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There’s not much more to say that what ATR lays out. In a nutshell, many IRS employees used an interoffice messaging chat system to communicate with one another, instead of email, because there was no archiving system turned on for that mode of communication — meaning there was no written trail of discussions. This methodology was discovered while looking at Lois Lerner’s emails.
From Americans for Tax Reform:
The IRS used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system that automatically deleted office communications, according to documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. The system appears to have been purposefully used by agency officials responsible for the targeting of conservative non-profits, in order to evade public scrutiny.
The system, known as “Office Communication Server” or OCS was used by IRS officials, including many in the Exempt Organizations (EO) Unit, which was headed by Lois Lerner.
As the Oversight Committee report states, the instant messaging system did not archive any communications, so it is not possible to know what employees of the EO unit discussed on it.
However, in an email uncovered by the Committee Lerner warns her colleagues about evading Congressional oversight:
“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails – so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.”
Lerner then asks whether OCS is automatically archived. When informed it was not, Lerner responded “Perfect.”
While it is possible to set the instant messaging system to automatically archive messages, the IRS chose not to do so, according to one employee interviewed by the Committee. The fact that the agency chose not to archive messages raises questions about the true purpose of OCS and what discussions took place.
Needless to say, the apparent use of OCS to evade Congressional oversight once again shows that the IRS does not want the American people to learn the truth about the Lois Lerner targeting scandal.
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There was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last month regarding Puerto Rico, called “Profligate Puerto Rico on the Brink”. It was written right at the time the the current Governor Alejandro García Padilla declared that Puerto Rico couldn’t pay its debts anymore. As someone who is involved in Puerto Rico with friends and clients whom I advise on matters there, I found most of the points agreeable — that Puerto Rico has not tried serious reforms before deciding to declare insolvency.
Some points he raises:
–The proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 contains no plans for head-count reductions.
–Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is the result of years of government mismanagement. Dozens of agencies and publicly owned corporations have run deficits year after year, making up the difference by borrowing from bond markets.
–The administration seems to believe higher taxes are the answer. An increase in the island’s sales tax passed last month, to 11.5% from 7%, is projected to raise more than $1 billion in a year. This is the fifth tax increase since 2013, intended cumulatively to generate more than $4 billion. In reality, they have raised less than $1.5 billion in new money as more Puerto Ricans move their economic activity underground, businesses cut outlays, and the exodus to the U.S. continues.
–In Puerto Rico, the decline in the real economy has been less than 8% over the past decade, and while total employment has declined 16%, the population has declined more than 10%, leaving the unemployment rate only slightly higher than it was in 2006. Yet the commonwealth continues to spend more on growth-inhibiting programs—regulations, fees and taxes—rather than on pro-growth stimulus initiatives like agency mergers, investment in business infrastructure and public-private partnerships.
One items, however, was incorrect; this has to do with Governor Fortuño, the Republican governor from several years back. The author suggested that overspending is a bipartisan problem by including Fortuño in his list of horribles . However, Governor Fortuño was the one leader who actually did make systemic changes to reduce Puerto Rico’s deficit. He eliminated 38,000 government jobs thereby reducing the size of the government by 20%. Then he cut income-tax rates by half and corporate-tax rates by nearly a third. He lowered the deficit to $660 million from $3.3 billion. For this, I disagree that he was just lumped into the analysis with the other profligate Democrats before and after him.
Reducing the size and scope of government is a major key part of getting Puerto Rico back on track. Without trying to sound callous, Puerto Rico should feel, to some degree, the consequences of their extraordinarily poor choice they made four years after the leadership of Fortuño who put Puerto Rico onto a path to solvency. By choosing to discontinue the rational, solvent course he had carved out and subsequently electing a leader that instead promised the unaffordable, Puerto Ricans must have to first experience tough reforms and cutbacks help Puerto Rico thrive once again.
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There was a short piece in the Wall Street Journal on July 7th in the “Notable and Quotable” section that should really be much more publicized. It documents how the FBI intentionally undermined the case against Senator Ted Stevens in 2008, thanks to a brave whistleblower.
The reason that this revelation is so incredulous is that the political aftermath of the case had long-lasting consequences on this nation, particularly through the passage of several controversial bills which may never have passed if the balance of power had not shifted in the Senate.
How did this happen? Prosecutors in the Department of Justice chose to indict Stevens on flimsy charges three months prior to the pivotal 2008 elections. Stevens himself pleaded not guilty and requested a swift trial in order to clear his name before the November elections:
“This case is about concealment,” the Department of Justice’s lead lawyer stated in her opening statement, claiming that the senator had concealed that he had not paid full value for renovations to his modest Alaska cabin. In fact, Ted Stevens and his wife had paid more than $160,000 for renovations that independent appraisers valued at less than $125,000 at the time.
But relying on false records and fueled by testimony from a richly rewarded “cooperating” witness that the senator was merely “covering his ass” when he wrote a note stating that his desire to comply with all Senate rules, government prosecutors convinced jurors to find the him guilty just eight days before the general election, which he lost by less than 2 percent of the vote. The cooperating witness, wealthy Alaska businessman Bill Allen, was testifying for his own freedom (he was guilty of unrelated crimes), that of his children (who received immunity from prosecution after the government apparently threatened them) and the ability to sell his company for hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The FBI failed to divulge that, during the initial interview with the contractor, he stated he was overpaid — then later changed his testimony to underpaid. Only because of a whistleblower did the knowledge come out that the FBI intentionally hid information that would have been damning to their case.
As a result of the FBI’s tactics, Ted Stevens was convicted of a crime. Stevens, at the time of his conviction, was the longest-serving Senate Republican in congressional history and the Senate at the time was evenly split. His defeat by a Democrat merely days after his conviction contributed to a multi-seat gain by the Democrats in the Senate.
The case was later invalidated and thrown out by another judge; however, the damage had been done. The loss of this seat changed the makeup of the Senate, meaning that a series of questionable Congressional decision were able to be passed at a later date. Now we have Dodd-Frank, we have Obamacare, and we have the worst recovery in the history of this country — all because the Department of Justice interfered with and ousted a sitting Senator that was perceived to be an impediment to “progress”.
Those at the FBI that withheld the evidence were punished, but not fired. But to add insult to injury, due to procedural error involving their disciplinary case, they “later had their review thrown out and punishment lifted. The board did not clear the attorneys of wrongdoing, it found that justice officials committed a “harmful procedural error that likely had a harmful effect on the outcome of the case before the agency,” according to the board’s 18-page decision.”
The Wall Street Journal had a fine summary of the whole sordid affair: “Did the government react in horror at having been caught with its hands in the cookie jar? Did Justice Department lawyers rend their garments and place ashes on their head to mourn this violation of their most fundamental duty of candor and fairness? No way, no how. Instead, the government argued strenuously that its ill-gotten conviction should stand because boys will be boys and the evidence wasn’t material to the case anyway. . . . Instead of contrition, what we have seen is Justice Department officials of the highest rank suffering torn glenoid labrums from furiously patting themselves on the back for having “done the right thing.”
The “right thing” in this case was removing a high ranking Republican Senator in order to help secure a Democrat majority and pave the way for transformative, unpalatable legislation to be passed in this country.
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Earlier this week, President Obama did an interview with Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart pointed to a number of government agencies that have had various scandals under his watch — including the IRS, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Office of Personal Management — and inquired as to why his Administration has been plagued with so many problems.
As the Washington Times reported, “Mr. Obama said Congress ‘passed a crummy law’ that provided vague guidance to the people who worked at the IRS. And he said that employees implemented the law ‘poorly and stupidly.’
The president went on to say that the ‘real scandal around the IRS is that they have been so poorly funded that they cannot go after these folks who are deliberately avoiding tax payments.'”
Congress cut funding this past year as a response to the targeting scandal. The IRS’s “internal auditor concluded that the agency did, in fact, target conservative and tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny”; Obama’s Department of Justice has not finished its own investigation.
The allegation that the IRS is underfunded is absolutely ridiculous; what’s worse is that Obama has repeated tried to blame the funding cut this past year as the reason for reduced customer service. However, their customer service had already been worsening over the past year and was orchestrated by the IRS itself.
A recent House Ways and Means report showed that, “while congressional funding for the IRS remained flat from 2014 to 2015, the IRS diverted $134 million away from customer service to other activities. In addition to the $11 billion appropriated by Congress, the IRS takes in more than $400 million in user fees and may allocate that money as it sees fit. In 2014, the IRS allocated $183 million in user fees to its customer service budget, but allocated just $49 million in 2015–a 76 percent cut.”
Just as Obama dared to close national parks and monuments and cut off treatment for cancer kids during the government shutdown, in order to inflict pain on ordinary citizens, the IRS decided follow the same tactic and abrogate its basic responsibility to help taxpayers with compliance. Reducing the ability to provide customer service is particularly shameless — and using it as a red herring to try to scoop up more funding to Congress is even more repugnant. Then to also blame funding on the reason why Congress wrote a “vague” law and therefore the IRS employees were helpless in implementing it, well, that is the worst excuse of all.
It just goes to show the Obama is still willing to deflect any blame he can for anything that reflects poorly on his abominable Administration and lack of leadership.
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For months now, I have written about “disparate impact”. The idea of “disparate impact” holds that “a defendant can be held liable for discrimination for a race-neutral policy that statistically disadvantages a specific minority group even if that negative “impact” was neither foreseen nor intended. Loretta Lynch, the new Attorney General, recently signaled a strong interest in making “disparate impact” a priority of her term.
Disparate impact is rapidly being expanded into other sectors such as housing and labor, beyond the business world where it originated. In disparate impact cases, defendants can be forced to pay for harm caused not by their own actions, but by economic and statistical realities, even if beyond their control.
The Obama Administration is particularly interested in this tactic. They first put forth Thomas Perez, the current Labor Secretary, as the preferred nominee for Attorney General. Thomas Perez has arguably been one of the biggest proponents of disparate impact in the workplace; his confirmation would have thrust “disparate impact” firmly into the spotlight.
Ultimately, Loretta Lynch became the next Attorney General . Lynch is a tough woman, known for her penchant for civil asset forfeiture cases. As such, it became apparent she would be a great choice for advocating and implementing disparate impact policies as well. After two cases before the Supreme Court that were unsuccessful putting forth disparate impact, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the policy on June 25th with the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. Lynch put out a press release praising the outcome and the policy of disparate impact; you can read that here.
Now it has subsequently been revealed by The New York Post a few days ago that the Obama Administration has created a secret database. It is apparent now that “a key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
The purpose of this endeavor is to help expand disparate impact claims. “This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.”
Besides the enormous invasion of privacy that such databases represent, just as alarming is the fact that race will now be analyzed and micromanaged in every aspect of modern society. With that, disparate impact claims, led by Lynch and the Department of Justice are certain to grow, impact, and cripple many industries in the years to come.
Below is the New York Post article in its entirety, for those who are interested:
Obama Collecting Personal Data For A Secret Race Database
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
Housing database
The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.
The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.
Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.
HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.
Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.
“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”
Mortgage database
Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.
Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.
The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.
FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.
The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”
However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”
Credit database
CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.
Employment database
CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.
School database
Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.
Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.
Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.
Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.
Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.
Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.
Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.
The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.
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If a higher minimum wage, higher regulations, the Jones Act, and other protectionist rules are actively destroying Puerto Rico’s economy, how can those same policies not also be harming the United States? Can Puerto Rico be considered the experiment proving this?
On June 28th, Puerto Rico announced that it was unable to pay back the $72 billion in public debt that it owed, money that was borrowed repeatedly to bolster an anemic economy for the last decade. Puerto Rico’s GDP has contracted an average of 1.7% yearly since 2005. Much of that can be attributed to the repeal of the IRS Code 936 which had encouraged specific industries to headquarter on Puerto Rico. The subsequent loss of business has resulted in tepid revenue collection which has not been enough to cover the government’s social programs and bloated government payroll. You can read the Puerto Rican Debt Report here.
In order to help Puerto Rico back on a path to economic recovery, it is imperative that more systemic changes are needed. The Manhattan Institute outlined some major ideas, such as repealing the Jones Act. For a more in-depth discussion on the Jones Act in relation to Puerto Rico, check out their article. Other suggestions include “offering Puerto Rico an exemption to the federal minimum wage, loosening territorial labor laws, and reducing benefits that disincentivize work.”
These very policies have impeded the economy’s ability to grow and recover from the fiscal woes that began last decade. When minimum wage requirements are high relative to the local average, employers hire less workers. And when receiving benefits can be more generous and lucrative than working full-time, less people participate in the workforce.
These types of policies have been shown to be extremely detrimental to Puerto Rico, and yet our country continues to expand them here. We see the effects in our own sluggish recovery, yet the Obama Administration ignores it, and then deflects the blame elsewhere. Puerto Rico should be a wake-up call for the U.S., but it’ll likely be ignored too.
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Bloomberg did a feature this week on the long-term outlook on pension funds for several major cities, and found that it is swiftly becoming a fiscal tsunami in several places. Part of this stems from severe under-funding of pension plans over many years, while the other part is accounting tricks.
As Bloomberg notes, “Moody’s, which in 2013 began using a lower rate than governments do to calculate future liabilities, has estimated that the 25 largest U.S. public pensions alone have $2 trillion less than they need.” This rate gimmick ultimately hides the true cost of retirement liabilities in municipalities. Additionally, “officials have been able to lower the size of the liability by counting on investment earnings of more than 7 percent a year, even after they expect to run out of cash. New rules from the Governmental Accounting Standards Board require a lower rate to be used after retirement plans go broke. Many reported shortfalls will grow as a result.”
Already, many U.S. cities each face billions in costs, resulting in trillions of dollars in municipal-bond market deficit. By now, many places have been downgraded — even down to junk — and thus face higher yield demands from investors.
For example:
Cincinnati and Minneapolis have already been lowered. Chicago was already downgraded to junk this past May as a result of a $20 billion pension deficit, and “was forced to pay yields of almost 8 percent on taxable bonds maturing in 2042, about twice what some homeowners can get on a 30-year mortgage.”
Houston was put on notice in early July by Moody’s that their bond rating was lowered to “negative” due to unfunded pensions costs. Houston’s revenue faces limitations from property tax caps, and thus funding the pension promises properly for three pension systems at this point has become increasingly difficult. It faces an unfunded liability of about $3.4 billion.
Likewise, in Dallas, the firefighters and police pension system deficit is poised to triple its shortfall “to $4.7 billion because of the accounting-rule shift.”
Perhaps the most egregious example is the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the biggest pension system in the United States. They reported this week that “it earned just 2.4 percent last fiscal year, one-third of the annual return it projects. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the second-biggest fund, gained 4.5 percent, compared with its 7.5 percent goal.” Years of over-generous promises have resulted in an enormous and unsustainable debt that ultimately taxpayer will have to foot the bill for.
When the public sector and unions signed off on lavish pension provisions for the employee, they hoped there would be enough growth and investment returns to cover it way down the road. There were no provisions made to handle the possibility of a low-interest rate society or a fledgling economy like we’ve experienced the last six years; they took their chances and their fallback was always that they could suck money from the taxpayer by raising taxes to cover budgeting shortfalls. That is reckless and irresponsible.
Years of fiscal mismanagement in the public sector has resulted in this fiscal nightmare. Because the public sector does not have the economic forces of competition to keep compensation levels in check, as the public sector does, it was always incumbent upon public negotiators to manage contracts properly. Failing to properly negotiate, making cozy deals, and maintaining unsustainable defined-benefit plans has created the soaring budget and pension deficits we are experiencing.
And its only going to get worse.
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From CNS News:
“The federal government raked in a record of approximately $2,446,920,000,000 in tax revenues through the first nine months of fiscal 2015 (Oct. 1, 2014 through the end of June), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
That equaled approximately $16,451 for every person in the country who had either a full-time or part-time job in June.
It is also up about $178,156,270,000 in constant 2015 dollars from the $2,268,763,730,000 in revenue (in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars) that the Treasury raked in during the first nine months of fiscal 2014.
Despite the record tax revenues of $2,446,920,000,000 in the first nine months of this fiscal year, the government spent $2,760,301,000,000 during those nine months, and, thus, ran up a deficit of $313,381,000,000 during the period.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total seasonally adjusted employment in the United States in June (including both full and part-time workers) was 148,739,000. That means that the federal tax haul so far this fiscal year has equaled $16,451 for every person in the United States with a job.”
There are three months left of the fiscal year. According to the US Debt Clock, today’s federal debt is is about $18,609,920,535,000. At the end of FY 2015 the total government debt in the United States, including federal, state, and local, is expected to be $21.694 trillion.
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I have written about disparate impact many times over the past couple of years. I was gravely concerned about Loretta Lynch’s nomination to be the next Attorney General because of the huge role she has played in civil asset forfeiture cases. Now that the disparate impact case has been decided by the Supreme Court, I am concerned that she will now take up the mantle of disparate impact, much in the way Thomas Perez, the Labor Secretary, has done (and don’t forget, Perez was the original front runner for the AG job).
Below is Loretta Lynch’s statement on the SCOTUS ruling regarding disparate impact — the last line says it all: “Bolstered by this important ruling, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce the Fair Housing Act with every tool at its disposal – including challenges based on unfair and unacceptable discriminatory effects.”
Remember, disparate impact allows if a protected class of citizens has a statistically lesser representation with respect to a business (hiring, mortgages origination, etc) it may be implied that the business or offender has intentionally discriminated — because there is an adverse impact as a result. In other words, “offenders” can be sought after for violating the law, whether or not there was actual intent. Unfortunately, disparate impact thus puts the burden to show lack of discrimination on the accused offender, meaning he is guilty until proven innocent.
It looks like with this statement that the Department of Justice will begin to more actively pursue disparate impact cases.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, Thursday, June 25, 2015
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Statement on the U.S. Supreme Court Ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communites Project Inc.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch released the following statement today after the Supreme Court ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project Inc.:
“I am pleased that the Supreme Court has affirmed that the Fair Housing Act encompasses disparate impact claims, which are an essential tool for realizing the Act’s promise of fair and open access to housing opportunities for all Americans. While our nation has made tremendous progress since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, disparate impact claims remain an all-too-necessary mechanism for rooting out discrimination in housing and lending. By recognizing that laws, policies and practices with unjustified discriminatory effects are inconsistent with the Fair Housing Act, today’s decision lends support to hardworking Americans who are attempting to find good housing opportunities for themselves and their families. Bolstered by this important ruling, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce the Fair Housing Act with every tool at its disposal – including challenges based on unfair and unacceptable discriminatory effects.”
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March 13, 2015, was the first day that the Daily Treasury Statements showed a closing limit at 18,112,975,000,000. This number has now been frozen for 4 straight months. The latest Treasury statement on July 13, 2015 also showed $18,112,975,000,000 at its closing. This repeating amount is a portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limitation, currently sitting about $25 million less than the legal debt limit allowed by Congress.
Every day since March 13th, the Daily Treasury Statement shows the debt starting and ending with the exact same amount — $18,112,975,000,000.
The same day that the debt amount ended in $18,112,975,000,000, the current Treasury Secretary, Jacob Lew, informed Congress via a letter that he was issuing a debt “suspension period.” His rationale was due to the fact that legislation passed in 2014 suspended the debt limit until March 15, 2015 — in two days time.
Therefore, Lew wrote, on March 16, “the outstanding debt of the United States will be at the statutory limit. In anticipation of reaching that date, Treasury has suspended until further notice the issue of State and Local Government Series securities, which count against the debt limit.” These securities are classified as public debt.
Without having the debt limit raised by an act of Congress, the Treasury Department announced an alternative solution. Lew would issue a “‘debt issuance suspension period’ with respect to investment of the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and also suspend the daily reinvestment of Treasury securities held by the Government Securities Investment Fund and the Federal Employees’ Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan.”
The last time the Treasury enacted a debt suspension was two years ago for roughly 150 days until the statutory debt limit was resolved. As I wrote back in October 2013,
“Monday, October 14, 2013 marks 150 days since the Treasury Department’s listing of public debt has not moved. The most current Daily Treasury report(October 10) shows “Total Public Debt Subject to Limit $ 16,699,396,000,000; Statutory Debt Limit $16,699,421,000,000.”
The record for these two entries remained unchanged since May 17, 2013, the first time it recorded the public debt at $16,699,396,000,000.”
The debt limit was raised a short time later. Currently, we have not raised the debt limit yet, and probably will not do so until late fall. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a stronger than expected tax season will give policymakers more time to haggle over an increase to the debt limit…An unexpected influx of revenue means that the nation is not expected to be at risk of a catastrophic default until November of December of 2015″
Then, as now, at some point, those transactions suspensions will have to be made up, along with continuing to pay on our obligations. In other words, the Administration is currently picking and choosing what parts of government to fund.
For those who are worried about our public debt, have no fear! The Treasury Department’s FAQ’s already have a solution. Did you know:
“There are two ways for you to make a contribution to reduce the debt:
You can make a contribution online either by credit card, checking or savings account at Pay.gov
You can write a check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it’s a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to:
Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188″
