Free Republic

“It’s ending purposeless, perpetual, global warfare, stupid.” Republican presidential contenders for 2016 should embrace that campaign theme to demolish the ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton and her Napoleonic complex. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign theme, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is obsolete. Presidential strategists sermonize that voters are instinctively concerned more about jobs, mortgages, and health care than about national security policy. True enough. But that is because presidential aspirants have failed to discern and to explain the direct connection between, on the one hand, purposeless, perpetual, global warfare and the projection of military force everywhere that has created an exorbitant, inefficient, and corrupt...

More than half of the nation’s school cafeteria workers expect to lose money selling low-salt, low-fat meals pushed by first lady Michelle Obama, a “serious” problem that threatens the programs, according to a survey of food providers.The School Nutrition Association, which is planning to demand changes to the meal requirements to make the food more attractive to students, found that 50.35 percent of cafeteria officials surveyed expect that serving the food will “exceed revenue” next year.“Of the 92 percent of respondents reporting that rising costs pose a ‘serious’ or ‘moderate’ challenge to their programs, 70 percent indicated ‘serious,’” said the...

Sorry, but this one you can’t blame on either party. Yes, President Obama has made the problem much, much worse, but the scary truth is that the national debt keeps rising inexorably no matter who or which party is in office. That’s the new law of American politics. When I first arrived in Washington in the early 1980s, the debt was roughly $2 trillion. This week, 30 years and five presidents later, the debt for the first time exceeded $18 trillion. We have been in the red in all but four of the last 40 years. That’s $18,000,000,000,000. We all...

Few Americans who entered polling booths for the Nov. 4 election and pulled the lever for their favorite candidate for Senate realize that for most of American history, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. It wasn’t until 1913 that the 17thAmendment was passed, granting American voters the constitutional right of directly electing their senators.While this important amendment may seem innocuous, the reality is that few other changes to our Constitution have had the same detrimental effect on our nation than this single, nearly forgotten alteration.The passage of the 17th Amendment was driven largely by the populist movement of the...

The idea that the Obama administration has the budget deficit under control is a complete and total lie. According to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government has officially run a deficit of 589 billion dollars for the first 11 months of fiscal year 2014. But this number is just for public consumption and it relies on accounting tricks which massively understate how much debt is actually being accumulated. If you want to know what the real budget deficit is, all you have to do is go to a U.S. Treasury website which calculates the U.S. national debt to the penny....

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday raised its estimate of the federal government’s budget deficit for the current fiscal year as it slashed its growth forecast, and warned red ink was due to rise in coming years if Washington doesn’t change current laws. In an update of budget and economic projections for 2014 to 2024, the nonpartisan CBO said the U.S. government’s deficit for fiscal 2014 will be $506 billion, or 2.9% of gross domestic product. The new estimate is $14 billion more than the agency’s prior estimate for the year, issued in April. The agency lowered its projection of...

The U.S. budget deficit was $95 billion at the end of July, down 3 percent from the same period last year, according to data released by the Treasury Department on Tuesday. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a $96 billion deficit for last month. The deficit was $98 billion in July of 2013. The fiscal year-to-date deficit at the end of July was $460 billion, the lowest level since the same period in fiscal year 2008, compared with a deficit of $607 billion for the same period in fiscal year 2013, according to Treasury's monthly budget statement.

Barack Obama has raised the deficit by more than 7 trillion in six years. Let me repeat: Barack Obama has accrued a 7 trillion dollar deficit in only six years of office! And the man still has two years remaining! It’s nearly beyond comprehension and more than the first 42 Presidents combined; nearly twice as much George W. Bush who presided over the economic fallout from 9/11, a war on two fronts, the credit collapse and subsequently was besieged by Democrats as “unpatriotic” and “incompetent” for wasting taxpayer money. So why isn’t anyone being held accountable for such reckless incompetence?...

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the nationÂ’s debt has skyrocketed during President Barack ObamaÂ’s tenure. In a little over five and a half years, the Obama administration has added more than $7 trillion to the total, a number that represents more debt accumulation than the administrations of George Washington through Bill Clinton combined. At the close of business on July 31, the nationÂ’s debt was $17.6 trillion, with $7.06 trillion of it accumulated since Obama was inaugurated in 2009. CNS News offers some gut-wrenching perspective regarding the numbers: As of June, there were 115,097,000 households in the United...

On July 3, 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama infamously called President George W. Bush “unpatriotic,” and his polices “irresponsible” for adding $4 Trillion to the country's "credit card." This was almost more than all other US presidents combined, he argued, and therefore was putting America on a dangerous path to fiscal insolvency. Less than six years into his own administration, however, the president has failed to reverse the untenable course set by his predecessor; and, indeed, is making America's heavy debt burden even worse. CNS News reports: The total federal debt of the U.S. government has now increased more than...

The pro-life movement often talks of the science behind life in the womb, the fact that abortion leaves emotional, psychological and physical scars on women and the inherent beauty of every life. What we don’t often talk about, though, is money.After all, doesn’t it seem somewhat crass to couch pro-life arguments in terms of economic benefit? The reality, though, is that abortion hasn’t impacted our society only in emotional, social, and cultural ways. It’s also impacted our society economically. And one political scientist is now claiming this very thing.Mark A. Olson, a former liberal community organizer turned pro-life consultant, has...

Buy now, pay later. That will be the epitaph on the tombstone of the Obama administration. The Congressional Budget Office, a research outfit that justifies government spending, is warning that while deficit may appear tame now-- comparatively speaking-- the budget path we are on is unsustainable. “The extended baseline projections show a substantial imbalance in the federal budget over the long term,” says the new CBO report, “with revenues falling well short of spending. As a result, budget deficits are projected to rise steadily and, by 2039, to push federal debt held by the public up to a percentage of...

The Congressional Budget Office has looked into its crystal ball and sees the deficit getting much worse in a few years, rising to 106% of GDP by 2039.The Obama administration has been celebrating a reduction in the budget deficit to $583 billion dollars for this fiscal year. I suppose that's better than trillion dollar deficits but I see no cause for triumphalism, especially when you consider the government is taking in a record amount of revenue. But CBO says that deficit reduction won't last and that we can expect rising deficits to begin again in a few years. Politico: In...

The $2.8 trillion Social Security Trust Fund is on track to be totally spent by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. That's one year earlier than projected in 2013 and a decade earlier than the CBO estimated as recently as 2011. The CBO delivered the warning in a gloomy long-term budget outlook that shows federal debt reaching 106% of GDP in 25 years, up from 74% now.

Congress’s nonpartisan budget watchdog warned Tuesday that U.S. entitlement programs would drive the country’s debt to unsustainable levels in the coming years. The federal debt is now 74 percent of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said in its latest long-term budget outlook, a product of the outsized budget deficits the U.S. recorded following the 2008 fiscal crash. That figure is already twice the debt level held in 2008, and matched in U.S. history only by a brief span after World War II. But CBO also projects that the public's share of debt will increase...

WASHINGTON - Republicans have a wealth of political issues that will dominate the 2014 midterm election races and determine their outcome. The national news media has done its best to try to bury these issues, play them down or sugar coat them, but the American people know better. They have persistently put these issues at or near the top of every voter poll in the last six years of Barack Obama's scandal-ridden, trouble-plagued administration. It's hard to break through and overcome the power of the Washington news media that has worked hard to cover up the Obama White House's blunders....

One of the Obama administration's major selling points in passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was a Congressional Budget Office forecast that the controversial legislation would reduce the deficit by more than $120 billion over the coming decade. The CBO has consistently projected that President Obama's overhaul will reduce the deficit, and the agency estimated that the Republicans’ 2011 effort to repeal the legislation would increase deficits by $210 billion from 2010 to 2021. In April, the agency quietly signaled that it can no longer make that projection; that the law had been changed and delayed so much that...

The Democratic chairwoman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee moved aggressively Thursday to use gimmicks to fill in an unexpected $4 billion gap in the budget. Mikulski's maneuver came after congressional scorekeepers surprised lawmakers by predicting that the Federal Housing Administration will produce $4 billion less in revenues from the mortgages it insures than the administration believes. Sen. Richard Shelby said Mikulski's maneuvering amounted to an end run around a December budget pact between Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan, R-Wis. that replaced some automatic cuts to agency operating budgets with new fees...

American history has been profoundly shaped by citizen-driven grass-roots movements that spontaneously combust into seismic political change. This is the story of the Founding Fathers, the abolitionists, the progressives, the civil-rights movement, the 1970s tax revolt and ... it's time to add to that list the oft-maligned tea party movement. We don't fully recognize the earthquake change brought about by these millions of military veterans, housewives, nurses, schoolteachers, construction workers, senior citizens, investment bankers and clergy who saw the recklessness and immorality of debt, redistribution, Washington waste, federal bailouts and ObamaCare. Nancy Pelosi couldn't have gotten it more wrong when...

Federal budget season is well underway in Washington, and the White House’s latest talking point is that the deficit is shrinking. “[The] deficit has been cut in half at a record pace, or been cut at a record pace,“ Press Secretary Jay Carney commented at a recent press briefing. Looking past the politically-charged posturing coming from the White House, we see that “shrinking deficits” is smoke and mirrors. Not to be confused with the national debt, the deficit is the difference between the amount that the government taxes in as revenue and the amount that it spends in a...