Free Republic

(He) stated his position when he said that the history of government, the history of liberty, was the history of the limitation of governmental power. This is true as an academic statement of history in the past. It is not true as a statement affecting the present. It is true of the history of medieval Europe. It is not true of the history of twentieth-century America. In the days when all governmental power existed exclusively in the king or in the baronage and when the people had no shred of that power in their own hands, then it undoubtedly was...

Although the details are scarce, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget, America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again, paints a dramatic picture for the American science and medical communities that is facing huge potential budget cuts. If it’s been a while since you’ve had a civics class, the Constitution states that it’s Congress that gets to decide how to spend the government’s money and how to tax its citizens, so this proposal is not the final word on what goes and what stays. But a President essentially starts the conversation, and for many scientists, it’s not a happy...

President Donald Trump's administration on Thursday proposed a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, as the White House seeks to eliminate climate change programs and trim initiatives to protect air and water quality. The White House's proposed 2018 EPA budget, with the biggest proposed cut for any federal agency, comes as Trump seeks to clear away regulations he claims are hobbling U.S. oil drillers, coal miners and farmers. The proposed cuts are a starting point in negotiations with Congress, and could be tempered. The proposal would eliminate 3,200 EPA employees, or 19 percent of the current workforce....

Americans who live outside of the nation’s capital should understand the District of Columbia is “sacred ground,” according to a Virginia congressman who represents a district that is among the wealthiest in the country thanks largely to its heavy concentration of highly paid federal workers. Rep. Gerry Connolly told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (HOGR) Wednesday that Congress may need to “educate” people on why federal departments and agencies should be centralized on the “sacred ground” of D.C. Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, made the comments as the committee debated a House resolution encouraging federal agencies to relocate...

As hard as it will be to pass health insurance reform, tax reform, and infrastructure legislation, President Trump's toughest challenge will come in trying to cut the numbers of federal workers. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but budget and government experts are calling the planned reductions in the federal workforce a "historic contraction" not seen since the drawdown after World War II.  Cabinet secretaries will have some leeway in how they reduce their departments' workforces.  Some may rely on the normal attrition that occurs in any workforce with retirements and vacancies created by promotions being responsible for...

Worst Humanitarian Crisis since 1945 Twenty million people at risk of starvation in Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, NE Nigeria. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-n-says-world-faces-largest-humanitarian-crisis-since-1945-1489223549 My Congressman, McClintock CA 4th, represents rice farmers. All these countries eat rice. We pay farmers billions not to grow food. No starvation is natural. All starvation is man-made geo-political manipulation, slow motion murder for political power gain. Please ask the President to declare an international crisis. A new Marshall Plan for Africa. Bomb them with food. What a positive PR blizzard for the Trump Administration.

<p>Slap them back twice as hard. You have the force of God and the people with you. You have been raised up by God to smite the evil America-hating, Christian-hating, Jew-hating, freedom-hating SOBs.</p> <p>You were elected by we the people (per the constitution) to drain the swamp and make America great again. One nation under God!</p>

Man alive. How often do you see poll results like this anymore?That’s from Quinnipiac. CNN asked the same question and got a slightly less enthusiastic response — but note the partisan numbers: Republicans are now more gung ho to spend on infrastructure than Democrats are, huh? Gotta be “the Trump effect” at work, with the right rushing to embrace Trump’s priorities as the left inches away from them. Here’s a famous bit from an interview Steve Bannon gave last November, 10 days after Trump’s victory: “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The...

Big Government: This week, IBM showed that it could cram data into a single atom, part of the private sector's never-ending quest to make things smaller and more efficient. If only government would follow this model. IBM Research announced on Wednesday that it was able to put a holmium atom — a rare earth element — on top of a magnesium oxide surface, and with "a pulse of electric current from the magnetized tip of scanning tunneling microscope ... flip the orientation of the atom's field between a 0 or 1," according to the journal Nature, which published the findings....

So, since 1960, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and federal undertakings have multiplied like dandelions, but the federal civilian workforce has expanded only negligibly, to approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Does this mean that “big government” is not really big? And that by doing much more with not many more employees it has accomplished prodigies of per-worker productivity? John J. Dilulio Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings Institution, says: Hardly. Since 1960, the number of state and local government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth...

Most other developed nations already have a VAT -- a system in which taxes are paid by each business in the different stages of production of a good or service, and, ultimately, directly or indirectly, by the consumer. VAT is considered a consumption tax, since it taxes what people consume, rather than how much they earn or their profits from investment. That's also a reason why some consider it unfair for lower-income households. And critics say it could let government take a bigger slice of the overall economic pie, enabling higher spending. Its supporters, meanwhile, say VAT is better for...

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. is out with his new book, On the Brink, where he details his version of events that occurred on Wall Street and Washington D.C.during the financial crisis while he was Treasury Secretary. All that you really need to know about this fairy tale can be found in the front of the book in what is labeled as "Author's Notes". In this preface, Paulson tells us that he doesn't take notes and doesn't use email and his staff was frustrated because he didn't send out memos, but fortunately, he tells us, he has a very...

Those who follow the messaging from within the unofficial news agency of the U.S. State Department, CNN or CNNi, might have noticed a report delivered by Wolf Blitzer yesterday claiming the Russians were set to influence another nationalist election victory, this time in France.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday evening https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-within-federal-workers-push-back-against-trump/2017/01/that there is “a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing” President Donald Trump’s agenda. What Breitbart News called the “coup of the bureaucrats” earlier this week is well under way, with apparent coordination by former Obama administration officials working on the outside: (snip) ..... As former Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Tevi Troy wrote recently, in recalling challenges George W. Bush faced in confronting the bureaucracy, firing is usually not an option: “Another thing we learned about early on was the lifetime tenure rules–technically known as ‘civil-service protections.’ These...

New Jersey’s infamously high property tax bills topped $8,500 per home in 2016, a 2.35 percent increase over the previous year, according to figures released Wednesday by the Department of Community Affairs. Property owners paid $8,549 — $196 more than they did in 2015 when the average tax bill rose about 2.2 percent, according to the analysis. The average residential bill has risen from $8,161 in 2014 to $8,353 in 2015 to $8,549 in 2016. Each year, the average bill set a new high bar for what Garden State property owners pay. […] Gov. Chris Christie’s spokesman Brian Murray said...

Do not allow the Tea Party to become a relic of the past. We’ve come too far to stop fighting now. Flashback to early-2009: The US was in the first one hundred days of the Barack Obama presidency. Many Americans already knew what to expect in the coming four (or eight) years. Others may have voted for President Obama hoping for the best but not realizing the kind of damage that he would be able to inflict upon our nation. Those who saw it coming had already begun to organize. We marched. We met. I attended a rally in Columbus,...

As he tries to convince the Senate to put him in charge of the Energy Department, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry will tell lawmakers Thursday that he was wrong to recommend eliminating that same department. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mr. Perry, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, advocated getting rid of the Energy Department, along with several other federal agencies. At one GOP primary debate he was unable to remember all of the departments he sought to scrap, leading to his infamous “Oops” moment. More than four years later, Mr. Perry now is a full-throated supporter of the...

Making good on a promise to slash government, President-elect Trump has asked his incoming team to pursue spending and staffing cuts. Insiders said that the spending reductions in some departments could go as high as 10 percent and staff cuts to 20 percent, numbers that would rock Washington if he follows through. At least two so-called "landing teams" in Cabinet agencies have relayed the call for cuts as part of their marching orders to shrink the flab in government. The cuts would target discretionary spending, not mandated programs such as Medicare or Social Security, the sources said. The spending reductions...

Making good on a promise to slash government, President-elect Trump has asked his incoming team to pursue spending and staffing cuts. Insiders said that the spending reductions in some departments could go as high as 10 percent and staff cuts to 20 percent, numbers that would rock Washington if he follows through. At least two so-called "landing teams" in Cabinet agencies have relayed the call for cuts as part of their marching orders to shrink the flab in government. The cuts would target discretionary spending, not mandated programs such as Medicare or Social Security, the sources said. The spending reductions...

As the debate continues over repeal of the Affordable Care Act and what might replace it, a growing share of Americans believe that the federal government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. ... The belief that the government has a responsibility to ensure health coverage has increased across many groups over the past year, but the rise has been particularly striking among lower- and middle-income Republicans. Currently, 52% of Republicans with family incomes below $30,000 say the federal government has a responsibility to ensure health coverage...