Federal Revenue Up $87 Billion – But, Spending Rises Twice That – in 1st Quarter of FY2024
Revenues were $83 billion (or 8%) higher, but outlays rose by $170 billion (or 12 percent), compared to year-ago’s first quarter.
Without shifts in the timing of certain federal payments, the first quarter deficit would have been even greater ($553 billion) - $94 billion more than the shortfall for the same period in FY2023.
Receipts totaled $1.1 trillion during the first three months of FY2024, CBO estimates—$83 billion more than during the same period a year before, largely due to the postponement until fiscal year 2024 of various 2023 tax deadlines for some taxpayers in federally-declared disaster areas.
Receipts from corporate income taxes increased by $44 billion (up 42%), aided by the postponement of tax payments, while state and gift taxes increased by $2 billion (up 29%).
Noteworthy increases in federal spending include:
- Net outlays for interest on the public debt were substantially higher, increasing by $73 billion (49%), primarily because of significantly higher interest rates.
- The outlays of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rose by $62 billion as a result of facilitating the resolution of bank failures that occurred in 2023.
- Spending for Social Security benefits rose by $37 billion (12%), due to increases in the average benefit payment (stemming mostly from cost-of-living adjustments) and an increase in the number of beneficiaries.
- Medicare outlays increased, on net, by $25 billion (or 13 percent), largely because of increased benefit payments to Medicare Advantage plans.
Also on Tuesday, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) introduced a bill to establish a commission on national debt and fiscal reforms. The Debt Commission would be tasked with addressing “the dire fiscal situation before the next debt ceiling increase at the end of 2024,” Rep. Spartz said in a press release.
“The federal government has been mismanaging our finances for a while now, with our fiscal problems reaching catastrophic proportions,” Spartz said. “We either start now and put some thought into how we get out of this situation with the least amount of pain or have a major fiscal crisis in a few years drastically affecting the lives of many Americans.”
The business and economic reporting of CNSNews is funded in part with a gift made in memory of Dr. Keith C. Wold.
NOW FACTOR 15 MILLION OF JOE'S ILLEGALS AND DO THE NUMBERS!
Government Employment Reports Overestimated Jobs By 443,000 in 2023
One reason Americans may be less happy about the economy despite the very strong jobs reports that have been coming out month after month: those reports have been wrong.
Each month the Department of Labor estimates the number of workers on nonfarm payrolls and publishes these in its employment situation report, usually on the first Friday of the month.
The initial estimates are based on surveys of employers taken in the middle of each month. Much like an opinion poll of a few thousand likely voters can be used to project election winners, relatively small surveys are used to extrapolate the labor market for the entire country.
The reports often get revised up or down as the government gets more information about employment in a given month.
The past year was extraordinary because of the cumulative size of the revisions—and the fact that they almost always have gone in one direction.
The payrolls figures have been revised down for four consecutive months through December. In fact, in the last 11 months, they’ve been revised down 10 times.
Cumulatively, this has added up to 443,000 fewer jobs than initially reported, according to the calculations of Joe Lavorgna, a former economist in the Trump White House who is now the chief economist at SMBC Nikko Securities.
That’s the largest 11-month total since 2022, according to Lavorgna.
The final tally may be even higher because the government could still revised the November and December estimates. In fact, the December jobs number was so much higher than forecasted by analysts that it is widely expected to be revised down.
The government’s estimation of the employment situation in the U.S. has been hampered post-pandemic by a collapse in the response rate from businesses to the Department of Labor’s surveys. To continue with the analogy, it is like the challenge faced by political pollsters when people keep refusing to answer opinion survey questions. The data becomes less reliable and more work has to be done by the econometric models. Essentially, fewer responses means more guesswork.
The consistency of the overestimation of jobs figures is threatening to undermine the credibility of the Labor Department’s employment reports. Already, some on the right are starting to wonder if the numbers are being rigged to flatter the Biden economy.
“Is it all by design? The implausibility of nearly all later revisions being downward suggests so,” Matt Palumbo wrote recently on the website of the Dan Bongino show.
Joe Biden has frequently claimed, without evidence, that his top rival for the White House, former President Donald Trump, is a threat to our democracy, employing apocalyptic rhetoric that could sway some in the government to fudge numbers or policies to hinder Trump’s election chances.
Biden is breaking the border on purpose — he wants mass amnesty
By Andrew R. Arthur
New York Post
Excerpt: The backlog of pending cases in the nation’s immigration courts has hit 3 million, as millions of border migrants have been released into the United States to seek asylum in the past three years. It’s a shocking figure, but just the latest example of President Biden’s efforts to break the immigration enforcement system, likely to force a massive amnesty he has long sought.
JOE BIDEN is known as a serial liar, a "public servant" who has somehow managed to accrue tremendous wealth, a race-baiting opportunist, a Catholic-in-name-only, and a bought-and-paid-for politician in bed with criminal cartels and foreign foes. In another era, Joe Biden would have been run out of his country much the same way Benedict Arnold was two and a half centuries ago; in an era when integrity, honor, fortitude, fidelity, and grit have been jettisoned for immorality, unscrupulousness, weakness, betrayal, and craven pliability, however, he is elevated to king sleazeball in a city drowning in sleaze. JB SHURK
A planned invasion and coordinated insurrection—which flooding a nation with tens of millions of illegal aliens and bribing them with American tax dollars to accomplish communistic political change certainly is—can only be described as organized crime, a racket made a reality only by the supreme stupidity and narcissism of the average voting leftist. What a perfectly fitting legacy.
Mayorkas allegedly issued a not-so-veiled threat against House Members preparing to impeach
It’s almost as if the Bidenites thought they were auditioning for roles in The Godfather hoping to make it as Corleone Family extras, but never heard that the cast was selected and the movie was filmed and produced—so they’ve been method-acting ever since while waiting on the call that will never come.
When Florida congresswoman Kat Cammack joined Harris Faulkner on a Fox News segment yesterday morning, she revealed that in a closed-door exchange with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in which members of Congress told the Bidenite he was fixing to be impeached, he allegedly responded with the most mafia-like answer possible: “You’re not gonna like who comes next.” When Cammack asked him if that was supposed to be a threat, Mayoraks allegedly said nothing, but gave her a sinister smirk instead. See a clip from the broadcast below:
As Cammack also said:
This man knows exactly what he’s doing. This is 100 percent by design. They want an open border crisis whether it is for an election, whether it’s for future votes as they work to get rid of citizenship as a requirement for voting, we’re not sure.
Yes of course it’s by design, and we absolutely know, among other things, that the transplants are for voting purposes; just listen to what Yvette Clarke from New York’s 9th congressional district said about it the other day:
First of all, voting districts are apportioned based on the population size residing within the district, not the number of citizens, and not the number of registered voters… which is why Clarke noted the invasion numbers are needed for “redistricting purposes.” With this, is it really that hard to conceive Machiavellian bureaucrats who live and politick by Hegelian ethics create a scheme in which they send caravans of people, perhaps, say, I don’t know, places called “sanctuary cities,” for redistricting purposes that will eventually be reflected on Capitol Hill? No, of course not.
A planned invasion and coordinated insurrection—which flooding a nation with tens of millions of illegal aliens and bribing them with American tax dollars to accomplish communistic political change certainly is—can only be described as organized crime, a racket made a reality only by the supreme stupidity and narcissism of the average voting leftist. What a perfectly fitting legacy.
Image: Public domain.
No Border – Say Goodbye to America
Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman scolded the Wall Street Journal for cheerleading an open-border immigration policy. "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state," he warned.
This leads to a “transfer state,” as the Heritage Foundation describes, the government taxing the upper and middle classes, transferring money to lower economic classes via subsidies and benefits.
In other words, “The transfer state redistributes funds from those with high-skill and high-income levels to those with lower skill levels.”
Heritage makes the assumption, “It takes the entire net tax payments (taxes paid minus benefits received) of one college-educated family to pay for the net benefits received by one low-skill immigrant family.”
What happens when that ratio changes to one financially sound family supporting not one, but two, three, or more families through ever-increasing taxes and families to support?
Which is why a welfare state in an open-borders country will eventually reaching a tipping point. Are we already there?
As reported by Fox News’s Griff Jenkins, “Encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border have topped over 300,000 in December.” Do the math. That’s 3.6 million per year, more than the population of every U.S. city except Los Angeles and New York.
YouTube screen grab
How many migrants are not encountered? Those are called “gotaways” and Border Patrol estimates 1,000 per day, or 365,000 per year. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledges, “600,000 illegal ‘gotaways’ crossed border in 2023, calls immigration system broken.”
These are estimates. But the real number is unknowable. Let’s say a million gotaways a year, making the total 4.6 million migrants a year, more than the population of L.A. added to America each and every year.
As most migrants are unskilled, unable to speak English, many illiterate and unemployable, they are by necessity, supported by American taxpayers for food, shelter, education, travel, health care, and clothing.
What does that cost? “NYC’s daily per-person cost to house migrants climbs to nearly $400.” What about health care? California plans to provide free health care insurance to all illegal migrants, at an annual cost of about $4,000 for each adult.
According to Judicial Watch the “Net cost of illegal immigration is greater than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of 15 different states.”
Clearly this is not sustainable. U.S. national debt recently topped $34 trillion. With the current interest rate on the debt at about 3 percent, interest on the debt is more than $1 trillion per year. Interest alone consumes about a quarter of the $4.4 trillion in annual federal receipts, more than defense spending.
We will be borrowing money to pay the interest on previously borrowed money. Economist Herbert Stein observed, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop“.
The something is America as we know it.
There is no interest in securing our national border. In a hyper-partisan Washington, D.C., this is one of few examples where Republicans and Democrats actually agree.
Democrats want new voters. Their policies and leaders are not so popular these days. Some 63 percent of likely U.S. voters think the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction, according to Rasmussen Reports. Only 24 percent of voters strongly approve of the job President Biden is doing.
Creating a new dependency class of tens of millions of potential voters serves Democrat electoral interests. Republicans don’t mind ceding power to the Democrats as long as their wallets are thick with cash.
Open borders provide cheap labor for the Chamber of Commerce Republican establishment. GOP lawmakers are rewarded with generous campaign contributions and other financial perks in exchange for looking the other way from an open border.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson visited the U.S.-Mexican border with a gaggle of Republicans, huffing and puffing about what a “catastrophe” exists at the border. So what? Lots of talk but no action.
Going back to his predecessor Paul Ryan, Republicans have fought Trump on building a border wall and applied no pressure on Biden to secure the border. They could defund any responsible agencies including Homeland Security and Customs and Border Enforcement until the border was secure,
They will probably vote to reward DHS with a new building, rather than holding them accountable, as they did with the weaponized and corrupt FBI. The DHS secretary, rather than securing the homeland per his job description, blames climate change rather than his inaction and incompetence.
The power of the purse and impeachment are unknown or enigmatic concepts to Congressional Republicans. Instead, the Republican Speaker is “advocating” for solutions. What a tough guy he is.
Financial ramifications are a fraction of the problem. What about the fact that there are millions of young, military aged men, from all over the world, including countries not friendly to U.S. interests, unvetted, with unknown backgrounds or intentions, now in this country?
How many are, as Trump would describe, “bad hombres”? Intent on crime or terrorism? The number of Chinese migrants crossing into America has risen dramatically.
If 4 million to 5 million migrants come to America each year, and 10 percent are troublemakers, that’s 450,000, the same size as the active duty U.S. Army.
Our enemies would not need to attack us from the outside, their militaries may already be embedded in America.
Is this migration? Or an invasion? And why is it being allowed, facilitated, and encouraged?
Rasmussen Reports ran a poll on X where 93 percent of respondents agreed that, “The current situation with migrants at the border with Mexico is an ‘invasion’ of the United States.”
KanekoaTheGreat on X summed it up well:
On President Biden's inaugural day, he introduced policies that incentivize illegal immigration:
• Paused Deportations
• Suspended "Remain in Mexico"
• Stopped Border Wall Construction
This surge in illegal immigration is a national security crisis, costing American taxpayers hundreds of billions per year. Major U.S. cities, grappling with the escalating financial burden, are slashing budgets for essential services such as fire, police, sanitation, and education. President Biden holds the power to halt this crisis that is draining America's resources.
This was no accident. Elon Musk correctly observed, “At this point, there is no question that this administration is actively facilitating illegal immigration.”
There’s more trouble besides an open border. Energy costs are up, and we are no longer energy-independent. America is fighting two proxy wars, in Ukraine against Russia, and in Israel against Iran. North Korea, China, and Taiwan are on deck.
Inflation has devastated middle class families. Homes are unaffordable. Personal and national debts are unsustainable. And finally, the cultural wars have destroyed Americans’ minds and sensibilities.
This deliberate effort to destroy America has a name. It’s the Cloward-Piven strategy, named after two communist sociology professors at Columbia University,
The four steps of the Cloward-Piven Strategy:
1. Overload and Break the Welfare System
2. Have Chaos Ensue
3. Take Control in the Chaos
4. Implement Socialism and Communism through Government Force
Number 1 is currently ushering in number 2. Number 3 will be determined next November. Donald Trump is the only hope to break the sequence. Another term of the architect Barack Obama, via Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, or Michelle Obama, will guarantee number 3 and 4, and then it’s lights out for the America of the past 250 years.
Closing our border and enforcing existing immigration law would be a good place to start. Continuing on our current path is the “fundamental change” that Obama promised, and goodbye to America as we know it.
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a physician and writer. Follow me on Twitter @retinaldoctor, Substack Dr. Brian’s Substack, Truth Social @BrianJoondeph, and LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph.
Biden’s easy-migration policies are deliberately adding the foreigners’ problems to the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.
Extraction Migration
Biden has imported or accepted roughly 5 million illegal migrants for economic purposes in less than three years.
That Extraction Migration economic strategy has helped investors by inflating real estate prices and reducing Americans’ wages.
Polls: Biden’s Migration Wrecks ‘Nation of Immigrants’ Narrative
President Joe Biden’s easy-migration policies have slashed Americans’ acceptance of the elite-imposed “Nation of Immigrants” narrative.
Forty-eight percent of Americans believe that Biden’s 5 million southern migrants will make American society “worse in the long run,” according to a CBS poll conducted January 3-5.
Just 22 percent of Americans — but 44 percent of liberals — believe the migration will make American society better.
Those numbers are echoed in prior polls by YouGov.
“I think a lot of the [pro-]immigration people figure, ‘Well, this [public mood] will pass,'” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News, adding:
But this [migration] is so bad, this is so unprecedented, that I think it’s entirely possible it will change the way a lot of people think about immigration for many years in the future.
The CBS report shows that a majority of Americans also believe that Biden’s choice to maximize immigration is threatening to Americans and their culture.
Fifty-two percent say Biden’s border is a crisis because it imposes “changes to U.S. culture and people.”
The mainstream 52 percent total includes 64 percent of conservatives, 49 percent of independents, 57 percent of blacks, and 47 percent of Hispanics.
Other polls show that more Americans are willing to openly describe Biden’s mass illegal migration as a government-sponsored “invasion.”
Biden’s migration has imported one migrant for every two Americans born during the last three years.
Fifty-four percent of respondents told an NPR poll in August 2022 that the migration is an “invasion.”
A January 2023 poll by Rasmussen showed that 65 percent of respondents endorsed the ‘invasion” term. The 65 percent includes 43 percent who describe the term as “very accurate.”
The “very accurate” description is endorsed by 43 percent of women, 33 percent of blacks, 28 percent of Democrats, 15 percent of liberals, and 36 percent of people with post-graduate degrees.
The polls show a growing rejection of the “Nation of Immigrants” narrative that was created and pushed by pro-migration groups in the early 1960s. The narrative says the United States needs migration to be prosperous.
But the elite-funded, K-12-enforced narrative was invented to help the 1925 law that had minimized migration — much to the benefit of the new American middle class in the years after World War 2.
The narrative was marketed by elites as both a moral cause and a Cold War strategy.
So the federal government restarted immigration in 1965, doubled it in 1990, and lifted border curbs in 2021. One result is that the American middle class has lost enormous wealth, status, and power to investors on Wall Street.
Under Biden, the current wave of migration is being engineered by his pro-migration border security chief, Alejandro Mayorkas. He is strongly backed by investor groups, including FWD.us, which is Mark Zuckerberg’s advocacy group for investors.
The Biden shift in public opinion is especially noteworthy because establishment media, investors, and Democrats are eager to impose a “conspiracy theory” stigma on Americans who worry that migrants will sideline them, their children, and their culture. For example, a Washington Post columnist wrote on October 27:
Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected House speaker, has repeatedly flirted with what’s known as the “great replacement theory,” the idea that Democrats are scheming to supplant American voters with immigrants. The Louisiana Republican’s views show how fringe conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in the Republican Party at the highest levels of power.
The growing opposition to the narrative has been boosted by the shocking display of antisemitism among immigrants that has spread to U.S. progressives. In an October poll, 52 percent of Jewish people in New York described immigration as a burden.
But there is vast evidence that Democrats and business groups are using the federal government’s migration policy to displace and replace Americans in high-0pportunity coastal cities and Fortune 500 jobs.
For example, “Massachusetts experienced a net outflow of 39,149 people to other states and a net inflow of 50,647 people from other countries,” in the year up to July 2023, LowellSun.com reported on January 8.
The replacement of Americans in Massachusetts is accelerated by the rising cost of housing because migrants will accept worse housing conditions. The LowellSun posted:
Many younger professionals and other workers have opted to transfer their skills elsewhere due to unaffordable housing costs. The state’s high cost of living would also likely factor into moving for family considerations, lifestyle and especially retirement.
Unsurprisingly, Mayorkas’s actions are also smashing Biden’s poll ratings. The CBS survey showed that Biden’s policy has the support of 30 percent of Americans — and opposition from 70 percent.
The 70 percent opposition includes 74 percent of whites, 58 percent of blacks, 68 percent of Hispanics, 40 percent of Democrats, and 56 percent of under-39s.
But 58 percent of liberals favor the policy, which has imported more than 5 million illegals in three years, so spiking housing costs and inflation while shrinking wages and high-tech investment.
Sixty-three percent say Biden should be “tougher on immigrants trying to cross the border.” Just 16 percent said he should be “easier on immigrants trying to cross the border.”
“Joe Biden is … now moving the public in a way that immigration hawks have never really been able to do,” said Krikorian. He continued:
Not because the border control wasn’t broadly popular — It was. But it wasn’t all that important and the problem didn’t look all that bad. One of the reasons Trump didn’t run on immigration [in 2020] was because most people figured he took care of it so there’s no problem anymore. Well, that’s not the case now.
“I think it definitely will mark a long-term rethinking of mass immigration on the part of a lot of people,” he added.
Extraction Migration
Biden has imported or accepted roughly 5 million illegal migrants for economic purposes in less than three years.
That Extraction Migration economic strategy has helped investors by inflating real estate prices and reducing Americans’ wages.
That flood is urged and welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. It also reduces marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, heartland states, and overseas markets. and it reduces economic pressure on the federal government to deal with the drug and “Deaths of Despair” crises.
Biden’s easy-migration policies are deliberately adding the foreigners’ problems to the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.
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