Free Republic

President Obama's budget for next year will call for a $68 billion boost in spending. It's just another in a line of fiscally irresponsible plans that have been the hallmark of this administration. Obama's official budget plan won't come out until Feb. 2, but he's already leaked the fact that he wants a 7% boost in discretionary programs above the spending caps he agreed to in exchange for getting his tax hikes. He'd split the money evenly between national security and domestic programs. In Obama's mind, more spending only makes sense, since deficits have been tumbling in recent years —...

Public school systems around the country preparing to begin a new school year will be facing the added burden of enrolling more than 37,000 unaccompanied minors who have entered the U.S. illegally. According to the Administration for Children & Families’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, 37,477 alien children have been placed with relatives or other sponsors around the country so far this year while their immigration cases are being processed in court. In the meantime, they are entitled to attend U.S. public schools, which have dropped out of the top 20 in global rankings for math, reading and science. …

The federal government paid $2,007,358,200,000 in benefits and entitlements in fiscal year 2013 from government programs, according to data from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Monthly Treasury Statement. The treasury statement summarizes the financial activities of the federal government, including data on government receipts, outlays, and surplus and deficit totals. The September 2013 monthly treasury statement calculates these metrics for the entire fiscal year of 2013, which began on October 1, 2012 and ended on September 30, 2013. According to the statement, the federal government’s total outlays, otherwise known as spending, for means-tested and non-means tested government programs—not including...

The total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,962,532 million in April, which exceeds the 10,815,197 people who live in the nation of Greece. … April was the 195th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January 1997. …

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending $4 million to increase the use of food stamps at farmers markets, claiming it is beneficial to the economy. As a record one-out-of-five households are on the benefit, the USDA says allowing food stamp use at farmers markets is a “win-win-win situation.” … The $4-million outreach is part of a two-year project that expires Sept. 20, 2013. With the funds, farmers markets can purchase equipment to accept EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) cards and wireless access in order to operate the equipment. Already, there are 2,091 farmers markets that accept food stamps, as...

After a full year of fruitless job hunting, Natasha Baebler just gave up. She’d already abandoned hope of getting work in her field, counseling the disabled. But she couldn’t land anything else, either—not even a job interview at a telephone call center. Until she feels confident enough to send out resumes again, she’ll get by on food stamps and disability checks from Social Security and live with her parents in St. Louis. … It isn’t supposed to be this way. After a recession, an improving economy is supposed to bring people back into the job market. Instead, the number of...

In the past four decades, the number of people receiving benefits from the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program has increased nearly sixfold, rising from 1.5 million in 1970 to 8.8 million in 2012, the Congressional Budget Office says. On Thursday, Joyce Manchester, a chief analyst with the Congressional budget Office, told a House subcommittee that the number of people seeking DI benefits is expected to continue rising, and she said the Affordable Care Act “is likely to influence application rates” although it’s “difficult to predict” what the impact will be. … Applications for disability insurance could increase under Obamacare,...

New York’s Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tells NBC’s “Today” show he’s encouraged that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is getting “actively engaged” in talks to resolve the problem. … (Senator John Thune, R-SD) said the two sides are at a stalemate because “Democrats haven’t been willing to discuss the issue of spending.” …

The Social Security program ran a $47.8 billion deficit in fiscal 2012 as the program brought in $725.429 billion in cash and paid $773.247 for benefits and overhead expenses, according to official data published by Social Security Administration. The Social Security Administration also released new data revealing that the number of workers collecting disability benefits hit a record 8,827,795 in December—up from 8,805,353 in November. The overall number of Social Security program beneficiaries—including retired workers, dependent family members and survivors and disabled workers and their dependent family members—also hit a record in December, climbing from 56,658,978 in November to 56,758,185...

Yesterday, Mitt Romney said he’s “not going to say outrageous things about the president.” Trouble with that statement is that “outrageous” is a pretty subjective adjective. Outrageous to whom? Apparently, Romney meant to say he’s not going to say anything about the president that would outrage the left — because he doesn’t seem to be afraid to say something about the president that would outrage the right. In fact, he did just that earlier today, when he essentially said the president shouldn’t be held responsible for the high price of gas. “I think people recognize that the president can’t precisely...

The campaign to use the tragic shootings in Tucson to silence conservatives continues. The latest twist is an attempt to highlight anonymous threats against leftist scholar and strategist Frances Fox Piven as a way of forcing Glenn Beck, a critic of Piven, off the air, or at least prohibiting him from mentioning her on his Fox News television show. This affects me as well, since an excerpt from my recent appearance on Beck’s show to discuss Piven has been aired in the course of the controversy. My new book, Radical-in-Chief, extensively treats Piven’s influence on contemporary leftist strategy, and on...

There's a fascinating phenomenon in medicine of a "carrier" of a disease. The most famous example is Typhoid Mary. Mary was a cook in the early 20th century who spread typhoid to over fifty people, although she never contracted the infection herself. There are carriers of a variety of illnesses. For instance, a person can test positive for TB without having suffered from the disease. Typhoid Mary is, I think, an apt metaphor for not just carriers of physical disease, but of psychological mayhem. I'm referring to people who wreak havoc without so much as lifting a finger. The most...

Many commentators on the U.S. left have tried to minimize the significance and importance of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, made famous by writer James Simpson and TV personality Glenn Beck. According to Simpson and Beck, Columbia University sociologists, husband and wife team Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, devised a strategy in the early 1960s, to crash the U.S. economy and bring on socialist revolution by deliberately overloading state welfare rolls to the point of bankruptcy. Many on the left regard this hypotheses as gross exaggeration at best, deliberate misrepresentation at worst. [caption id="attachment_732" align="aligncenter" width="404" caption="Richard A. Cloward"][/caption] Cloward and...

America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again. Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's...