Free Republic

Nashville Mayor Cooper today filed the city’s recommended operating budget for fiscal year 2021 with the Metro Council. Metro Finance estimates that the city will experience a $470 million revenue decline over a 16-month time frame due to the impact of COVID-19 and the March tornado. The decline in revenue during Q4 of fiscal year 2020 required Metro to cut expenditures and spend down remaining fund balances, leaving Metro with only $12 million of fund balances at the end of FY20.

The latest Golden State gift to America might be called the California triple whammy. It's an ongoing, ever-growing fiscal perfect storm that may be coming to a state near you. For Californians what follows is an explanation of how you've turned gold into dust. For out-of-staters, it's how to avoid triple whammy fever where you live. The first stage of the California triple whammy required spendaholics at government's helm running up perpetual double-digit, billion-dollar annual budget deficits papered over in the current year, to be fretted over in the next. Following close behind was an addictive need to issue billions...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While Congress brawls over how to shrink a $1.6 trillion budget deficit this year, an even tougher battle has begun over cutting popular Social Security retirement benefits to achieve long-term savings. It's unclear whether Congress will be able to agree on how to reform the massive government pension program, which has provided a social safety net for the elderly since 1935. That in part will depend on whether President Barack Obama throws his weight behind a reform effort that politicians of all stripes fear could be full of political risks. While the president has invited a conversation...

If the Obama administration has taken flak for suggesting that conservative groups might be home to domestic terrorists, it looks like some House Democrat leaders are willing to go even further: But in an interview on Fox TV in San Francisco, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) chalked up the GOP grass-roots effort as “AstroTurf.” “This initiative is funded by the high end; we call it AstroTurf, it's not really a grass-roots movement. It's AstroTurf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class,” Pelosi said....

Let the Senate advise DAVID BRODER: LET THE SENATE ADVISE Bush should consult with Democratic leaders about possible Supreme Court nominees. It would greatly disappoint the warring armies of interest groups in Washington, D.C., salivating for a fight over the next U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. But there is a way out of such a debilitating battle -- with all its ominous implications for the independence and reputation of the judiciary -- if key players at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are willing to show some flexibility. The path around such a knock-down-drag-out fight has been opened by Democratic senators who...