Free Republic

n Washington, it is never too early to discuss who will next reside in the White House. But the real question is not who; it's what he will do there. Could even a President Paul, Lee, or Cruz accomplish the dramatic downsizing of government that we need? How would he push a Tea Party agenda, given what I call the Big Conundrum? The Big Conundrum is that those of us who believe in limited government abhor how much power has been appropriated to the executive branch. It would seem a type of hypocrisy to use those same powers to radically...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A report released Thursday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says President Barack Obama's budget request would mean significantly larger budget deficits than the White House claims. CBO says the budget plan proposed last month by Obama would produce deficits of $6.6 trillion over the next 10 years — $1.6 trillion more than the White House estimates. The main reason is that the White House has a rosier estimate of the economy's performance over the decade than CBO. That means the administration predicts higher tax revenues. The president's budget is just a proposal; it has gained little...

From the Goldwater Institute ...comes an innovative idea. It would use the Constitution's Article V to move the nation back toward the limited government the Constitution's framers thought their document guaranteed. The Compact for America is the innovation of the Goldwater Institute's Nick Dranias, who proposes a constitutional convention carefully called under Article V to enact a balanced-budget amendment written precisely enough to preclude evasion by the political class.Congress, which relishes deficit spending, would not, unilaterally and unpressured, send this amendment to the states for ratification. Hence the Goldwater Institute's recourse to Article V. It provides, in the same sentence,...

Washington - Even when Sylvia Mathews Burwell was in her early 30s, friends speculated that she might return to her native Hinton, W.Va., and run for governor someday. After all, she had been a Rhodes scholar, and her mother — who later became mayor of Hinton, pop. 2,600 — had driven her daughter’s interest in politics. So far that has not happened, but plenty of other things under two presidents have. On Friday, President Obama is to nominate Ms. Burwell, currently director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to take over one of the largest and most...

Paul Ryan has laid down another marker. Pity he doesn’t have the power to lay down the law. Representative Ryan has a budget, and the Democrats do not have one, nor do they plan to produce one. The proverb holds that you can’t beat something with nothing, but that is precisely what congressional Democrats are going to do with this Republican budget, just as they have with earlier iterations of the same concept. Representative Ryan finds himself in much the same position as Senator Rand Paul: ready to lead, a bit short on followers. My recent pessimistic assessment of Senator...

Whatever objections anyone might have to various details in Rep. Paul Ryan's bold new plan to cut $5 trillion of government waste, one fact trumps all else: Unlike Democrats, he offers solutions, not denial. The one thing that stands out in the long-term budget plan unveiled Tuesday by House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan, R-Wis., is his acceptance of a fact Democrats want to hide: You can't squeeze enough extra money out of the rich to pay for our endlessly expanding entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Tax revenue over many decades has been relatively unchanging . And it...

Watching congressional Democrats and Republicans wrestle over the budget is a little like watching Thelma and Louise. Democrats want to stomp on the gas pedal and race to the edge of the cliff at top speed, while Republicans want merely to set the cruise control. Neither approach addresses the fiscal realities of the situation. America has a debt of $17 trillion. That’s more than $54,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It is unsustainable and has to stop. Failure to do so will leave generations of Americans strapped with a crushing load of debt that jeopardizes...

Are you kidding? You’d think one who is representing the mighty Badgers, who made it to the Final Four based on sacrificial work ethic and discipline that obviously pays off in the end, he who represents the great state of Wisconsin that hosts this underdog celebrated college basketball team, would understand that future success depends on hard work and sacrifices. The latest Ryan (R, Wisconsin) Budget is not an April Fool’s joke. Palin said that the budget that was presented, though,"really IS a joke because it is STILL not seeing the problem." "It STILL is not proposing reining in wasteful...

House Budget Committee Chairman released his Fiscal Year 2015 budget Tuesday ahead of a potentially difficult vote in the House as he continues to deal with unrest on the right from a deal he struck with Democratic Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA). The 2014 budget spent $3.498 trillion in 2015, while this year's budget spends $3.664 trillion, an increase of $166 billion. The 2014 budget spent $3.660 trillion in 2016, while this year's budget spends $3.676, an increase of $26 billion, according to a report outlining the budget. The spending in years further out is actually lower than...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid preemptively slammed the budget proposal Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will release Tuesday, calling it a document written to pander to the Koch brothers and other billionaires. “It’s a blueprint for a modern… how would we say this? Koch-topia. Yes, that’s it,” Reid said. “Call it whatever you want. We might as well call it the Koch budget because that’s what they’re doing, protecting the Koch brothers.” Reid’s remarks mark the latest volley in Democrats’ mid-term election year strategy of attacking the Kochs repeatedly, hoping to fire up their liberal base and associate Republicans with the...

"Tighten the belts" is one tired takeaway from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget proposal, released today. The budget proposes to cut $5.1 trillion from projected spending over the next 10 years, getting a lot of its savings from repealing the president's health care law and changing Medicaid. The document, titled again, "Path to Prosperity," is largely for show, as the bipartisan budget agreement authored by Ryan, R-Wisc., and his Senate counterpart, Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., already set discretionary spending levels for the 2015 fiscal year. The budget agreement passed in both the Senate and the House...

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan unveiled an updated Republican budget plan Tuesday that would slash $5.1 trillion in federal spending over coming decade and promises to balance the government's books with wide-ranging cuts in programs like food stamps and government-paid health care for the poor and working class. Ryan's plan would also cut Pell Grants for low-income students and pensions for federal workers, while steering away from cuts to benefits for senior citizens, at least in the short term. The proposal would reprise a voucher-like Medicare program for future retirees that would be the basis for...

This worked so well for France that Belgium had a real estate boom with the new tax on millionaires was announced. And New Jersey learned that millionaires have a tendency to leave when confronted with higher taxes. But Illinois? Well, per Michael Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, Illinois is different: “Well, if they’re in Illinois today, they’re probably so much in love with Illinois that they’re not going to leave,” he said, according to the Tribune–a backhanded acknowledgement of how poorly the state is already doing.Madigan may also be encouraged by California’s example, where millionaires have largely...

Britain's welfare budget is to be capped at around £120billion-a-year to stop the benefits bill ballooning out of control. Chancellor George Osborne wants to limit the total amount the state spends on handouts, with ministers forced to face a Commons vote if costs spiral. Only pensions and Jobseekers Allowance will be excluded, meaning a raft of payments including pensioner benefits, income support, maternity pay and most housing benefit could be in the firing line. Mr Osborne argues that under Labour spending on benefits was 'out of control', with the number of people who have never worked doubling in a decade....

Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified on the Health and Human Services Department fiscal year 2015 budget request.

The partial government shutdown in October was largely to blame for a 3% drop in visitors to America's national parks in 2013, according to a report released Monday by the National Park Service. The country's 401 parks, historic sites and recreation areas drew 273.6 million visitors in 2013, about 9 million fewer than the previous year, according to the report. The 16-day government shutdown, sparked by a budget dispute in Washington, was responsible for reducing the visitation numbers by about 7.9 million, the report said. The communities near the parks lost about $414 million in spending by visitors because of...

Buried deep in a section of President Obama's budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high. In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP. What's more, the cost of these direct payments is...

The standard media coverage of President Obama's new budget claimed the proposals will cut $600 billion in spending over the next decade. It was just about impossible, though, to find any media story mentioning some basic numbers that belong in any story about a new federal budget. How much money is the federal government spending this year? How does that compare to what it spent last year, or expects to spend next year? Perhaps the reason for this failure is because the real numbers don't match up with the storyline. For example, in the current year, the federal government is...

President Obama's budget released Tuesday claims to reduce deficits by trillions of dollars, but a closer look at the details reveals that the deficit reduction is dependent on a number of gimmicks.Overall, Obama's budget for fiscal year 2015 still projects deficits of $4.9 trillion between 2015 and 2024 if all of his policies are adopted. But that is about $3 trillion less than what the Congressional Budget Office is projecting for the period and $2.2 trillion less than what the White House's own Office of Management and Budget is estimating for the period if there are no changes to current...

The White House dropped President Obama’s FY2015 budget readout yesterday, and as the NYT rather aptly titled it, it amounted to little more than a “populist wish list” that doesn’t even try to look serious about addressing our runaway entitlement spending or ballooning national debt. It includes a lot more of the stimulus-spending-as-growth utter crapola we’ve been dealing with for the past five years, and to really demonstrate just how bass-ackwards his and the Democrats’ brand of economic thinking really is, we need look no further than what his would-be budget would inflict on one of the few bright spots...