Free Republic

Stan Druckenmiller ... when I look at the current picture of expected tax revenues combined with benefits promised to future generations, this is the most unsustainable situation I have seen ever in my career. The disaster that Druckenmiller sees coming for the United States is all about changing demographics and entitlement spending. They don’t add up to a sustainable situation. In 1940, entitlement payments, which include everything from disability payments to Social Security to Medicare, amounted to just over 20% of annual government spending in the United States. Today, entitlement spending has swelled to nearly 70% of the annual federal...

... What Trump implicitly promises is a closing of the gap between federal revenue and spending without any pain for ordinary voters. He claims that better management, led by him, is all it will take. It is the worst kind of wishful thinking and deception. On entitlements, Trump is essentially in agreement with most Democrats. He says he won’t make any changes to Social Security or Medicare benefits. In previous years, he also said Medicaid shouldn’t be cut. He says he now favors converting Medicaid into a block grant to the states, although he has not promised that this switch...

For rent: brand new one-bed apartments in the shadow of downtown Dallas, a short walk from one of the city's trendiest areas. On-site concierge. Successful applicants will be homeless, mentally ill and possess criminal records. . . . All for a rent of 30% of the tenant's monthly income - whether it is $1,000 or $10. The only requirement? "Be a good tenant," James says. That means no criminal or disruptive behaviour; but no pressure on residents to immediately go sober if they are addicted to alcohol, for example.

During this election year, we are destined to hear many words that are toxic in the way they misrepresent reality and substitute fantasies that can win votes. One of these words is "entitlement." To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from "affordable housing" to "a living wage." But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive. If we don't produce food, we are just going to starve. If we don't build housing, then we are not going to...

There is a letter titled "Isn't It Strange?" making the rounds in email boxes. It asks questions to which our fellow Americans should know the answers, save for those caught up in modernity. It starts off asking, "Isn't it strange that after a bombing, everyone blames the bomber, his upbringing, his environment, his culture but ... after a shooting, the problem is the gun?" In other words, after a shooting, it is the gun, an inanimate object, that is the culprit, but after a bombing, it is not the bomb that receives the blame but the evil individual. In both...

When Congress passed the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act in 2000, it introduced a new concept called “voluntary suspension” of benefits, allowing those who had already started Social Security benefits to stop their payments and earn delayed retirement credits. In the process, however, the new voluntary suspension rules unleashed several additional Social Security claiming strategies, including various “claim now, claim more later” tactics involving File-and-Suspend and Restricted Applications for spousal benefits. Those may be going away. Under this week’s two-year budget agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House, Congress will close these loopholes in the Social Security rules....

(CNN) Mitch McConnell privately wants the White House to pay this price to enact a major budget deal: Significant changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and funding the government.

DailyCaller OPINION ‘Global Indifference’: Pope Francis’ Cure is A Cause ROGER BANKS @rogerbanksesq Writer While in America, Pope Francis will almost surely repeat his call for the “redistribution of economic benefits by the state” as a remedy for what his November 2013 Apostolic Exhortation calls “an economy of exclusion and inequality.” Presupposing a causal connection between a “culture of prosperity” and “global indifference” to the poor, the Exhortation reads as follows: We end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all...

While markets hone in on the Federal Reserve's monetary policy hints, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan sees a bigger economic irritant—government spending. On Wednesday, Greenspan decried a rise in entitlement costs, which he contended have pressured the U.S. economy. "To me the discussion today shouldn't even be on monetary policy it should be on how do we constrain this extraordinary rise in entitlements," he said in a CNBC "Closing Bell" interview, calling the trend "extremely dangerous." Social expenditures in the U.S. were 19.2 percent of gross domestic product last year, up from 15.5 percent in 2005, according to data from...

Real estate baron and reality TV star Donald Trump threw his hat into the ring in the race for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination this week. In his announcement in front of a crowd—many of whom were paid $50 apiece to cheer him on—Trump pledged to secure government entitlements. “With the other Republicans in the race, you never know whether they might end up cutting or privatizing Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid,” Trump alleged. “Right here and right now I’m promising that these programs will be fully funded for as long as there is money to pay for them.” Trump...

Despite his socially-conservative bona fides, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has officially lost the support of Iowa’s influential talk radio host Steve Deace — a dramatic shift from their supportive relationship in the 2008 Republican Party primaries. Deace has been described as a “hitmaker” and “one of the most powerful Republicans you’ve never heard of” because his stumping for Huckabee was seen as a substantial contributor to the former governor’s 2008 Iowa caucus victory. But, in 2016, Deace is not thrilled with Huckabee’s support for entitlement programs. As MMfA first reported, during the May 6 edition of the Steve Deace...

New York real estate mogul Donald Trump said Thursday that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) could not prevent funding cuts to entitlement programs if elected president in 2016. “Huckabee is a nice guy but will never be able to bring in the funds so as not to cut Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid,” Trump tweeted. “I will.” Trump, a possible 2016 GOP presidential candidate, also argued Huckabee was stealing his potential campaign ideas. “Huckabee copied me,” Trump wrote. “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare &...

<p>AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — More than 9,000 Maine residents have been removed from the state's food stamp program since Republican Gov. Paul LePage's administration began enforcing work and volunteer requirements late last year, officials said.</p> <p>The number of people that have been dropped from the program has exceeded even the administration's expectations.</p>

Both Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are speaking bluntly about entitlement reform, advocating means-testing for Social Security retirement benefits as a way to save the system for those who need it. “These are real ideas,“ Christie said in New Hampshire on Friday. “And, you know, I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘Well, why would you possibly want to suggest those things?’ Because we have to. We have to. And if you want to start a national conversation, let’s start one that matters.” “We’re $18 trillion in debt,” Graham told Fox News Sunday. “Eighty million...

The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart News. Rector, a senior research fellow at Heritage, is slated to speak on the costs of Obama’s executive amnesty Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He will testify to the high entitlement costs of granting legal status to millions of illegal immigrants. Based on Rector’s calculations, which assume that at least 3.97 illegal immigrants...

Due to an increase in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program’s budget, formerly known as food stamps, President Obama is requiring all SNAP agencies to add a sales team. The sales team will be responsible for telemarketing, cold-calling eligible Americans and persuading them to join the entitlement program that already services 50 million citizens and visa-holders.

John Boehner and the rest of the GOP RINO establishment didn’t have enough Conservative votes to pass their $1.1 TRILLION budget. That’s because while these so-called “Republicans” criticized Obama’s amnesty in public, their budget completely funded it. More than 60 Republicans voted against the spending bill, forcing Boehner to get approximately 50 Democrats to vote for it. GOP leaders blocked any anti-amnesty amendments and allowed the bill to proceed without any mention of Obama’s amnesty. That means that newly “legalized” illegal aliens will begin receiving working papers and become eligible for Social Security and Medicare as soon as they come...

Under President Obama’s new program to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation, many of those affected will be eligible to receive Social Security, Medicare and a wide array of other federal benefits, a White House official said Tuesday. In his speech Thursday night, the president touted his plan as a means of bringing accountability to a broken immigration system, under which 11 million or more people are estimated to be living in this country illegally. “We’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve with been in America more than five years. If you have children who are American citizens...

President Obama has constantly complained about the rich not paying their "fair share." But a new Congressional Budget Office report shows that the rich were paying more than their fair share of taxes before the numerous hikes he imposed. The CBO looks at the distribution of household income and federal taxes up through 2011, the last year for which it has data. It found, for example, that:

Earlier this week I had lunch with a CPA client of mine to talk with him about increasing the number of his small business clients who provide medical insurance plans to their employees. Everything I recount herein is from him; I am not making this up. His answer and the reasoning behind his answer were stunning to me. In my naivety, I hadn’t even dreamed that I would hear anything like what he was about to tell me.