Free Republic

The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused...

More bad news for Gov. Chris Christie: New Jersey is dead last in the nation in terms of its fiscal solvency, according to a new report. The study, released this week by the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University, ranked each state's financial health based on a variety of measures, such as cash on hand to pay its current bills, budget surpluses or deficits, unfunded liabilities and ability to provide adequate public services. The Mercatus study used 2012 data. New Jersey came in last on two of those measures — budget and long-term solvency — and finished in the...

Sequester, we hardly knew ye. The omnibus budget deal slithering its way toward President Barack Obama’s desk for signing abandons the automatic spending cuts that resulted from an earlier fiscal compromise. Why was the sequester abandoned? Like the Gramm-Rudman Act a generation earlier, the sequester had to be stopped for one fundamental, undeniable, bipartisan reason. It worked. It did not work perfectly, and it did not balance the budget or put us on course for a balanced budget. But it did play a critical role in nudging the deficit away from “catastrophic existential threat” territory and toward “terrifying money-suck.” It...

I thought you’d like to know: with the release of the greatly anticipated White House feature, “2013 – YEAR IN REVIEW”Yes: the White House really did title this image “Hero”the WhiteHouse.Gov site has officially been recognized as the most thorough, reliable and verifiable propaganda machine in the nation! It readily beat out all of its close competitors at ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Ms.NBC and the New York Times for the title Propagandist of the Year.You can see why, with “highlights” from each and every month of the year that includes a vast array of fun facts:@ 1:34: “Here’s where it...

The financial position of the U.S. is not just troubled; it is artificially created to fool the people. The nation's budget deficit and debt are exponentially higher than what our politicians say they are. None of the headline figures used as the basis of public discourse have any relevance to the true state of U.S. finances. The government's financial reporting is misleading because our political leaders have subverted the democratic process to advance their personal interests. Adding all of the costs associated with the nation's social-insurance programs to the amounts reflected in the Financial Report shows that over the past...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Monday she’ll push for a vote for more unemployment benefits and said the additional $25 billion cost should be tacked onto the deficit rather than paid for by cuts elsewhere. On a conference call with fellow House Democratic women, the California lawmaker said Republicans acted “cruelly” when they went home for a three-week vacation earlier this month without approving more weeks of unemployment payments for the long-term jobless. As many as 1.3 million people will lose benefits on Saturday, when enhanced benefits expire. Republicans have said they would consider taking up a bill, but...

Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz (Likud Beytenu) had harsh words for Finance Minister Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) on Saturday night. Speaking on Channel 2’s “Meet the Press”, Steinitz, who served as Finance Minister before Lapid, said that his successor misled the public and created unnecessary panic about the state of the Israeli economy. Steinitz claimed that the deficit, which is expected to be released in January, will stand at about 3%, in contrast to Lapid’s earlier predictions. "By doing this, he caused severe damage,” he charged. “No top official in the Treasury or in the Bank of Israel ever told...

"The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were...

The White House reiterated Monday that administration officials would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said over the weekend that Republicans would seek concessions in exchange for extending the limit on borrowing. "The president's position has not changed," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. Carney said officials were skeptical that Republicans would actually pursue the strategy after the polling hit the party took during the government shutdown earlier this year. "We do not expect Republicans to walk that path again, precisely because it proved so disastrous," Carney said. But Ryan on...

Senate Democrats are on the cusp of securing enough GOP votes to break a filibuster next week on the bipartisan budget, temporarily ending the fiscal crises that have dominated Washington for the past several years. With 53 Democrats and two independents expected to back the measure, four Republicans — John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina — said that they would vote to cut off debate on the budget, putting proponents just one vote shy of advancing the measure to final passage. Several additional GOP senators signaled Friday that...

While American babies are born with 54,320 debt on each citizen, PLUS a $149,947.00 per taxpayer on their shoulders, Australia’s national debt is a half-a-trillion only. The amounts are simply staggering. And, as the National Debt Clock keeps turning, numbers are at 17,224,121,XXX,XXX trillion. The clock’s mechanism is so accurate and runs at such speed that a naked eye can barely catch changes at the infinitesimal seconds at which it turns. As American citizens at large need to understand the methodology of a debt and the way to recovery, we repeat here the economic formula, courtesy of Investopedia: GDP =...

The House Budget Committee filed the text of the new Ryan-Murray budget deal before midnight on Tuesday and the Rules Committee announced an emergency meeting at 2 p.m. on Wednesday to prepare a House floor vote on the package. The text of the $85 billion deal is here. [77 page PDF] The deal sets spending levels for 2014 and 2015, allowing appropriators to create a fully detailed omnibus spending package before the government shutdown deadline of Jan. 15. The spending panel will also now have the chance to do all 12 individual appropriations bills for 2015 before the Oct. 1...

Some 1.6 million Americans have registered for Obamacare, but more than nine-out-of-10 of them actually signed up for Medicaid, a trend that could end up slamming federal and state government budgets. Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security already account for 48 percent of federal spending, writes economist Michael Tanner, a senior fellow for the Cato Institute, in an article for The New York Post. But with Obamacare adding to the Medicaid costs, "we are picking up speed on the road to insolvency," Tanner writes. The Medicaid program is already the third-largest government program in the United States, coming in only behind...

Over at The Atlantic, Ron Fournier -- the editorial director of National Journal -- argues that the Republicans are "The Party of Zilch."  As part of his rationale for why the GOP "stands for nothing," Fournier states that "[t]he country needs to tame a massive debt that will be 100 percent of the gross domestic product by 2038 unless Congress raises revenue and trims entitlements. No, says the GOP." Here is a news flash for The Atlantic: the American gross federal debt already exceeds 100% of GDP.  No need to wait until 2038; it is currently at 106.5% of...

The Tea Party/Republican House majority was elected in 2010 to stop the runaway Obama Progressive Democrat big government spending spree........Federal spending soared from $2.655 trillion in 2006,when the Democrat Congress was elected to replace the Republican Congress, to $3.6 trillion in fiscal 2011, reflecting the last spending legislation adopted by that completely Democrat Congress in the prior year, an increase of 36% in just four years of control.But after the new Tea Party/Republican House majority forced a major budget showdown in 2011,total, actual, nominal federal spending actually declined in fiscal 2012 to $3.54 trillion. Such an absolute decline rarely ever...

Since there were no federal offices up for election last week and only a handful of statewide races, you may have missed many of the results. Across the country this election cycle, voters considered raising income and sales taxes, raising the minimum wage, whether or not to add to a state’s current debt level, or to refuse these changes in favor of fiscal responsibility and taxpayer protection. The National Taxpayers Union has put together a great list of the “good, bad, and ugly” of last week’s election. As NTU reports, some of the most costly tax increases were avoided, while...

In rare political remarks since becoming president of Purdue University, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has voiced sharp disagreement with many fellow Republicans over whether the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration should continue. Daniels, once director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, dubbed sequestration a "bad idea" during a press breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. In so doing, the 64-year-old Daniels put himself on the opposite side of such national conservative leaders as Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who recently told Newsmax "in the short term, it's important to...

The House on Wednesday passed a resolution that disapproves of President Obama's decision to suspend the debt ceiling until early February. The House passed the disapproval resolution, H.J.Res. 99, in a 222-191 vote. Three Democrats voted for it, while four Republicans voted against it and two GOP members voted "present." Democrats voting in favor were Reps. John Barrow (Ga.), Jim Matheson (Utah), and Mike McIntyre (N.C.). Republicans voting against were Reps. Charlie Dent (Pa.), Joe Heck (Nev.), Darrell Issa (Calif.), and Peter King (N.Y.). Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Reid Ribble (R-Wis.) voted "present." The resolution was the result of...

President Obama told FBI agents on Monday that he would fight to reverse sequester cuts that have trimmed the agency's budget, declaring that the "least we can do" for those who put their lives on the line was make sure "operations are not disrupted because of the politics in this town." "I'll keep fighting for those resources because our country asks and expects a lot from you, and we should make sure you've got the resources you need to do the job, especially when many of your colleagues put their lives on the line on a daily basis, all to...

From an Extreme Radical Independent Centrist- By: Larry Walker II -In his 1943 study entitled, The New Philosophy of Public Debt, U.S. economist, founder and 1st president of Brookings Institution (1927-1952), Harold G. Moulton expounded on the two conflicting debt philosophies of that era. First was the traditional view, that “a continuously unbalanced budget and rapidly rising public debt imperil the financial stability of the nation.” And, second, the new conception of the day, that “a huge public debt is a national asset rather than a liability and continuous deficit spending is essential to economic prosperity of the nation.”At...