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If you're in the hospital with multiple fractures, a staph infection and a collapsed lung, you may not take great comfort when your doctor informs you that his last patient has it worse, being dead. Sometimes encouraging comparisons are not that encouraging. So Chicagoans didn't break out confetti upon hearing that Standard & Poor's Ratings Services regard the city's fiscal condition as less dire than Detroit's. In other news, most residents of Baghdad were not killed by suicide bombers yesterday. The S&P report is not exactly a burst of sunshine. It judges "both Detroit's and Chicago's budgetary performance to be...

A Capitol Hill source source says that Senate Democrats will not produce a budget this year. The news is expected to come from Senator Patty Murray's office at 3 p.m. today, as part of a Friday afternoon news dump. Murray is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama released this statement. "Senate Democrats are required by law to produce a budget," wrote Sessions. "Our nation is in enormous financial distress, and workers and families are suffering. Senate Democrats have produced only one budget in the last five years. This Senate and, more importantly, the American public,...

As the Obama administration announces proposed sweeping defense cuts, a Congressional Budget Office report documents how increases in other areas of domestic spending may be forcing the White House to reduce money for the military. The CBO report finds that mandatory spending, which includes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, is projected to rise $85 billion, or 4 percent, to $2.1 trillion this year. Interest on the debt is worse. It is projected to increase 14 percent per year, almost quadrupling in dollar terms between 2014 and 2024. "We are going to be spending more in interest in a couple of...

Just two days after the Pentagon outlined major cuts to the U.S. Army and other military programs, President Obama is calling for a whopping $300 billion commitment for America's roads, bridges and mass transit systems -- though as much as half comes from a tax plan that has bleak prospects on the Hill. The president talked about the stimulus-style plan during a stop Wednesday afternoon in St. Paul, Minn. Officials say the money, as proposed, largely would come from "pro-growth business tax reform." But aside from the challenges in pushing tax reform, Obama could have a hard time making the...

Full title: Col. Oliver North: 'There is no strategy' to the defense budget that reduces military to pre-WWII levelsVIDEO at link: Ollie North up to the 4:45 minute mark. GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: Colonel Oliver North joins us. Nice to see you, Colonel. LT. COL. OLIVER NORTH, HOST, 'WAR STORIES' & FORMERLY U.S. MARINE CORPS: Good to be with you but not on a day like this. VAN SUSTEREN: All right. I was going to ask you two things. Two-part question. First, do we have to make cuts in the military? Is that smart and wise? And secondly,...

According to news reports, the US military will be cut dramatically: "Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has proposed shrinking the Army to its smallest size in 74 years through a series of base closures and troops cuts, and by completely eliminating several Air Force aircraft fleets. The move comes as the U.S. Army moves into the final phases of a massive troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Congress raises new red flags about American deficit spending. Hagel surprised some observers on Monday when he outlined a global military philosophy that removed America from the center of its universe. [SNIP] I oppose these...

Benefits for active ­duty personnel and their families would be slashed under a budget proposal released Monday by the Pentagon. The budget would dramatically reduce the Army’s size and trigger a new round of controversial base closures, while cutting healthcare co-pays and deductibles and reducing the subsidies military families get for housing and low-cost goods. Defense Sec. Chuck Hagel acknowledged the cuts would be controversial, but argued they were unavoidable in a belt-tightening era following the end of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Congress has taken some important steps in recent years to control the growth in compensation spending, but...

Teeing up what could be a politically explosive fight before the midterm elections in November, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday will recommend billions of dollars in annual budget cuts that would reduce housing allowances and other benefits, increase health-care premiums, and limit pay raises, CBS News confirms. The recommendations, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, are part of a broader effort to trim the Pentagon's budget while minimizing the impact on preparedness and capability. But they're likely to provoke fierce opposition from veterans' interest groups and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The Pentagon argues that personnel costs are simply...

S&P is “keeping a close eye on budget gimmicks” that the state has tried to use to paper over problems. Petek says that the most populous state in the country, with an economy the ninth largest in the world, already is “overly reliant on personal income taxes” and that the state’s “tax structure is behind the deficit, because it over relies on the personal income tax” as its source of revenue. He adds that “for California to rely on capital gains tax revenue from things like the Facebook initial public offering is like looking for change in the seat cushions.”...

Say, did you know that we are living in the age of austerity budgets in Washington? This year’s budget will spend more than last year’s $3.44 trillion, but not as much as Barack Obama requested for FY2014, which was an apparently austere $3.778 trillion. Nevertheless, the Washington Post reports that a newly-emboldened President will demand an end to an “era of austerity” that we haven’t seen in decades with his new FY2015 budget proposal: President Obama’s forthcoming budget request will seek tens of billions of dollars in fresh spending for domestic priorities while abandoning a compromise proposal to tame the...

Buoyed by increased contributions and a strengthened economy, the Archdiocese of Baltimore ended Fiscal Year 2012-2013 in a stronger position than the previous fiscal year. According to an annual report released at the beginning of February, the archdiocese had a consolidated operating surplus of $44.3 million. In Fiscal Year 2011-2012, the archdiocese had a consolidated operating deficit of $12.6 million. The new report shows that last fiscal year, $12 million of the surplus was gained prior to factoring in investment income, which amounted to $10.8 million. It was the second consecutive year in which the archdiocese had a surplus prior...

President Obama’s forthcoming budget request will seek tens of billions of dollars in fresh spending for domestic priorities while abandoning a compromise proposal to tame the national debt in part by trimming Social Security benefits. 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...

President Obama is facing a deepening dilemma about whether to abandon cuts to Social Security in his next fiscal blueprint, which is due out in March. Obama touched the third rail of American politics last year when he proposed a new formula for Social Security and other entitlements that would result in benefits being cut over time. Now congressional Democrats and unions are ramping up their pressure on Obama to drop the proposal, which many fear could become an albatross for the party in the midterm elections. “We want the president to make very clear that he is going to...

Is it not our duty, more than ever, and as Tea Party Activists, to inform the American People about the brilliance of our Founder’s original tax plan and how our Founders intended to extinguish deficits if imposts, duties and excise taxes were found insufficient to meet Congress’ constitutionally authorized expenditures? In 1995 and 1996 Congress held Hearings on “Replacing the Federal Income Tax”. My submissions before the Committee on Ways and Means which were presented under the heading “American Constitutional Research Service” are part of these recorded hearings, and I recently found they are available on line. My two submissions...

The Obama Administration is reportedly evaluating the possibility of using data gathered by the National Security Agency (NSA) to help fund the government. NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett says that “for too long we’ve been overlooking the commercial opportunities of this vast surveillance project. We know what web sites people have been visiting. We know who they’ve been calling on their cell phones. And in many instances we’ve been reading their emails. There has got to be a lot of businesses that would pay substantial sums to have a peek at this information.” Ledgett speculated that “the obvious customers for...

The latest budget battle in Washington has Democrats and Republicans once again at loggerheads. Democrats think Republicans should get nothing in return for another debt ceiling increase. Republicans think they should get less than nothing. The House GOP leadership has longed to stop the gory budget showdowns of the past few years. That means giving up on further cuts and passing a clean debt ceiling increase; a cringeworthy proposal, but one that should have attained enough Democrat and establishment Republican support to pass the House. Instead, the GOP found a creative way to make it worse. Republicans attached a provision...

With election season upon us and the Democrats' generic ballot numbers declining, President Obama has done the only thing he could do -- delay, again, the employer mandate in Obamacare. The new delay will run until 2016. The delay comes after a Congressional Budget Office report found anecdotal evidence of employers already shifting employees to part-time employment. The report also noted "(b)eginning in 2015, employers of 50 or more full-time equivalent workers that do not offer health insurance ... may respond to the employer penalty by seeking to reduce or limit their full-time staffing and to hire more part-time employees."...

Federal spending and debt are out of control If America does not change course, the future will be dramatically worse. Now more than ever, it is crucial that Americans understand what our nation's spending, taxes, and debt mean for them and their families. The Heritage Foundation's Federal Budget in Pictures offers a unique tool to learn about the federal budget in a clear and compelling way.

A mere eight weeks from the December budget deal, House Republicans on Tuesday bowed to the inevitable and allowed a vote on a "clean" debt-ceiling increase that Democrats promptly passed—no reform strings attached. Perhaps as a follow-up the GOP could repeal the debt ceiling altogether and finally end this periodic self-torture. Before it created the debt ceiling in 1917, Congress had to vote to approve each new government bond issue, specifying the amount to be borrowed and the terms. This is in stark contrast to today's practice, when Treasury is generally free to borrow at will until it hits the...

WASHINGTON – House Speaker John Boehner, in an abrupt shift, announced Tuesday that the House would vote on an increase in the nation's borrowing cap without any strings attached. A senior House GOP leadership source told Fox News that the vote is expected Tuesday night. Boehner's decision to proceed with a "clean" debt-ceiling bill amounts to a capitulation by Republicans to President Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats who argued that the GOP should not attempt to use the bill as leverage to extract concessions from the administration.