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K-12 education is the biggest item in the California budget, but for California’s education cartel the state never spends enough. As this report notes, the Education Coalition, an alliance of unions, school boards and administrators, “lobbies for higher school spending continuously.” The Coalition wants to put California in the top 10 states on per-pupil spending. That would cost California an additional $36 billion a year. To raise spending to the $11,864 per-pupil average for all states would add $20 billion to current spending in the neighborhood of $50 billion for K-12 and the community college system.

Before they reach students in the classroom all those dollars must trickle down through multiple layers of bureaucratic sediment. For example, the Centinela Valley School District in southern California, which serves only 6,600 students, is paying superintendent Jose Fernandez $663,000 a year, and his deal grants him an annual raise of 9 percent. The district also loaned Fernandez nearly $1 million – $910,000 – at a rate of 2 percent, to buy a home in upscale Ladera Heights. Fernandez has 40 years to pay off the loan.

Fernandez’s haul is so grotesque it prompted a bill by Torrance assemblyman Al Muratsuchi to prevent “excessive school superintendent compensation packages.” The assemblyman felt compelled to add that “the vast majority of school administrators are honest, hardworking educators.” That may well be doubted, particularly the “educator” part.

District superintendents do not teach. They are basically bureaucrats, bagmen, and public-relations pitchmen. Their primary job is to make parents content with the tenth-rate education the government K-12 collective farm inflicts on students. Superintendents are all overpaid and Fernandez may be the most overpaid of all. Like the entire state, school districts are not exactly up-front about bureaucratic waste.

Taxpayers should recall that, academically, California is a bottom feeder, and about one-third of students entering the California State University system need remedial math and English. So all that spending has not translated to high achievement. On the other hand, Jose Fernandez and his fellow bureaucrats are living large and the education cartel wants to spend $36 billion more. As in the past, politicians are likely to give the cartel everything it wants.

We said before that President Obama’s proposed budget for the federal government in its 2015 fiscal year was big and bad, but John Merlin writing at Investors Business Daily describes just how big and bad federal spending has grown:

Buried deep in a section of President Obama’s budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.

In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP.

What’s more, the cost of these direct payments is exploding. Even after adjusting for inflation, they’ve shot up 29% under Obama.

The section of the budget in which this particular data is tucked away is Table 6.1 of the budget’s historical tables, which describes the composition of federal spending from 1940 through 2013, with the White House’s forecasts through 2019.

We made the following chart showing each of the major categories’ inflation-adjusted spending covering all the data.

What we find is that in real terms, increasing payments to individuals, through welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, food stamps, and countless others has been the driving factor behind the inflation-adjusted exponential growth of federal spending. Far more than spending for national defense, which if anything, has mostly flatlined by comparison since the early 1950s.

But what’s really unsettling is that the full bill for all the money the federal government has been borrowing to sustain that spending will begin coming due after this year, as President Obama indicates that the net interest that the U.S. federal government must pay to its creditors will begin rising sharply.

The reason why is because the President anticipates that the interest rates that the government must pay to its creditors after that time will also begin rising at that time. And since the federal government has racked up so much debt under his watch, without any meaningful reduction in spending, the federal government will not be able to avoid having to roll over its debt and effectively re-borrow the money it has previously borrowed, but at higher interest rates.

And the dynamics are such that net interest on the national debt will soon become the fastest growing category of federal spending. Not to mention President Obama’s enduring legacy.

So much reporting on Obamacare ignores the failures of the so-called Affordable Care Act. One pleasant exception is Emily Bazar of the CHCF Center for Health Reporting. In a recent column she outlines what has been called Obamacare’s “kid,” “family,” or “affordability” glitch.

As she notes, the federal government offers sliding-scale tax credits to individuals and families who earn between 138 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level. But those with job-based insurance have to pass a second test to qualify for tax credits. The plan offered by their employer also must be “unaffordable,” but the employee and the boss don’t make that call. The government determines “unaffordable,” and deems it so when the employee’s individual premium is more than 9.5 percent of annual household income. As Bazar notes, “if premium costs for the employee alone are less than 9.5 percent of household income, then that employee and his or her family are ineligible for tax credits. Not even if the cost of family coverage exceeds 9.5 percent of household income.”

As Bazar explains, families denied tax credits are paying high premiums that would be higher still if they added family members. Andrew Yates, 31, pays $88 for his employer-based coverage, which the government considers “affordable.” To add his wife Amy would increase the cost to $530 a month, some 15 percent of their annual household income. Amy says “that’s ridiculous. That’s not affordable.” But that’s the way the “Affordable” Care Act works. And despite pressure from family groups, Bazar says, “there isn’t much hope for a fix.” Any fix would be expensive, and “the question becomes whether fixing the glitch would be affordable for the government.”

That’s the key right there: “for the government.” Obamacare takes away the care you want and gives you only the health care the government wants you to have. So it makes sense that the government alone determines what is “affordable.” So this isn’t really a “glitch” at all. It’s the essence of the seventeenth-rate sub-travesty the federal government is now imposing on Andrew and Amy Yates and millions of others nationwide. Once again, the folks up there in Washington are looking out for number one. And number one ain’t you. You ain’t even number two.

If the history of the Obama administration is any indication, one of the most efficient ways for the federal government to waste money is to “invest” it in green energy projects. Projects that are doomed to fail because they are nowhere near being economically viable.

In fact, we could argue that the green energy industry itself just isn’t sustainable, which makes these kinds of government-subsidized “investments” a very bad deal for taxpayers.

It would be one thing if only the money of millionaires and billionaires were at high risk of being lost, but when ventures like these are entirely dependent upon government subsidies to even exist in the first place, that’s a very good indication that there are a lot of better and smarter things that could be done with the taxpayers’ money. Especially when there is no hope of the green energy projects ever living up to their promises.

Unfortunately, because the green energy industry is so dependent upon the government’s subsidized support for its existence, rather than developing economically viable technologies and businesses, it spends a lot of its limited resources on keeping the stream of government subsidies that feed it going. Their latest gambit has reached all the way into the White House, as President Obama’s latest budget proposal is actually proposing disadvantaging their profitable competitors while making their own subsidized support permanent:

Yesterday, President Obama unveiled his proposed national budget for fiscal year 2015, and it includes a smorgasbord of efforts on climate issues.

“We know that future generations will continue to deal with the effects of a warming planet,” the President said yesterday in a speech introducing the budget.

The $3.9 trillion document allocates about $1 trillion for discretionary spending across both defense and non-defense, with the rest going to mandatory programs like Social Security and Medicare. Within that $1 trillion, Obama carves out numerous programs to push forward the climate action plan he announced last year….

This includes a permanent extension of the production tax credit for wind — a cost of $19.2 billion over ten years — which expired at the end of 2013….

The budget would axe about $4 billion in tax breaks that are currently available to the oil and natural gas industries, and another $3.9 billion in tax preferences for coal.

It must be really nice to have a “friend” in the White House who is willing to help you stack the deck in your favor, no matter the cost to taxpayers. Bloomberg Businessweek explains how important it is for the wind energy lobby to get that tax credit made permanent:

In Texas, the wind tends to blow the hardest in the middle of the night. That’s also when most people are asleep and electricity prices drop, which would be a big problem for the companies that own the state’s 7,690 wind turbines if not for a 20-year-old federal subsidy that effectively pays them a flat rate for making clean energy no matter what time it is. Wind farms, whether privately owned or part of a public utility, receive a $23 tax credit for every megawatt-hour of electricity they generate. (A megawatt-hour is enough juice to power about 1,000 homes for one hour.) This credit, which was worth about $2 billion for all U.S. wind projects in 2013, has helped lower the price of electricity in parts of the country where wind power is prevalent, since wind producers can charge less and still turn a profit. In Texas, the biggest wind-producing state in the U.S., wind farms have occasionally sold electricity for less than zero—that is, they’ve paid to provide power to the grid to undercut the state’s nuclear or coal energy providers.

This sweetheart deal looks to be on its way out, in part because it succeeded in what it set out to do. Over the past five years, wind has accounted for 36 percent of all new electricity generation installed in the U.S., second only to new natural gas installations. Wind now supplies more than 4 percent of the country’s electricity. At about 60,000 megawatts, there’s enough wind energy capacity to power 15.2 million U.S. homes, a more than twentyfold increase since 2000. It’s still tiny compared to fossil fuel: Combined, coal and natural gas supply roughly two-thirds of U.S. electricity. But wind produces about six times more electricity than solar. That’s led Congress to take steps to do away with tax incentives first established in 1992 to help the fledgling industry take root. In December lawmakers allowed the credit to expire.

That the green energy lobby is now working to make the wind energy tax credit a permanent burden upon U.S. taxpayers, even as the industry supporters claim the industry’s “success”, really means that the entire industry’s business model is fatally flawed. In calling to make the tax credit permanent at their behest, President Obama is really communicating on their behalf that the wind energy industry will never be able to sustain itself without it.

A smart investor would recognize these things and cut their losses so they could move on to greener opportunities. Allowing the wind energy industry’s tax credit to permanently expire rather than be made a permanent burden for American taxpayers would make that possible.

As we recently noted, deploying the IRS, NSA, ATF, EPA and now the FCC against Americans shows that ruling-class abuse has become inclusive. But some think the abuse is not quite inclusive enough, or severe enough. Consider, for example, this remark about critics of Obamacare.

“There’s plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they’re being told all over America.”

That is not a drunk in some waterfront bar in San Francisco, or an unemployed carnival worker in Boston. That is Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate. Reid backtracked a bit, but one gets his drift. Senator, let this writer assure you that Obamabuse has no existential problem.

Cut loose from a job after more than 13 years with no warning or severance, in a conference call, this writer had a hard time finding health insurance. But with some effort he did find a plan he liked, and he wanted to keep it. Barack Obama, President of the United States, said he could keep it, but that was a lie. Obamacare slapped this writer with a 50-percent increase in premiums for decidedly inferior coverage with ludicrous deductibles.

As Screamin’ Jay Hawkins said, “I ain’t lyin.” Neither are millions of others with Obamacare horror stories, particularly those with serious medical issues who want to keep their doctor and hospital but now find they can’t do that. The government health websites remain largely dysfunctional and insecure, and the worst is yet to come.

To charge that this is all untrue, as Senator Reid did, is verbal abuse of the highest order but it does confirm a couple of things. Some politicians nurse a grudge against reality. And some politicians recall why the American and French Revolutions actually happened. The people of that day had experienced enough ruling-class abuse for one lifetime.

Meanwhile, elimination of Obamacare horror stories is not a difficult matter.

Let all Americans choose the quality health care they want, instead of forcing on them the seventh-rate health care the government wants them to have.

The Obama administration released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2015 earlier today. Dan Mitchell has an early reaction:

There are lots of provisions that deserve detailed attention, but I always look first at the overall trends. Most specifically, I want to see what’s happening with the burden of government spending.

And you probably won’t be surprised to see that Obama isn’t imposing any fiscal restraint. He wants spending to increase more than twice as fast as needed to keep pace with inflation.

What makes these numbers so disappointing is that we learned last month that even a modest bit of spending discipline is all that’s needed to balance the budget.

By the way, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the President also wants a $651 billion tax hike.

That’s in addition to the big fiscal cliff tax hike from early last and the (thankfully smaller) tax increase in the Ryan-Murray budget that was approved late last year.

To avoid increasing the burden of government spending upon typical Americans, the rate at which the federal government spends money would need to be less than the combined average rate of inflation and population growth.

As you can see in Dan’s chart above, the average rate of inflation is about 2.2%. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average rate of population growth (the resident U.S. population plus Armed Forces members stationed outside of the U.S.) from April 2010 through January 2014 works out to be about 0.7%. That puts the combined average rate of inflation and population growth at 2.9%.

Meanwhile, President Obama wants to increase federal spending by 5.0%, which means that the burden of supporting that spending upon Americans will be increased. That, in turn, means two things: taxes need to go up and the federal government needs to borrow more money.

Keeping true to form, President Obama is seeking to directly increase the burden of that additional spending upon Americans through a $651 billion tax hike.

Coincidentally, that tax hike would appear designed to offset the “unexpectedly” $621 billion higher cost of the federal government’s expected spending for health care over the next 10 years, which is being caused by the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”).

The remaining $30 billion of the proposed new tax collections would, also coincidentally, be enough to pay for all the wasteful spending by the federal government identified in the 2013 Wastebook.

Just so we’re clear that the amount of President Obama’s newly proposed tax hike wasn’t arrived at by accident!

We recently noted massive dysfunction at Covered California, the state subsidiary of Obamacare, which, among other things, wasted $1.3 million on an absurd promotional video. But as Emily Bazar of the CHCF Center for Health Reporting notes, these are hardly the only problems.

She writes that California paid Accenture $359 million to set up a “consumer-friendly web portal” that would “simplify and streamline” the application process under Obamacare. Says Bazar, “there must be another definition of ‘consumer friendly’ I’m not familiar with.”

The enrollment deadline is looming but “Californians are still struggling with the website, including some of its basic functions.” And the website does not allow anybody to reset their password. “Instead you have to call the jammed customer service number and wait on hold until someone can help.” As a rule, they are unable to help. The IT people “take hours, days or weeks” to resolve the issue, and this is not simple a tech glitch. Says Bazar, who does not work for Fox News, “you can’t sign up for a health plan online without being signed into your account.”

San Francisco web engineer Sean Knox, 33, knew what plan he wanted and even had the money for it. But he found himself “hamstrung by the most basic process on any website that has been rolled out in the last 15 years.” Says Bazar, “That, my fellow Californians, is what $359 million buys you.”

Given that kind of waste and dysfunction, nobody has grounds to believe any glowing report from Covered California. Californians would do well to get out of there altogether, which is what Sean Knox finally did. Actually, Californians would be better off avoiding the site altogether, but nobody should think that Covered California exhausts the state’s problems with government waste.

Last year, as the Los Angeles Times observed, “California’s computer problems, which have already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, have mounted as state officials cut short work on a $208-million DMV technology overhaul that is only half done.”

Remember, this is supposed to be a high-tech state.

The Federal Communications Commission planned a “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs” that would monitor newspapers, websites and broadcast stations for the way they select stories and for their political leanings. The plan sparked enough outrage that the FCC backed off. Now various theories abound as to what the FCC may still be up to.

Some speculate this may be an attempt to revive the Fairness Doctrine, which was not about fairness at all. Some see the hand of leftist bagman George Soros, and others find a push for minority ownership of major media outlets. A key advocate of the study, they note, is Obama appointee Mignon Clyburn, an FCC commissioner and the daughter of Rep. James Clyburn. Those views all have merit but another FCC Commissioner went to the heart of the matter.

“The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories,” wrote Ajit Pai in the Wall Street Journal. Pai also wondered why the “critical information needs” study included newspapers “when the FCC has no authority to regulate print media.” So what are they up to anyway?

Last week an FCC mouthpiece said “Any suggestion that the FCC intends to regulate the speech of news media or plans to put monitors in America’s newsrooms is false.” With the federal government one should never believe anything until it is officially denied. The FCC is clearly out to infringe on free speech and freedom of the press. The attempt shows that government is being inclusive in the way it abuses Americans.

The NSA has taken away Americans’ right to privacy and the IRS has harassed groups less than worshipful of big government. The EPA regularly violates Americans’ property and economic rights. The ACA, the Affordable Care Act, takes away the health plans Americans want and forces them into inferior plans the government wants them to have. In similar style, the FCC wants the news media to cover the stories government thinks they should cover. The American Counterrevolution is mounting a surge and federal agencies are the shock troops.

The eastern United States is not showing much evidence of global warming this winter. Blizzards have slammed southern cities such as Atlanta, leaving motorists stranded on icy highways. That type of problem is not new in states such as New Jersey. They fight back with rock salt, which melts the ice and gets people moving. New Jersey’s salt stocks are way low but 40,000 tons of the stuff was sitting in Searsport, Maine. New Jersey wanted to buy the salt and ship it to Port Newark but that didn’t happen because as New Jersey transportation commissioner James S. Simpson told reporters “government, the federal government, gets in the way.”

The Jones Act, passed in 1920 during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, mandates that only ships with U.S. flags and crews can transport goods between American ports. So the salt New Jersey needed sat in Maine, and this was not the first time the Jones Act block emergency supplies.

After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the government granted only limited waivers to speed the movement of fuel and oil to areas battered by the storm. But gaining a waiver requires so many hurdles some officials never even applied. This year New Jersey officials did apply but bosses at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, with a budget of nearly $60 billion, said they could only grant a waiver if no U.S. vessels were available and if the waiver was in the interests of national defense.

No national security interest is apparent here and a U.S. barge was not readily available to ship the salt in a timely way. So Mr. Simpson is right. Government did get in the way of an emergency situation, based on a law nearly 100 years old. But there’s more to it. The federal government is bigger than ever, more costly than ever, resists reform more than ever, and elevates bureaucratic concerns over the safety of citizens.

Now that the Olympics are over, we have some interesting budget news coming out of Washington D.C. – the Obama administration is proposing cuts to the U.S. military, but much smaller cuts than what would have occurred under President Obama’s budget sequester, which was adopted as part of the Budget Control Act of 2012. The Washington Post reports on the newly reduced cuts:

The Defense Department on Monday proposed cutting the Army to its smallest size in 74 years, slashing a class of attack jets and rolling back personnel costs in an effort to adjust a department buoyed by a decade of war to an era of leaner budgets.

[…]

Under the proposal, during the next five years the Pentagon would get $115 billion above the savings it would have had to find under sequestration but $113 billion less than the spending levels contemplated in last year’s budget proposal.

Doing the math, what that means is that instead of having to cut $228 billion of its spending over the next five years, as it otherwise would have to cut under the terms of the budget sequester, the Defense Department will instead cut its spending by just under half of that amount.

Originally, the U.S. Defense Department was going to have to bear half of all spending cuts mandated under President Obama’s budget sequester, with the other half of the mandated spending cuts to be applied to “civilian” government agencies, like the Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Interagency Coordinating Committee, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Department of Education, which saw 95% of its employees declared to be nonessential during the partial federal government shutdown during the first two-and-a-half weeks of October 2013.

Word has leaked out of the White House however that rather than seeing any reductions in spending, President Obama’s next budget proposal will boost that kind of discretionary spending instead:

With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans. Instead, the president will focus on pumping new cash into job training, early-childhood education and other programs aimed at bolstering the middle class, providing Democrats with a policy blueprint heading into the midterm elections.

At least we know what President Obama’s priorities really are now, which can be summed up by the last two words of the preceding paragraph.