Free Republic

A Trump-aligned super PAC released a new attack ad on Ron DeSantis, which mocks him for eating pudding with his fingers and hammers him on his record of voting to cut Social Security, Medicare, and increasing the retirement age to 70.

A Trump-aligned super PAC is hitting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for sticking his “dirty fingers” into entitlement programs for senior citizens — and allegedly using them to eat pudding as well, according to a stomach-churning ad released Friday. “Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong, and we’re not just talking about pudding,” the ad’s narrator says, referring to an alleged 2019 incident where the 44-year-old Florida governor ate chocolate pudding with three of his fingers while on a private plane ride to Washington, DC. “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements like cutting Medicare, slashing...

Former President Donald Trump swung left in his latest bizarre attack on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, on Tuesday accusing him of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare and calling him a “wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy” in an all-caps blast. ​Trump, 76, who announced Nov. 15 that he was seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and is expected to face his most significant primary challenge from DeSantis, initially touted his poll numbers showing him leading the 44-year-old governor before cribbing from Democratic attack ads of the past. “Great Poll numbers are springing forth for your favorite President,...

Step one: Scream that the GOP tax reform bill would be a "massive attack" on the middle class.  Step two: Concede that actually yes, nearly all middle income earners would get a tax break under the bill.  Step three: Call for its repeal anyway, effectively demanding a tax increase -- a "massive attack," one might even say -- on middle class Americans and US businesses.  It sounds like Bernie Sanders has picked up the same tax hike hymnal from which Nancy Pelosi was singing last week: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called Monday for the Republican tax law to be repealed...

Almost every promise made eight years ago about Obamacare turned out to be a falsehood. That is first and foremost why the law must be repealed. No, you couldn't keep your insurance plan, doctor or provider in many cases. No, it didn't save $2,500 per family (more like cost $2,500 more per family). No, it didn't lead to expanded patient choice. And yes, the tax increases and insurance mandates damaged the economy and cost jobs. We are now left with insurance markets that have entered a death spiral. The entire health insurance market will financially implode unless it's changed. The...

As Donald Trump's poll numbers have faltered, his rhetoric, if you can believe it, has heated up. Except now he's starting to attack his Republican opponents from the left.

The Census Bureau just released a report on America’s aging population. The big takeaway is that our population will be getting much older between now and 2050. And since I’m a baby boomer, I very much like the fact that we’re expected to live longer. But as a public finance economist, I’m not nearly as happy. As I explain in this interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network (and as confirmed by BIS, OECD, and IMF data), the United States is going to get deluged by a tsunami of entitlement spending. Dan Mitchell Discussing the Slow Motion Train Wreck...

epublican leaders in Congress predicted Wednesday that painful automatic spending cuts — the sequester, in Washington lingo — will hit at the end of the month, as scheduled. "I think the sequester’s gonna happen," Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of Senate Republican leadership, said at a Politico post-State-of-the-Union event. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans have made little or no progress on a compromise deficit reduction deal that would head off the across-the-board budget cuts, which would hit the Pentagon and social programs especially hard. President Obama warned in his address that allowing the sequester to hit would be disastrous,...

Do you remember what the mainstream media mainly talked about as the country careened toward the fiscal cliff? Did they talk about the harmful economic effects of impending tax increases? Did they talk about which tax increases would be worse than others? Did they talk about the need to get rid of waste in government without causing economic harm? No. None of that. The taking heads and opinion writers focused like a laser on one and only one question: who was going to get the blame if we went over the cliff. Up next will be the debt ceiling deadline...

Did you watch the Notre Dame v. Alabama, BCS Championship game this week? Alabama beat Notre Dame 42-12. It wasn’t even close. 42-12, now that’s a big win. You know who didn’t have an overwhelming victory? President Obama. His margin was significantly closer than the Alabama- Notre Dame game and it was a substantially closer than four years ago. So while there is no doubt that this year was a disappointing outcome for conservatives, the close election results mean that the Left lacks the mandate to enact the president’s liberal agenda. There has been a huge victory in a recent...

I hate to break it to those deniers who believe that President Obama's tax-guzzling capacity has somehow been diminished by the fiscal cliff provision to fix "permanent" tax rates. You're dreaming. Several smart columnists and respected conservative editorial pieces tell us that a major silver lining in the crisis deal just concluded is that by agreeing not to reinstitute the Clinton tax rates (and leave the Bush rates in place) for all but the "wealthy" (income of $400,000 for single filers and $450,000 for marrieds), Obama and the Democrats made a major concession. They argue that if Democrats couldn't do...

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Budget Committee, tells Newsmax he will refuse to approve an increase in the debt ceiling unless a deal is reached on major entitlement reform—and he is convinced House Speaker John Boehner will refuse as well. The South Carolina Republican also says President Obama should “man up” and create a lasting legacy by saving Medicare and Social Security with those reforms. And he insists defense spending should not suffer significant new cuts because “there is no Social Security without national security.” …

We can get back to discussing GOP minority constituent recruitment soon, but in the meantime, we have a fiscal cliff issue that beckons -- the real fiscal cliff (America's imminent financial collapse), not the government shutdown molehill everyone is agonizing over. Congressional Republicans should look at their party's loss in the presidential election as liberating. They surely now understand that the strategy of soft-pedaling Obama's record and agenda doesn't work. They surely grasp that its fear of calling President Obama out on his real intentions and the disastrous consequences of his destructive policies just plays into his hands and enables...

The White House has been hyping its #My2K Twitter hashtag in an attempt to galvanize supporters to contact their Congressional representatives to demand action to avert the fiscal cliff.  The administration estimates that unless Congress moves, the average family's tax bill will jump by more than $2,000, starting on the first of January.  The implication, of course, is that Republicans are once again standing in the way of resolving this problem.  Show of hands -- as the media breathlessly follows every minor twist and turn of these negotiations, how many of you have seen this fact reported?   .@barackobama's #My2K shenanigans ignore...

There are a large number of policies that make up the fiscal cliff: the expiration of the Bush-era income tax cuts, the end of a temporary payroll tax cut, budgetary caps on discretionary spending imposed by last year’s debt deal, a reduction in planned spending on defense as a result the sequestration process, the so-called “doc fix” which governs physician’s Medicare reimbursements. All of these policies are set to change automatically if Congress does nothing. What won’t change automatically is the fundamental shape and structure of any of the country’s major entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Yet Republicans are...

Barack Obama really does have a plan for the next four years. When he thought he was speaking off the record to the Des Moines Register the other day, he said he wanted to negotiate a "grand bargain" with the congressional Republicans. It would include spending reductions and tax increases to reduce forecasted federal deficits. About the same time that the president was giving his interview, more than 80 CEOs of some of the nation’s largest companies were making a similar announcement. To get the country’s fiscal house in order, they said, we need both spending reductions and tax increases.The...

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...

Not defending what Todd Akin said...just making lemonade out of lemons...

Yesterday, I urged the Romney campaign to go on "aggressive, sustained offense" over Medicare.  Not only is the bipartisan Romney-Ryan plan to save the social safety net and control the national debt entirely defensible, President Obama's previous actions and current non-plan are eminently assailable.  Today, Team Romney has demonstrated that it is fully prepared to throw a hard punch.  Up next?  Sustain it.  This is excellent:   Paid InEvery statement in this ad is factually accurate.  I'm told it will air across numerous swing states in "strong rotation."  (Unspoken, but  obvious: Florida.)  The truth is that Barack Obama slashed more...

Today we witnessed something truly remarkable. Barack Obama managed to out-do himself by uncorking what very well may have been the most dishonest, demagogic, and bitterly partisan speech of his presidency. I render that assessment as someone who has sat through and analyzed countless Obama lectures, some of which earned very high marks for deceit and ideological invective. Indeed, today's Occupy-inspired rant takes the cake. It was a depressing and enraging preview of the next seven months, over which this president will unleash a barrage of sophistic and pernicious arguments deliberately designed to sow discord and divide Americans. He will...