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President Obama will continue his campaign to bypass Congressional opposition to his jobs agenda Thursday by announcing a new partnership aimed at helping a quarter of a million young people find summer jobs. The initiative, part of Obama’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign, is intended to replace a youth jobs fund that would have been enacted had Congress passed the president’s $447 billion jobs bill. “America’s young people face record unemployment, and we need to do everything we can to make sure they’ve got the opportunity to earn the skills and a work ethic that come with a job. It’s important...

WASHINGTON (AP) — It's a massive health care entitlement with unfunded future costs over $7 trillion. Many conservatives are still upset at the way it was rammed through Congress. But when the Republican presidential candidates were asked last week asked if they would repeal the Medicare drug benefit, they said no way. After all, Republicans created it. Republicans want to pull the plug on the health care overhaul they call "Obamacare," but that law is arguably less a deficit driver than the Medicare drug plan they are defending.

California public pension funds had a combined $490 billion in obligations in fiscal 2008-09 and enough assets on hand to cover 81 percent of those promises, according to a new report. But the state's overall public employee retiree health care liabilities reached $66.6 billion with virtually no money set aside for those future obligations, according to the survey by Pew Center on the States. "The Widening Gap: The Great Recession's Impact on State Pension and Retiree Health Care Costs" also says that California should have paid $12.4 billion into its public retirement funds that year but paid only about 82...

(CNSNews.com) -- Former House Speaker New Gingrich (R-Ga.), a likely 2012 presidential candidate, told CNSNews.com today that he does not regret supporting the enactment of the Medicare prescription drug plan which now presents the federal government with a $7.2 trillion unfunded liability. An unfunded liability is a benefit the federal government has promised to pay that is not matched by tax revenue to fund it and thus represents an anticipated increase in the national debt.

In Policy Options for State Pension Systems and Their Impact on Plan Liabilities (NBER Working Paper No. 16453), co-authors Joshua Rauh and Robert Novy-Marx examine 116 state-sponsored pension plans, including all of those with more than $1 billion of assets, to estimate the extent of unfunded pension liabilities and how that issue might be addressed. When states value their pension systems, they typically use a discount rate of 8 percent. The authors note that the principles of financial economics suggest using a much more conservative discount rate. "This means discounting either with a taxable state-specific municipal yield curve, which credits...

A couple of days ago I posted this original article on my blog about the huge problem coming with the 'real' national debt. Several people wanted me to post it here so I hope you find it as interesting: We here at Surviving California have been asking our friends for the last several years a question…and “it” has surprised us that no one else seems to be asking “it”. Either “it” is a very dumb question (a real possibility consider our history) or people have been in a self-induced fog preventing them from realizing the immensity of “it”. When we...

Got a spare $5,500 lying around that you want to get rid of? If every single San Franciscan coughed up that amount, we could pay City Hall's retiree health care bill - for now anyway. A new report from the controller's office shows the city has an unfunded retiree health care liability of $4.36 billion. That means it'll cost that much to pay the promised health care benefits for every current employee and retiree - and that number will keep growing as health care costs rise. By 2033, the tab will be a whopping $9.7 billion. Guess how much the...

Republican Governors Association chairman Rick Perry (R-Texas) called Social Security a Ponzi scheme on Sunday and said young workers know they will never receive any of the money they currently pay into the fund. "What I'm saying is that between Social Security, Medicaid and Medicaid there's $106 trillion of unfunded liabilities and not one dime saved to pay for them," Perry said on Fox News Sunday. "My children who are in their 20s know that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme." When challenged by host Chris Wallace, who pointed out that when Social Security started there were seven or eight...

SACRAMENTO - Already grappling with spiraling annual health costs, some of the largest agencies across California are facing a new squeeze as they're forced to begin fully accounting next year for retiree health-care liabilities. And for the first time, many will have to acknowledge they have accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars in looming costs with no comprehensive way to pay for it other than by cutting strained budgets. Annual health costs for state and local government retirees are expected to total at least $4.5 billion this year and could soar to almost $31.5 billion by 2019, according to a...

Excerpt - NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Taxpayers owe more than $500,000 per household for financial promises made by government, mostly to cover the cost of retirement benefits for baby boomers, USA Today reported, citing its own analysis. Federal, state and local governments have added nearly $10 trillion to taxpayer liabilities in the past two years, bringing the total of government's unfunded obligations to an unprecedented $57.8 trillion, said the report late Wednesday. That is the equivalent of $510,678 for every household in the U.S., said USA Today. ~ snip ~

Salvatore Dimassi Mass State Representativ (D) Speaker of the House. This was a ll a scam to get federal matching dollars! On C-span now. Basically this is one big socialitst exposure festival. These people are crazy!

Sometimes in order to see an issue with clarity, it must be framed in the proper context. Such is the case with Secretary of Education Rod Paige’s decision to pay a pundit to promote a more "truthful" message about NCLB to combat the misinformation campaign led by the NEA. The attempts to discredit No Child Left Behind as an unfunded mandate with impossible demands made on the states has been swallowed hook, line, and sinker, as truth by the mainstream media and "Educrats". Yet, the misinformation floating around about NCLB ranks right up with the propaganda spewed out by the...

PLF Challenges Federal HHS English Translation MandateUnfunded Illegal Mandate on Doctors and Healthcare Providers Threatens Access to Care for Countless Seniors on Medicare/MedicaidSeptember 2004 In one of his many last-minute acts as President, Bill Clinton implemented Executive Order 13166, and dealt a devastating blow to doctors, medical practices, and senior citizens across the nation. This Executive Order is still on the books and has become a catalyst for unprecedented expansion of the federal government?s control of private healthcare in this country. Signed by Clinton on August 11, 2000, Executive Order 13166 directs all federal agencies to adopt a plan to ?improve access?...

The Army chief of staff "adamantly opposes" an end- strength increase to the size of his service. Gen. Peter Schoomaker told the House Armed Services Committee today that an unfunded end-strength increase "puts readiness at risk, it puts training at risk, it puts modernization at risk, it puts transformation at risk – and that's why I'm resisting it." Many in Congress believe the Army is stressed with worldwide operations. One proposal calls for adding two more combat divisions. Another calls for a 40,000-man increase in the Army, while other, more general proposals just call for end-strength increases. Schoomaker agrees the...

<p>NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Many economists worry that the U.S. federal budget deficit could approach a record $500 billion this year.</p> <p>Few, however, have grasped that the fiscal problems facing the United States could make an itty bitty $500 billion deficit look like pocket change.</p>

Opposition in Nebraska highlights GOP conflict(Excerpt)The U.S. Department of Education humiliated tiny Washington Elementary School in northeast Nebraska this year, declaring that its students had produced abysmal test scores and that it was a "failing" school. The pronouncement did not exactly spur Nebraska officials to take emergency action. Instead, they decided to challenge the federal government, saying its assessment was plain wrong. What's more, they said, the "feds" should back off and let this state evaluate its schools as it sees fit. ... Nelson, a Republican, voted for Bush but now complains about his stance on this issue. "On one...