Free Republic

20) I can tell you that if you were to elect President Obama, you know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a repeat of the last four years. We just can’t afford four more years like the last four years. -- Mitt Romney 19) We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through. We don’t have to settle for gasoline at four bucks. We don’t have to settle for unemployment at a chronically high level. We don’t have to settle for 47 million people on food stamps. We don’t have to settle for 50 percent of...

Sometimes a few facts tell important stories. The American economy now is full of facts that tell stories that you really don't want, but need, to hear. Where are we now? Did you know that annual spending by the federal government now exceeds the 2007 level by about $1 trillion? With a slow economy, revenues are little changed. The result is an unprecedented string of federal budget deficits, $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and another $1.2 trillion on the way this year. The four-year increase in borrowing amounts to $55,000 per U.S. household....

We do not know who will win the White House in November. But we do know that American politics has crossed the Rubicon on spending and entitlements, and these issues will at long last complete the journey from a forbidden third rail to a central element of national politics. Even if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan lose this year’s battle to Barack Obama, they will win the war on the challenge of our generation. Congressman Paul Ryan is best known for his budget, the Ryan Roadmap, which ties together the two sides of our fiscal-crisis coin: First, the major entitlements...

In a not-so-subtle rebuke of President Obama’s tendency to offer unsolicited recommendations on how Europeans should handle their debt crises on Sunday evening, Germany’s finance minister suggested that perhaps His Munificence should focus on his own problems before trying to fix everybody else’s. Wolfgang Schaeuble told public broadcaster ZDF in an interview late Sunday that “people are always very quick at giving others advice.”He says: “Mr. Obama should first of all take care of reducing the American deficit, which is higher than in the eurozone.” An unfortunate and embarrassing truth — the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is well over eighty percent,...

Trading in the securities of Spanish lender Bankia has been suspended "due to circumstances that may affect the normal share trading," stock market regulator CNMV said on Friday. Bankia will ask the state for more than 15 billion euros ($19 billion) to bail it out when its new management team presents a restructuring plan on Friday, a financial sector source said late on Thursday.

Your credit card's been stolen- and the punk that  did it has been running hog-wild ever since Every American voter needs to see this stuff...  please help to drill reality into some of the thicker skulls within your own personal sphere from now until the election.  Just look at the charts, what's to debate unless you're talking to some hard-core, incurable Cloward-Pivenist?  We're doomed if we don't 86 this guy... period More at Reaganite Republican... RightChange  SodaHead   PoliticoMafioso   FinanceWand   Oddhammer.com One Conservative Voice   TownHall   DittoRush   The Roanoke Slant    TerrellAfterMath   Cartoon-a-Day   Two Minute Conservative   BabylonToday

In 2008, the financial world as we know it changed. Many of the principles we were taught were invalidated, it seemed. Save for retirement and live happily ever after was the conventional wisdom. Then the market crashed! In his book The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan discusses the importance of the rule of law in a healthy economy. Dr. Greenspan notes that the vast majority of business transactions go through normally because of trust and the "rule of law." But what if the rule of law changes such that the circumstances under which normal commerce is undertaken become disrupted? In...

We in America today live in a country circumscribed by entitlement policies devised by an America that has steadily been disappearing. Those policies established over a generation ago cannot possibly in mathematical or demographic terms support the America of the present much less the America of the future. That is the stark reality. We need to reform those policies or we shall go bankrupt, and raising taxes on the so-called rich will not fix things. Even raising taxes on the middle class will not fix things. Nor will spending a trillion dollars more than we have on hand fix things....

As large parts of the world turn green to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has been flying the green, white and gold flag on a charm offensive around the world. Kenny is packing in trips to London, China and New York within a couple of weeks in an effort to carry forward the country’s gradual return to economic health, which has been based largely on attracting foreign investment. He opens the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, after visiting at the White House over the weekend. “This is a very important push for Ireland,” Irish...

This is a stunner. In the new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, journalist Noam Scheiber uncovers this tantalizing tidbit: In May 2009, the president asked [White House budget director Peter Orszag] to draft a secret memo laying out the government’s options in the event of a fiscal crisis, in which a runaway deficit sent interest rates spiraling upward. No other member of the Obama economic team was even aware of the assignment. OK, let’s take this step by step:1. The Obama administration has already conceded it has no long-term plan to deal with rising U.S....

Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011 Time for IMF to save Europe By LAURENCE H. SUMMERS The Washington Post WASHINGTON — European leaders met last week for yet another "historic" summit at which the fate of Europe is said to hang in the balance. Yet it is clear that this will not be the last one convened to deal with the financial crisis. Given that Europe is the largest component of the global economy, the rest of the world has a stake in helping to avoid major financial accidents. It also has a stake in aiding continued growth in Europe and ensuring...

Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill are moving to block the International Monetary Fund from using U.S. money for European bailouts, as talks intensify across the pond over how to stanch the debt crisis. Some U.S. lawmakers want their concerns addressed as part of the feverish end-of-year budget talks. On the House and Senate side, lawmakers have introduced legislation to wall off U.S. taxpayer money from playing any role in averting a European meltdown. "It's time to stop the bailouts and start restoring fiscal discipline to our own economy," Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said in a statement, as he and 25...

With the European debt crisis dominating the news and threatening to pull the world into a double-dip recession, there are growing calls for Uncle Sam to come to the rescue. The U.S. is already committing untold billions to the $1.4 trillion European bailout fund, but that's not enough, according to some European leaders and even U.S. politicians. They say that while the EU bailout is costly, it's also necessary. They are only right about the cost. These endless bailouts are not only unnecessary, but are in fact dangerous. "The problem with socialism," former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said, "is...

Milton Friedman was an extraordinary Nobel Prize-winning economist whose ideas helped underpin modern conservative economic theory. His contributions to economics and the conservative movement cannot be underestimated. Sadly, Milton Friedman passed away a little more than five years ago at the ripe old age of 94. Although Friedman is no longer with us, his words, his ideas, and his legacy live on. In honor of Friedman, here are some of his best quotations. 10) "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." 9) "I am in favor...

Obama is a national embarrassment and each day proves himself even more incapable of honestly confronting the nation’s urgent issues.  Just days ago, Americans were once again left gob-smacked as Obama beat the drums for the SAVE awards, his signature effort to cut the $1.4 trillion annual deficit.    This Obama initiative hopes to demonstrate the president’s commitment to fiscal sanity by cutting wasteful spending. The basic idea of the SAVE awards is a good one.  Federal employees are encouraged to identify and propose cost-saving ideas and to finger poorly performing programs that should be cut.  With an almost $4 trillion...

Very notable news, via Vatican expert Sandro Magister, following the aftermath of the Justice & Peace’s ill-advised white paper (emphasis mine) Precisely when the G20 summit in Cannes was coming to its weak and uncertain conclusion, on that same Friday, November 4 at the Vatican, a smaller summit convened in the secretariat of state was doing damage control on the latest of many moments of confusion in the Roman curia. In the hot seat was the document on the global financial crisis released ten days earlier by the pontifical council for justice and peace. A document that had disturbed many,...

DELONG: It Is 1931. We Are Austria. If The Fed Doesn't Save Us Here Comes Another Great Depression... Henry Blodget Nov. 9, 2011, 5:21 PM How does Berkeley professor Brad Delong feel about what's going on in Europe? He's freaking out: Time to Spread Foam on the Runway: The Federal Reserve Needs to Act Now to Firewall Off the Eurocrisis I have been complaining for some time now that Reinhart and Rogoff think that the time is always 1931 and that we are always Austria--that the great fiscal crisis is about to erupt and send us lurching down toward Great...

"The plan of initiatives calls for a confidence vote," Papandreou told his Socialist party lawmakers in parliament, moments after he had also announced a referendum would also be held on the EU deal. "The command of the Greek people will bind us," he said.

David Cameron clashed repeatedly with Nicolas Sarkozy today after the French President tried to exclude Britain and non-eurozone countries from a critical Brussels summit to rescue European banks. During two hours of bitter exchanges during a meeting of all 27 EU leaders before a crisis summit of the eurozone’s 17 members on Wednesday, President Sarkozy fought hard to get the Prime Minister barred from talks that would finalise a 100billion euros cash injection into banks. ”We’re sick of you criticising us and telling us what to do. You say you hate the euro, you didn’t want to join and now...

Monster Prediction From BofA: Another US Debt Downgrade Is Coming In Just A Few Weeks Joe Weisenthal | Oct. 22, 2011, 7:04 AM | 4,055 | 48 In an analyst note, Bofa/ML Ethan S. Harris drops a bit of a bombshell prediction: We expect a moderate slowdown in the beginning of next year, as two small policy shocks—another debt downgrade and fiscal tightening—hit the economy. The “not-so-super” Deficit Commission is very unlikely to come up with a credible deficit-reduction plan. The committee is more divided than the overall Congress. Since the fall-back plan is sharp cuts in discretionary spending, the...