Global Warming Update

I love the global warming issue because even as the cause becomes more and more ridiculous, the advocates just double down again and again.  When you think they should be looking to climb down gracefully and hope nobody would remember to associate their names with this scam, instead they become ever louder and more extreme and more shrill in their demands.  The end game is going to take a long time, and be a lot of fun.

​On March 8 one Shaun Marcott, a new Ph.D. at Oregon State University, and other authors, published in Science a new reconstruction of temperatures over the last 11,300 years.  The reconstruction was based largely on cores from undersea sediments, and showed a strong 20th century uptick, thus appearing to vindicate, at least in part, the famous and discredited "Hockey Stick" graph of Michael Mann et al.  The article promptly got a lot of publicity.

It took Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org just over a week to completely demolish the article, in a series of posts from March 13 to March 19.  By March 31 Marcott et al. had posted a "FAQ" about their article at realclimate.org, admitting that the 20th century portion of their reconstruction "is not statistically robust [and] cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes."

Meanwhile, the real news in the field of climate is the refusal, now for over 15 years, of global temperatures to increase, even as atmospheric CO2 continues to soar.​  The data are easily available, for example here from the UAH satellite temperature series.  Sooner or later somebody has to notice.  Well, for example, the Economist magazine, long a group thinker of global warming alarmism, is starting to notice, and published  a long article in the March 30 edition beginning the attempt at graceful climb down.

[A]s an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.

​And at the Financial Post in Canada, long skeptical environmental columnist Lawrence Solomon writes on April 13 to welcome to the ranks of the skeptics, along with the Economist,  Die Zeit of Germany and its top (and very green) columnist Harald Martenstein.

But in a world badly in need of the humor coming from people making fools of themselves, the super-environmentalist Bill McKibben of Middlebury College in Vermont and of the web site 350.org obliges by choosing this time to launch a massive campaign to get university endowments to divest from investment in fossil fuel companies.​  McKibben is the non-scientist former writer for the New Yorker who chooses to make a career lecturing everybody else on how they are destroying the planet by using fossil fuels.  He doesn't know a thing about the subject matter, but he must have some personal charisma or something, because it is remarkable how many in the environmental movement are completely willing to follow him over the cliff of the global warming scam and take the whole movement with them. 

According to the Yale Daily News here, McKibben's divestment campaign "has spread to 252 college campuses, including most of the Ivy League" as of February 8.  Vassar is one of the colleges most deeply in the grip of the hysteria, and you really need to read some of the stuff to understand the powerful religious fervor of these people.  From the February 27 Vassar Miscellany News, by Gabe Dunsmith and Erin Boss: 

​Divestment from fossil fuels promises to bring about a people-powered transition to a sustainable world.  Though the atrocities of fossil fuel may seem far from our campus, Vassar's endowment, like that of so many other institutions, is invested in corporate conglomerates like BP, Exxon, and Halliburton. . . .  Perhaps most importantly, divestment is a fight for justice. It brings Vassar students one step closer to the communities that the fossil fuel industry decimates. . . .  After all, the brunt of the climate crisis will be felt in communities that are already silenced and oppressed.

You mean you didn't know that the landowners of northern Pennsylvania were "silenced and oppressed" by the fracking boom?  Of course, the kids who write this stuff have never gone more than a day or two in their lives without electricity, they fly and drive wherever they want, they have plenty of heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, and computers and smartphones and everything else you can think of.  I wonder how many of them are prepared to give all that up.  My bet is zero.  You may think you have to be smart to get into these fancy schools, but not really very smart.

Could Anthony Weiner Really Be A Credible Candidate For Mayor Of New York?

Do you remember Anthony Weiner?  For New Yorkers, he's hard to forget.  He was the high-flying recently-married Congressman from a Brooklyn/Queens district who self-destructed ​spectacularly in the Spring of 2011 when he accidentally posted on a site accessible to his social media "followers" a picture of his crotch intended only to be tweeted to a young unmarried female college student from Seattle.  After initially digging his hole deeper for a few days by denying he was the tweeter, he ended up resigning about a month after the initial revelation.  Now, you would think, there is a guy who is never coming back in politics.

Not so fast!  Last week via an article in the New York Times Magazine, Weiner floated his name as a potential candidate for Mayor, in an election coming up this November.  According to this morning's New York Post, an initial poll shows him running a relatively strong second in a field of five.​  Could this guy possibly be a credible candidate?

To answer that question, you need first a recognition of the importance of the Democratic party nomination, and second an understanding of the various buffoons who are the other candidates for that nomination.​  Given that the Republican candidate has defeated the Democrat for mayor in all of the last five elections spanning 20 years, you would think that the Democratic nomination cannot be all that important.  But you would be wrong.  The Democratic nominee will undoubtedly be the strong favorite, no matter how loony.   Democrats have a voter registration advantage over Republicans of about 6 to 1.  Mike Bloomberg has managed to hang on for three terms under the Republican banner, but by spending vast sums of personal money and with increasingly narrow margins of victory.  No Republican candidate will come remotely close to raising the sums that Bloomberg has spent of his own money to get elected.  And on top of that, he's not a real Republican in his policies.  So at best any Republican candidate will start out as a serious underdog.

Now let's consider briefly the Democratic alternatives.  I wrote about current city Comptroller John Liu a few days ago here.  ​Although as Comptroller he is in charge of the pension plans for the city workforce, from all indications he has no clue that there are multi billions of annual dollars of increase in required pension contributions baked into the current system and ready to explode upon us.  Instead of telling us his solution to that problem, he proposes a collection of new non-starter spending programs, all to be financed with tax increases on a handful of "the rich" who just got hit with big increases at both the Federal and State levels.  No amount of arithmetic can make his numbers add up, but hey, he's only the Comptroller, so what can you expect him to know about numbers?  Also, he's the darling of the city worker unions, although he hasn't yet been endorsed in this cycle by their political arm, the Working Families Party.  Oh, and did I mention that his former campaign treasurer is about to start a Federal trial for corruption?

​Well, how about Christine Quinn, Speaker of the City Council and representative from the trendy precincts of Greenwich Village -- my own councilwoman!  She's the current frontrunner in the polls, and thought to be allied with Bloomberg.  Many think she is at least somewhat saner than the typical Democratic NYC pol, who believes that more government spending is the answer to absolutely every problem.  Well, but her signature issue is vast expansion of "permanently affordable housing," otherwise known as lifetime subsidies to non-poor people and the least cost-effective expenditure of public funds ever devised.  No mention from her campaign that I can find of recognition of the pension problem or any proposed solution.  Since she is a Manhattanite, we think we can expect her to be not quite so overtly on the take as her colleagues from the outer boroughs.  Oh but wait, let's check out this from yesterday's Wall Street Journal.  It seems that as Speaker of the City Council Quinn has total personal discretion over some $17 million of funds known as "member items," and that she has requested in each of the past three years that $100,000 of such funds be directed to an outfit called the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development specifically to "advocate" for Quinn's signature issue, permanently affordable housing.   Directing public funds to lobbyists to lobby for your pet campaign issues -- that takes a little chutzpah!  In her favor, I guess we have to admit that she didn't just pocket the money personally (well, maybe we shouldn't be too quick to jump to that conclusion). 

Deeper down in the polls we have Bill de Blasio, current Public Advocate (citywide elected office with no responsibilities that anyone can name).  This fellow is a true member of the Loony Left, desperately trying to run to the left of everyone else on every issue, and to get the endorsements of the city worker unions.  ​He has never seen a tax increase or a spending program that he would not support.

Are you starting to see why Weiner might actually be preferable to the alternatives?​  Spending most of his career in Washington (he was an aide to Schumer before running for Congress), there is every reason to think that he is far less in debt to the city worker unions than the other candidates. 

And did I mention that every one of the labor contracts for the city workers has expired.  Some blame Bloomberg for not negotiating new contracts, but I don't -- there is no way the unions will do a deal with Bloomberg, when the alternative is to wait until after an election where it is entirely likely that their support will have put the winner in office.​

Yikes, Weiner may be our best hope.  Amazing but true.​

The Dopes At The IMF Continue Their Advocacy For Bigger Government

Yesterday in Washington, the IMF held a web press conference to announce the release of its April 2013 World Economic Outlook.  The transcript of the event is here.  The Wall Street Journal report is here.​

Could there possibly be a more destructive force in world economic policy than the IMF?  Tell me I'm wrong, but I assert that their main purpose in life is to promote economic fallacy in the effort to provide legitimacy to big governments and high government spending around the world.​  The principal tool in their arsenal right now is the use of terms like "austerity," "stimulus," and "fiscal consolidation" as descriptors of the main alternatives in economic policy.  These terms are hugely misleading and lead to precisely the wrong result every time.

For those new to the Manhattan Contrarian, here is my view of the basic issue:​

Here is really everything you need to know about economic policy:  large private sector, small state sector, successful economy;  small private sector, large state sector, unsuccessful economy.

The IMF's Keynes-based terminology entirely muddles the relevant concepts to make the bad policies appear marginally superior to a fake straw man, thus to support larger government.  What is "austerity," sometimes also known as "fiscal consolidation"?  It is some combination of cuts to government spending -- good policy -- with tax increases -- bad policy.  Since the tax increases almost always exceed the cuts to spending, the combination represented by "austerity" is very likely to be a negative.  The IMF uses that fact to make a fallacious argument in favor of bad policy -- increased government spending -- over good policy -- cuts to government spending.

Don't believe me?  Here they are yesterday.  According to the WSJ report:​

​Seeking to keep a fragile global recovery on track, the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday called on countries that can afford it—including the U.S. and Britain—to slow the pace of their austerity measures.  The fund warned that "overly strong" belt-tightening in the U.S. will slow growth this year.  Across-the-board government spending cuts, known as the sequester, were the "wrong way" to shrink the budget deficit, it said in its semiannual report on economic growth.

Or check out a few choice quotes from the IMF's Chief Economist, M. Olivier Blanchard (that's Blahn-SHAR -- he's a frog):​

The growth figure for the United States for 2013 may not seem that high. Indeed, it is insufficient to make a large dent in a still very high unemployment rate, but it comes in the face of very strong, indeed an overly strong, fiscal consolidation of about 1.8 percent of GDP.

"Overly strong fiscal consolidation" = "Don't you dare try to cut government spending!"  They will never, ever admit that tax increases are the problem and cuts to government spending are the solution.  In fact, it is a required feature of their style manual that they must never, ever use any term that breaks "austerity" or "fiscal consolidation" down into the two components parts of government spending cuts on the one hand and increased taxes on the other.  Here is Blanchard's comparable remark as to France: ​

France's growth is forecast to be slightly negative in 2013, reflecting a combination of fiscal consolidation, poor export performance, and increasingly, so, low confidence.

I like that "growth slightly negative" bit -- are they allowed to use the word "shrinkage"?  Now what exactly does so-called "fiscal consolidation" look like in France?  Can they mention that spending by the French government is a stunning 56% of GDP?  Possibly, could that be part of the problem?  (Federal/State/Local combined spending in the U.S. is around 40% +/- of GDP.)  Are they actually planning to shrink the 56% even by a little?  Time here describes the proposed fiscal plan of the Hollande government as "combin[ing] cuts [with] targeted stimulus spending and increased taxes."   So on the spending side it's just a complete bait and switch -- some goes down and some goes up, and the government never shrinks by one iota.  And can they even breathe a word that the threatened 75% tax rate on high earners might have something to do with the problem?​

We can never be reminded too often that when the policy of massive spending cuts without tax increases has been tried, it has set off an economic boom.  If you have not read Dave Henderson's Hoover Institution piece on the post-World War II spending cuts (well over 50%) in the U.S. and ensuing boom, you must.​  And don't forget the classic 1943 quote from delusional uber-Keynesianist Paul Samuelson:

The final conclusion to be drawn from our experience at the end of the last war is inescapable—were the war to end suddenly within the next 6 months, were we again planning to wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, to demobilize our armed forces, to liquidate price controls, to shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties—then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.

All those government actions he warned against ("wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, demobilize our armed forces, . . . liquidate price controls, . . . shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties") actually happened, except of course for the deficits part -- they actually went to surplus in 1947, 1948 and 1949.  But of course, the "greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced" didn't happen at all.  Instead, there was a boom.  Oh, and Samuelson went on to make millions selling his Keynesian claptrap textbook to a couple of generations of credulous college students.

You really can't trust a single word that the so-called "experts" say on these subjects.  ​

The Consequences Of Bad Economic Policy: Gradual Relative Decline

California's recent rounds of tax increases, particularly on incomes of high earners, have many predicting some kind of exodus or other rapid economic calamity.  See for example this article from the Orange County Register.  For better or worse, these economic forces work much more slowly than that.  We can get an idea how bad economic policies will play out from looking at the histories of places that have tried them.

Consider Venezuela.​   Short of North Korea, this is about as bad as economic policy can get.  A Heritage Foundation report out yesterday contains a litany of the bad ideas of the just-ended Chavez era:  doubling in size of the state sector over 13 years; government deficits increasing to 15% of GDP in the most recent period; rampant inflation accompanied by exchange controls, black markets for currency, and allocation of currency at official rates to government cronies; bureaucratic interference in the judicial system; subsidies to favored products (gasoline in this case); etc., etc.

​What have been the results?  in the real economy, bad.  "There are scarcities of nearly all staple food and fuel products. . . .   Venezuela faces the most severe food shortages in four years. . . .  [O]ver the past 10 years inflation in food and nonalcoholic beverages is 1,284%."  In official economic statistics, not nearly that bad, but still bad:  "Between 1999 and 2012, average annual per capita growth was just 1.1 percent. . . ."  That's from the IMF, which of course counts all government spending at 100 cents on the dollar in measuring GDP.  When wasteful government spending has just exploded, that methodology gives a wildly misleading picture of the real economy.  If you gave government spending an appropriate discount of 50% or more in calculating GDP, then almost certainly the correct number for Venezuela's GDP  "growth" over the last 13 years is negative, although Venezuelans are not told that.  And meanwhile, the Chavista candidate just won a new six year term, although very narrowly. 

Still, terms like "economic collapse" are very strong.  Even with the hugely counterproductive policies of the Chavez regime, what Venezuela has experienced is really a gradual decline, a slow slide into economic irrelevance.  By comparison to Venezuela, California's new high tax rates are only a pale imitation of the medley of disastrous policies pursued by the Chavistas.​

Similarly, consider the UK in the pre-Thatcher era.  As discussed by me a few days ago here and in the linked Wikipedia article, the policies of the preceding Labor governments included ​nationalization of most major industry, high government spending, special political status for labor unions, repeated Keynesian "stimulus" programs, and price controls (then known as "incomes policy").  According to a 2011 article in the Economist, the top marginal income tax rate in the UK pre-Thatcher was 83% (an additional tax on investment income could lead to a top rate of 98%!); Thatcher reduced the 83% to 40% between 1979 and 1988.  But even with those incredible rates for long periods in the 60s and 70s, it's not like everyone picked and left, or like the economy experienced sudden collapse.  Instead, they had what the Economist calls "the dawn of stagnation."  England became the "sick man of Europe," with a prolonged era of little-to-no economic growth (again, likely negative if government spending were accounted for reasonably in GDP instead of at 100 cents on the dollar). 

Or closer to home, consider New York.  It's hard to say that New York City is not doing rather well today, after 20 years of at least nominally Republican mayors.  Public safety is hugely improved over that time, and taxes have at least been kept somewhat under control.  But still, with a top income tax rate of near 13% (combining New York State and City rates), New York is being far outpaced in growth by lower tax jurisdictions.  People want to live in big, happening cities, and in other countries throughout the world, the main business capitals are booming relative to the rest of the country they are in (think any place from London to Shanghai to Bangalore to Moscow).   New York is holding its own, but it could be doing far better, if only it had just reasonably competitive economic and tax policy.  And upstate New York, saddled with the high taxes but lacking the allure of the big city, is in a slow death spiral.

​But here's the hardest thing to understand:  In places with bad economic policies, and suffering ongoing relative economic decline, somehow the grip of the political class gets tighter and tighter, and the possibilities of effecting change through the voting booth become less and less.  Those receiving state handouts come to perceive their well-being as coming from the handouts, even as nations or regions surrounding them achieve superior economic performance for all without the handouts.​  So New York and Chicago, and Detroit, and Philadelphia, and very likely now California go into gradual relative economic decline, and continue to decline for decades, but even as their decline becomes more and more obvious to anyone following the data the voters in these jurisdictions vote in higher and higher percentages for the continuation of the policies of high taxes and handouts that brought about the decline.   It's the political genius of Progressivism.

John Liu Runs For Mayor

Here in New York City we have a race for mayor getting underway, and the Manhattan Contrarian thinks it may be time to turn our attention away from national affairs to see what's happening on the local scene.  We hold our mayoral elections in the odd off years, so this year Mr. Bloomberg leaves after 12 years in office, term limited, and the election to replace him is in November.​  The primary is September 10.  Main candidates for the Democratic nomination include Christine Quinn (Speaker of the City Council), Bill de Blasio (Public Advocate), Bill Thompson (former Comptroller), and John Liu (current Comptroller).  Today I will consider Mr. Liu.

The Comptroller of New York City has major responsibilities for oversight of the City's money, handling bond issuances, auditing agency expenditures, and acting as trustee of employee pension funds.  Anyone holding that office automatically becomes a serious contender to replace the mayor, and indeed the Democratic nominee last time around was Thompson, who at the time was the sitting Comptroller.

But other than that, it's very hard to think of anything positive to say about Mr. Liu.  ​To me, the fact that Liu is considered a credible candidate illustrates everything that is wrong with New York City politics.

I'll start by mentioning Liu's ongoing scandal.  About a year ago, Liu's campaign treasurer Jia Hou was indicted by the Feds for alleged use of "straw donors" to evade campaign finance restrictions.  Her trial has not yet occurred.  So far the case has not touched Liu directly, but campaign treasurer is not a minor office.  I'm not a fan of these campaign finance laws, so I won't mention it further, but the investigation is casting a big shadow over his effort.

Meanwhile, Liu soldiers on.  He is known as the darling of the city employee unions, and won the endorsement of their political arm, the Working Families Party, in his race for Comptroller in 2009.  So far they have not made an endorsement for mayor this time around.​

A couple of days ago Liu released what he called the "People's Budget" to set forth his priorities in the campaign.  ​Where did he release this campaign document?  On the New York City Comptroller's web site, of course.  That's a little shameless for a guy under a serious ethical cloud already.  The same day he showed up at a breakfast of the Association for a Better New York at the Roosevelt Hotel to talk about it.  Here's a report on his performance from Capital New York.  The gist of the proposal:  lots of new programs, from universal pre-K (where did he get that one?) to 5000 new police officers, to 100,000 units of "affordable housing."  How to pay for it?  Raise taxes on the "rich" (aka, high income) of course, as well as on businesses and insurance companies, and toll the Harlem and East River bridges for non-residents only.

Capital New York reports the following exchange between Liu and real estate magnate Bill Rudin at the breakfast:​

"This idea that well, everybody's going to leave New York City, I don't think--you're not going to leave, Bill," Liu said to Bill Rudin, the association's famously civic-minded president and head of a big New York real estate family, who had joined him on stage to moderate the question-and-answer session.

"My tenants will," Rudin replied.

"You're not going to leave," Liu scoffed.

So for starters Liu demonstrates his ignorance of New York City's history of hemorrhaging population and businesses in the 1970s when its taxes got way out of line with the other states.  But that's just the beginning.  Liu is the trustee of all the city employee pension funds.  Does he know anything about the disastrous state they are in, and the huge increase in pension costs that the City is facing?  ​At this post, I estimated that the five City pension funds are short by some $250 - 300 billion, a level that will mean that we can expect rapid acceleration of pension contributions from a current $8 billion per year and 12% of the budget to easily double those figures in a few years.  Liu is the guy currently in charge of this, and I honestly don't think he knows the first thing about it.

Well, but let's consider Liu's proposal that all of his new programs can be funded by increased taxes on a handful of "the rich."  I wonder if he knows that the entire take of the City income tax is just over $8 billion per year, only 12% of the budget and just barely enough to pay for the employees who don't work for the City any more.  The Feds just raised their income tax rates on these people by about 4%, and New York State just made permanent a sur-tax on the incomes of the same people of 2%, so now they are paying over 50% of their income in tax.  John, what is the total Adjusted Gross Income of New York City taxpayers whose income exceeds $500,000?  Data from the Tax Foundation for 2010 has the total AGI for New York State for people with income of $200,000 and above at $252 billion.  A good guesstimate for AGI of people with income over $500,000 in New York City would be around $60 billion.  Over half of that already goes to income tax to all government levels.  You've got an $8 billion or so annual pension cost increase staring you in the face.  Do you really think there is any real money to be had by raising yet a third level of income tax rates on this same very limited pool of income?  Well, our Comptroller can't do much math, but what else is new? 

Dare I mention the proposal to toll the bridges for non-residents only?  Seems he hasn't heard of the Federal Constitution either.​

Only in New York City could this guy be a credible candidate for anything.​

Infinite Credit Card Update: The Obama Budget

Our President has now proposed a budget for the upcoming fiscal year.​  It's a few months late, but I guess that's better than just blowing off the job completely, as the Senate has done for the past few years.

To read reports from the President's cheerleaders in the press, the big news is his proposal to use a somewhat modified index for adjusting Social Security payments for inflation, otherwise known as "chained CPI."  That's supposed to save about $340 billion over the next ten years, hugely back-weighted to the later years of course. ​ That would be maybe a 3 - 4% savings on the cash-basis deficit, if you think the cash-basis deficit is a meaningful figure.

But just to see if they're at all serious about their job, let's look at a few other programs running on autopilot on the infinite credit card.​

Student loans:  ​Now over $1 trillion, essentially all guaranteed by the Federal government in an off-balance sheet item not reported as part of the debt.  Any problem there?  If you follow this at all, you've probably seen delinquency rates of between 5 and 10%.  Well, in late February 2013 the New York Fed held a briefing on the latest status of the student loan situation.  This link will take you to a full deck of the power point slides.  At page 11 we learn that  the delinquency rate has gone from about 9% as of 2004 to 17% as of the most recent data in 2012.  Oh, but wait -- on page 12 we learn that some 44% of the student loans are not in "repayment status," either because the student is still in school or has some kind of deferment.  The 17% "delinquent" is of all student loans.  What percent is that of the remaining 56% who are supposed to be repaying?  The answer is that over 30% of the student loans in "repayment status" are delinquent.   And rising rapidly.  They will be very lucky to get back half of the trillion dollars of student loans.  Meanwhile, they continue to make more of them, and the trillion is growing rapidly.  And the students who will be defaulting on the half trillion or so face a future of personal financial disaster.  Nothing I can find in the President's budget to address this.  Hey, it's off balance sheet!

PBGC.  How exactly the Federal government thought it was a good idea to guarantee all private defined benefit pensions, I will never understand.  Where is that now?​  An article here from the website "Top 1000 Funds" about a year ago (April 13, 2012) says that the "funding shortfall" of those top funds was $1.415 trillion..  That of course comes from their official reports.  You can believe the number if you want, but I have strong reason to suspect that they are valuing their liabilities using wishful thinking discount rates of 7 and 8%, some even higher.  Suppose you used a more realistic 5%, or even 4%.  You would need lots of terabytes of data to do an exact calculation, but a back-of-the-envelope estimate tells me that the real "shortfall" (all guaranteed by the PBGC) is in the $5 trillion range.  Anything in the President's Budget to deal with this?  Yes!  Deep in the Budget at page 127 it says that they propose "to give the PBGC Board the authority to adjust premiums . . . ."; and then they credit themselves with a $25 billion deficit reduction for that over 10 years.  Nothing to it!  In reality defined benefit plans are in a death spiral, and the PBGC with them.  From Walter Russell Meade today:  ​"If these estimates are accurate, the PBGC itself could run out of money within 15 years, and much sooner if two particularly large troubled funds become insolvent."  Well, in the great tradition of politicians everywhere, Obama will be gone.

Food Stamps.  ​This is the program that has nearly doubled from 26 million to 48 million recipients in four years of Obama, and now runs at close to $80 billion per year.  Is that just going to double again in the next four years, or are there going to be some efforts to bring it under a semblance of control?  Other than a two-word reference to "program integrity," I don't find anything meaningful about trying to bring it under control.  At page 61 of the Budget, we find that we will now provide what appears to be an additional $7.6 billion in "discretionary nutrition programs" including for the WIC programs for "women, infants and children."  My bet is on continued explosion.

Disability.  A few ​days ago I noted that this program has about doubled under Obama and now runs at about $124 billion per year.  Since then I have seen several articles pointing out that the true cost of the disability program needs to include the fact that disability recipients become entitled to Medicare coverage after two years, even though they are under 65.  That adds another $80 billion, so the actual cost of the disability program is now over $200 billion per year.  And growing like a weed.  Anything in the Obama Budget to bring that under control?  Nothing that I can find.

And I haven't even started to look at the numbers for Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.  The overall impression is that they think that handing out the free money is a good thing.  Deficits are projected to decrease somewhat because the explosion of commitments is way underestimated and then covered over by decreases in defense spending.   But I seriously doubt that it will be possible to continue to hide the problems for the full four years.  ​