the lawsuits that were brought by various cities against the firearms industry instead of fighting them. Feldman poorly understood when it was smart to cut a deal, and when you should fight. NRA chose to fight, and the industry quickly got together on that and showed Feldman the door.
So it’s worthwhile to remember that Feldman has an axe to grind.
The NRA, he says, would love to see Hillary Clinton in the White House, because once again it would have an adversary in power. “In the endless struggle, it is always better to fight than to win,” he said last week. “For the NRA, losing is winning.”
And the NRA will spend large sums of money trying to defeat Hillary, just like they did Al Gore, even though Feldman also claims Al Gore would have been better for fund raising. If they are in it merely for the money, it would seem that they don’t know what’s good for them.
The gun issue ain’t going away folks, and there will never be a time when we can stop fighting and NRA can go back to being a shooting sports organization. I doubt highly that Chris Cox lies awake at night worrying he might be so successful that he’ll be out of a job.
http://www.pagunblog.com/2007/11/05/feldman-the-appeaser/
Richard Feldman’s Middle Ground
There’s a few ways you can look at Richard Feldman’s middle ground. SayUncle thinks Richard Feldman needs to take a closer look at the media, and that’s certainly true, but I also think Feldman, perhaps as a public relations tactic, or perhaps out of a desire to appear reasonable, often makes the assertion that both sides are extreme, and can’t we all just come to a middle ground and this issue? I can understand the sentiment, and agree that Feldman’s position can be useful in persuading people who are perhaps a bit tired of the issue. But as Feldman, who has a background in lobbying ought to know, there’s nothing about the political process that involves people, in good faith and with honest, sincere intentions, coming together to fix a problem.
I’ve read Feldman’s book Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, which I enjoyed, even though I have disagreements with him on a number of things. One of the areas I disagree with him, and that he hints at in his LA Times article, is that both sides in this issue want to keep things going for the sake of fundraising, and that is preventing us from bringing this issue to a reasonable conclusion. Both sides use some shameful methods of fundraising. I’ve criticized NRA for it in the past, and have done so privately with staff in Fairfax as well. But fundraising is a necessary and vital function of every interest group out there, and I wouldn’t say our issue is alone in that. We do it, the Bradys do it, ACU does it, ACLU does it, NRLF does it, NOW does it, and all of them, at one point or another, will use scare tactics to get you to open up your wallet, because scare tactics work. But as much as Feldman might want to believe that’s what’s keeping the issue from resolving, he’s kidding himself. Let’s take a look at his article:
The bottom line is this: We must stop debating the polemics of guns and instead show wisdom and maturity to begin to resolve the problems of the negligent misuse of guns. Though a cliche, the following is nevertheless true: Guns aren’t ever the problem; guns in the wrong hands are always the problem. How we address this problem will determine the future of gun safety in America.
The LA Times aside, I think that’s the direction the debate is actually moving in, largely because the Supreme Court has settled the debate over guns in our society by taking prohibition off the table. But is that going to resolve the issue? Are both sides going to suddenly come to an agreement and find Congress completely willing to broker the deal for us, no tricks or subterfuge? Hardly. I don’t think you’d find any fundamental disagreement between Richard Feldman, most of us, and many gun control groups, over the statement above. It’s the details where you’ll find the devil, not in the intransigence of either side. As much as I think Mr. Feldman will seem the reasonable one for looking for a middle ground, I think it cheapens the legitimate disagreements and concerns of both sides in the debate, which I will talk about in the next post.
http://www.pagunblog.com/2009/12/09/richard-feldmans-middle-ground/
National Rifle Association of America (NRA)
The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is an American nonprofit organization[3] founded in 1871 that promotes firearm ownership, as well as police training, firearm safety, marksmanship, hunting and self-defense training in the United States. The NRA is designated by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) and its lobbying branch is a 501(c)(4) organization.[4][5][6]
The NRA is the parent organization of affiliated groups such as the tax-deductible NRA Foundation and a lobbying group, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA). The NRA is also one of the United States’ largest certifying bodies for firearm safety training and proficiency training courses for police departments, recreational hunting, and child firearm safety. The organization publishes several magazines and sponsors marksmanship events featuring shooting skill and sports.
The NRA’s political activity is based on the idea that firearm ownership is a civil right protected by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights.[7] The group has a nearly century long record of influencing as well as lobbying for or against proposed firearm legislation on behalf of its members. Observers and lawmakers see the NRA as one of the top three most influential lobbying groups in Washington.[6][8] NRA membership reached 4.5 million in 2013.[9][10]
History
Origins
The National Rifle Association was first chartered in the state of New York on November 17, 1871[11] by Army and Navy Journal editor William Conant Church and General George Wood Wingate. Its first president was Civil War General Ambrose Burnside, who had worked as a Rhode Island gunsmith, and Wingate was the original secretary of the organization. Church succeeded Burnside as president in the following year.
Union Army records for the Civil War indicate that its troops fired about 1,000 rifle shots for each Confederate soldier hit, causing General Burnside to lament his recruits: “Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn.”[12] The generals attributed this to the use of volley tactics, devised for earlier, less accurate smoothbore muskets.[13][14]
Recognizing a need for better training, Wingate traveled to Europe and observed European armies’ marksmanship training programs. With plans provided by Wingate, the New York Legislature funded the construction of a modern range at Creedmore, Long Island, for long-range shooting competitions. Wingate then wrote a marksmanship manual.[12]
After winning the British Empire championship at Wimbledon, London, in 1874, the Irish Rifle Team issued a challenge through the New York Herald to riflemen of the United States to raise a team for a long-range match to determine an Anglo-American championship. The NRA organized a team through a subsidiary amateur rifle club. Remington Arms and Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company produced breech-loading weapons for the team. Although muzzle-loading rifles had long been considered more accurate, eight American riflemen won the match firing breech-loading rifles. Publicity of the event generated by the New York Herald helped to establish breech-loading firearms as suitable for military marksmanship training, and promoted the NRA to national prominence.[12]
Eight U.S. Presidents have been NRA members. They are Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.[15]
Rifle clubs
The NRA organized rifle clubs in other states, and many state National Guard organizations sought NRA advice to improve members’ marksmanship. Wingate’s markmanship manual evolved into the United States Army marksmanship instruction program.[12] Former President Ulysses S. Grant served as the NRA’s eighth President[16] and General Philip H. Sheridan as its ninth.[17] The U.S. Congress created the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice in 1901 to include representatives from the NRA, National Guard, and United States military services. A program of annual rifle and pistol competitions was authorized, and included a national match open to military and civilian shooters. NRA headquarters moved to Washington, D.C. to facilitate the organization’s advocacy efforts.[12] In 1903, Congress authorized the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which was designed to train civilians who might later be called to serve in the U.S. military.[18] Springfield Armory and Rock Island Arsenal began the manufacture of M1903 Springfield rifles for civilian members of the NRA in 1910.[19]
Lobbying
Along with the president, executive vice president (CEO), and board of directors, the organization’s lobbying division, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), is considered a power center of the NRA.[citation needed]
The NRA formed a legislative affairs division in response to debate concerning passage of the 1934 National Firearms Act,[20] the first major gun control legislation in the United States. At the time, the NRA supported the act without studying its impact on the second amendment, and also supported the Gun Control Act of 1968. The two acts created a system to license gun dealers and imposed taxes on the private ownership of machine guns.[21]
In 1975, the NRA created the Institute for Legislative Action to lobby for Second Amendment rights as a complement its core mission of supporting hunting, conservation and marksmanship.
Until the middle 1970s, the NRA had mainly focused on sportsmen, hunters and target shooters, and had downplayed issues of gun control. The 1977 annual convention in Cincinnati would be a defining election for the organization and came to be known as “The Cincinnati Revolution.”[22] At the convention, the leadership had planned an elaborate new headquarters in Colorado, designed to promote sportsmanship and conservation. Within the organization, now existed a group of members whose central concern was Second Amendment rights. Those activists defeated the incumbents in 1977 and elected Harlon Carter as executive director and Neal Knox as head of the ILA.[23][24]
After 1977, the organization expanded its membership by focusing heavily on political issues and forming coalitions with conservative politicians, most of them Republicans.[25] With a goal to weaken the Gun Control Act of 1968, Knox’s NRA successfully lobbied Congress to pass the McClure-Volker firearms decontrol bill of 1986 and worked to reduce the powers of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 1982, Knox was ousted as director of the ILA but began mobilizing outside the NRA framework and continued to promote opposition to gun control laws.[26]
At the 1991 national convention, Knox’s supporters were elected to the board, and named staff lobbyist Wayne LaPierre as the executive vice president. The NRA focused its attention on the gun control policies of the Clinton Administration.[27] Knox again lost power in 1997, as he lost reelection to a coalition of moderate leaders who supported movie star Charlton Heston, despite Heston’s past support of gun control legislation.[28] In 1994, the NRA unsuccessfully opposed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, but successfully lobbied for the ban’s 2004 expiration.[29] Heston was elected president in 1998 and became a highly visible spokesman for the organization. In an effort to improve the NRA’s image, Heston presented himself as the voice of reason in contrast to Knox.[30]
Safety and sporting programs
NRA firearms safety programs
NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia
The NRA sponsors a range of programs designed to encourage the safe use of firearms. NRA hunting safety courses are offered in the United States for both children and adults. Classes focusing on firearm safety, particularly for women, have become popular. Intended for school-age children, the NRA’s “Eddie Eagle” program encourages the viewer to “Stop! Don’t touch! Leave the area! Tell an adult!” if the child ever sees a firearm lying around.[31] The NRA has also published an instructional guide, called The Basics of Personal Protection In The Home (published in 2000).[32]
Shooting sports
Prior to 1992, the NRA governed shooting sports in the United States.[citation needed] In 1992, USA Shooting replaced the NRA as the national governing body for Olympic shooting, and in 2000, the NRA chose not to be a member of the National Three-Position Air Rifle Council. Additionally, the NRA is not directly involved in the practical pistol competitions conducted by the International Practical Shooting Confederation and International Defensive Pistol Association, or in cowboy action shooting.
The NRA hosts the National Rifle and Pistol Matches at Camp Perry, events which are considered to be the “world series of competitive shooting.”[33] Commonly known as Bullseye or Conventional Pistol, shooters from the military as well as many top-ranked civilians gather annually in July and August for this competition. The NRA also sponsors its National Muzzle Loading Championship at the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association’s Friendship, Indiana facility. Additionally, the Bianchi Cup, hosted by NRA, is considered among the most lucrative of all the shooting sports tournaments.[citation needed]
The NRA house magazine, American Rifleman, covers major shooting competitions and related topics, and the NRA offers a publication dedicated to competitive shooting, Shooting Sports USA. Most competitive shooters are NRA members.[citation needed] The current NRA competitions division publishes its own rulebooks, maintains a registry of marksmanship classifications, and sanctions matches. The NRA also represents the United States on the International Confederation of Fullbore Rifle Associations (ICFRA),[citation needed] which administers the World Long-Range Rifle Team Championships, contested every four years for the PALMA trophy.
Instructors
The National Rifle Association issues credentials and trains firearm instructors in a variety of disciplines. NRA-credentialed instructors teach marksmanship, maintenance, and legalities.[34] NRA Instructors are commonly found at privately owned firearms ranges, and are often employed by the Boy Scouts of America on their summer camps.[citation needed]
Relationship with other organizations
The National Rifle Association maintains ties with other organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America and 4-H.[35] Involvement includes monetary donations, equipment to supply firearms ranges, and instructors to assist in their programs. Notably, the Boy Scouts of America has strict guidelines on who is allowed to operate their ranges, the recognized personnel groups including NRA Certified Instructors along with military and law enforcement.[36]
The NRA joined the American Civil Liberties Union and several other civil liberties organizations in joint letters to President Clinton on 10 January 1994 and to the House Committee on the Judiciary on 24 October 1995 calling for federal law enforcement reforms drawing on lessons from the Waco siege and Ruby Ridge.[37]
Fundraising and shooting support
Friends of NRA is a grassroots program that raises money for The NRA Foundation, the organization’s 501(c)(3).[38] As part of Friends of NRA activities, volunteers in the United States organize committees and plan events in their communities.
Established in 1990, The NRA Foundation raises tax-deductible contributions in support of a wide range of firearm related public interest activities. These activities are designed to promote firearms and hunting safety, to enhance marksmanship skills of those participating in the shooting sports, and to educate the general public about firearms in their historic, technological and artistic context. Funds granted by The NRA Foundation benefit a variety of constituencies throughout the United States including children, youth, women, individuals with disabilities, gun collectors, law enforcement officers, hunters, and competitive shooters.[39]
Political advocacy
Because the NRA considers gun ownership to be a civil right, the organization calls itself the “largest and oldest civil rights organization in the United States.”[40][41][42][43]
The Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the lobbying branch of the National Rifle Association of America.[44] Members of Congress have ranked the NRA as the most powerful lobbying organization in the country several years in a row.[6] Chris W. Cox is the NRA’s chief lobbyist and principal political strategist, a position he has held since 2002. Jim Baker is the head of the federal affairs division at the institute.[45]
In its lobbying for gun rights, the NRA asserts that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to bear arms. The NRA opposes measures which it believes conflict with the Second Amendment and the right to privacy as it relates to gun owners. Additionally, the organization has invoked the Tenth Amendment to defend gun rights.
Legislation
The NRA currently opposes most new gun-control legislation, calling instead for stricter enforcement of existing laws such as prohibiting convicted felons and violent criminals from possessing firearms and increased sentencing for gun-related crimes. The NRA also advocates for concealed carry in the United States. It also takes positions on non-firearm hunting issues, such as supporting wildlife management programs that allow hunting and opposing restrictions on devices like crossbows and leg hold traps.[citation needed]
The NRA supported the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA), which regulated what were considered at the time “gangster weapons” such as machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers.[46][47][48] However, the organization’s position on parts of the act has since changed.[49]
The 1937 Pittman–Robertson Act was passed which put an excise tax on the manufacture of firearms. The Act created an excise tax that provides funds to each state to manage such animals and their habitats.[50][51] Prior to the creation of the Pittman–Robertson Act many species of wildlife were driven to or near extinction by hunting pressure and/or habitat degradation from humans.[50]
The NRA supported the 1938 Federal Firearms Act (FFA) which established the Federal Firearms License (FFL) program. The FFA required all manufacturers and dealers of firearms who ship or receive firearms or ammunition in interstate or foreign commerce to have a license, and forbade them from transferring any firearm or most ammunition to any person interstate unless certain conditions were met.[52] As a practical matter, this did not affect the interstate commerce in firearms or ammunition. It was with the adoption of the Gun Control Act in 1968, which repealed most of the FFA, that the lawful interstate trade of firearms was limited almost entirely to persons holding a federal firearms license.
The NRA supported and opposed parts of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which broadly regulated the firearms industry and firearms owners, primarily focusing on regulating interstate commerce in firearms by prohibiting interstate firearms transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers and importers. The law was supported by America’s oldest manufacturers (Colt, S&W, etc.) in an effort to forestall even greater restrictions which were feared in response to recent domestic violence. The NRA supported elements of the law, such as those forbidding the sale of firearms to convicted criminals and the mentally ill.[53][54]
In 2000, when evidence surfaced that the Pittman-Robertson Act sportsman`s conservation trust funds were being mismanaged, NRA board member and sportsman, U.S. Representative Don Young (R-Alaska) introduced the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Programs Improvement Act. The NRA backed bill passed the House 423-2 and became law on Nov. 1, 2000 and defines in what manner the monies can be spent.
In 2004, the NRA opposed renewal of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. The ban expired at midnight on September 13, 2004.[55]
In 2005 President Bush signed into law the NRA backed Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act which prevent firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable for negligence when crimes have been committed with their products.[56]
The NRA-backed Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act of 2006 prohibited the confiscation of legal firearms from citizens during states of emergency.[57]
In 2012, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the NRA called on the United States Congress to appropriate funds for a “National School Shield Program,” under which armed police officers would protect students in every U.S. school.[58][59] The NRA also announced the creation of a program that would advocate for best practices in the areas of security, building design, access control, information technology, and student and teacher training.[59][60][61][62]
Lawsuits
In 2005, the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and others successfully sued New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and others to stop gun seizures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.[63][64][65][66][67][68] On October 4, 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush signed into law the Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act.
In November 2005, the NRA and other gun advocates filed a lawsuit challenging San Francisco Proposition H, which banned the ownership and sales of firearms. The NRA argued that the citizen-passed proposition overstepped local government authority and intruded into an area regulated by the state. The San Francisco County Superior Court agreed with the NRA position.[69] The city appealed the court’s ruling, but lost a 2008 appeal.[70] In October 2008, San Francisco was forced to pay a $380,000 settlement to the National Rifle Association and other plaintiffs to cover the costs of litigating Proposition H.[71]
After a 2008 ruling (District of Columbia v. Heller) by the U.S. Supreme Court that affirmed the individual right to own a handgun, the NRA has participated in lawsuits contesting such legislation.[72]
In 2009 the NRA filed suit again (Guy Montag Doe v. San Francisco Housing Authority) in the city of San Francisco challenging the city’s ban of guns in public housing. On January 14, 2009, the San Francisco Housing Authority reached a settlement with the NRA, which allows residents to possess legal firearms within a SFHA apartment building.[73]
In 2010, the NRA sued the city of Chicago, Illinois (McDonald v. Chicago) and the Supreme Court ruled that like other substantive rights, the right to bear arms is incorporated via the Fourteenth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, and therefore applies to the states.[74][75]
The NRA supported the case of Brian Aitken, a New Jersey resident sentenced to seven years in state prison for transporting guns without a carry permit.[76] The organization’s Civil Rights Defense Fund helped to pay Brian Aitken’s legal bills.[77] On December 20, 2010, Governor Chris Christie granted Aitken clemency and ordered Aitken’s immediate release from prison.[78]
Endorsements
The NRA’s policy is that it will endorse any incumbent politician who supports its positions, even if the challenger supports them as well. For example, in the 2006 Senate Elections the NRA endorsed Rick Santorum over Bob Casey, Jr. even though they both had an “A” rating from the NRA Political Victory Fund, because Santorum was the incumbent.[79]
The NRA endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in 1980 backing Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter.[80][81]
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA spent $10 million in opposition of the election of then Senator Barack Obama.[82]
Publications
The NRA publishes a number of periodicals including [83] American Rifleman,[84] American Hunter, Shooting Illustrated, America’s 1st Freedom and Shooting Sports USA. They have also published a collection of firearms titles through its affiliate Palladium Press LLC.
Current leadership and policies
The National Rifle Association is governed by a seventy-six member[85] board of directors. There are seventy-five elected Directors that each serve a three year term. One director, the seventy-sixth, is elected to serve as a cross-over Director and “holds office from the adjournment of the Annual Meeting of Members at which [this person] was elected until the adjournment of the next Annual Meeting of Members, or until a successor is elected and qualified.”
The directors choose the President, one or more Vice Presidents, and the Executive Vice President (the leading spokesman for the organization), along with a Secretary, and Treasurer from among the elected Directors. Additionally two other officers are elected by the Board of Directors, the Executive Director of the National Rifle Association General Operations and the Executive Director of the National rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA).
Charlton Heston served famously as president from 1997 to 2003, and David Keene is the current president, replacing Ron Schmeits who served 2009–2011. John C. Sigler served 2007–2009. Sandra Froman served 2005–2007. Marion P. Hammer was the first female president, serving from 1995 to 1998.[86]
The organization’s executive vice president functions as chief executive officer. Wayne LaPierre has held this position since 1991. Chris W. Cox is the executive director of the NRA’s lobbying branch, the Institute for Legislative Action. Cox has been appointed by LaPierre every year since 2002. Kayne Robinson is executive director of general operations.[87]
Finances and organizational structure
The NRA is a 501(c)(4) membership association with four 501(c)(3) charitable subsidiaries and a Section 527 Political Action Committee separate segregated fund. The NRA’s four charities are NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund, NRA Foundation Inc., NRA Special Contribution Fund (dba NRA Whittington Center), and NRA Freedom Action Foundation.[1]
According to published statements,[1] the NRA’s total income for 2011 was $218,983,530, with total expenditures of $231,071,589. In 2010, the organization reported an income of $227.8 million with roughly $115 million in revenue generated from fundraising, sales, advertising and royalties, with the remainder originating from membership dues.[88] Corporate sponsors include a variety of companies such as outdoors supply, sporting goods companies, and firearm manufacturers.[88][89]
Since 2005, the organization has received at least $14.8 million from more than 50 firearms-related firms[88] In 2008, Beretta exceeded $2 million in donations to the NRA, and in 2012, Smith & Wesson reached $1 million.[90] According to an April 2012 press release, Sturm, Ruger & Company raised $1.25 million through a program in which it donated $1 to the ILA for each gun it sold from May 2011 to May 2012.[90]
In 2010, one of the organization’s tax exempt 501(c)3 groups, the NRA Foundation, distributed $12.6 million to the NRA itself, and gave a further $5.5 million to local organizations such as 4-H and shooting clubs. The NRA Foundation has no staff and pays no salaries.[88][90]
The NRA also raises a portion of its revenues through “round-up” programs, in which gun buyers and participating stores are invited to “round up” the purchase price to the nearest dollar as a voluntary contribution. According to the NRA’s 2010 tax forms, the “round-up” funds have been allocated to both public interest programs and lobbying.[90]
Public opinion
In six out of seven surveys conducted by Gallup since 1993, the majority of Americans reported holding a favorable opinion of the National Rifle Association. A Gallup survey conducted in December 2012 found that 54% of Americans held a favorable opinion of the NRA, with Republicans responding significantly more positively about the organization than Democrats.[91] A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in April 2012 found that 82% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats see the NRA “in a positive light.”[5][92][93]
Criticism
The NRA is criticized by groups advocating for gun control such as Americans for Gun Safety, Brady Campaign, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Million Mom March. Some newspaper editorial boards like the New York Times,[94] Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette[95] have also criticized the NRA’s positions.
Members of the U.S. Democratic Party and liberal commentators have frequently criticized the National Rifle Association’s policies. However, on occasion, politicians in the U.S. Republican Party and conservative commentators have also criticized the organization.[96][97][98] In 1969, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon resigned his “Honorary Life Membership” to the NRA. In 1995, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush also resigned his life membership to the organization after LaPierre sent him a letter that labeled agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), “jack-booted government thugs”. The NRA later apologized for the letter’s language.[99] After the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called an online video created by the NRA “reprehensible” and said that it “demeans” the organization.[100] Jim Baker, a senior lobbyist for the organization, later characterized the video as “not particularly helpful” and “ill-advised.”[101]
The NRA has been criticized by other gun rights groups for doing too little to get existing restrictions repealed. Organizations such as Gun Owners of America (GOA) and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) have at times disagreed with NRA for what they perceive as its willingness to compromise on legislation that would restrict access to firearms.[102]
Notable members
In its history, the NRA has had numerous notable members and officers from a variety of professions. Among these people are eight Presidents of the United States, two Vice President of the United States, two Chief Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and several U.S. Congressmen, as well as legislators and officials of state governments.[103] Past presidents of the association include Ambrose Burnside, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, Charlton Heston, and General Philip H. Sheridan. Other notables include Olympian Karl Frederick, actress Whoopi Goldberg, civil rights activist Roy Innis, actor James Earl Jones, President John F. Kennedy, singer Miranda Lambert, NBA player Karl Malone, screen writer John Milius, President Richard Nixon, actor Chuck Norris, musician Ted Nugent, Governor Sarah Palin, President Ronald Reagan, President Theodore Roosevelt, and actor Tom Selleck.[104][105]
See also
- Gun politics in the United States
- Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
- Concealed carry
- Gun safety
- Hunting
- Brazil
- Viva Brazil Movement
- Canada
- Dominion of Canada Rifle Association
- Canada Firearms Centre
- Canadian gun registry
- Gun politics in Canada
- Possession and Acquisition Licence
- Philippines
- PROGUN
- Spain
- National Arms Association of Spain (ANARMA)
- Switzerland
- ProTell
References
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- ^ LaPierre, Wayne. “Wayne LaPierre Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Committee, 01/31/2013″. http://www.nra.org. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
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- ^ http://www.nrahq.org/history.asp
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- ^ “WALL OF FIRE – THE RIFLE AND CIVIL WAR INFANTRY TACTICS”. U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Retrieved 2012-04-29.
- ^ “Did You Know?”. National Rifle Association. Retrieved August 24, 2011.
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- ^ ”The “Academy” Must Now Share Michael Moore`s Cinematic Shame”. Nra-Ila. 2003-03-27. Retrieved 2010-11-21.
- ^ “Civilian Marksmanship Sales”. Retrieved 2011-04-13.
- ^ Canfield, Bruce N. American Rifleman (September 2008) pp.72–75
- ^ “National Firearms Act of 1934″. Retrieved 2011-04-17.
- ^ Jill Lepor (April 23, 2012). “Battleground America; One nation, under the gun”. The New Yorker.
- ^ Neal Knox (2009). Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War. MacFarlane Press. pp. 298–300.
- ^ Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, “How NRA’s true believers converted a marksmanship group into a mighty gun lobby,” Washington Post January 12, 2013
- ^ Glen H. Utter, Encyclopedia of Gun Control and Gun Rights (2000) pp 137-8, 161-3, 166-7, 186, 219-220
- ^ Glen H. Utter, Encyclopedia of Gun Control and Gun Rights (2000) pp 99-100, 162
- ^ Neal Knox (2009). Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War. pp. 314–20.
- ^ Glen H. Utter, Encyclopedia of Gun Control and Gun Rights (2000) pp 62, 158, 162, 166-7
- ^ Robert J. Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control (2nd ed. 1998) p 88
- ^ Richard Feldman (2011). Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist. John Wiley. p. 209.
- ^ Emilie Raymond, From My Cold, Dead Hands: Charlton Heston and American Politics (2006) pp 262-68, quote p. 265
- ^ “NRA Victories: Eighteen Million Safer Kids”. National Rifle Association of America, Institute for Legislative Action. July 27, 2006. Retrieved 2010-11-06.
- ^ Wormley, Jr., Stanton L. (2000). The basics of personal protection in the home (1st ed. ed.). Fairfax, VA: National Rifle Association. p. 223. ISBN 0935998993.
- ^ Standifird, S.L. (2010-09-17). “Making his mark: El Paso sergeant member of winning national rifle team”. El Paso Times. Retrieved 9 October 2010. “The national matches are considered America’s World Series of competitive shooting and have been a tradition at Camp Perry since 1907″
- ^ NRAHQ.org “Education & Training”. Retrieved 2013-01-25.
- ^ “National: 11 facts about the NRA”. The Washington Post. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
- ^ “Why Teach the Eddie Eagle Program”. NRA. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
- ^ Kessler, Raymond G. Ideological and Civil Liberties Implications of the Public Health Approach to Guns, Crime and Violence. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
- ^ “Friends of NRA Reaches $400 Million Milestone” (Press release). NRA. Retrieved 2011-07-01.
- ^ “Charity Navigator Rating – The NRA Foundation”. Charitynavigator.org. Retrieved 2012-04-19.
- ^ Patrick, Brian Anse (2002). The National Rifle Association and the media: the motivating force of negative coverage 1. Peter Lang. p. 193. ISBN 978-0-8204-5122-0.
- ^ Sapp, Rick (2010). “Lead Ammo-The Truth is Out There Somewhere”. Gun Digest Book of Green Shooting: A Practical Guide to Non-Toxic Hunting and Recreation. Gun Digest Books. p. 115. ISBN 978-1-4402-1362-5.
- ^ Horner, William T. (2005). Showdown in the Show-Me State: the fight over conceal-and-carry gun laws in Missouri. University of Missouri Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-8262-1587-1.
- ^ http://www.wnd.com/2007/04/41058/
- ^ “Who We Are, And What We Do”. Institute for Legislative Action. Retrieved 30 August 2011.
- ^ Cornwell, Susan. “Exclusive: NRA senior lobbyist says attack ad was “ill-advised”". Reuters.com. Retrieved 3 February 2013.
- ^ History of the National Firearms Act, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms.
- ^ American Rifleman, March 1968, P. 22
- ^ Winkler, Adam (10/03/11). “When the NRA Promoted Gun Control”. Huffington Post.
- ^ http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/articles/2011/suppressors-good-for-our-hearing.aspx
- ^ a b Bolen, Eric (2003). Wildlife Ecology and Management. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. pp. Chapter 2.
- ^ “Pittman–Robertson Act: Friend Of The Hunter & Hunted”. National Rifle Association – Institute for Legislative Action. Retrieved 1 December 2011.
- ^ http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Ascione1.html
- ^ Knox, Neal (June 1966). “The Dodd Bill Both Fact … and Fantasy”. Guns & Ammo Magazine.
- ^ Rosenfeld, Steven. “The NRA once supported gun control”. Salon.
- ^ Washingtonpost.com
- ^ NRA. President Bush signs Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
- ^ ”H.R.5441″. The Library of Congress> THOMAS Home > Bills, Resolutions.
- ^ “NRA releases statement on Conn. shooting”. December 18, 2012. Retrieved 6 January 2013.
- ^ a b “NRA December 21st Press Briefing”. National Rifle Association. Retrieved 21 December 2012.
- ^ Sullivan, Sean (December 21, 2012). “Put armed guards in every school, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre says”. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 21, 2012.
- ^ Cushman Jr., John H. (December 22, 2012). “N.R.A. Calls for Armed Guards in Schools to Deter Violence”. New York Times.
- ^ “NRA calls for armed police officer in every school”. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 21 December 2012.
- ^ CCN.com, CNN transcript of NRA video interviews
- ^ Youtube.com NRA video on YouTube of Katrina victims describing illegal confiscation of personal firearms.
- ^ KHOU : 100,000 evacuees in Houston[dead link]
- ^ “Officials grab guns, holdouts”. Columbia Daily Tribune. 2005-09-09. Retrieved 2012-05-05.
- ^ ”Police prepare to use force”. Azcentral.com. 2005-09-09. Retrieved 2010-11-21.
- ^ Isabella Hunter (2012). You and Guns: a Conversation: The Practicalities of Responsible Gun Ownership. iUniverse. p. 40.
- ^ Egelko, Bob; Goodyear, Charlie (2006-06-13). “Judge invalidates Prop. H handgun ban”. SFGate. Retrieved 2010-11-21.
- ^ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/13/SFGUN.TMP
- ^ Matier, Phillip; Andrew Ross (October 27, 2008) “Newsom’s city car makes trip to his wedding.” San Francisco Chronicle. (Retrieved on 11-2-08.)
- ^ “NRA, D.C. Residents Take District of Columbia Back to Court Over Gun Regulations”. NRA-ILA. 2008-07-30. Retrieved 2010-11-21.
- ^ Egelko, Bob (January 14, 2009). “San Francisco Housing Authority settles gun lawsuit”. SFGate.com. Retrieved 2009-01-16.
- ^ “In McDonald v. Chicago another Supreme Court landmark ruling on guns?”. The Christian Science Monitor. 2010-03-01.
- ^ Mears, Bill (June 28, 2009). “Court rules for gun rights, strikes down Chicago handgun ban”. CNN.
- ^ “Freed New Jersey Man Wants Gun Conviction Overturned”. Fox News. 2010-12-23.
- ^ http://briandaitken.com/content/2011/01/BrianAitken-NRA.jpg
- ^ “NJ Gov. Chris Christie commutes Aitken’s sentence”. The Daily Caller. 2010-12-20. Retrieved 2012-04-19.
- ^ “Post-gazette.com”. Post-gazette.com. 2006-10-25. Retrieved 2012-04-19.
- ^ SCHMIDT, GINA M. “100 YEARS: REMEMBERING PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN”. http://www.nraila.org. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
- ^ Facts on File 1980 Yearbook, p.844
- ^ Eunice Moscoso, “NRA campaign against Obama carries $10 million price tag,” Palm Beach Post, October 21, 2008)
- ^ NRA Publications as of 2009.
- ^ American Rifleman website.
- ^ The National Rifle Association of America Bylaws. Article IV, S. 1a: NRA. 2012. p. 12.
- ^ Marion P. Hammer, NRAWinningTeam.com
- ^ ”National Rifle Association Announces New Officers and Board Members”. NRAILA. 2009-05-19. Retrieved 2010-11-21.
- ^ a b c d Peter Robison and John Crewdson. “NRA Raises $200 Million as Gun Lobby Toasters Burn Logo on Bread”. Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2013-01-30.
- ^ Greene, Jeremy. “Friends of NRA Industry Supporter directory”. http://www.friendsofnra.org. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
- ^ a b c d “Do Assault Weapons Sales Pay NRA Salaries?”. FactCheck.org. January 15, 2013.
- ^ Newport, Frank. “NRA Has 54% Favorable Image in U.S. – Republicans most positive about NRA; Democrats most negative”. Gallup. Retrieved 2013-02-02.
- ^ Clement, Scott. “Everything you need to know about Americans’ views on guns — in 7 easy steps”. Washington Post. Retrieved 2013-02-02.
- ^ “Gun control takes a back seat to the economy, the deficit and taxes”. Washington Post. Retrieved 2013-02-02.
- ^ “The Gun Lobby’s Loss”. The New York Times. December 2, 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-03.
- ^ ”NRA nonsense: LaPierre speaks for gun makers, not gun owners”. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved 2013-01-03.
- ^ “Bloomberg Throws Punch at NRA, Obama: Bloomberg says NRA “encourages behavior that causes things like Connecticut” shooting”. ABC News. Retrieved 2013-01-25.
- ^ ROBILLARD, KEVIN. “Frank Luntz: NRA not listening to public”. Politico. Retrieved 2013-01-03.
- ^ Poor, Jeff. “Ann Coulter rails against NRA’s Wayne LaPierre”. The Daily Caller. Retrieved 2013-01-03.
- ^ “NRA Apologizes for ‘Jack Boot’ Letter” Seattle Times (AP) 05/18/95 http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19950518&slug=2121718
- ^ Knox, Olivier. “Christie: NRA ad with Obama daughters ‘reprehensible’”. Yahoo! News. Retrieved 2013-01-19.
- ^ Cornwell, Susan. “Exclusive: NRA senior lobbyist says attack ad was “ill-advised”". Reuters. Retrieved 2013-01-25.
- ^ “A Letter From Larry Pratt To The Directors Of The NRA”. Gunowners.org. Retrieved 2010-11-21.
- ^ The National Rifle Association of America Bylaws. Inside front cover, organization summary: NRA. 2012.
- ^ Coleman, Christina. “Gun Show: Guess Which Celebrities Are NRA Members? Read more: http://globalgrind.com/news/celebrity-nra-members-photos#ixzz2QbLg4YxV”. Global Grind. Retrieved 16 April 2013.
- ^ Shropshire, Terry. “Celebrity members of the NRA gun group”. Rollingout.com. Retrieved 16 April 2013.
Further reading
- Anderson, Jack. Inside the NRA: Armed and Dangerous. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Dove, 1996. ISBN 0-7871-0677-1.
- Brennan, Pauline Gasdow, Alan J. Lizotte, and David McDowall. “Guns, Southernness, and Gun Control”. Journal of Quantitative Criminology 9, no. 3 (1993): 289–307.
- Bruce, John M., and Clyde Wilcox, eds. The Changing Politics of Gun Control. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. ISBN 0-8476-8614-0, ISBN 0-8476-8615-9.
- Carter, Gregg Lee, ed. Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law (3rd ed. 2012) excepr and text search
- Carter, Gregg Lee. Gun Control in the United States: A Reference Handbook (2006) 408pp
- Davidson, Osha Gray. Under Fire: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control, 2nd ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. ISBN 0-87745-646-1.
- Edel, Wilbur. Gun Control: Threat to Liberty or Defense against Anarchy? Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1995. ISBN 0-275-95145-6.
- Feldman, Richard. Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist (John Wiley, 2011) excerpt and text search
- Goss, Kristin A. Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America (Priceton Studies in American Politics) (2008) excerpt and text search
- Langbein, Laura I., and Mark A. Lotwis, “Political Efficacy of Lobbying and Money: Gun Control in the U.S. House, 1986″. Legislative Studies Quarterly 15 (August 1990): 413–40.
- LaPierre, Wayne R. Guns, Crime, and Freedom. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1994. ISBN 0-89526-477-3.
- McGarrity, Joseph P., and Daniel Sutter. “A Test of the Structure of PAC Contracts: An Analysis of House Gun Control Votes in the 1980s”. Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 67 (2000).
- Melzer, Scott. Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (New York University Press, 2009) 336 pp. online
- Raymond, Emilie. From My Cold, Dead Hands: Charlton Heston and American Politics (2006) excerpt and text search
- Spitzer, Robert J. The Politics of Gun Control, 2nd ed. New York: Chatham House Publishers, 1998. ISBN 1-56643-072-0.
- Sugarmann, Josh. National Rifle Association: Money, Firepower, and Fear. Washington, D.C.: National Press Books, 1992. ISBN 0-915765-88-8.
- Trefethen, James B., and James E. Serven. Americans and Their Guns: The National Rifle Association Story Through Nearly a Century of Service to the Nation. Harrisburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1967.
- Utter, Glenn H., ed. Encyclopedia of Gun Control and Gun Rights. Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 2000. ISBN 1-57356-172-X. online, 378pp
- Winkler, Adam. Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011) excerpt and text search
Gunshow Loophole MYTH and Other Piers Morgan LIES
Obama calls Senate gun vote “shameful”
Obama: Gun lobby ‘willfully lied’
Barack Obama Speaks After Gun Control Fails in the Senate
GOP Sen. Toomey- Background Checks Are Not ‘Gun Control,’ They’re ‘Common Sense’
Senators propose US gun control compromise
Wayne LaPierre On Whether NRA Supports Universal Background Checks At Gun Shows: ‘We Do Not’
Uncle Ted Cruz: ‘The Gun Show Loophole(Background Check) Doesn’t Exist’
What Gun Show Loophole?
The so called “gun show loophole” does not exist (I set the record straight)
Sore Loser – Sen. Feinstein After Losing Gun legislation states there will be no background checks
Dianne Feinstein’s amendment to reinstate assault weapons ban fails
Just after the U.S. Senate voted down a measure Wednesday afternoon to expand background checks for gun buyers, it also voted against California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s amendment to reinstate an assault weapons ban.
Feinstein’s amendment had not been expected to pass. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) knew weeks ago there weren’t enough votes for the assault weapons ban, so he removed it from the main gun control bill.
The final vote on Feinstein’s amendment was 60-40 against passage.
Feinstein issued this statement after Tuesday’s vote:
“I’m disappointed by today’s vote, but I always knew this was an uphill battle. I believe the American people are far ahead of their elected officials on this issue, and I will continue to fight for a renewed ban on assault weapons.
“The very fact that we’re debating gun violence on the Senate floor is a step in the right direction, and I hope my colleagues vote their conscience and approve the underlying bill. But I’m certain that in the coming months and years, we will be forced to confront by other incidents like Newtown, where innocents are murdered with one of these weapons of war.
“I will carry on this fight against military-style assault weapons, and I ask of the American people that they continue to pressure their elected officials to take action. It’s long overdue that we take serious steps to remove these dangerous firearms and high-capacity ammunition magazines from society.”
Feinstein’s original assault weapons ban was in place from 1994-2004. An attempt to extend it in 2004 failed. Feinstein vowed to resume her fight after mass shootings in Colorado and Connecticut.
In a recent speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Feinstein said: “This is a lifetime pursuit for me. If I can’t get it done this time, there will be another time.”
Just after the U.S. Senate voted down a measure Wednesday afternoon to expand background checks for gun buyers, it also voted against California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s amendment to reinstate an assault weapons ban.
Feinstein’s amendment had not been expected to pass. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) knew weeks ago there weren’t enough votes for the assault weapons ban, so he removed it from the main gun control bill.
The final vote on Feinstein’s amendment was 60-40 against passage.
Feinstein issued this statement after Tuesday’s vote:
“I’m disappointed by today’s vote, but I always knew this was an uphill battle. I believe the American people are far ahead of their elected officials on this issue, and I will continue to fight for a renewed ban on assault weapons.
“The very fact that we’re debating gun violence on the Senate floor is a step in the right direction, and I hope my colleagues vote their conscience and approve the underlying bill. But I’m certain that in the coming months and years, we will be forced to confront by other incidents like Newtown, where innocents are murdered with one of these weapons of war.
“I will carry on this fight against military-style assault weapons, and I ask of the American people that they continue to pressure their elected officials to take action. It’s long overdue that we take serious steps to remove these dangerous firearms and high-capacity ammunition magazines from society.”
Feinstein’s original assault weapons ban was in place from 1994-2004. An attempt to extend it in 2004 failed. Feinstein vowed to resume her fight after mass shootings in Colorado and Connecticut.
In a recent speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Feinstein said: “This is a lifetime pursuit for me. If I can’t get it done this time, there will be another time.”
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Democratic Controlled U.S. Senate Fiscal Year 2014 Budget for the Federal Government — Videos
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WASHINGTON, March 22—Throughout the course of the budget debate, Democratic Senators have repeatedly suggested their budget contains a “balanced approach,” a rhetorical description that has no accounting value. (Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) went even further last night and repeatedly said his party’s plan called for “balancing the budget.”)
But as Sen. Sessions pointed out this morning, “They know they don’t have a balanced budget. They won’t tell the American people they don’t have one. They just use the word. But it’s not in their document. Where and when do we hold people accountable in this United States Senate for an accurate [description] of legislation? It’s wrong.”
To view for yourself the budget tables with the Democrats’ own numbers (in other words, before one even begins to strip out all the gimmicks and accounting tricks), please click here: http://1.usa.gov/YwdsbM. Note that cumulative deficits will amount to $5.198 trillion, and the nation’s gross debt will climb to $24.365 trillion by 2023.
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Foundation for Growth: Restoring the Promise of American Opportunity
U.S. Senate Budget Committee
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray unveils her vision for the Fiscal Year 2014 Senate Budget resolution.
For more information: http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic
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Background Articles and Videos
Making the Federal Budget
How do you spend four trillion dollars? Turns out, you don’t; it takes the President and the Congress to allocate, authorize, appropriate, resolve, outlay, sequester, impound, and just plain spend that much in 2011. Such a process is baffling at times. It’s so complex that you may marvel that Washington can get any action accomplished and paid for at all. So how does the federal budget happen?
Join the Mercatus Center’s Capitol Hill Campus and Senior Research Fellow Jason J. Fichtner for a walk through the process of making the federal budget. He explains the process from its beginnings in the halls of the White House, highlight the many roles Congress takes to authorize and enforce the budget, and navigate the twisting, puzzling conglomeration of bureaucratic steps, political goals, and accountancy rules that go into making our government function.
Changing the Budget Process to Promote Fiscal Responsibility
A Sustainable Approach to Entitlement Reform
Foundation for Growth: Restoring the Promise of American Opportunity
The Fiscal Year 2014 Senate Budget builds on the work done over the last two years to create jobs, invest in broad-based economic growth, and tackle our deficit and debt responsibly.
This budget takes the balanced and responsible approach to our fiscal challenges that every bipartisan group has endorsed and that the American people support. It includes responsible spending cuts made across the federal budget, as well as significant new savings achieved by eliminating loopholes and cutting wasteful spending in the tax code that benefits the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.
The Senate Budget is grounded in the understanding that our country’s long-term fiscal and economic goals will only be met with policies that support a strong and growing middle class. And it keeps the promises we have made to our seniors, our families, and our communities.
The American people are sick and tired of watching their government lurch from crisis to crisis. The Senate Budget offers a serious and credible path away from this gridlock and dysfunction and toward a long-term plan to create jobs, lay down a strong foundation for broad-based economic growth, replace sequestration, and tackle our deficit and debt responsibly and credibly.
This budget reflects the values of a diverse Senate serving a diverse nation, and it is guided by the principles and priorities that are strongly supported by the constituents we were elected to represent
http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/index.cfm/senatebudget
Foundation for Growth: Restoring the Promise of American Opportunity
The Fiscal Year 2014 Senate Budget builds on the work done over the last two years to create jobs, invest in broad-based economic growth, and tackle our deficit and debt responsibly.
This budget takes the balanced and responsible approach to our fiscal challenges that every bipartisan group has endorsed and that the American people support. It includes responsible spending cuts made across the federal budget, as well as significant new savings achieved by eliminating loopholes and cutting wasteful spending in the tax code that benefits the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.
The Senate Budget is grounded in the understanding that our country’s long-term fiscal and economic goals will only be met with policies that support a strong and growing middle class. And it keeps the promises we have made to our seniors, our families, and our communities.
The American people are sick and tired of watching their government lurch from crisis to crisis. The Senate Budget offers a serious and credible path away from this gridlock and dysfunction and toward a long-term plan to create jobs, lay down a strong foundation for broad-based economic growth, replace sequestration, and tackle our deficit and debt responsibly and credibly.
This budget reflects the values of a diverse Senate serving a diverse nation, and it is guided by the principles and priorities that are strongly supported by the constituents we were elected to represent.
The highest priority of the Senate Budget is to create the conditions for job creation, economic growth, and prosperity built from the middle out, not the top down.
The Senate Budget takes the position that trickle-down economics has failed as an economic policy and that true national prosperity comes from the middle out, not the top down. We believe that deficit reduction at the expense of economic growth is doomed to failure, and policies that promote a strong middle class are essential to tackling our long-term deficit and debt challenges.
The policies President Barack Obama and Congress put in place in response to the Great Recession pulled our economy back from the brink and helped to add back jobs. But with an unemployment rate that remains stubbornly high, and a middle class that has seen their wages stagnate for far too long, we simply cannot afford any threats to our fragile recovery. Therefore, the Senate Budget:
• Fully replaces the harmful cuts from sequestration with smart, balanced, and responsible deficit reduction, which would save hundreds of thousands of jobs while protecting families, communities, and the fragile economic recovery.
• Invests in long-term economic growth and national competitiveness by tackling our serious deficits in infrastructure, education, job training, and innovation to create jobs now and lay down a strong foundation for broad-based growth.
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• Includes a $100 billion targeted jobs and infrastructure package that would start creating new jobs quickly, begin repairing the worst of our crumbling roads and bridges, and help train our workers to fill 21
st century jobs. This jobs investment package is fully paid for by eliminating loopholes and cutting wasteful spending in the tax code that benefits the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.
• Protects and continues tax cuts for the middle class and low-income working families.
The Senate Budget builds on the work we have done over the last two years to tackle our deficit and debt responsibly.
At the end of 2010, the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission report laid out a responsible goal of reducing our deficit by $4 trillion over ten years. Since that time, Congress and the administration have implemented $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction, with $1.8 trillion coming from spending cuts and $600 billion coming from new revenue from the wealthiest Americans. The Senate Budget:
• Surpasses the bipartisan goal of $4 trillion in 10-year deficit reduction and puts our deficit and debt on a downward, sustainable, and responsible path.
• Builds on the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction already done with an additional $1.85 trillion in new deficit reduction for a total of $4.25 trillion in deficit reduction since the Simpson-Bowles report.
• Includes an equal mix of responsible spending cuts and new revenue raised by closing loopholes and ending wasteful spending in the tax code.
• Achieves $975 billion in deficit reduction through responsible spending cuts made across the federal budget:
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$493 billion saved on the domestic spending side, including $275 billion in health care savings made in a way that does not harm seniors or families.
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$240 billion saved by carefully and responsibly cutting defense spending to align with the drawdown of troops in our overseas operations.
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$242 billion saved in reduced interest payments.
• Achieves $975 billion in deficit reduction by closing loopholes and eliminating wasteful spending in the tax code that benefits the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.
• Includes reconciliation instructions, a fast-track process that makes sure that the new revenue from the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations cannot be filibustered in the Senate.
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The Senate Budget keeps the promises we have made to our seniors, families, veterans, and communities.
The Senate Budget takes the position that the promises we made to our seniors, families, veterans, and communities ought to be fulfilled. This budget:
• Preserves and protects Medicare so that it is strong for seniors today and will be there for our children and grandchildren.
• Rejects calls to dismantle, privatize, or voucherize Medicare.
• Builds on the responsible changes made in the Affordable Care Act to continue reducing health care costs while protecting patients.
• Protects the expansion of health insurance to nearly 30 million Americans and ensures the federal-state partnership on Medicaid is preserved.
• Rejects efforts to simply shift health care costs to states or make cuts that harm seniors and the most vulnerable families.
• Maintains the key principle that deficit reduction should not be done on the backs of the most vulnerable families and communities.
• Continues to make the investments we need in national defense, homeland security, and law enforcement to keep our country and our communities strong and secure.
• Keeps the promise we have made to our veterans that their country will be there for them and provide the resources and support they need when they come home.
The House Republican approach would hurt middle class families and the economy and break the promises we have made to our seniors.
The Senate Budget offers a very different vision than the approach taken by House Republicans.
Their proposals would cut the legs out from under our fragile economic recovery and threaten millions of jobs. They would slash the investments in infrastructure, education, and innovation that we need to lay down a strong foundation for broad-based growth and that would position us to compete and win in the 21
st century global economy.
House Republicans would dismantle Medicare and cut off programs that support the middle class and most vulnerable families. And they would do all that while refusing to ask the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to contribute their fair share.
We believe that the American people strongly support the pro-growth, pro-middle class approach taken in the Senate Budget. And we look forward to engaging with families and seniors across the country as we work to pass the responsible, fair, and bipartisan budget deal the American people expect and deserve.
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The following timetable is used to guide the federal budget process each year (see 2. U.S.C. 631)
| Date | Action |
| 1st Monday in February | President’s budget submission (includes OMB sequester preview report and adjustments to spending caps). |
| February 15 | CBO budget and economic outlook report |
| Within 6 weeks of President’s budget | Committees submit views and estimates to the Budget Committees |
| April 1 | Senate Budget Committee reports resolution |
| April 15 | Congress completes budget resolution. If not, Chairman of House Budget Committee files 302(a) allocations; Ways and Means is free to proceed with pay-as-you-go measures |
| May 15 | Appropriations bills may be considered in the House |
| June 10 | House Appropriations reports last bill |
| June 15 | Congress completes action on reconciliation reconciliation (if applicable) |
| June 30 | House completes action on annual appropriation bills |
| July 15 | President submits mid-session review |
| October 1 |
Fiscal year begins Home / Committee Resources / Glossary Appropriations Act: A statute, under the jurisdiction of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, that generally provides authority for Federal agencies to incur obligations and to make payments out of the Treasury for specified purposes. An appropriation act is the most common means of providing budget authority. Currently, there are 13 regular appropriations acts for each fiscal year. From time to time, Congress also enacts supplemental appropriations acts. (See Appropriations under Budget Authority; Continuing Resolution; Supplemental Appropriation.) Authorizing Committee: A committee of the House or Senate with legislative jurisdiction over laws that set up or continue the operations of Federal programs and provide the legal basis for making appropriations for those programs. Authorizing committees also have direct control over spending for mandatory programs since the Government’s obligation to make payments for such program is contained in the authorizing legislation (See Entitlement.) Authorizing Legislation: Legislation enacted by Congress that sets up or continues the operation of a Federal program or agency indefinitely or for a specific period of time. Authorizing legislation may limit the amount of budget authority which can be appropriated for a program or may authorize the appropriation of “such sums as are necessary.” (See Budget Authority; Entitlement.) Backdoor Spending: (See Direct Spending or Mandatory Spending.) Budget Authority: The authority Congress gives to Government agencies, permitting them to enter into obligations which will result in immediate or future outlays. Budget authority may be classified in several ways. It may be classified by the form it takes: appropriations, borrowing authority, or contract authority. Budget authority may also be classified by the determination of amount: definite authority or indefinite authority. Finally budget authority may be classified by the period of availability: 1-year authority, multi-year authority, or no-year authority (available until used). Forms of Budget Authority Appropriations.–An act of Congress that permits Federal agencies to incur obligations and to make payments out of the Treasury for specified purposes. An appropriations act is the most common means of providing budget authority. Borrowing Authority.–Statutory authority that permits a Federal agency to incur obligations and to make payments for specified purposes out of money borrowed from the Treasury, the Federal Financing Bank, or the public. The Budget Act in most cases requires that new authority to borrow must be approved in advance in an appropriation act. Contract Authority.–Statutory authority that permits a Federal agency to enter into contracts in advance of appropriations. Under the Budget Act, most new authority to contract must be approved in advance in an appropriation act. Offsetting collections and receipts.–Income from the public which is displayed in the budget as negative budget authority. (See Offsetting Collections and Offsetting Receipts. Budget Baseline: Projected Federal spending, revenue and deficit levels based on the assumption that current policies will continue unchanged for the upcoming fiscal year. In determining the budget baseline under Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, the Directors of OMB and CBO estimate revenue levels and spending levels for entitlement programs based on continuation of current laws. For estimating discretionary spending amounts (both defense and non- defense), the Directors assume an adjustment for inflation (GNP deflator) added to the previous year’s discretionary spending levels. The baseline also includes sufficient appropriations to cover a Federal pay comparability raise (without absorption). Budget Deficit: The amount by which the Government’s total outlays exceed its total revenues for a given fiscal year. (See Outlays; Revenues.) Budget Resolution: A concurrent resolution passed by both Houses of Congress setting forth, reaffirming, or revising the congressional budget for the U.S. Government for a fiscal year. A budget resolution is a concurrent resolution of Congress. Concurrent resolutions do not require a presidential signature because they are not laws. Budget resolutions do not need to be laws because they are a legislative device for the Congress to regulate itself as it works on spending and revenue bills. (Unified) Budget Surplus: The amount by which the Government’s revenues exceed its outlays for a given fiscal year. The “on-budget surplus” excludes spending and revenues of the Social Security Trust Fund, and the Postal Service. (See Outlays; Revenues.) Capital Budget: A budget that segregates capital spending from all other spending, what is usually considered the “operating budget.” In a capital budget, spending and receipts in the capital budget are excluded from the operating budget and are not included in the operating budget’s deficit or surplus calculations. A capital budget would include spending only for capital assets. Capital assets are usually defined to be limited to land, structures, equipment, and intellectual property that are owned and used by the Federal government and have a useful life of more than 2 years. However, some proponents of capital budgeting have suggested that capital should be defined to include Federal “investment” spending that yields long-term benefits. President Clinton established a Commission to Study Capital Budgeting by issuing Executive Order 13037 on March 3, 1997. The Commission is required to issue its report by December 17, 1998. Congressional Budget: (See Budget Resolution.) Continuing Resolution: Appropriations legislation enacted by Congress to provide temporary budget authority for Federal agencies to keep them in operation when their regular appropriation bill has not been enacted by the start of the fiscal year. A continuing resolution is a joint resolution, which has the same legal status as a bill. A continuing resolution frequently specifies a maximum rate at which obligations may be incurred, based on the rate of the prior year, the President’s budget request, or an appropriation bill passed by either or both chambers of Congress. However, there have been instances when Congress has used a continuing resolution as an omnibus measure to enact a number of appropriation bills. A continuing resolution is a form of appropriation act and should not be confused with the budget resolution. Credit Authority: Authority to incur direct loan obligations or to incur primary loan guarantee commitments. Under the Budget Act, new credit authority must be approved in advance in an appropriation act. Crosswalk: Also known as “committee allocation” or “section 302 allocation.” The means by which budget resolution spending totals are translated into binding guidelines with respect to budget authority and outlays for committee action on spending bills. The Budget Committees allocate the budget resolution totals among the committees by jurisdiction, Crosswalk allocations of budget authority and outlays to the committee appear in the joint explanatory statement accompanying a conference report on the budget resolution. Current Services Budget: A section of the President’s budget, required by the Budget Act, that sets forth the level of spending or taxes that would occur if existing programs and policies were continued unchanged through the fiscal year and beyond, with all programs adjusted for inflation so that existing levels of activity are maintained. (See Baseline.) Deferral of Budget Authority: An action by the executive branch that delays the obligation of budget authority beyond the point it would normally occur. Pursuant to the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the President must provide advanced notice to the Congress of any proposed deferrals. A deferral may not extend beyond the end of the fiscal year in which the President’s message proposing the deferral is made. Congress may overturn a deferral by passing a law disapproving the deferral. Deficit: The amount by which the government’s total budget outlays exceeds its total receipts for a fiscal year. Direct Spending: A term defined in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 to include entitlement authority, the food stamp program, and budget authority provided in law other than appropriations acts. From the perspective of the appropriations process, all direct spending is classified as mandatory as opposed to discretionary spending. New direct spending is subject to pay-as-you-go requirements. Direct spending is synonymous with mandatory spending. (See Mandatory Spending and Entitlement.) Discretionary Spending: A category of spending (budget authority and outlays) subject to the annual appropriations process. (See Appropriations Acts.) Entitlement: Programs that are governed by legislation in a way that legally obligates the Federal government to make specific payments to qualified recipients. Payments to persons under the Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ pensions programs are considered to be entitlements. (See Direct Spending and Mandatory Spending.) Emergency Spending: As provided in the Budget Enforcement Act, a provision of legislation designated as an emergency by both the President and the Congress. As a result, this additional spending is not subject to the discretionary caps or the pay go requirements and thus will not cause a sequester. In addition, emergency legislation is effectively exempt from Budget Act points of order. There is no specific criteria in the law for emergency spending. However, the following criteria were contained in a June 1991 report prepared by the Office of Management and Budget–as required by Pub. L. No. 102-55 for the determination of whether to designate spending as an emergency spending: Necessary expenditure.–an essential or vital expenditure, not one that is merely useful or beneficial; Sudden.–quickly coming into being, not building up over time; Urgent.–pressing and compelling need requiring immediate action; Unforseen.–not predictable or seen beforehand as a coming need (an emergency that is part of an aggregate level of anticipated emergencies, particularly when normally estimated in advance, would not be “unforseen”); and Not permanent.–the need is temporary in nature. Expenditures: (See Outlays.) Federal Debt: Consists of all Treasury and agency debt issues outstanding. Current law places a limit or ceiling on the amount of debt. Debt subject to limit has two components: debt held by the government and debt held by the public. Debt held by the government.–Represents the holdings of debt by federal trust funds and other special government funds. For example, when a trust fund is in surplus as is presently the case with Social Security, the law requires that this surplus be invested in government securities. Debt held by the public.–Represents the holdings of debt by individuals, institutions, other buyers outside the federal government, and the Federal Reserve System. The change in debt held by the public in any given year closely tracks the unified budget deficit for that year. Fiscal Policy: Federal government policies with respect to taxes, spending, and debt management intended to promote the nations’ macroeconomic goals, particularly with respect to employment, gross national product, price level stability, and equilibrium in balance of payments. The budget process is a major vehicle for determining and implementing Federal fiscal policy. The other major component of Federal macroeconomic policy is monetary policy. (See Monetary Policy.) Fiscal Year: A fiscal year is a 12-month accounting period. The fiscal for the Federal Government begins October 1 and ends September 30. The fiscal year is designated by the calendar year in which it ends; for example fiscal year 1997 is the year beginning October 1, 1996, and ending September 30, 1997. Functional Classification: A system of classifying budget resources by major purpose so that budget authority, outlays, and credit activities can be related in terms of the national needs being addressed (for example, national defense, health) regardless of the agency administrating the program. There are currently 20 functions. A function may be divided into two or more subfunctions depending upon the complexity of the national need addressed by that function. (See Budget Authority; Outlays.) return to topIImpoundment: A generic term referring to any action or inaction by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government that precludes the obligation or expenditure of budget authority in the manner intended by Congress. (See Deferral of Budget Authority; Rescission of Budget Authority.) return to topJJoint Committee on Taxation (JCT): Section 8001 of the Internal Revenue Code authorized the creation of the Joint Committee on Taxation. By statute, it is composed of five members from the Committee on Finance (three majority, two minority) chosen by such Committee and five members from the Committee on Ways and Means (three majority, two minority) chosen by such Committee. In practice, the Chairmanship and Vice Chairmanship of the Joint Committee on Taxation has rotated between the Chairman of the Committee on Finance and the Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means with each new Congress. Among other things, the JCT’s duties are to investigate the operation and effects of the federal tax system. return to topM Mandatory Spending: Refers to spending for programs the level of which is governed by formulas or criteria set forth in authorizing legislation rather than by appropriations. Examples of mandatory spending include: Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ pensions, rehabilitation services, Members’ pay, judges pay and the payment of interest of the public debt. Many of these programs are considered entitlement. (See Direct Spending.) Mark-Up: Meetings where congressional committees work on language of bills or resolutions. At Budget Committee mark-ups, the House and Senate Budget Committees work on the language and numbers contained in budget resolutions and legislation affecting the congressional budget process. Monetary Policy: Management of the money supply, under the direction of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system, with the aim of achieving price stability and full employment. Government actions in guiding monetary policy, include currency revaluation, credit contradiction or expansion, rediscount policy, regulation of bank reserves and the purchase and sale of Government securities. (See Fiscal Policy.) return to topNNet Deficit Reduction: Savings below the defined budget baseline achieved for the upcoming fiscal year because of laws enacted or final regulations promulgated since January 1. CBO and OMB independently estimate these savings in their initial and final sequester reports. return to topO Offsetting Collections: Income from the public that results from the government engaging in “business-like” activities with the public, such as the sale of products or the rendering of a service. Examples include proceeds funds derived from the sale of postage stamps. Offsetting collections are credited against the level of budget authority or outlays associated with a specific program or account. (See Offsetting receipts.) Offsetting Receipts: Income from the public that results from the government engaging in “business-like” activities with the public such as the sale of products or the rendering of services. Examples include proceeds from the sale of timber from Federal lands or entrance fees paid at national parks. Rather than being credited against the spending of a particular program or account, (as in the case with offsetting collections) offsetting receipts are deducted from total budget authority and outlays rather than added to Federal revenues even though they are deposited in the Treasury as miscellaneous receipts. Generally offsetting receipts are associated with mandatory spending. (See Offsetting collections.) Off-budget Federal Entity: Any Federal fund or trust fund whose transactions are required by law to be excluded from the totals of President’s budget submission and Congress’ budget resolution, despite the fact that these are part of the government’s total transactions. Current law requires that the Social Security trust funds (the Federal Old Age, Survivors, and Disability trust fund) and the Postal Service be off-budget. However, these entities are reflected in the budget in that they are included in calculating the deficit in order to derive the total government deficit that must be financed by borrowing from the public or by other means. All other federal funds and trust funds are on budget. (See Unified Budget.) Outlays: Outlays are disbursements by the Federal Treasury in the form of checks or cash. Outlays flow in part from budget authority granted in prior years and in part from budget authority provided for the year in which the disbursements occur. Outlay Rates: The ratio of outlays (actual government disbursements) in a fiscal year relative to new budgetary resources in that fiscal year. In estimating the budget baseline and baseline deficit for their sequestration reports, CBO and OMB use outlay rates for projecting levels of spending resulting from available budget authority. Pay-as-you-go: Arises in two separate contexts: a point of order in the Senate and a sequester order from OMB. Pay-as-you-go in the Senate.–Since fiscal year 1994, the budget resolution has included a pay-as-you-go rule in the Senate. The rule provides a 3/5ths vote point of order in the Senate against consideration of legislation that would cause a net increase in the deficit over a ten year period. It applies to all legislation except appropriations legislation. To determine a violation, CBO measures the budget impact of a direct spending or revenue bill combined with the budget impact of all direct spending and revenue legislation enacted since the latest budget resolution’s adoption to see if the legislation would result in a net deficit increase for any one of three time periods (the first year, the sum of years 1 through 5, and the sum of years 6 through 10.) The pay-go rule sunsets at the end of fiscal year 2002. Pay-as-you-go and sequestration under the BEA.–The Budget Enforcement Act requires OMB to also enforce a “pay-as-you-go” requirement which has a similar effect as the Senate’s point of order: Congress is required to “pay for” any changes to programs which result in an increase in direct spending, or in this case risk a sequester. If OMB estimates that the sum of all direct spending and revenue legislation enacted since 1990 will result in a net increase in the deficit for the fiscal year, then the President is required to issue a sequester order reducing all non-exempt direct spending accounts by a uniform percentage in order to eliminate the net deficit increase. Most direct spending is either exempt from a sequester order or operates under special rules that minimize the reduction that can be made in direct spending. Social Security is exempt from a pay-as-you-go sequester and Medicare cannot be reduced by more than 4 percent. President’s Budget: The document sent to Congress by the President in January or February of each year, requesting new budget authority for Federal programs and estimating Federal revenues and outlays for the upcoming fiscal year. Revenues: Collections from the public arising from the Government’s sovereign power to tax. Revenues include individual and corporate income taxes, social insurance taxes (such as social security payroll taxes), excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties and the like. Reconciliation Process: A process by which Congress includes in a budget resolution “reconciliation instructions” to specific committees, directing them to report legislation which changes existing laws, usually for the purpose of decreasing spending or increasing revenues by a specified amount by a certain date. The legislation may also contain an increase in the debt limit. The reported legislation is then considered as a single “reconciliation bill under expedited procedures.” Reserve Fund: A provision in a budget resolution that grants the Chairman of the Budget Committee the authority to make changes in budget aggregates and committee allocations once some condition or conditions have been met. Since a budget resolution establishes a binding ceiling on aggregate budget authority and outlay levels and a binding floor on revenues, budget resolutions frequently include reserve funds for deficit-neutral legislation that would otherwise violate the budget resolution and be subject to a point of order under the Budget Act. For example, the FY 1997 budget resolution included a tax reduction reserve fund that allowed the Chairman to reduce the revenue floor and the relevant spending allocations to accommodate legislation that reduced taxes if that legislation also contained offsetting spending reductions. Rescission of Budget Authority: Cancellation of budget authority before the time when the authority would otherwise cease to be available for obligation. The rescission process begins when the President proposes a rescission to the Congress for fiscal or policy reasons. Unlike the deferral of budget authority which occurs unless Congress acts to disapprove the deferral, rescission off budget authority occurs only if Congress enacts the rescission. (See Deferral of Budget Authority; Impoundment.) Scoring or Scorekeeping: The process for estimating budget authority, outlay, revenue and deficit levels which result from congressional budgetary actions. Scorekeeping data prepared by the Congressional Budget Office include status reports on the effect of congressional actions and comparisons of these actions to targets and ceilings set by Congress in budget resolutions. These reports are published in the Congressional Record on a regular basis. OMB is responsible for scoring legislation to determine if a sequester is necessary. Sequester: Pursuant to Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, a presidential spending reduction order that occurs by reducing spending by uniform percentages. Sequestrable Resource: Pursuant to Gramm-Rudman-Hollings federal funding authority (budgetary resources) subject to reductions under a presidential sequester order for achieving required outlay reductions (in non-exempt programs). Supplemental Appropriation: An act appropriating funds in addition to those in the 13 regular annual appropriations acts. Supplemental appropriations provide additional budget authority beyond the original estimates for programs or activities (including new programs authorized after the date of the original appropriation act) in cases where the need for funds is too urgent to be postponed until enactment of the next regular appropriation bill. (See Appropriations Act.) return to topTTax Expenditures: Revenue losses attributable to a special exclusion, exemption, or deduction from gross income or to a special credit, preferential rate of tax, or deferral of tax liability. return to topU Unfunded Mandates: A Federal Intergovernmental Mandate is any provision in legislation, statute, or regulation that would impose an enforceable duty upon State, local or tribal government, except as conditions of assistance or duties arising from participation in a voluntary federal program. Exceptions to this rule are: enforcing constitutional rights; statutory prohibitions against discrimination; emergency assistance requested by states; accounting/auditing for federal assistance; national security; Presidential designated emergencies; and Social Security. Provisions that increase stringency of conditions of assistance or decrease federal funding for large state entitlement programs (greater than $500 million) if states lack authority to decrease their responsibilities are considered mandates as well. A Federal Private Sector Mandate is any provision in legislation, statute, or regulation that would impose an enforceable duty upon the private sector. The exceptions are a condition of Federal assistance or a duty arising from participation in a voluntary Federal program. Unified Budget: A comprehensive display of the Federal budget. This display includes all revenues and all spending for all regular Federal programs and trust funds. The 1967 President’s Commission on Budget Concepts recommended the unified budget and it has been the basis for budgeting since 1968. The unified budget replaced a system of the budgets that existed before 1968 (an administrative budget, a consolidated cash budget, and a national income accounts budget). |
Budget Control Act
The Budget Control Act Serves as the Budget for 2012 and 2013
The Budget Control Act states: “For the purpose of enforcing the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 through April 15, 2012 … the allocations, aggregates, and levels set in subsection (b)(1) shall apply in the Senate in the same manner as for a concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2012.” In many ways, the Budget Control Act is even more extensive than a traditional budget resolution. Number one, it has the force of law, unlike a budget resolution that never goes to the President. A budget resolution is purely a Congressional document; the Budget Control Act is a law. Number two, it sets discretionary caps for 10 years, instead of the one year normally set in a budget resolution. Number three, it provides enforcement mechanisms, including two years of “deeming resolutions,” which allow budget points of order to be enforced. And fourth, it creates a reconciliation-like “Super Committee” process to address both entitlements and tax reform. And it backs that process up with a $1.2 trillion sequester.
Budget Control Act Legislative Text
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Tory! Tory! Tory! — Videos
Tory! Tory! Tory! – Ep 1: Outsiders – BBC 2007
Series exploring the history of the people and ideas behind what became known as Thatcherism. When Thatcher became Prime Minister, the monetarist policies used to combat inflation created large-scale unemployment and weakened the unions. As riots broke out across Britain, there was growing dissent even inside the government. How would Mrs Thatcher survive her plummeting popularity?
Tory! Tory! Tory! – Ep 2: The Road to Power – BBC 2007
Tory! Tory! Tory! – Ep 3: The Exercise of Power – BBC 2007
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Conservative savior of UK’s economy, Margaret Thatcher dead at 87
By Raymond Thomas Pronk
“Some Socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals. We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else, however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.”
~Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 10, 1975
Ceremonial funeral services with military honors for Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, known as Maggie to her friends and “the Iron Lady” to her opponents, will be held this Wednesday at St Paul’s Cathedral, according to Prime Minister David Cameron’s office.
Her legacy was to change her country’s dominant ideology from collectivist state socialism implemented in decades of Labour Party policies to an individualist market capitalism implemented in Conservative Party policies. In the process she returned the U.K. to eight years of economic growth and prosperity in the 1980s.
Thatcher supported President Ronald Reagan and the United States in defeating communism in the Soviet Union and winning the Cold War.
Thatcher had been in declining health for a number of years and died peacefully in her sleep the morning of April 8 following a stroke.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said of Thatcher, “As our first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds and the real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country, and I believe she’ll go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.”
President Barack Obama said, “The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty and America has lost a true friend.” Obama said she had taught “our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.”
John Boehner, speaker of the house, said, “The greatest peacetime prime minister in British history is dead. Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, stared down elites, union bosses and communists to win three consecutive elections, establish conservative principles in Western Europe and bring down the Iron Curtain. There was no secret to her values – hard work and personal responsibility – and no nonsense in her leadership.”
Nancy Reagan, widow of former President Ronald Reagan said: “Ronnie and Margaret were political soul mates, committed to freedom and resolved to end Communism. As Prime Minister, Margaret had the clear vision and strong determination to stand up for her beliefs at a time when so many were afraid to ‘rock the boat.’ As a result, she helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of millions of people.”
In 1975 Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party. She was subsequently elected prime minister of the United Kingdom on May 4, 1979. Thatcher served three terms from 1979 to 1990 becoming Britain’s longest-serving prime minister in over a century as well as the most dynamic, inspirational and controversial.
When Thatcher took office, the British economy was in shambles and in recession, inflation was rising and the government faced possible bankruptcy. This was a direct result of many years of Labour Party socialistic policies of out-of-control government spending, confiscatory taxation and the nationalization or state control of many industries including coal, steel, railways, gas, electricity, water, trucking, airlines and telecommunications.
The writings of Austrian economist and political philosopher, Friedrick A. Hayek, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Economics, in particular his book, “The Road to Serfdom”, inspired and guided Thatcher’s economic policies.
Thatcher turned the economy around and made Britain governable again by taking on and taming the trade unions with labor reform legislation. No longer were the unions able to dictate the nation’s economic policies. Under Thatcher the British government pursued a policy of selling state assets with privatization of industry, thus reversing the Labour Party’s nationalization of industry.
When the Argentina government under the fascist junta invaded the British protectorate of the Falkland Islands in April 1982, she led the U.K. to victory. The Argentinians soon toppled the military junta.
In October 1984 there was an assassination attempt on her life when a hotel in Brighton where she and her husband and other members of her cabinet were staying was bombed by Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists.
Thatcher supported Reagan in opposing communism and confronting the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. She was instrumental in the introduction of cruise missiles in Britain to counter the Soviet military threat. She allied the United Kingdom with the United States against the communist expansion and subversion in the West and the winning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
A concise biography of her life can be found at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation web site http://www.margaretthatcher.org/essential/biography.asp. An excellent critical biography is Claire Berlinsky’s “There is No Alternative: Why Thatcher Matters” and related interview on YouTube video titled, “Thatcher & More with Claire Berlinski.”
An excellent multi-part documentary about Thatcher produced in 2008 by the conservative paper, The Daily Telegraph, can be viewed on YouTube as well as an entertaining movie about her early political career titled, “Margaret Thatcher – The Long Walk to Finchley.”
Her husband of more than 50 years, Denis Thatcher, died in June 2003. She is survived by her twin son, Mark, and daughter, Carol, born in 1953.
Thatcher remains a controversial figure in Britain. She was loved and revered by many as well as loathed and reviled by some. She will be remembered by all who value economic freedom and individual liberty.
“Freedom to choose is something we take for granted—until it is in danger of being taken away. Socialist governments set out perpetually to restrict the area of choice, Conservative governments to increase it. We believe that you become a responsible citizen by making decisions yourself, not by having them made for you.”
~Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 10, 1975
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Speech to Conservative Party Conference
| Document type: | speeches |
|---|---|
| Document kind: | Speech |
| Venue: | Winter Gardens, Blackpool |
| Source: | Thatcher Archive: speaking text |
| Journalist: | - |
| Editorial comments: | 1045. MT spoke for 41 minute 16 seconds; the BBC Sound Archive has a complete recording. Evening Standard (10 October 1975) noted that the audience applauded every passage of the speech – not one was delivered without interruption. Parts of the text have been checked against material broadcast on ITN during the day. |
| Importance ranking: | Key |
| Word count: | 3722 |
| Themes: | Conservative Party (organisation), Autobiographical comments, Conservative Party (history), Economy (general discussions), Labour Party and Socialism, Economy (general discussions), Employment, Public spending and borrowing, Economy (general discussions), Labour Party and Socialism, Foreign policy (USSR and successor states), Foreign policy (Central and Eastern Europe), Economy (general discussions), Labour Party and Socialism, Higher and further education, Industry, Science and technology, Conservatism, Social security and welfare, Labour Party and Socialism, Industry, Conservatism, Labour Party and Socialism, Agriculture, Employment, Labour Party and Socialism, Conservatism, Secondary education, Health policy, Private health care, Labour Party and Socialism, Trade unions, British constitution (general discussions), Law and order, Labour Party and Socialism, Northern Ireland |
Note by MT: “Relax. Low Speaking Voice. Not too slow”.
The first Conservative Party Conference I attended was in 1946.
I came to it as an undergraduate representing Oxford University Conservative Association (I know our Cambridge supporters will not mind.) That Conference was held in this very hall and the platform then seemed a long way away, and I had no thought of joining the lofty and distinguished people sitting up there.
But our Party is the Party of equality of opportunity—as you can see. (Laughter).[fo 1]
You will understand, I know, the humility I feel at following in the footsteps of great men like our Leader that year, Winston Churchill a man called by destiny who raised the name of Britain to supreme heights in the history of the free world. (Applause).
In the footsteps of Anthony Eden , who set us the goal of a property-owning democracy—a goal we still pursue today.(Applause).
Of Harold Macmillan whose leadership brought so many ambitions within the grasp of every citizen. (Applause).[fo 2]
Of Alec Douglas-Home whose career of selfless public service earned the affection and admiration of us all. (Applause).
And of Edward Heath who successfully led the Party to victory in 1970 and brilliantly led the nation into Europe in 1973. (Applause).
During my lifetime, all the leaders of the Conservative Party have served as Prime Minister. I hope the habit will continue. (Laughter)
Our leaders have been different men with different qualities and different styles. But they have one thing in common. Each met the challenge-of-his-time.[fo 3]
What is the challenge of our time?
I believe there are two—to overcome the country’s economic and financial problems, and to regain our confidence in Britain and ourselves.
The Economic Challenge
The economic challenge has been debated at length in this hall.
Last week it gave rise to the usual scenes of cordial brotherly strife.[fo 4]
Day after day the comrades called one another far from comradely names, and occasionally, when they remembered, they called us names too.
Some of them, for example, suggested that I criticised Britain when I was overseas. They are wrong.
It wasn’t Britain I was criticising. It was-Socialism. (Applause).
And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain—and Britain and Socialism are not the same thing.[fo 5]
As long as I have health and strength, they never will be. (Applause).
But whatever could I say about Britain that is half as damaging as what this Labour Government have done to our country?
Let’s look at the record.
It is the Labour Government that have caused prices to rise at a record rate of 26 per cent a year.[fo 6]
They told us that the Social Contract would solve everything. But now everyone can see that the so-called contract was a fraud—a fraud for which the people of this country have had to pay a very high price.
It is the Labour Government whose policies are forcing unemployment higher than it need have been—thousands more men and women lose their jobs every day.
There are going to be men and women many of them youngsters straight out of school—who will be without a job this winter because Socialist Ministers spent last year attacking us, instead of attacking inflation.[fo 7]Beginning of section checked against ITN News at Ten, 10 October 1975:
And it’s the Labour Government that have brought the level of production below that of the 3-day week in 1974. W’ve really got a 3-day week now,—only it takes five days to do it. (Applause).
It’s the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease—they’ve run out of other people’s money. (Laughter).
And it’s the Labour Government that have pushed public spending to record levels.
And how’ve they done it? By borrowing, and borrowing and borrowing.
Never in the field of human credit has so much been owed. (Laughter).End of section checked against ITN News at Ten, 10 October 1975.[fo 8]
But serious as the economic challenge is, the political and moral challenge is just as grave, perhaps more so.
POLITICAL AND MORAL CHALLENGE
Economic problems never start with economics. They have deeper roots—in human nature and in politics.
They don’t finish at economics either.
Labour’s failure to cope, to look at the nation’s problems from the point of view of the whole nation, not just one section of it, has led to loss of confidence and a sense of helplessness.[fo 9]
With it goes a feeling that Parliament, which ought to be in charge, is not in charge—that the actions and the decisions are taken elsewhere.
And it goes deeper than that. There are voices that seem anxious not to overcome our economic difficulties, but to exploit them, to destroy the free enterprise society and put a Marxist system in its place.
Today those voices form a sizeable chorus in the Parliamentary Labour Party. A chorus which, aided and abetted by many Constituency Labour Parties, seems to be growing in numbers.[fo 10]
Anyone who says this openly is promptly accused of seeing Reds Under the Bed.
But look who’s seeing them now!
On his own admission, Mr Wilson has at last discovered that his own Party is infiltrated by extreme left-wingers—or to use his own words it is infested with them.
When even Mr Wilson gets scared about their success in capturing key positions in the Labour Party, shouldn’t the rest of us be?[fo 11]
And shouldn’t the rest of us ask him “Where have you been while all this has been going on, and what are you doing about it?” (Applause). The answer is nothing.
I sometimes think the Labour Party is like a pub where the mild is running out. If someone doesn’t do something soon, all that’s left will be bitter. (Laughter). And all that’s bitter will be Left. (Laughter).
Whenever I visit Communist countries, their politicians never hesitate to boast about their achievements.[fo 12]
They know them all by heart and reel off the facts and figures, claiming that this is the rich harvest of the Communist system.
Yet they are not prosperous as we in the West are prosperous, and they are not free as we in the West are free.
Our capitalist system produces a far higher standard of prosperity and happiness because it believes in incentive and opportunity, and because it is founded on human dignity and freedom. (Applause).[fo 13]
Even the Russians have to go to a capitalist country, America to buy enough wheat to feed their people. And that aftermore than 50 years of a State controlled economy.
Yet they boast incessantly while we, who have so much more to boast about, forever criticise and decry.
Isn’t it time we spoke up for our way of life? (Applause) After all, no Western nation has to build a wall round itself to keep its people in. (Applause).[fo 14]
So let us have no truck with those who say the free enterprise system has failed. What we face today is not a crisis of capital ism, but of Socialism. No country can flourish if its economic and social life is dominated by nationalisation and state control.
The cause of our shortcomings does not therefore lie in private enterprise. Our problem is not that we have too little socialism. It is that we have too much.
If only the Labour Party in this country would act like Social Democrats in West Germany. If only they would stop trying to prove their Socialist virility by relentlessly nationalising one industry after another.[fo 15]
Of course, a halt to further State control will not on its own restore our belief in ourselves, because something else is happening to this country. We are witnessing a deliberate attack on our values, a deliberate attack on those who wish to promote merit and excellence, a deliberate attack on our heritage and great past. (Applause).Beginning of section checked against ITN News at Ten, 10 October 1975:
And there are those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure.
As days of hopelessness—not Days of Hope.[fo 16]
And others, under the shelter of our education system, are ruthlessly attacking the minds of the young. Everyone who believes in freedom must be appalled at the tactics employed by the far Left in the systematic destruction of the North London Polytechnic. (Applause).
Blatant tactics of intimidation, designed to undermine the fundamental beliefs and values of every student.
Tactics pursued by people who are the first to insist on their own civil rights while seeking to deny them to the rest of us. We must not be bullied and brainwashed out of our beliefs. (Applause).[fo 17]
No wonder so many of our people—some of the best and brightest—are depressed and talk of emigrating.
Even so, I think they are wrong at giving up too soon. Many of the things we hold dear are threatened as never before, but none has yet been lost.
So stay here. (Applause). Stay and help us defeat Socialism, so that the Britain you have known may be the Britain your children will know. (Applause).End of section checked against ITN News at Ten, 10 October 1975.[fo 18]
Those are the two great challenges of our time.
The moral and political challenge, and the economic challenge.
They have to be faced together—and we have to master them both.
POTENTIAL
What are our chances of success? It depends what kind of people we are. Well, what kind of people are we?[fo 19]
We are the people that in the past made Great Britain the Workshop of the World. The people who persuaded others to buy British not by begging them to do so, but because it was best.
We are a people who have received more Nobel prizes than any other nation except America, and head for head we have done better than America. Twice as well, in fact.
We are the people who, among other things, invented the computer, refrigerator, electric motor, stethoscope, rayon, steam turbine, stainless steel, the tank, television, penicillin, radar, jet engine, hovercraft, float glass and carbonfibres. Oh, and the best half of Concorde. (Laughter).[fo 20]
We export more of what we produce than either West Germany, France, Japan or the United States.
And well over 90%; of these exports come from private enterprise. It’s a triumph for the private sector and all who work in it. Let us say so, loud and clear. (Applause).
With achievements like that who can doubt that Britain can have a great future? What our friends abroad want to know is whether that future is going to happen.
Well, how can we Conservatives make it happen?[fo 21]
Many of the details have already been dealt with in the various debates. But policies and programmes should not be just a list of unrelated items. They are part of a total vision of the kind of life we want for our country and our children. [Beginning of section checked against ITN Early Evening News, 10 October 1975] Let me give you my vision.
THE FREE SOCIETY AND THE ECONOMY
A man’s right to work as he will to spend what he earns to own property to have the State as servant and not as master these are the British inheritance.
They are the essence of a free economy. And on that freedom all our other freedoms depend. (Applause).End of section checked against ITN Early Evening News, 10 October 1975.[fo 22]
But we want a free economy, not only because it guarantees our liberties, but also because it is the best way of creating wealth and prosperity for the whole country.
It is this prosperity alone which can give us the resources for better services for the community, better services for those in need. (Applause).
By their attack on private enterprise, this Labour Government have made certain that there will be next to nothing available for improvements in our social services over the next few years.[fo 23]
We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery, not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped.
The way to recovery is through profits. Good profits today, leading to high investment, well-paid jobs and a better standard of living tomorrow. (Applause).
No profits mean no investment, and a dying industry geared to yesterday’s world.
Other nations have recognised that for years now. They are going ahead faster than we are; and the gap between us will continue to increase unless we change our ways.[fo 24]
The trouble here is that for years the Labour Party have made people feel that profits are guilty-unless proved innocent.
But when I visit factories and businesses I do not find that those who actually work in them are against profits. On the contrary, they want to work for a prosperous concern. With a future—their future. (Applause).
Governments must learn to leave these companies with enough of their own profits to produce the goods and jobs for tomorrow.
If the Socialists won’t or can’t there will be no profit making industry left to support the losses caused by fresh bouts of nationalisation.[fo 25]
And if anyone says I am preaching laissez-faire, let me say this.
I am not arguing, and never have argued, that all we have to do is to let the economy run by itself.
I believe that, just as each of us has an obligation to make the best of his talents so governments have an obligation to create the framework within which we can do so. Not only individual people, but individual firms and particularly small firms. (Applause).
Some of these will stay small but others will expand and become the great companies of the future.[fo 26]
The Labour Government have pursued a disastrous vendetta against small businesses and the self-employed. We will reverse their damaging policies. (Applause).
Nowhere is this more important than in Agriculture—one of our most successful industries made up entirely of small businesses. We live in a world in which food is no longer cheap or plentiful. Everything we cannot produce here must be imported at a high price.
Yet the Government could not have destroyed the confidence of the industry more effectively if they had tried deliberately to do so, with their formula of empty promises and penal taxation.[fo 27]
So today what is the picture? Depressed profits, low investment, no incentive, and overshadowing everything government spending, spending far beyond the taxpayers means. (Applause).
To recover, to get from where we are to where we want to be, will take time.
“Economic policy” wrote Maynard Keynes “should not be a matter of tearing up by the roots but of slowly training a plant to grow in a different direction.”[fo 28]
It will take time to reduce public spending, rebuild profits and incentives, to benefit from the investments which must be made. The sooner that time starts, the better for Britain’s unemployed.
One of the reasons why this Labour Government has incurred more unemployment than any Conservative Government since the War is because they have concentrated too much on distributing what we have, and too little on seeing that we have more. (Applause).[fo 29]
We Conservatives hate unemployment.
We hate the idea of men and women not being able to use their abilities. We deplore the waste of national resources, and the deep affront to peoples’ dignity from being out of work through no fault of their own. (Applause).
It is ironic that we should be accused of wanting unemployment to solve our economic problems by the very Government which has produced a record post-War unemployment, and is expecting more.[fo 30]
The record of Mr Wilson and his colleagues on this is unparallelled in the history of political hypocricy.
We are now seeing the full consequences of nearly twenty months of Labour Government.
They have done the wrong things at the wrong time in the wrong way.
They have been a disaster for this country.[fo 31]
EQUALITY
Now let me turn to something I spoke about in America.
Some Socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals.
We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else, however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise.
We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.[fo 32]
Engineers, miners, manual workers, shop assistants, farm workers, postmen, housewives—these are the essential foundations of our society. Without them there would be no nation. (Applause).
But their are others with special gifts who should also have their chance, because if the adventurers who strike out in new directions in science, technology, medicine, commerce and industry the arts are hobbled, there can be no advance.
The spirit of envy can destroy. It can never build.[fo 33]
Everyone must be allowed to develop the abilities he knows he has within him, and she knows she has within her, in the way they choose.
CHOICE
Freedom to choose is something we take for granted—until it is in danger of being taken away.
Socialist governments set out perpetually to restrict the area of choice, Conservative governments to increase it.
We believe that you become a responsible citizen by making decisions yourself, not by having them made for you.[fo 34]
But they are made for you under Labour all right.
Take education.
Beginning of section checked against ITN News at Ten, 10 October 1975:
Our education system used to serve us well. A child from an ordinary family, as I was, could use it as a ladder as an advancement.
But the Socialists are better at demolition than reconstruction, are destroying many good grammar schools.
Now this is nothing to do with private education. It’s opportunity and excellence in our State schools that are being diminished under Socialism.
And naturally enough, parents don’t like this. But in a Socialist society parents should be seen and not heard. (Laughter).[fo 35]
And another denial of choice is being applied to health.
The private sector helps to keep some of our best doctors here, and so are available part time to the National Health Service. It also helps to bring in more money for the general health of the nation.
But under Labour, private medicine is being squeezed out, and the result will be to add to the burden on the National Health Service without adding one penny to its income.[fo 36]
Let me make this absolutely clear.
When we return to power we shall reverse Mrs Castle ‘s stupid and spiteful attack on hospital pay beds. (Applause).
We Conservatives do not accept that because some people have no choice, no one should have it.
Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, not as the Government dictates.End of section checked against ITN News at Ten, 10 October 1975.
Let us extend choice, the will to choose and the chance to choose.[fo 37]
TRADE UNIONS
I want to come now to the argument which Mr Wilson is trying to put across the country: namely that the Labour Party is the natural party of Government because it is the only one that the Trade Unions will accept.
From what I saw on television last week, the Labour Party did not look like a party of Government at all, let alone a natural one.
But let’s examine the argument.Beginning of section checked against ITN First Report, 10 October 1975
If we are to be told that a Conservative Government could not govern because certain extreme leaders would not let it, then General Elections are a mockery we’ve arrived at[fo 38] the one party state, and parliamentary democracy in this country will have perished. (Applause).
The democracy for which our fathers fought and died is not to be laid to rest as lightly as that.
When the next Conservative Government comes to power many Trade Unionists will have put it there. Millions of them vote for us at every Election.
I want to say this to them, and to every one of our supporters in industry.[fo 39]
Go out and join in the work of your Union.
Go to its meetings—and stay to the end.
Learn the Union rules as well as the Far Left know them, and remember this. If Parliamentary democracy dies, free Trade Unions die with it. (Applause).End of section checked against ITN First Report, 10 October 1975.[fo 40]
RULE OF LAW
I come last to what many would put first. The Rule of Law.
The first people to uphold the law should be governments. It is tragic that the Socialist Government, to its lasting shame, should have lost its nerve and shed its principles over the People’s Republic of Clay Cross. And that a group of the Labour Party should have tried to turn the Shrewsbury pickets into martyrs.
On both occasions the law was broken. On one, violence was done.[fo 41]No decent society can live like that. No responsible party should condone it. (Applause).
The first duty of Government is to uphold the law. If it tries to bob and weave and duck around that duty when its inconvenient, if government does that, then so will the governed, and then nothing is safe—not home, not liberty, not life itself.
There is one part of this country where tragically defiance of the law is costing life day after day.[fo 42]
In Northern Ireland our troops have the dangerous and thankless task of trying to keep the peace and hold the balance. We are proud of the way they have discharged their duty.
This Party is pledged to support the unity of the United Kingdom. To preserve that unity and to protect the people, Catholic and Protestant alike, we believe that our armed forces must remain until a genuine peace is made.
Our thoughts are with them, and our pride is with them too. (Applause).[fo 43]
I have spoken of the challenges that face us here in Britain. The challenge to recover economically. The challenge to recover our belief in ourselves.
I have shown our potential for recovery.
I have dealt with some aspects of our strength and approach.
And I have tried to tell you something of my personal vision, my belief in the standards on which this nation was greatly built, on which it greatly thrived, and from which in recent years it has greatly fallen away.[fo 44]
We are coming, I think, to yet another turning point in our long history.
We can go on as we have been going and continue down.
Or we can stop—and with a decisive act of will we can say “Enough”.
Let us, all of us, here today and others, far beyond this hall who believe in our cause make that act of will.
Let us proclaim our faith in a new and better future for our Party and our people.[fo 45]
Let us resolve to heal the wounds of a divided nation.
And let that act of healing be the prelude to a lasting victory. (Prolonged applause).
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102777
Note by MT: “It’s over!”
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Excellence in Action — Strategies Sessions — Videos
Breakfast Keynote: Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education
Strategy Session 1: Reaching More Students with Vouchers and Tax-credit Scholarships
Whether you are an advocate of education vouchers for all or believe special scholarships should be reserved for students in failing schools, the debate on school choice is one that matters. States across the country are enacting new reforms and expanding those that already exist to ensure vouchers and tax-credit scholarships reach the kids who need them the most. Join these state lawmakers as they discuss strategies to keep up with the growing demand from families for quality school choice options.
Moderator: John Kirtley, Chairman of Step Up for Students and vice chairman of the Alliance for School Choice and the American Federation for Children
Panelists: Conrad Appel, Louisiana State Senator Algie Howell, Virginia State Delegate Jason Nelson, Oklahoma State Representative Bill O’Brien, New Hampshire State Representative
Strategy Session 2: Implementing Bold Teacher-Effectiveness Reform
Over the past few years, states across the country have passed reforms linking student-learning data to teacher evaluations. Now, leaders have entered the critical phase of putting the reforms into practice at the local level. Learn how these education chiefs are developing assessments and evaluation systems in their respective states to measure hard-to-test areas and elevate educators’ professional development.
Moderator: Hanna Skandera, New Mexico Secretary-Designate of Public Education and Vice-Chair of Chiefs for Change
Panelists: Kevin Huffman, Tennessee Commissioner of Education Jill Hawley, Colorado Associate Commissioner for Achievement and Strategy Dr. Diane Ullman, Chief Talent Officer for the Connecticut State Department of Education
Strategy Session 3: Accountability-Based Flexibility for School Districts
Across the nation, crisis situations are giving birth to new, student-centered learning models. In the midst of challenging economic times and a national focus on improving the quality of education, a new kind of school district is emerging — one with both autonomy and performance-based accountability. Learn how some of our nation’s most troubled school districts are challenging a conventional structure to change the futures of their students, schools and cities.
Moderator: Dr. Paul Hill, Founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education
Panelists: David Harris, Founder and CEO of The Mind Trust John White, Louisiana Superintendent of Education Tyrone Winfrey, Chief of Staff of the Michigan Education Achievement Authority
Strategy Session 4: How to Prepare for Common Core Assessments
The state-led transition to Common Core State Standards will change the expectation of what students need to be learning and is aligned with what they’ll need for success after high school in our changing world. The pressure is on for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to deliver new online assessments and for schools to build the technology infrastructure they’ll need to use those assessments. The Common Core transition brings individual opportunities for states but also challenges. Meanwhile, many state leaders are preparing parents, teachers and communities for the initial results which will likely follow new standards and assessments. Join this panel to discuss specific strategies states and districts can take to ensure everyone and everything is prepared to transition to these new assessments.
Moderator: Governor Bob Wise, President of Alliance for Excellent Education
Panelists: Dr. Tony Bennett, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction and Chairman of Chiefs for Change Steve Bowen, Maine Commissioner of Education Laura McGiffert Slover, Senior Vice President of Achieve Dr. Joe Willhoft, Executive Director of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
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Strategy Session 5: Transforming Colleges of Education
Nine out of every ten teachers graduate from traditional teacher prep programs at colleges of education. Should these colleges be held accountable for the caliber of students they admit into their programs and the teachers they send into the classroom? Don’t miss this discussion on what can be done to ensure new teachers entering the profession are fully equipped to help each of their students succeed.
Moderator: Kate Walsh, President of the National Council on Teacher Quality
Panelists: Dr. John Chubb, CEO of Education Sector and member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education Paul Pastorek, former Louisiana Superintendent of Education
Strategy Session 6: Charter Schools: Accountability and Funding
With over 40 states now authorizing charter schools, the potential for innovation continues to grow. Each state serves as a testing site for diverse approaches to approving, funding and maintaining the accountability of these unique public schools. Learn the best policies states are using to shape high-quality charter schools across the nation.
Moderator: Jeanne Allen, President of the Center for Education Reform
Panelists: Todd Huston, Indiana State Representative Peggy Lehner, Ohio State Senator Nina Rees, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools James H. Shelton III, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education
Strategy Session 7: Thinking Outside the School-Zone Box
From coast to coast, states are proving there is more than one way to provide families with school choice options. Many are developing new strategies to empower parents with the ability to choose the public school that is best for their child. Listen to these battle-proven leaders share lessons learned and strategies to expand public school choice programs and remove barriers limiting students’ education options.
Moderator: Mike Petrilli, Executive Vice President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Panelists: Matthew Barnes, Executive Director of Families Empowered John Huppenthal, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Luther Olsen, Wisconsin State Senator
Strategy Session 8: College & Career Readiness
State leaders are facing a desperate call to action: just one-third of America’s high school students graduate with the knowledge and skills they’ll need to succeed in college. This tragic reality calls for rigorous standards and innovative policies, ones that incentivize acceleration and launch students into college or gainful employment. It’s time to give students the opportunity to advance to college or careers as soon as they are ready, even if that’s earlier that the traditional K-12 calendar allows. Get the details on what methods states are using to prepare our youngest generation to thrive in today’s competitive global economy.
Moderator: Laysha Ward, President of Community Relations and the Target Foundation
Panelists: David Abbott, Deputy Commissioner and General Counsel at the Rhode Island Department of Education Russell Armstrong, Education and Workforce Policy Advisor to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal Joe Pickens, President of St. Johns River State College Kelli Stargel, Florida State Senator
Strategy Session 9: Developing and Retaining Teachers We Can’t Afford to Lose
A teacher’s influence — good or bad — can have life-long effects on the students in his or her classroom. Hear new research on the teacher-retention crisis, and join the ensuing discussion on what can be done to develop and retain the high-quality educators our states need to reverse student decline and elevate the status of the teaching profession.
Moderator: Dr. Stefanie Sanford, Director of Policy & Advocacy, United States Program, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Panelists: Tim Daly, President of the New Teacher Project Christopher Cerf, New Jersey Commissioner of Education Gary Holder-Winfield, Connecticut State Representative
Strategy Session 10: The Florida Formula for Student Achievement
More than a dozen years ago, Florida embarked on a path to reverse a generation of decline in its public schools by forcing the system to focus on the student instead of the adult. Since then, Florida’s formula of high expectations for students, accountability for schools, choices for families and rewards for progress has yielded incredible gains in student learning. In the eight-year period prior to the reforms, graduation rates had declined by nearly seven percent, but since the reforms were put in place, graduation rates have increased by 20 percent. Education in the Sunshine State is now a model for the nation, inspiring leaders to strategically and boldly transform public education. Learn how Florida’s formula can transform student achievement for any state.
Moderator: Julia Johnson, President of Net Communications and former member of Florida’s Board of Education
Panelists: Dr. Christy Hovanetz, Senior Policy Fellow at the Foundation for Excellence in Education Dr. Matthew Ladner, Senior Advisor on Policy and Research to the Foundation for Excellence in Education
Strategy Session 11: Transforming Education for the Digital Age
Last year, Digital Learning Now! released “The Roadmap for Reform: Digital Learning,” a guide providing governors, lawmakers and policymakers with the nuts-and-bolts policies to transition to student-centered education. Now, states are changing the face of education by introducing blended learning models that combine the best of face-to-face instruction with the best of online learning. Hear state and school leaders share what they are doing — and what is yet to be done — to harness the power of technology and provide students with rigorous, high-quality, customized education.
Moderator: John Bailey, Executive Director of Digital Learning Now!
Panelists: Dr. Janet Barresi, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Mark Edwards, Superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District Pam Myhra, Minnesota State Representative Governor Bev Perdue, North Carolina Chip Rogers, Majority Leader of the Georgia State Senate
General Session: Common Core State Standards
Moderator: Governor Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida from 1999-2007 and Chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education
Panelists: David Coleman, President and CEO of the College Board Bob Corcoran, President and Chairman of the GE Foundation Dr. William Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, Minnesota State Representative
Lunch Keynote: Mitch Daniels, Indiana Governor
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DAVID STOCKMAN: We’ve Been Lied To, Robbed, And Misled
hen, when the Fed’s fire hoses started spraying an elephant soup of liquidity injections in every direction and its balance sheet grew by $1.3 trillion in just thirteen weeks compared to $850 billion during its first ninety-four years, I became convinced that the Fed was flying by the seat of its pants, making it up as it went along. It was evident that its aim was to stop the hissy fit on Wall Street and that the thread of a Great Depression 2.0 was just a cover story for a panicked spree of money printing that exceeded any other episode in recorded human history.
David Stockman, The Great Deformation
David Stockman, former director of the OMB under President Reagan, former US Representative, and veteran financier is an insider’s insider. Few people understand the ways in which both Washington DC and Wall Street work and intersect better than he does.
In his upcoming book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America [37], Stockman lays out how we have devolved from a free market economy into a managed one that operates for the benefit of a privileged few. And when trouble arises, these few are bailed out at the expense of the public good.
By manipulating the price of money through sustained and historically low interest rates, Greenspan and Bernanke created an era of asset mis-pricing that inevitably would need to correct. And when market forces attempted to do so in 2008, Paulson et al hoodwinked the world into believing the repercussions would be so calamitous for all that the institutions responsible for the bad actions that instigated the problem needed to be rescued — in full — at all costs.
Of course, history shows that our markets and economy would have been better off had the system been allowed to correct. Most of the “too big to fail” institutions would have survived or been broken into smaller, more resilient, entities. For those that would have failed, smaller, more responsible banks would have stepped up to replace them – as happens as part of the natural course of a free market system:
Essentially there was a cleansing run on the wholesale funding market in the canyons of Wall Street going on. It would have worked its will, just like JP Morgan allowed it to happen in 1907 when we did not have the Fed getting in the way. Because they stopped it in its tracks after the AIG bailout and then all the alphabet soup of different lines that the Fed threw out, and then the enactment of TARP, the last two investment banks standing were rescued, Goldman and Morgan [Stanley], and they should not have been. As a result of being rescued and having the cleansing liquidation of rotten balance sheets stopped, within a few weeks and certainly months they were back to the same old games, such that Goldman Sachs got $10 billion dollars for the fiscal year that started three months later after that check went out, which was October 2008. For the fiscal 2009 year, Goldman Sachs generated what I call a $29 billion surplus – $13 billion of net income after tax, and on top of that $16 billion of salaries and bonuses, 95% of it which was bonuses.
Therefore, the idea that they were on death’s door does not stack up. Even if they had been, it would not make any difference to the health of the financial system. These firms are supposed to come and go, and if people make really bad bets, if they have a trillion dollar balance sheet with six, seven, eight hundred billion dollars worth of hot-money short-term funding, then they ought to take their just reward, because it would create lessons, it would create discipline. So all the new firms that would have been formed out of the remnants of Goldman Sachs where everybody lost their stock values – which for most of these partners is tens of millions, hundreds of millions – when they formed a new firm, I doubt whether they would have gone back to the old game. What happened was the Fed stopped everything in its tracks, kept Goldman Sachs intact, the reckless Goldman Sachs and the reckless Morgan Stanley, everyone quickly recovered their stock value and the game continues. This is one of the evils that comes from this kind of deep intervention in the capital and money markets.
Stockman’s anger at the unnecessary and unfair capital transfer from taxpayer to TBTF bank is matched only by his concern that, even with those bailouts, the banking system is still unacceptably vulnerable to a repeat of the same crime:
The banks quickly worked out their solvency issues because the Fed basically took it out of the hides of Main Street savers and depositors throughout America. When the Fed panicked, it basically destroyed the free-market interest rate – you cannot have capitalism, you cannot have healthy financial markets without an interest rate, which is the price of money, the price of capital that can freely measure and reflect risk and true economic prospects.
Well, once you basically unplug the pricing mechanism of a capital market and make it entirely an administered rate by the Fed, you are going to cause all kinds of deformations as I call them, or mal-investments as some of the Austrians used to call them, that basically pollutes and corrupts the system. Look at the deposit rate right now, it is 50 basis points, maybe 40, for six months. As a result of that, probably $400-500 billion a year is being transferred as a fiscal maneuver by the Fed from savers to the banks. They are collecting the spread, they’ve then booked the profits, they’ve rebuilt their book net worth, and they paid back the TARP basically out of what was thieved from the savers of America.
Now they go down and pound the table and whine and pout like JP Morgan and the rest of them, you have to let us do stock buy backs, you have to let us pay out dividends so we can ramp our stock and collect our stock option winnings. It is outrageous that the authorities, after the so-called “near death experience” of 2008 and this massive fiscal safety net and monetary safety net was put out there, is allowing them to pay dividends and to go into the market and buy back their stock. They should be under house arrest in a sense that every dime they are making from this artificial yield group being delivered by the Fed out of the hides of savers should be put on their balance sheet to build up retained earnings, to build up a cushion. I do not care whether it is fifteen or twenty or twenty-five percent common equity and retained earnings-to-assets or not, that is what we should be doing if we are going to protect the system from another raid by these people the next time we get a meltdown, which can happen at any time.
You can see why I talk about corruption, why crony capitalism is so bad. I mean, the Basel capital standards, they are a joke. We are just allowing the banks to go back into the same old game they were playing before. Everybody said the banks in late 2007 were the greatest thing since sliced bread. The market cap of the ten largest banks in America, including from Bear Stearns all the way to Citibank and JP Morgan and Goldman and so forth, was $1.25 trillion. That was up thirty times from where the predecessors of those institutions had been. Only in 1987, when Greenspan took over and began the era of bubble finance – slowly at first then rapidly, eventually, to have the market cap grow thirty times – and then on the eve of the great meltdown see the $1.25 trillion to market cap disappear, vanish, vaporize in panic in September 2008. Only a few months later, $1 trillion of that market cap disappeared in to the abyss and panic, and Bear Stearns is going down, and all the rest.
This tells you the system is dramatically unstable. In a healthy financial system and a free capital market, if I can put it that way, you are not going to have stuff going from nowhere to @1.2 trillion and then back to a trillion practically at the drop of a hat. That is instability; that is a case of a medicated market that is essentially very dangerous and is one of the many adverse consequences and deformations that result from the central-bank dominated, corrupt monetary system that has slowly built up ever since Nixon closed the gold window, but really as I say in my book, going back to 1933 in April when Roosevelt took all the private gold. So we are in a big dead-end trap, and they are digging deeper every time you get a new maneuver.
Reagan Adviser Stockman Warns of Crash From ‘Unsustainable’ Fed-Fueled Bubble
The U.S. economy is in a bubble inflated by “phony money” from the Federal Reserve and will burst within a few years, warned David Stockman, who was budget director for President Ronald Reagan.
In an essay published in the New York Times, Stockman wrote that the Fed’s quantitative easing policies in the aftermath of the credit crisis have flooded stock markets with cash even while the “Main Street economy” remains weak. The combination, he wrote, is “unsustainable.”
“When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008,” wrote Stockman, a former senior managing director at Blackstone Group LP and a former Republican congressman from Michigan.
“Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.”
Stockman, 66, is the author of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,” which will be published April 2.
The Fed, led by Ben S. Bernanke, is purchasing $85 billion in assets every month. The Fed is leaving its key interest rate near zero while it tries to reduce unemployment below 6.5 percent and hold inflation below 2.5 percent.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose to an all-time high last week, closing at 1,569.19 on March 28. That surpassed the previous record of 1,565.15 set in October 2007. U.S. stock markets were closed March 29 for the Good Friday holiday.
Gold Standard
Among the other culprits Stockman blamed for what he termed a “state-wreck” are President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for weakening the gold standard in 1933, President Richard Nixon for removing the convertibility of dollars to gold and “lapsed hero” Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, for keeping interest rates too low for too long.
Investors will sell, Stockman wrote, at any hint that the Fed is starting to remove assets from its balance sheet.
“Notwithstanding Bernanke’s assurances about eventually, gradually making a smooth exit, the Fed is domiciled in a monetary prison of its own making,” he wrote, warning of unsustainable fiscal policies as well. “These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen.”
Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist, responded on his blog yesterday, saying that he was “disappointed” in Stockman’s “gee-whiz, context- and model-free numbers embedded in a rant — and not even an interesting rant.”
Krugman called Stockman’s piece “cranky old man stuff,” and summarized it this way:
“We’ve been doomed, yes doomed, ever since FDR took us off the gold standard and introduced unemployment insurance. What about those 80 years of non-doom? Just a series of lucky accidents. Now we’re really doomed. I mean it!”
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.moneynews.com/StreetTalk/reagan-stockman-fed-disaster/2013/04/01/id/497179?s=al&promo_code=12FD5-1#ixzz2PGkRF765
Supreme Court Hears Gay Marriage Oral Arguments — Videos
Supreme Court Hears Gay Marriage Oral Arguments
By Raymond Thomas Pronk
The traditional definition of marriage as a union between a man and woman held by a majority of Americans is being challenged by a growing minority who want to expand the definition of marriage by including gay or same-sex couples.
In November 2008 California voters approved the Proposition 8 ballot initiative, which amended the state constitution and states that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Subsequently, the United States District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have found Proposition 8’s ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional.
On March 26, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry (formerly Perry v. Schwarzenegger, initially, and then Perry v. Brown) regarding the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8.
Below are some of the highlights of the justices’ questions and remarks:
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia
“When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?”
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor
“Outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits or imposing burdens on them? Is there any other rational decision-making that the government could make? Denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort, any other decision?”
Associate Justice Elena Kagan
“Suppose a state said that, Because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55. Would that be constitutional?”
Associate Justice Samuel Alito
“You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cellphones or the Internet? I mean we — we are not — we do not have the ability to see the future.”
Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy
“There’s substance to the point that sociological information is new. We have five years of information to weigh against 2,000 years of history or more.”
Chief Justice John Roberts
“I’m not sure that it’s right to view this as excluding a particular group. When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn’t get around and say, ‘Let’s have this institution, but let’s keep out homosexuals.’ The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.”
The oral arguments can be heard in their entirety on the YouTube video titled “Gay Marriage Supreme Court Oral Arguments.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in the case is expected in June.
Raymond Thomas Pronk is host of the Pronk Pops Show on KDUX web radio from 3-5 p.m. Fridays and author of the companion blog http://www.pronkpops.wordpress.com/
Audio Excerpts of High Court Gay Marriage Case
Supreme Court Proposition 8 Case Arguments Cast Doubt On Gay Marriage Ban
Supreme Court Hears Prop. 8 Case (Full Audio)
Gay marriage was heard before the Supreme Court, which heard arguments on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, that defined marriage between one man and one woman. The proposition was approved by California’s voters in the 2008 General Election, but struck down later by the district court.
The basic history of how the case came to the court:
Hollingsworth v. Perry (formerly Perry v. Schwarzenegger, initially, and then Perry v. Brown) is a case currently before the United States Supreme Court, on appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. There, a three judge appellate panel held that California’s Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to allow only opposite-sex couples to marry, was unconstitutional. Lawsuits challenging Proposition 8 were filed in state and federal courts nearly immediately after the initiative’s passage. In Strauss v. Horton (2009), the California Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 8 was a valid enactment under California law. However, in August 2010, Judge Vaughn Walker of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Proposition 8 violated the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The judgment was stayed pending appeal. On February 7, 2012, a divided three judge panel of the Ninth Circuit upheld the decision of the district court, though it did so on much narrower grounds than the District Court did. On June 5, 2012, the Ninth Circuit denied a request for a rehearing en banc. The proponents of Proposition 8 appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court on July 31, 2012. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case by granting a writ of certiorari on December 7, 2012. Oral arguments were heard on March 26, 2013.
The full case:
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Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2011
In 2011, 73.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.1 percent of all wage and salary workers.1 Among those paid by the hour, 1.7 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.2 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.8 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 5.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers. Tables 1 through 10 present data on a wide array of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics for hourly-paid workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage. The following are some highlights from the 2011 data.
- Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly-paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 23 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 3 percent of workers age 25 and over. (See table 1 and table 7.)
- About 6 percent of women paid hourly rates had wages at or below the prevailing Federal minimum, compared with about 4 percent of men. (See table 1.)
- About 5 percent of White hourly-paid workers earned the Federal minimum wage or less, compared with about 6 percent of Blacks and about 3 percent of Asians. Among hourly-paid workers of Hispanic ethnicity, about 5 percent earned the minimum wage or less. (See table 1.)
- Among hourly-paid workers age 16 and over, about 11 percent of those who had less than a high school diploma earned the Federal minimum wage or less, compared with about 5 percent of those who had a high school diploma (with no college) and about 2 percent of college graduates. (See table 6.)
- Never-married workers, who tend to be young, were more likely than married workers to earn the Federal minimum wage or less (about 9 percent versus about 2 percent). (See table 8.)
- Part-time workers (persons who usually work less than 35 hours per week) were more likely than full-time workers to be paid the Federal minimum wage or less (about 13 percent versus about 2 percent). (See table 1 and table 9.)
- By major occupational group, the highest proportion of hourly-paid workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage was in service occupations, at 13 percent. About 6 in 10 workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2011 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving related jobs. (See table 4.)
- The industry with the highest proportion of workers with hourly wages at or below the Federal minimum wage was leisure and hospitality (22 percent). About one-half of all workers paid at or below the Federal minimum wage were employed in this industry, primarily in restaurants and other food services. For many of these workers, tips and commissions supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 5.)
- The states with the highest proportions of hourly-paid workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage were Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas (all between 8 and 10 percent). The states with the lowest percentage of workers earning at or below the Federal minimum wage were Oregon, California, Washington, and Alaska (all under 2 percent). It should be noted that some states have minimum wage laws establishing standards that exceed the Federal minimum wage. (See table 2 and table 3.)
- The proportion of hourly-paid workers earning the prevailing Federal minimum wage or less declined from 6.0 percent in 2010 to 5.2 percent in 2011. This remains well below the figure of 13.4 percent in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis. (See table 10.)
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). These data on minimum wage earners are derived from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly nationwide survey of households. Data in this summary are 2011 annual averages.
1 Data are for wage and salary workers age 16 and over and refer to earnings on a person’s sole or principal job. Hourly earnings for hourly-paid workers do not include overtime pay, commissions, or tips received. All self-employed persons are excluded whether or not their businesses are incorporated.
2 The presence of a sizable number of workers with wages below the Federal minimum does not necessarily indicate violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, as there are exemptions to the minimum wage provisions of the law. The estimates of the numbers of minimum and subminimum wage workers presented in the accompanying tables pertain to workers paid at hourly rates; salaried and other non-hourly workers are excluded. As such, the actual number of workers with earnings at or below the prevailing Federal minimum is undoubtedly understated. Research has shown that a relatively small number and share of salaried workers and others not paid by the hour have earnings that, when translated into hourly rates, are at or below the minimum wage. However, BLS does not routinely estimate hourly earnings for non-hourly workers because of data concerns that arise in producing these estimates.
Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2011, Tables 1 – 10
Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2011 (PDF)
| Characteristic | Number of workers (in thousands) |
Percent distribution | Percent of workers paid hourly rates | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total paid hourly rates | At or below minimum wage | Total paid hourly rates | At or below minimum wage | At or below minimum wage | |||||||
| Total | At minimum wage | Below minimum wage | Total | At minimum wage | Below minimum wage | Total | At minimum wage | Below minimum wage | |||
| AGE AND SEX | |||||||||||
| Total, 16 years and over | 73,926 | 3,829 | 1,677 | 2,152 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 5.2 | 2.3 | 2.9 |
| 16 to 24 years | 14,436 | 1,896 | 893 | 1,003 | 19.5 | 49.5 | 53.2 | 46.6 | 13.1 | 6.2 | 6.9 |
| 16 to 19 years | 3,936 | 899 | 491 | 408 | 5.3 | 23.5 | 29.3 | 19.0 | 22.8 | 12.5 | 10.4 |
| 25 years and over | 59,490 | 1,933 | 784 | 1,149 | 80.5 | 50.5 | 46.8 | 53.4 | 3.2 | 1.3 | 1.9 |
| Men, 16 years and over | 36,457 | 1,433 | 648 | 785 | 49.3 | 37.4 | 38.6 | 36.5 | 3.9 | 1.8 | 2.2 |
| 16 to 24 years | 7,290 | 787 | 388 | 399 | 9.9 | 20.6 | 23.1 | 18.5 | 10.8 | 5.3 | 5.5 |
| 16 to 19 years | 1,872 | 373 | 212 | 161 | 2.5 | 9.7 | 12.6 | 7.5 | 19.9 | 11.3 | 8.6 |
| 25 years and over | 29,167 | 647 | 260 | 387 | 39.5 | 16.9 | 15.5 | 18.0 | 2.2 | 0.9 | 1.3 |
| Women, 16 years and over | 37,469 | 2,395 | 1,029 | 1,366 | 50.7 | 62.5 | 61.4 | 63.5 | 6.4 | 2.7 | 3.6 |
| 16 to 24 years | 7,147 | 1,109 | 505 | 604 | 9.7 | 29.0 | 30.1 | 28.1 | 15.5 | 7.1 | 8.5 |
| 16 to 19 years | 2,064 | 526 | 279 | 247 | 2.8 | 13.7 | 16.6 | 11.5 | 25.5 | 13.5 | 12.0 |
| 25 years and over | 30,323 | 1,286 | 524 | 762 | 41.0 | 33.6 | 31.2 | 35.4 | 4.2 | 1.7 | 2.5 |
| RACE, SEX, AND HISPANIC OR LATINO ETHNICITY | |||||||||||
| White (1) | 59,314 | 3,006 | 1,258 | 1,748 | 80.2 | 78.5 | 75.0 | 81.2 | 5.1 | 2.1 | 2.9 |
| Men | 29,743 | 1,108 | 484 | 624 | 40.2 | 28.9 | 28.9 | 29.0 | 3.7 | 1.6 | 2.1 |
| Women | 29,571 | 1,898 | 774 | 1,124 | 40.0 | 49.6 | 46.2 | 52.2 | 6.4 | 2.6 | 3.8 |
| Black or African American (1) | 9,523 | 577 | 324 | 253 | 12.9 | 15.1 | 19.3 | 11.8 | 6.1 | 3.4 | 2.7 |
| Men | 4,252 | 222 | 117 | 105 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 7.0 | 4.9 | 5.2 | 2.8 | 2.5 |
| Women | 5,271 | 356 | 208 | 148 | 7.1 | 9.3 | 12.4 | 6.9 | 6.8 | 3.9 | 2.8 |
| Asian (1) | 3,037 | 99 | 36 | 63 | 4.1 | 2.6 | 2.1 | 2.9 | 3.3 | 1.2 | 2.1 |
| Men | 1,425 | 41 | 13 | 28 | 1.9 | 1.1 | 0.8 | 1.3 | 2.9 | 0.9 | 2.0 |
| Women | 1,612 | 58 | 23 | 35 | 2.2 | 1.5 | 1.4 | 1.6 | 3.6 | 1.4 | 2.2 |
| Hispanic or Latino (1) | 13,264 | 720 | 340 | 380 | 17.9 | 18.8 | 20.3 | 17.7 | 5.4 | 2.6 | 2.9 |
| Men | 7,703 | 326 | 154 | 172 | 10.4 | 8.5 | 9.2 | 8.0 | 4.2 | 2.0 | 2.2 |
| Women | 5,561 | 394 | 186 | 208 | 7.5 | 10.3 | 11.1 | 9.7 | 7.1 | 3.3 | 3.7 |
| FULL- AND PART-TIME STATUS AND SEX | |||||||||||
| Full-time workers (2) | 53,594 | 1,274 | 522 | 752 | 72.5 | 33.3 | 31.1 | 34.9 | 2.4 | 1.0 | 1.4 |
| Men | 29,292 | 501 | 205 | 296 | 39.6 | 13.1 | 12.2 | 13.8 | 1.7 | 0.7 | 1.0 |
| Women | 24,302 | 773 | 317 | 456 | 32.9 | 20.2 | 18.9 | 21.2 | 3.2 | 1.3 | 1.9 |
| Part-time workers (2) | 20,199 | 2,545 | 1,153 | 1,392 | 27.3 | 66.5 | 68.8 | 64.7 | 12.6 | 5.7 | 6.9 |
| Men | 7,103 | 932 | 443 | 489 | 9.6 | 24.3 | 26.4 | 22.7 | 13.1 | 6.2 | 6.9 |
| Women | 13,096 | 1,615 | 711 | 904 | 17.7 | 42.2 | 42.4 | 42.0 | 12.3 | 5.4 | 6.9 |
| Footnotes: (1) Estimates for the above race groups (White, Black or African American, and Asian) do not sum to totals because data are not presented for all races. Persons whose ethnicity is identified as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race. (2) The distinction between full- and part-time workers is based on hours usually worked. These data will not sum to totals because full- or part-time status on the principal job is not identifiable for a small number of multiple jobholders. Full time is 35 hours or more per week; part time is less than 35 hours. |
|||||||||||
NOTE: Data exclude all self-employed persons whether or not their businesses are incorporated.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011tbls.htm#1
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
Series Id: LNS14000012
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Seas) Unemployment Rate – 16-19 yrs.
Labor force status: Unemployment rate
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 to 19 years
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1948 | 8.5 | 10.0 | 10.5 | 9.5 | 7.0 | 9.3 | 9.7 | 9.6 | 8.8 | 8.5 | 9.1 | 8.5 | |
| 1949 | 10.0 | 10.6 | 11.9 | 13.2 | 13.4 | 13.8 | 14.3 | 15.0 | 14.6 | 15.8 | 14.0 | 15.4 | |
| 1950 | 15.2 | 15.2 | 14.3 | 12.0 | 13.3 | 12.2 | 11.2 | 10.7 | 10.9 | 10.3 | 9.5 | 11.1 | |
| 1951 | 8.5 | 8.1 | 8.3 | 7.9 | 6.7 | 8.3 | 8.7 | 8.2 | 8.3 | 7.7 | 9.5 | 7.6 | |
| 1952 | 9.3 | 8.3 | 8.2 | 7.6 | 8.9 | 8.4 | 8.8 | 8.5 | 8.9 | 8.4 | 8.2 | 7.6 | |
| 1953 | 6.9 | 6.7 | 6.7 | 7.1 | 6.4 | 6.9 | 7.3 | 7.4 | 7.3 | 9.7 | 8.6 | 11.8 | |
| 1954 | 12.1 | 13.5 | 13.0 | 13.6 | 13.4 | 10.5 | 12.9 | 14.0 | 14.0 | 12.2 | 11.4 | 12.6 | |
| 1955 | 11.7 | 11.3 | 11.0 | 10.7 | 10.9 | 10.8 | 10.4 | 11.5 | 11.3 | 11.0 | 11.7 | 11.0 | |
| 1956 | 10.6 | 11.4 | 11.5 | 10.9 | 11.9 | 12.2 | 11.2 | 10.1 | 9.8 | 10.1 | 12.6 | 9.7 | |
| 1957 | 11.6 | 10.5 | 11.2 | 11.1 | 11.4 | 11.7 | 11.8 | 11.5 | 11.0 | 10.9 | 13.4 | 13.1 | |
| 1958 | 14.4 | 14.6 | 14.7 | 17.2 | 16.3 | 15.4 | 17.9 | 16.0 | 17.9 | 16.0 | 15.9 | 14.9 | |
| 1959 | 14.0 | 12.9 | 13.6 | 15.0 | 14.3 | 13.9 | 14.5 | 16.1 | 14.9 | 15.8 | 15.1 | 15.3 | |
| 1960 | 14.6 | 13.1 | 15.6 | 14.2 | 13.9 | 14.6 | 13.9 | 15.3 | 14.5 | 16.1 | 14.7 | 16.4 | |
| 1961 | 17.1 | 17.4 | 17.1 | 16.4 | 15.8 | 16.6 | 17.3 | 17.1 | 18.0 | 16.9 | 16.0 | 15.3 | |
| 1962 | 16.2 | 16.0 | 15.1 | 15.1 | 14.2 | 13.6 | 13.9 | 14.1 | 14.5 | 14.3 | 16.3 | 14.4 | |
| 1963 | 15.8 | 17.7 | 17.1 | 16.8 | 18.7 | 17.2 | 18.1 | 16.1 | 17.4 | 17.1 | 17.7 | 16.3 | |
| 1964 | 16.7 | 15.8 | 16.3 | 17.0 | 16.4 | 16.8 | 14.7 | 16.7 | 15.7 | 15.8 | 15.6 | 17.1 | |
| 1965 | 16.8 | 16.7 | 15.8 | 16.2 | 14.8 | 15.3 | 14.5 | 13.9 | 14.7 | 14.5 | 13.0 | 13.3 | |
| 1966 | 13.0 | 12.4 | 13.1 | 13.0 | 13.6 | 13.0 | 12.9 | 12.4 | 12.8 | 12.6 | 11.8 | 12.1 | |
| 1967 | 11.9 | 12.9 | 11.6 | 12.1 | 12.8 | 12.9 | 13.0 | 13.4 | 12.9 | 13.7 | 13.8 | 13.0 | |
| 1968 | 12.0 | 12.9 | 12.7 | 11.8 | 12.5 | 13.9 | 13.8 | 12.0 | 12.0 | 11.8 | 12.2 | 12.7 | |
| 1969 | 12.0 | 11.9 | 12.3 | 12.0 | 12.4 | 12.2 | 12.8 | 12.2 | 12.6 | 12.6 | 11.6 | 11.8 | |
| 1970 | 13.5 | 13.3 | 13.4 | 14.7 | 14.2 | 16.3 | 14.7 | 15.7 | 16.2 | 16.7 | 17.4 | 17.1 | |
| 1971 | 16.8 | 16.3 | 16.9 | 16.3 | 16.8 | 17.7 | 17.7 | 16.8 | 16.7 | 16.9 | 16.9 | 16.9 | |
| 1972 | 16.9 | 18.0 | 17.2 | 16.5 | 15.3 | 15.9 | 15.6 | 16.5 | 16.3 | 15.8 | 15.7 | 15.6 | |
| 1973 | 13.7 | 15.3 | 14.3 | 15.5 | 14.9 | 13.8 | 14.3 | 14.0 | 14.7 | 14.4 | 15.0 | 14.6 | |
| 1974 | 14.6 | 14.9 | 14.9 | 14.3 | 15.4 | 16.3 | 16.8 | 14.9 | 17.0 | 17.2 | 17.8 | 18.2 | |
| 1975 | 19.5 | 19.4 | 19.9 | 19.9 | 20.4 | 20.9 | 20.7 | 20.7 | 19.5 | 19.8 | 19.0 | 19.8 | |
| 1976 | 19.6 | 19.0 | 18.9 | 19.5 | 18.6 | 18.5 | 18.3 | 19.6 | 18.6 | 19.0 | 19.2 | 19.1 | |
| 1977 | 18.9 | 18.4 | 18.6 | 18.0 | 17.8 | 18.8 | 17.5 | 17.4 | 18.0 | 17.2 | 17.2 | 15.5 | |
| 1978 | 16.7 | 17.2 | 17.3 | 16.6 | 16.0 | 15.4 | 16.5 | 15.7 | 16.4 | 16.1 | 16.3 | 16.7 | |
| 1979 | 16.1 | 16.1 | 15.9 | 16.3 | 16.1 | 15.7 | 15.6 | 16.5 | 16.5 | 16.5 | 15.9 | 16.2 | |
| 1980 | 16.5 | 16.6 | 16.3 | 16.2 | 18.6 | 18.9 | 19.1 | 18.9 | 18.0 | 18.4 | 18.5 | 17.6 | |
| 1981 | 19.1 | 19.3 | 19.2 | 18.8 | 19.1 | 19.8 | 18.6 | 18.8 | 19.7 | 20.3 | 21.3 | 21.1 | |
| 1982 | 22.0 | 22.6 | 21.8 | 22.8 | 22.8 | 22.9 | 24.0 | 23.7 | 23.6 | 23.7 | 24.1 | 24.1 | |
| 1983 | 23.1 | 22.8 | 23.5 | 23.4 | 22.8 | 24.0 | 22.8 | 22.9 | 21.7 | 21.4 | 20.2 | 19.9 | |
| 1984 | 19.5 | 19.4 | 19.8 | 19.2 | 18.7 | 18.2 | 18.8 | 18.7 | 19.2 | 18.6 | 17.7 | 18.8 | |
| 1985 | 18.8 | 18.3 | 18.2 | 17.5 | 18.5 | 18.5 | 20.2 | 17.9 | 17.9 | 20.0 | 18.3 | 19.1 | |
| 1986 | 18.1 | 18.8 | 18.2 | 19.2 | 18.6 | 19.2 | 18.4 | 18.0 | 18.4 | 17.7 | 18.1 | 17.5 | |
| 1987 | 17.7 | 18.0 | 17.9 | 17.3 | 17.4 | 16.5 | 15.8 | 15.9 | 16.2 | 17.3 | 16.6 | 16.0 | |
| 1988 | 16.1 | 15.6 | 16.6 | 16.0 | 15.3 | 14.2 | 14.8 | 15.4 | 15.5 | 15.1 | 13.9 | 14.8 | |
| 1989 | 16.4 | 15.0 | 13.9 | 14.6 | 14.8 | 15.7 | 14.2 | 14.6 | 15.2 | 15.0 | 15.5 | 15.3 | |
| 1990 | 14.8 | 15.0 | 14.3 | 14.7 | 15.0 | 14.3 | 15.0 | 16.3 | 16.4 | 16.5 | 17.1 | 17.4 | |
| 1991 | 18.6 | 17.4 | 18.3 | 17.8 | 18.8 | 18.5 | 19.4 | 18.9 | 18.8 | 19.1 | 19.0 | 20.3 | |
| 1992 | 19.2 | 20.1 | 20.3 | 18.5 | 20.1 | 23.0 | 20.8 | 19.9 | 21.0 | 18.3 | 20.5 | 19.8 | |
| 1993 | 19.9 | 19.7 | 19.7 | 19.5 | 19.8 | 19.9 | 18.4 | 18.4 | 18.2 | 18.7 | 18.5 | 17.9 | |
| 1994 | 18.3 | 18.0 | 18.0 | 19.1 | 18.0 | 17.6 | 17.6 | 17.3 | 17.5 | 17.5 | 15.6 | 17.0 | |
| 1995 | 16.5 | 17.4 | 16.1 | 17.5 | 17.5 | 17.1 | 18.2 | 17.3 | 17.6 | 17.4 | 17.5 | 18.0 | |
| 1996 | 17.7 | 16.8 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 16.8 | 16.2 | 17.1 | 16.8 | 15.6 | 16.3 | 16.8 | 16.6 | |
| 1997 | 16.8 | 17.1 | 16.4 | 15.9 | 16.0 | 16.8 | 17.1 | 16.1 | 16.1 | 15.1 | 14.8 | 14.0 | |
| 1998 | 13.9 | 14.5 | 14.8 | 13.5 | 14.8 | 14.9 | 14.6 | 14.7 | 15.0 | 15.7 | 14.7 | 13.5 | |
| 1999 | 15.2 | 13.9 | 14.2 | 14.2 | 13.3 | 13.9 | 13.4 | 13.3 | 14.8 | 13.8 | 13.9 | 13.4 | |
| 2000 | 12.7 | 13.8 | 13.3 | 12.6 | 12.8 | 12.3 | 13.4 | 14.0 | 13.0 | 12.8 | 13.0 | 13.2 | |
| 2001 | 13.8 | 13.7 | 13.8 | 13.9 | 13.4 | 14.2 | 14.4 | 15.6 | 15.2 | 16.0 | 15.9 | 17.0 | |
| 2002 | 16.5 | 16.0 | 16.6 | 16.7 | 16.6 | 16.7 | 16.8 | 17.0 | 16.3 | 15.1 | 17.1 | 16.9 | |
| 2003 | 17.2 | 17.2 | 17.8 | 17.7 | 17.9 | 19.0 | 18.2 | 16.6 | 17.6 | 17.2 | 15.7 | 16.2 | |
| 2004 | 17.0 | 16.5 | 16.8 | 16.6 | 17.1 | 17.0 | 17.8 | 16.7 | 16.6 | 17.4 | 16.4 | 17.6 | |
| 2005 | 16.2 | 17.5 | 17.1 | 17.8 | 17.8 | 16.3 | 16.1 | 16.1 | 15.5 | 16.1 | 17.0 | 14.9 | |
| 2006 | 15.1 | 15.3 | 16.1 | 14.6 | 14.0 | 15.8 | 15.9 | 16.0 | 16.3 | 15.2 | 14.8 | 14.6 | |
| 2007 | 14.8 | 14.9 | 14.9 | 15.9 | 15.9 | 16.3 | 15.3 | 15.9 | 15.9 | 15.4 | 16.2 | 16.8 | |
| 2008 | 17.8 | 16.6 | 16.1 | 15.9 | 19.0 | 19.2 | 20.7 | 18.6 | 19.1 | 20.0 | 20.3 | 20.5 | |
| 2009 | 20.7 | 22.2 | 22.2 | 22.2 | 23.4 | 24.7 | 24.3 | 25.0 | 25.9 | 27.1 | 26.9 | 26.6 | |
| 2010 | 26.0 | 25.4 | 26.2 | 25.5 | 26.6 | 26.0 | 26.0 | 25.7 | 25.8 | 27.2 | 24.6 | 25.1 | |
| 2011 | 25.5 | 24.0 | 24.4 | 24.7 | 24.0 | 24.7 | 24.9 | 25.2 | 24.4 | 24.1 | 23.9 | 22.9 | |
| 2012 | 23.4 | 23.7 | 25.0 | 24.9 | 24.4 | 23.7 | 23.9 | 24.5 | 23.7 | 23.7 | 23.6 | 23.5 | |
| 2013 | 23.4 | 25.1 |
Federal Minimum Wage Rates, 1955–2012
| Value of the minimum wage |
Value of the minimum wage |
Value of the minimum wage |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Current dollars |
Constant (1996) dollars1 |
Year | Current dollars |
Constant (1996) dollars1 |
Year | Current dollars |
Constant (1996) dollars1 |
| 1955 | $0.75 | $4.39 | 1983 | 3.35 | 5.28 | 2011 | 7.25 | 5.06 |
| 1956 | 1.00 | 5.77 | 1984 | 3.35 | 5.06 | 2012 | 7.25 | 4.97 |
| 1957 | 1.00 | 5.58 | 1985 | 3.35 | 4.88 | |||
| 1958 | 1.00 | 5.43 | 1986 | 3.35 | 4.80 | |||
| 1959 | 1.00 | 5.39 | 1987 | 3.35 | 4.63 | |||
| 1960 | 1.00 | 5.30 | 1988 | 3.35 | 4.44 | |||
| 1961 | 1.15 | 6.03 | 1989 | 3.35 | 4.24 | |||
| 1962 | 1.15 | 5.97 | 1990 | 3.80 | 4.56 | |||
| 1963 | 1.25 | 6.41 | 1991 | 4.25 | 4.90 | |||
| 1964 | 1.25 | 6.33 | 1992 | 4.25 | 4.75 | |||
| 1965 | 1.25 | 6.23 | 1993 | 4.25 | 4.61 | |||
| 1966 | 1.25 | 6.05 | 1994 | 4.25 | 4.50 | |||
| 1967 | 1.40 | 6.58 | 1995 | 4.25 | 4.38 | |||
| 1968 | 1.60 | 7.21 | 1996 | 4.75 | 4.75 | |||
| 1969 | 1.60 | 6.84 | 1997 | 5.15 | 5.03 | |||
| 1970 | 1.60 | 6.47 | 1998 | 5.15 | 4.96 | |||
| 1971 | 1.60 | 6.20 | 1999 | 5.15 | 4.85 | |||
| 1972 | 1.60 | 6.01 | 2000 | 5.15 | 4.69 | |||
| 1973 | 1.60 | 5.65 | 2001 | 5.15 | 4.56 | |||
| 1974 | 2.00 | 6.37 | 2002 | 5.15 | 4.49 | |||
| 1975 | 2.10 | 6.12 | 2003 | 5.15 | 4.39 | |||
| 1976 | 2.30 | 6.34 | 2004 | 5.15 | 4.28 | |||
| 1977 | 2.30 | 5.95 | 2005 | 5.15 | 4.14 | |||
| 1978 | 2.65 | 6.38 | 2006 | 5.15 | 4.04 | |||
| 1979 | 2.90 | 6.27 | 2007 | 5.85 | 4.41 | |||
| 1980 | 3.10 | 5.90 | 2008 | 6.55 | 4.77 | |||
| 1981 | 3.35 | 5.78 | 2009 | 7.25 | 5.30 | |||
| 1982 | 3.35 | 5.78 | 2010 | 7.25 | 5.22 | |||
Information Please® Database, © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Wage and Hour Division (WHD)
History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938 – 2009
The table of federal minimum wage rates under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938 – 2009 is also available in a PDF Version. In order to view and/or print PDF documents you must have a PDF viewer (e.g., Adobe Acrobat Reader v5 or later) available on your workstation.
| Effective Date | 1938 Act 1 | 1961 Amendments 2 | 1966 and Subsequent Amendments3 |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nonfarm | Farm | |||||||
| Oct 24, 1938 | $0.25 | |||||||
| Oct 24, 1939 | $0.30 | |||||||
| Oct 24, 1945 | $0.40 | |||||||
| Jan 25, 1950 | $0.75 | |||||||
| Mar 1, 1956 | $1.00 | |||||||
| Sep 3, 1961 | $1.15 | $1.00 | ||||||
| Sep 3, 1963 | $1.25 | |||||||
| Sep 3, 1964 | $1.15 | |||||||
| Sep 3, 1965 | $1.25 | |||||||
| Feb 1, 1967 | $1.40 | $1.40 | $1.00 | $1.00 | ||||
| Feb 1, 1968 | $1.60 | $1.60 | $1.15 | $1.15 | ||||
| Feb 1, 1969 | $1.30 | $1.30 | ||||||
| Feb 1, 1970 | $1.45 | |||||||
| Feb 1, 1971 | $1.60 | |||||||
| May 1, 1974 | $2.00 | $2.00 | $1.90 | $1.60 | ||||
| Jan. 1, 1975 | $2.10 | $2.10 | $2.00 | $1.80 | ||||
| Jan 1, 1976 | $2.30 | $2.30 | $2.20 | $2.00 | ||||
| Jan 1, 1977 | $2.30 | $2.20 | ||||||
| Jan 1, 1978 | $2.65 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Jan 1, 1979 | $2.90 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Jan 1, 1980 | $3.10 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Jan 1, 1981 | $3.35 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Apr 1, 19904 | $3.80 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Apr 1, 1991 | $4.25 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Oct 1, 1996 | $4.75 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Sep 1, 19975 | $5.15 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Jul 24, 2007 | $5.85 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Jul 24, 2008 | $6.55 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
| Jul 24, 2009 | $7.25 for all covered, nonexempt workers | |||||||
Where to Obtain Additional Information
This publication is for general information and is not to be considered in the same light as official statements of position contained in the regulations.
For additional information, visit our Wage-Hour website: http://www.wagehour.dol.gov and/or call our Wage-Hour toll-free information and helpline, available 8am to 5pm in your time zone, 1-866-4USWAGE (1-866-487-9243).
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US drones killed almost five thousand people
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MQ-9 Reaper UAV Predator
Predator RQ-1 / MQ-1 / MQ-9 Reaper – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle part 1
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Rand Paul: Obama Wants No Judicial Oversight To Kill An American – Hannity 3/5/2013
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030613 – Sen. Rand Paul Senate Filibuster – HOUR 1
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030613 – Sen. Rand Paul Senate Filibuster HOUR 5
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By Raymond Thomas Pronk
Crisis and fear mongering as well as blame shifting are again running rampant among the ruling political elites in Washington over out-of-control government spending and what to do about it.
President Barack Obama and progressive Congressional Democrats want to increase federal government spending by increasing taxes through closing so-called “tax loopholes” or more precisely eliminating existing tax deductions and credits in the Internal Revenue code.
House Speaker John Boehner and conservative Congressional Republicans want to decrease government spending and decrease tax rates by also eliminating “tax loopholes.” There is no middle ground to negotiate given the diametrically opposed positions of the political parties. This was not always the case.
Early in his first term Obama delivered a speech in the White House titled “A New Era of Responsibility,” captured on the YouTube video titled “Obama will cut deficit in half FEB 2009.” He said, “We cannot, and will not, sustain deficits like these without end. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration, or the next generation.
“We are paying the price for these deficits right now. In 2008 alone, we paid $250 billion in interest on our debt — one in every 10 taxpayer dollars. That is more than three times what we spent on education that year; more than seven times what we spent on VA health care.
“So if we confront this crisis without also confronting the deficits that helped cause it, we risk sinking into another crisis down the road as our interest payments rise, our obligations come due, confidence in our economy erodes, and our children and our grandchildren are unable to pursue their dreams because they’re saddled with our debts.
“And that’s why today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay — and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”
The last George W. Bush deficit for fiscal year 2008 was nearly $459 billion. If Obama was serious about meeting his pledge of cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term, the deficit should have been less than $230 billion for fiscal year 2012. Obama did the exact opposite of what he promised the American people he would do in February 2009. Instead of cutting the deficit in half, he doubled the deficit to more than a trillion dollars for each fiscal year he has been in office as the table below clearly shows:
|
Summary of Spending Outlays, Tax Receipts, Deficits (-) or Surpluses, 2005-2013 (in millions of dollars) |
||||||
| Fiscal Year |
Spending Outlays |
Tax Receipts |
-Deficit +Surplus |
President (Party) | House Control | Senate Control |
| 2005 |
2,471,957 |
2,153,611 |
-318,346 |
Bush (R) | Republicans | Democrats |
| 2006 |
2,655,050 |
2,406,859 |
-248,181 |
Bush (R) | Republicans | Democrats |
| 2007 |
2,728,686 |
2,567,985 |
-150,701 |
Bush (R) | Democrats | Democrats |
| 2008 |
2,982,544 |
2,523,991 |
-458,553 |
Bush (R) | Democrats | Democrats |
| 2009 |
3,517,677 |
2,104,989 |
-1,412,588 |
Obama (D) | Democrats | Democrats |
| 2010 |
3,456,213 |
2,162,724 |
-1,293,489 |
Obama (D) | Democrats | Democrats |
| 2011 |
3,603,061 |
2,303,466 |
-1,299,595 |
Obama (D) | Republicans | Democrats |
| 2012 |
3,538,286 |
2,449,093 |
-1,089,193 |
Obama (D) | Republicans | Democrats |
| 2013 est. |
3,803,364 |
2,901,956 |
-901,408 |
Obama (D) | Republicans | Democrats |
| Source: The Budget for Fiscal Year 2013, Historical Tables, Table 1.1http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/hist.pdf | ||||||
These massive and unprecedented deficits required that the national debt be increased to pay for the government’s out-of-control spending and for Congress to increase the debt ceiling to $16.4 trillion. On Aug. 2, 2011 President Obama signed into law The Budget Control Act of 2011. This ended the so-called debt ceiling crisis by increasing the debt-level immediately by $400 billion and allowing Obama to ask for another increase of the ceiling by $500 billion with Congressional approval in the future. The law established the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Debt Reduction, better known as the “super committee,” with the task of reducing the deficit by $1.5 trillion by Dec. 23, 2011. The super committee failed to accomplish its assigned task.
This triggered the sequestration provisions in the law requiring across-the-board cuts in government spending of $1.2 trillion over 10 years with a corresponding increase in the debt-level by $1.2 trillion. Both Democrats and Republicans voted for the sequestration when they passed the law. However, the original idea for sequestration came from White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors and Jack Lew, who was then budget director, whom with Obama’s approval presented the idea to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, according to Bob Woodward as documented in his book “The Price of Politics.“
On Jan. 31, Congress suspended the borrowing limit or debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion for three months until May 19.
By March 1 Congress needed to cut $1.2 trillion from the growth in the Congressional Budget Office baseline for fiscal years 2013 through 2021 or the sequestration would be triggered. These automatic spending cuts had to come from both discretionary and mandatory spending.
Under the sequestration order for fiscal year 2013, signed by Obama on Mar. 1, there needs to be a $85.3 billion cut in growth in federal government budget authority of which $42.7 billion is defense, $28.7 billion non-defense discretionary, $9.9 billion Medicare and $4 billion other mandatory.
For fiscal year 2013 the total federal government spending outlays are estimated to be about $3.8 trillion with estimated total tax revenues of about $2.9 trillion resulting in a deficit of about $901 billion. The sequestration impact for fiscal year 2013 is an estimated $44 billion cut in spending outlays or about 1.4% of total federal government spending.
The crisis and fear mongering and blame shifting is never-ending as Congress must now agree to a fiscal year 2013 continuing resolution by March 31. Meanwhile the U.S. economy is on the verge of another recession with higher unemployment rates and many more millions of unemployed Americans.
The absence of leadership in Washington to budget to estimated tax receipts and by so doing live within the means of the American people is the core problem. The solution would require the repeal of Congress’s baseline budgeting process whereby current spending levels are used to determine future funding requirements by adding increased funding for population growth, inflation and other factors to the current level of spending. The congressional budget baseline process totally ignores estimated tax receipts or revenues as a budgetary constraint. The result is massive unsustainable deficits.
Obama’s new era of responsibility was pure propaganda prevarication. Obama’s age of fiscal insanity and spending addiction disorder continues to destroy jobs, wreck the economy and kill the American dream. Neither progressive Democrats nor Republicans have the will, courage, integrity, wisdom and vision to balance the federal budget. Truly unbelievable.
http://federalbudget.com/
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/debt_deficit_history
Historical Debt Outstanding – Annual 2000 – 2012
Includes legal tender notes, gold and silver certificates, etc.
The first fiscal year for the U.S. Government started Jan. 1, 1789. Congress changed the beginning of the fiscal year from Jan. 1 to Jul. 1 in 1842, and finally from Jul. 1 to Oct. 1 in 1977 where it remains today.
To find more historical information, visit The Public Debt Historical Information archives.
| Date | Dollar Amount |
|---|---|
| 09/30/2012 | 16,066,241,407,385.89 |
| 09/30/2011 | 14,790,340,328,557.15 |
| 09/30/2010 | 13,561,623,030,891.79 |
| 09/30/2009 | 11,909,829,003,511.75 |
| 09/30/2008 | 10,024,724,896,912.49 |
| 09/30/2007 | 9,007,653,372,262.48 |
| 09/30/2006 | 8,506,973,899,215.23 |
| 09/30/2005 | 7,932,709,661,723.50 |
| 09/30/2004 | 7,379,052,696,330.32 |
| 09/30/2003 | 6,783,231,062,743.62 |
| 09/30/2002 | 6,228,235,965,597.16 |
| 09/30/2001 | 5,807,463,412,200.06 |
| 09/30/2000 | 5,674,178,209,886.86 |
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm
The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It
U.S. Debt Clock
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Budget Control Act Sequestration Would Hit Defense Hardest
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In summer 2011, a partisan Congress sparred with the White House on how to solve the U.S. debt crisis. Judy Woodruff talks to journalist Bob Woodward about his new book, “The Price of Politics,” about how Washington’s politicians couldn’t look past their own political aspirations in order to forge a deal.
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John Boehner: The President Is Raging Against a Budget Crisis He Created
Obama invented the ‘sequester’ in the summer of 2011 to avoid facing up to America’s spending problem.
By JOHN BOEHNER
A week from now, a dramatic new federal policy is set to go into effect that threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more. In a bit of irony, President Obama stood Tuesday with first responders who could lose their jobs if the policy goes into effect. Most Americans are just hearing about this Washington creation for the first time: the sequester. What they might not realize from Mr. Obama’s statements is that it is a product of the president’s own failed leadership.
The sequester is a wave of deep spending cuts scheduled to hit on March 1. Unless Congress acts, $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will occur this year, with another $1.1 trillion coming over the next decade. There is nothing wrong with cutting spending that much—we should be cutting even more—but the sequester is an ugly and dangerous way to do it.
By law, the sequester focuses on the narrow portion of the budget that funds the operating accounts for federal agencies and departments, including the Department of Defense. Exempt is most entitlement spending—the large portion of the budget that is driving the nation’s looming debt crisis. Should the sequester take effect, America’s military budget would be slashed nearly half a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Border security, law enforcement, aviation safety and many other programs would all have diminished resources.
How did the country find itself in this mess?
During the summer of 2011, as Washington worked toward a plan to reduce the deficit to allow for an increase in the federal debt limit, President Obama and I very nearly came to a historic agreement. Unfortunately our deal fell apart at the last minute when the president demanded an extra $400 billion in new tax revenue—50% more than we had shaken hands on just days before.
It was a disappointing decision by the president, but with just days until a breach of the debt limit, a solution was still required—and fast. I immediately got together with Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to forge a bipartisan congressional plan. It would be called the Budget Control Act.
The plan called for immediate caps on discretionary spending (to save $917 billion) and the creation of a special House-Senate “super committee” to find an additional $1.2 trillion in savings. The deal also included a simple but powerful mechanism to ensure that the committee met its deficit-reduction target: If it didn’t, the debt limit would not be increased again in a few months.
But President Obama was determined not to face another debt-limit increase before his re-election campaign. Having just blown up one deal, the president scuttled this bipartisan, bicameral agreement. His solution? A sequester.
With the debt limit set to be hit in a matter of hours, Republicans and Democrats in Congress reluctantly accepted the president’s demand for the sequester, and a revised version of the Budget Control Act was passed on a bipartisan basis.
Ultimately, the super committee failed to find an agreement, despite Republicans offering a balanced mix of spending cuts and new revenue through tax reform. As a result, the president’s sequester is now imminent.
Both parties today have a responsibility to find a bipartisan solution to the sequester. Turning it off and erasing its deficit reduction isn’t an option. What Congress should do is replace it with other spending cuts that put America on the path to a balanced budget in 10 years, without threatening national security.
Having first proposed and demanded the sequester, it would make sense that the president lead the effort to replace it. Unfortunately, he has put forth no detailed plan that can pass Congress, and the Senate—controlled by his Democratic allies—hasn’t even voted on a solution, let alone passed one. By contrast, House Republicans have twice passed plans to replace the sequester with common-sense cuts and reforms that protect national security.
The president has repeatedly called for even more tax revenue, but the American people don’t support trading spending cuts for higher taxes. They understand that the tax debate is now closed.
The president got his higher taxes—$600 billion from higher earners, with no spending cuts—at the end of 2012. He also got higher taxes via ObamaCare. Meanwhile, no one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cellphones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines.
Washington must get serious about its spending problem. If it can’t reform America’s safety net and retirement-security programs, they will no longer be there for those who rely on them. Republicans’ willingness to do what is necessary to save these programs is well-known. But after four years, we haven’t seen the same type of courage from the president.
The president’s sequester is the wrong way to reduce the deficit, but it is here to stay until Washington Democrats get serious about cutting spending. The government simply cannot keep delaying the inevitable and spending money it doesn’t have.
So, as the president’s outrage about the sequester grows in coming days, Republicans have a simple response: Mr. President, we agree that your sequester is bad policy. What spending are you willing to cut to replace it?
— Mr. Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio, is speaker of the House.
A version of this article appeared February 20, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The President Is Raging Against a Budget Crisis He Created.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323495104578314240032274944.html
2013 United States federal budget
The 2013 United States federal budget is the budget to fund government operations for the fiscal year 2013, which is October 2012–September 2013. The original spending request was issued by President Barack Obama in February 2012.[1] The actual appropriations for fiscal year 2013 must be authorized by the full Congress before the budget can take effect, in accordance with the United States budget process.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 mandates caps on discretionary spending, which under current law will be lowered beginning in January 2013 to remove $1.2 trillion of spending over the following ten years. In addition, several temporary tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the beginning of the 2013 calendar year, including the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts on income, capital gains, and estate tax, which had been extended in a 2010 tax deal, as well as a payroll tax cut that began as a result of the 2010 deal and had been most recently extended in an early 2012 tax deal. The combination of sudden spending cuts and tax increases has led to concerns about significant negative effects on the economy in the wake of the weak recovery from the late 2000s recession.
History
Budget Control Act and the Deficit Reduction Committee
The Budget Control Act of 2011 was passed in August 2011 as a resolution to the debt-ceiling crisis. The fiscal year (FY) 2013 budget is the first to be affected by the second of two rounds of budget cuts specified in the act. (The first round of cuts has already been applied to the ten years beginning in FY2012.) For this second round of cuts, the Budget Control Act had formed the United States Congress Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, sometimes referred to as the “supercommittee”, to identify at least $1.2 trillion in cuts over the ten years beginning with FY2013, and specified automatic across-the-board cuts of the same amount, equally split between security and non-security programs, if no such budget reduction legislation was passed by Congress.[4]
On November 21, 2011, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction announced that it did not reach a deal on the budget-cutting legislation, raising the possibility that the automatic cuts would be activated if the full Congress could not enact its own deficit reduction legislation by December 23, 2011. The supercommittee’s lack of an agreement was attributed to the refusal of Republicans to consider any tax increases, combined with Democratic insistence on including these revenue increases such as the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which under current law expire at the end of 2012.[5]
Initial proposals
President Obama’s February 2012 budget message to Congress addressed themes of economic crisis and response, an updated defense strategy, taxation fairness, income equality, fiscal responsibility, and investments in education and research to help the U.S. compete economically. He wrote: “The way to rebuild our economy and strengthen the middle class is to make sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. Instead of lowering our standards and our sights, we need to win a race to the top for good jobs that pay well and offer security for the middle class. To succeed and thrive in the global, high-tech economy, we need America to be a place with the highest-skilled, highest-educated workers; the most advanced transportation and communication networks; and the strongest commitment to research and technology in the world. This Budget makes investments that can help America win this race, create good jobs, and lead in the world economy.”[6]
Key elements of the President’s budget for fiscal year (FY) 2013 included expiration of a variety of tax cuts for couples earning over $250,000 ($200,000 if single), short-term stimulus measures to support job growth, and targeted tax cuts for families and businesses. The budget included 2013 revenues of $2.9 trillion or 17.8% GDP (up from $2.5 trillion or 15.8% GDP in 2012) and spending of $3.8 trillion or 23.3% GDP (similar to the prior year in dollar terms but below the 24.3% GDP in 2012). The projected 2013 deficit was $900 billion (5.5% GDP), down from the 2012 deficit of $1.3 trillion (8.5% GDP).[7]
Over the 2013-2022 period, the budget essentially freezes defense and non-defense discretionary spending in dollar terms, such that these categories shrink relative to a growing economy, from 8.7% GDP to 5.9% GDP. Mandatory spending (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other safety net programs) remain around 14% GDP. Net interest rises from 1.5% GDP to 3.3% GDP. Revenues rise steadily during the period from 17.8% GDP to 20.1% GDP, averaging 19.2% GDP.[8] Debt held by the public rises from $12.6 trillion to $18.7 trillion, but remains flat around 77% GDP during the period.[9]
On May 16, 2012, the United States Senate voted on a 52-page Republican budget amendment billed as a summary of the nearly 2,000 pages in the Obama administration’s 2013 budget proposal. The amendment was defeated by a unanimous 99–0 vote, which paralleled the House of Representatives having voted a similar rejection in March by a count of 414–0. Those defeats of the Republicans’ amendments marked the second year in a row such summary bills met unanimous opposition.[10] In explaining their votes against, Congressional Democrats disputed whether the Republican summary accurately represented the Obama budget proposal; by contrast, Congressional Republicans claimed that their amendment included ample data taken directly from said budget.[11]
Legislation begins to be passed
On July 31, 2012, a tentative deal was announced to fund the government from October 2012 through March 2013 through a continuing resolution, with spending rates slightly higher than the FY2012 levels. The deal was reached because Republicans were eager to avoid a prolonged dispute that could threaten a government shutdown just before the upcoming 2012 general elections.[12] The bill, the Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2013, was passed in the House 329–91,[13] passed in the Senate 62–30,[14] and signed by President Obama on September 28, 2012.[15]
On August 1, 2012, the House and Senate passed competing bills on the extension of the Bush tax cuts. The House bill would extend all the tax cuts for one year, while the Senate version would allow taxes to rise on incomes over $250,000. The passage of the bills was reported as being intended as political cover; progress on tax legislation was not expected until after the November elections.[16]
In late December, the Republican House leadership proposed legislation that would allow tax cuts to rise relative to 2012 levels only for annual income over $1,000,000. The proposal was known as “Plan B”, and was intended to force the Senate and the Obama administration to pass it and delay further negotiations until the following month, when Republicans were expected to use the reaching of the federal debt limit as leverage. However, the House vote on the plan was abruptly cancelled on December 20, 2012 after it became clear that the bill did not have enough support to pass, due to conservative members of the House who would not support any legislation that would raise taxes without also cutting spending.[17]
On December 28, 2012, the Senate passed the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act, 2013 to provide for $60.4 billion in additional spending to cover recovery costs from Hurricane Sandy, which had hit the northeastern United States in late October. The bill passed the Senate 62–32, but faced uncertain prospects in the House.[18]
At around 2 a.m. on January 1, 2013, the Senate passed a compromise bill, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, by a margin of 89–8. The bill would delay the budget sequestration by two months, and bill includes $600 billion over ten years in new tax revenue relative to extending 2012 levels, which is about one-fifth of the revenue that would have been raised had no legislation been passed. The revenue would come from increased marginal income and capital gains tax rates relative to their 2012 levels for annual income over $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for couples; a phase-out of certain tax deductions and credits for those with incomes over $250,000 for individuals and $300,000 for couples, an increase in estate taxes relative to 2012 levels on estates over $5 million, and expiration of the two-year-old cut to payroll taxes, which is applied to income under the Social Security Wage Base, which was $110,100 in 2012. All these changes would all be made permanent.[19][20] House Speaker John Boehner promised a prompt vote on the Senate bill, but the prospect of the House passing an amended bill raised the prospect that legislation might not be enacted by the end of the 112th Congress at noon on January 3.[21]
Analysis
Implications of the Budget Control Act
The automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion resulting from the absence of a deal from the supercommittee over ten years would be split equally between security and non-security programs, and include $500 billion in cuts to the Department of Defense. The FY2013 defense budget would be reduced 11%, from $525 billion to $472 billion, after already having been cut from $571 billion in the first installment of cuts in the Budget Control Act. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta initially gave the total cut figure as 23%.[22] The planned cuts include reductions in troop levels, a modest limit in pay raises for soldiers starting in 2015, an increase in health fees for veterans, delays in the construction of new naval ships and in the purchasing of new fighter aircraft such as the F-35, and the possibility of a round of base closings within the United States, but cuts to special operations, cyberwarfare, and intelligence programs were avoided.[23] Initial reports had also suggested that the number of carrier battle groups might be reduced from 11 to 10,[22] although it was later determined that the number of aircraft carriers would not in fact be cut.[24] Some Republicans in Congress advocated reversing the cuts to the military, citing the effect on national security, and Secretary Panetta has opposed the cuts, calling them “devastating” and raising “substantial risk of not being able to meet our defense needs.” President Obama has promised to veto any legislation seeking to avoid the cuts, and House Speaker John Boehner also indicated his commitment to following the cuts in the Budget Control Act.[5][25] According to the Center for American Progress, several Presidents have significantly reduced defense spending after wars, without compromising national security. Defense spending in 2011 remained high by historical standards, adjusted for inflation.[26]
The Budget Control Act also specifies automatic cuts of 7.8% to domestic programs and 2% to Medicare, while Medicaid and Social Security will be unaffected. These entitlement programs were protected from cuts in return for the absence of new revenues in the Budget Control Act.[27]
The automatic cuts to domestic programs would include cuts of up to 11% to science research and development agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the U. S. National Laboratories run by the Department of Energy. It is anticipated that this could cause federal grant acceptance levels to fall into the single digits, a consequence which has been called catastrophic for academic institutions by Michael Lubell of the American Physical Society. The cuts could also endanger politically controversial research such as climate change research programs in NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.[28] Due to the role of scientific research in economic growth and job creation, and given international competition in this field, the cuts have been opposed by professional and academic organizations, and federal support of research and development has been called “an area of U.S. investment too critical to be cut” by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[29][30]
Ten-year projections
Annual rates of increase in major revenue categories budgeted for the 2012-2022 period were:
- Individual income taxes: 8.4%
- Corporation income taxes: 8.2%
- Social insurance (mainly payroll) taxes: 6.6%
- Total tax revenues: 7.6%
Annual rates of increase in major spending categories budgeted for the 2012-2022 period were:
- Defense: 1.8%
- Non-defense discretionary: 1.6%
- Social Security: 5.8%
- Medicare: 6.6%
- Medicaid: 8.5%
- Net interest: 14.2%
- Total spending: 5.0%[31]
Changes in revenues primarily represent a return to the long-run average. Tax revenues historically have averaged around 18% GDP. The subprime mortgage crisis resulted in significant declines in revenues due to high unemployment and reduced economic activity, with revenue falling to a record low 15% GDP. President Obama’s budget preserves the Bush income tax cuts for couples earning below $250,000, while eliminating some tax exemptions and deductions (tax expenditures).[32]
Defense and non-defense discretionary expenses are essentially frozen in real dollar terms for the 2013-2022 period, growing at or below the rate of inflation. Department of Defense spending rose at an annual rate of 8% between 2000 and 2011; this amount includes both the baseline and war spending. Non-defense discretionary spending rose at an annual rate of 6.6% between 2000 and 2011. Mandatory spending is mainly driven by demographic changes (i.e., an aging population, with fewer workers per retiree), healthcare cost increases per capita, and Social Security cost of living adjustments. Interest costs represent a return to more typical interest rates as the economy recovers along with the growing public debt.[32]
Total revenues and spending
The Obama administration’s February 2012 budget request contained $2.902 trillion in receipts and $3.803 trillion in outlays, for a deficit of $901 billion.[33] The budget projects a reduction in the deficit to $575 billion by 2018 before rising to $704 billion by 2022.[34]
Total receipts (in billions of dollars)::
| Item | Requested[33] |
|---|---|
| Individual income tax | 1,359 |
| Corporate income tax | 348 |
| Social Security and other payroll tax | 959 |
| Excise tax | 88 |
| Customs duties | 33 |
| Estate and gift taxes | 13 |
| Deposits of earnings and Federal Reserve System | 80 |
| Other miscellaneous receipts | 21 |
| Total | 2902 |
Total outlays by agency (in billions of dollars):
| Agency | Discretionary | Mandatory | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Department of Defense including Overseas Contingency Operations | 666.2 | 6.7 | 672.9 |
| Department of Health and Human Services including Medicare and Medicaid | 80.6 | 860.3 | 940.9 |
| Department of Education | 67.7 | 4.2 | 71.9 |
| Department of Veterans Affairs | 60.4 | 79.4 | 139.7 |
| Department of Housing and Urban Development | 41.1 | 5.2 | 46.3 |
| Department of State and Other International Programs | 56.1 | 3.4 | 59.5 |
| Department of Homeland Security | 54.9 | 0.5 | 55.4 |
| Department of Energy | 35.6 | –0.6 | 35.0 |
| Department of Justice | 23.9 | 12.7 | 36.5 |
| Department of Agriculture | 26.8 | 127.7 | 154.5 |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | 17.8 | –0.02 | 17.8 |
| National Intelligence Program | 52.6 | 0 | 52.6 |
| Department of Transportation | 24.0 | 74.5 | 98.5 |
| Department of the Treasury | 14.1 | 96.2 | 110.3 |
| Department of the Interior | 12.3 | 1.2 | 13.5 |
| Department of Labor | 13.2 | 88.4 | 101.7 |
| Social Security Administration | 11.7 | 871.0 | 882.7 |
| Department of Commerce | 9.5 | –0.5 | 9.0 |
| Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works | 8.2 | –0.007 | 8.2 |
| Environmental Protection Agency | 9.2 | –0.2 | 8.9 |
| National Science Foundation | 7.4 | 0.2 | 7.5 |
| Small Business Administration | 1.4 | –0.006 | 1.4 |
| Corporation for National and Community Service | 1.1 | 0.007 | 1.1 |
| Net interest | 246 | 0 | 246 |
| Disaster costs | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Other spending | 34.0- | 61.7 | 29.5 |
| Total | 1,510 | 2,293 | 3,803 |
References
- ^ Riley, Charles (February 13, 2012). “Obama unveils $3.8 trillion budget”. CNNMoney. Retrieved February 13, 2012.
- ^ Hensarling, Jeb (November 22, 2011). “Why the Super Committee Failed”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved December 9, 2011.
- ^ Murray, Patty. “Deficit-reduction chair says she’s not done working for compromise”. Retrieved December 14, 2011.
- ^ Lisa Mascaro; Kathleen Hennessey (July 31, 2011). “U.S. leaders strike debt deal to avoid default”. Los Angeles Times.
- ^ a b Steinhauer, Jennifer; Cooper, Helene; and Pear, Robert (22 November 2011). “Panel Fails to Reach Deal on Plan for Deficit Reduction”. The New York Times: p. A18. Retrieved 7 December 2011.
- ^ President Obama-The Budget Message of the President-February 2012
- ^ OMB-President Obama’s 2013 Budget-Summary Tables S5 and S6
- ^ OMB-President Obama’s 2013 Budget-Summary Table S-6
- ^ OMB-President Obama’s 2013 Budget-Summary Table S15
- ^ Dinan, Stephen (16 May 2012). “Obama budget defeated 99-0 in Senate”. Washington Times. Retrieved 16 May 2012.
- ^ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/house-and-senate-unanimously-reject-obama-budgets-or-do-they/
- ^ Steinhauer, Jennifer (1 August 2012). “Leaders Reach Tentative Deal on Spending to Avoid Fight Before Election Day”. The New York Times: p. A11. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
- ^ Weisman, Jonathan (14 September 2012). “House Republicans Welcome Back Ryan, and His Vote, on a Spending Measure”. The New York Times: p. A13. Retrieved 21 September 2012.
- ^ “U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 112th Congress – 2nd Session: On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 117)”. United States Senate. Retrieved 1 October 2012.
- ^ “Status of Appropriations Legislation for Fiscal Year 2013″. Library of Congress. Retrieved 1 October 2012.
- ^ Weisman, Jonathan (2 August 2012). “House Approves One-Year Extension of the Bush-Era Tax Cuts”. The New York Times: p. A12. Retrieved 21 September 2012.
- ^ Weisman, Jonathat (21 December 2012). “Boehner Cancels Tax Vote in Face of G.O.P. Revolt”. The New York Times: p. A1. Retrieved 1 January 2013.
- ^ Hernandez, Raymond (29 December 2012). “Senate Passes $60.4 Billion for Storm Aid; Bill’s Fate in House Is Unclear”. The New York Times: p. A15. Retrieved 1 January 2013.
- ^ Weisman, Jonathan (1 January 2013). “Senate Passes Legislation to Allow Taxes on Affluent to Rise”. The New York Times. Retrieved 1 January 2013.
- ^ Hook, Janet; Hughes, Siobhan (1 January 2013). “Fiscal-Cliff Focus Moves to House”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 1 January 2013.
- ^ Steinhauer, Jennifer; Weisman, Jonathan (1 January 2013). “G.O.P. Anger Over Tax Deal Endangers Final Passage”. The New York Times. Retrieved 1 January 2013.
- ^ a b Bumiller, Elisabeth (23 November 2011). “Despite Threat of Cuts, Pentagon Officials Made No Contingency Plans”. The New York Times: p. A20. Retrieved 7 December 2011.
- ^ Bumiller, Elisabeth; Shanker, Thom (27 January 2012). “Defense Budget Cuts Would Limit Raises and Close Bases”. The New York Times: p. A12. Retrieved 3 February 2012.
- ^ Stewart, Phil (21 January 2012). “U.S. won’t cut carrier fleet to fix budget, Panetta says”. Reuters. Retrieved 3 February 2012.
- ^ Steinhauer, Jennifer (23 November 2011). “Automatic Military Cuts May Stand in Congress”. The New York Times: p. A20. Retrieved 7 December 2011.
- ^ Center on American Progress-A Historical Perspective on Defense Spending-July 2011
- ^ Bendavid, Naftali (21 November 2011). “Congress’s Deficit ‘Bomb’: Scary or Not?”. Washington Wire. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 7 December 2011.
- ^ Hand, E. (2011). “Debt deal sets day of reckoning”. Nature 476 (7359): 133–134. doi:10.1038/476133a. PMID 21833060. edit
- ^ Ham, Becky (25 November 2011). “Science, Engineering Groups Urge Lawmakers to Protect R&D”. Science 334 (6059): 1079. doi:10.1126/science.334.6059.1079.
- ^ “Open Letter to the United States Congress Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction”. Stand With Science. Retrieved 7 December 2011.
- ^ OMB-President Obama’s 2013 Budget-Summary Table S4 and S5
- ^ a b CBO-Long Term Economic Outlook-January 2012
- ^ a b “Fiscal Year 2013 Budget of the U.S. Government”. United States Office of Management and Budget. Retrieved 13 February 2012.
- ^ Weisman, Jonathan (2012-02-10). “Obama Budget Bets Other Concerns Will Trump the Deficit”. New York Times. Retrieved 2012-04-22.
Further reading
- “Estimated Impact of Automatic Budget Enforcement Procedures Specified in the Budget Control Act”. United States Congressional Budget Office. 12 September 2011. Retrieved 8 December 2011.
External links
- Status of Appropriations Legislation for Fiscal Year 2013 from the Library of Congress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budget
Amity Shlaes–Coolidge–Videos
President Coolidge, 1st Presidential Film (1924)
President Coolidge’s Inauguration (1925)
Calvin Coolidge: The Best President You’ve Never Heard Of – Amity Shlaes
Calvin Coolidge book by Amity Shlaes on w/ Glenn Beck on The Blaze TV
Amity Shlaes, Author, “Coolidge”
Digital Age-Why is Coolidge the Forgotten President?-Amity Shlaes
“How They Did It” – Part 1 of 4
“How They Did It” – Part 2 of 4
“How They Did It” – Part 3 of 4
“How They Did It” – Part 4 of 4
Background Articles and Videos
Keep Cool With Coolidge, Not Obama: Obama Reveals His True Hatred of Business
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Calvin Coolidge–Videos
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Santa Obama’s $9 Minimum Wage: Good Propaganda, Bad Economics–Videos
Santa Obama’s $9 minimum wage: good propaganda, bad economics
By Raymond Thomas Pronk
Presidential economic policies like the proverbial “road to hell” are often paved with good intentions.
In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said:
“Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong. Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour. This single step would raise the incomes of millions of working families. It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead. For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets.”
Why not increase the minimum wage to $18 per hour and win America’s war on poverty?
What are the economic consequences or impact of a $9 minimum wage on young high school and college students seeking employment? A decidedly negative impact if economic history is any guide.
The large increase in teenage unemployment is partly driven by the increase in the minimum wage. When the minimum wage rate was increased in July 2008 from $5.85 to $6.55 there was an upward spike in the teenage unemployment rate to greater than 20 percent. When the minimum wage was again increased in July 2009 from $6.55 to its current rate of $7.25, there was another upward spike in the teenage unemployment rate to greater than 25 percent. This rising trend of upward spikes in teenage unemployment rates after an increase in the minimum wage is reflected in the following chart.
Unemployment rate or percent of 16-19 years from 1948 to present
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor
David Neumark, professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine and William L. Wascher, deputy director in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board, in their book, “Minimum Wages,” provide a comprehensive review of the evidence on the economic effects of minimum wage laws. They concluded that such laws reduce employment opportunities for less-skilled workers, tend to reduce their earnings and are not very effective in reducing poverty.
If Congress passes an increase in the minimum wage to $9 as proposed by Obama, young, inexperienced, low-skill workers, especially blacks and Hispanics, will again be hurt for they will not be hired by businesses who cannot afford to pay them the higher mandated minimum wage. This will be reflected in yet another spike upward in the teenage unemployment rate that might exceed 30 percent.
Furthermore, young American citizens, especially blacks and Hispanics, will face stiff competition from the more than 11 million illegal aliens who predominantly seek low-skilled jobs. Obama and progressives in both the Democratic and Republican parties want to grant these illegal aliens immediate legal status to work in the U.S.
Obama is repeating the past economic policy mistakes of progressive presidents from both political parties such as Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Carter and the Bushes in mandating higher than free market wage rates. These well-intentioned but massive government interventionist economic policies lead to prolonged depressions and recessions with high unemployment rates, especially for young, inexperienced, low skilled and minority workers.
Thirty years ago the black economist, Walter E. Williams, explored the effects of federal and state government intervention into the economy, including minimum wage laws, in the PBS documentary, Good Intentions, based upon his 1982 book, “The State Against Blacks.” Those favoring a rise in the federal minimum wage would be well advised to view this video together with “Milton Friedman on the Minimum Wage” on YouTube before advocating an increase in the minimum wage.
For young American citizens an entry-level job paying a lower competitive market wage rate is preferable to no job at a higher government mandated minimum wage.
Good intentions are not enough. Results measured in jobs created count.
Raymond Thomas Pronk is host of the Pronk Pops Show on KDUX web radio from 3-5 p.m. Fridays and author of the companion blog http://www.pronkpops.wordpress.com/
Digital Age-Why is Coolidge the Forgotten President?-Amity Shlaes
Sumner’s Explanation of The Forgotten Man – Revised for the 21st Century
Sumner’s Explanation of The Forgotten Man – Revised for the 21st
Century
By Joshua Lyons 9/25/09
As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed – with the praise of Y – to remedy the evil and help X.
Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X.
As for A and B, who get a law to make themselves do for X what they are willing to do for him, we have nothing to say except that they might better have done it without any law, but C is forced to comply with the new law.
All this is done while Y looks on with glee and proclaims that A and B are so good for helping poor X.
A is the politician
B is the humanitarian, special interest, do-gooder, reformer, social speculator, etc.
C is The Forgotten Man (i.e. you, me, us)
X is the downtrodden, the oppressed, the little guy, the misunderstood, etc.
Y is the Mainstream Media
In other words…
As soon as THE POLITICIAN observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which THE DOWNTRODDEN is suffering, THE POLITICIAN talks it over with THE HUMANITARIAN, and THE POLITICIAN and THE HUMANITARIAN then propose to get a law passed – with the praise of THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA – to remedy the evil and help THE DOWNTRODDEN.
Their law always proposes to determine what THE FORGOTTEN MAN shall do for THE DOWNTRODDEN or, in the
better case, what THE POLITICIAN, THE HUMANITARIAN and THE FORGOTTEN MAN shall do for THE DOWNTRODDEN.
As for THE POLITICIAN and THE HUMANITARIAN, who get a law to make themselves do for THE DOWNTRODDEN what they are willing to do for him, we have
nothing to say except that they might better have done it without any law, but THE FORGOTTEN MAN is forced to comply with the new law.
All this is done while THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA looks on with glee and proclaims that THE POLITICIAN and THE HUMANITARIAN are so good for helping poor THE DOWNTRODDEN.
The preceding commentary was based on William Graham Sumner’s explanation of The Forgotten Man.
http://forgottenmenblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/sumners-explanation-of-forgotten-man.html
The Truth about the Minimum Wage
Obama: “Raise Minimum Wage to $9 an Hour” – SOTU 2013
More on Minimum Wage
Obama’s $9/Hour SOTU Minimum Wage
Milton Friedman on Minimum Wage
Power of the Market – Minimum Wage
Williams with Sowell – Minimum Wage
The Job-Killing Impact of Minimum Wage Laws
“Good Intentions” by Dr. Walter Williams
Dr. Walter Williams’ 1982 PBS documentary “Good Intentions” based on his book, “The State Against Blacks”. The documentary was very controversial at the time it was released and led to many animosities and even threats of murder.
In “Good Intentions”, Dr. Williams examines the failure of the war on poverty and the devastating effect of well meaning government policies on blacks asserting that the state harms people in the U.S. more than it helps them. He shows how government anti-poverty programs have often locked people into poverty making the points that:
- being forced to attend 3rd rate public schools leave students unprepared for working life
- minimum wages prevent young people from obtaining jobs at an early age
- licensing and labor laws have had the effect of restricting entrance of blacks into the skilled trades and unions
- the welfare system creates perverse incentives for the poor to make bad choices they otherwise would not
Dr. Williams presents the following solutions to these problems:
Failing Public Schools – Give parents greater control over their children’s education by setting up a tuition tax credit or voucher system to broaden competition in turn revitalizing both public and non-public schools
Minimum Wages – Remove the minimum wage from youngsters to give more young people the chance to learn the world of work at an early age instead spending their free time idle an possibly falling into the habits of the street
Restrictive Labor Laws, Jobs Programs – Eliminate government roadblocks that prevent new entrepreneurs from starting their own business
Welfare Programs – Enact a compassionate welfare system such as a negative income tax which would remove dependency and dis-incentives for the poor to get themselves out of poverty
Scholars interviewed in the documentary include Donald Eberle, Charles Murray, and George Gilder.
Good Intentions 1 of 3 Introduction and Public Schools with Walter Williams
Good Intentions 2 of 3 Minimum Wage, Licensing, and Labor Laws with Walter
Good Intentions 3 of 3 The Welfare System and Conclusions with Walter Williams
Government Intervention and Individual Freedom | Walter Williams
Obama: “Time to Pass Immigration Reform” – State of the Union 2013
Contrasting Views of the Great Depression | Robert P. Murphy
Why You’ve Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920 | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Uncommon Knowledge: The Great Depression with Amity Shlaes
Calvin Coolidge: The Best President You’ve Never Heard Of – Amity Shlaes
Amity Shlaes, Author, “Coolidge”
Keep Cool With Coolidge, Not Obama: Obama Reveals His True Hatred of Business
Obama Wants $9 Minimum Wage…
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