Free Republic

Federal deficits may have been falling since the end of the recent recession, but thanks to spending increases in major health care programs, including Obamacare, deficits are set to explode in 2017, according to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office. Thanks to the recent recession and President Obama's trillion dollar stimulus, the federal budget deficit reached an all time $1.4 trillion high in 2009. Then, as the economy slowly improved and Obama's stimulus trickled to end, the deficit began to fall. According to the CBO, the deficit will continue to fall to $467 billion in 2016. Immediately...

In his State of the Union Tuesday, President Obama claimed that Obamacare has helped cut the deficit by two thirds by slowing the rate of health care spending growth. Not only is this claim false, but Obamacare has created a deficit time bomb that will explode just as he is leaving office.Now it is true that the growth of health care spending has fallen during Obama's presidency. But that slowdown began not only before Obama passed Obamacare, but even before Obama took office. The reality is that larger economic factors, including the growth of cost-sharing health care plans, began slowing health care spending...

Conservatives in Congress are reviving the push for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution now that Republicans control both houses of Congress. GOP lawmakers in both chambers have filed several amendment proposals in the early days of the congressional session, breathing new life into an issue that had faded somewhat from the agenda. “I came here with a clear mission: work to get a balanced budget and do my best to reduce the size and scope of government, so that our small businesses and farm families can grow and create jobs,” said Freshman Rep. David Rouzer (R-N.C.) in a recent...

On Jan. 8, 1835, the U.S. national debt stood at zero, the first and only time in its history. It was a remarkable turnabout from Jan. 1, 1791, when the federal government was in debt to the tune of $75,463,476.52. But that wasn’t the peak amount of indebtedness for the new nation ($120 million), which occurred at the end of the three-year War of 1812. To be sure, President Andrew Jackson, under whose watch the no-debt day was achieved, was jubilant, and a big Washington party overflowed with superlatives, as illustrated by Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton’s remarks: “The apparition,...

On the front of today's New York Times business section is a remarkable—or should I say remarkably unremarkable—news article whose entire premise, unchallenged in the course of 1,341 words and input from 10 sources, is that more government spending is a very good thing because it leads to more government jobs and therefore helps the economy. Hooray! If you think I am being unfair in this characterization, consider the headline: "Government Spending, Edging Up, Is a Stimulus." Or the headline on the jump page inside: "Rebound in Government Spending Starts to Aid Economy After Years of Cuts." Or the headline...

“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...