Orrin PAC's Blog

The other week Democrats in the House and Senate passed President Obama's budget that is a three-pronged assault on American job creation:

  • New taxes on America's industrial output and energy
  • Tax increases on America's job creation through small businesses
  • Tax increases on America's competitiveness

This is the wrong way to go! Thankfully, Republicans stood 100% united against this misguided plan.

We have a good chance to stop two of the most insidious parts of Obama's liberal agenda: a multi-trillion dollar national sales tax on energy and the march to socialized medicine.

I need your help today.

With support cooling for Obama's far-left policies, folks are starting to turn on his liberal allies in Congress. In fact, for the first time in nearly four years, Americans say they no longer prefer that Democrats control Congress.

Please donate $25 or more today to help rally opposition to Obama's fiscal irresponsibility.

Of course, it's not enough to just object to Obama's record spending plan. That's why I, along with other Republicans, offered a number of amendments to stop the Democrats assault on family budgets and the bottom line of our small businesses.

Can I count on your support?

P.S. As Barack Obama said during the campaign, "What you do right now will help decide America's future for decades to come." Can you join Orrin's Army and donate $10 or $20 a month to help restore fiscal responsibility?


The Associated Press reported today that the Obama administration plans to ax increased oversight of financial corruption in labor unions:

The Labor Department moved Tuesday to rescind a regulation approved during President George W. Bush's last days in office that would have increased scrutiny of union finances to help root out financial corruption.

...

Union officials praised the decision, the latest in a series of pro-labor actions taken since President Barack Obama took office.

...

Unions are required to file annual financial disclosure reports to the Labor Department's Office of Labor-Management Standards. The agency's criminal enforcement program uses the information to investigate embezzlement from labor unions and other types of union fraud.

Labor Department figures show that investigations of union fraud from 2001-2008 resulted in more than 1,000 indictments, with 929 convictions and court-ordered restitution of more than $93 million.

The new rule would have required unions to disclose even more information about compensation to union officers and employees, details about buying or selling union assets and additional information about union receipts.

Back in 2007, John Fund of The Wall Street Journal reported on the Democrats' earlier push to cut oversight of Big Labor:

The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law.

In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration's budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight.

Although Congress has long insisted on copious reporting by corporations, including the burdens of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, lawmakers have been relatively nonchalant about union reporting. Unlike the quarterly filings of corporations, unions must only file once a year with the Labor Department using a free software program. They don't have to get an independent certified audit, are only rarely audited by the government, and don't have to follow standard accounting methods.


Hot Air takes a look at today's Congressional Budget Office report that analyzes President Obama's proposed budget:

To put these numbers in context, bear in mind that last year's deficit of $459 billion was the largest on record.

In a new report that provides the first independent analysis of President Obama's budget request, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the administration's agenda would generate deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion a year over the next decade -- $2.3 trillion more than the president predicted when he unveiled his spending plan just one month ago.

And while Obama would come close to meeting his goal of cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term, the CBO predicts that the nation's annual operating deficit would never drop below 4 percent of the overall economy over the next decade, a level administration officials have said is unsustainable because the national debt would grow too rapidly.

By the CBO's estimate, for example, the nation's debt would grow to 82 percent of the overall economy by 2019 under Obama's policies, compared with a pre-recession average of 40 percent...

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (N-N.D.) has said the gloomier CBO forecast would require "adjustments" to Obama's budget, though he declined to specify what changes would be necessary.

The Congressional Budget Office's blog adds:

Our analysis of the President's budget proposals indicates that:

  • As estimated by CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the President's proposals would add $4.8 trillion to the baseline deficits over the 2010–2019 period. CBO projects that if those proposals were enacted, the deficit would total $1.8 trillion (13 percent of GDP) in 2009 and $1.4 trillion (10 percent of GDP) in 2010. It would decline to about 4 percent of GDP by 2012 and remain between 4 percent and 6 percent of GDP through 2019.

Read the complete Congressional Budget Office report.


Hugh Hewitt gives us some insight on the fiscal irresponsibility contained in President Obama's budget:

This is not an easy message war for Democrats. Obama's budget calls for the largest deficit in U.S. history and a doubling of the national debt to $23 trillion in 2019. That is a big, juicy target for the GOP, which plans to hit this theme relentlessly all spring.

Doubling the national debt in a decade. Wow.