Free Republic

The Republican-led House Rules Committee late Monday approved a rule for a massive Hurricane Sandy relief package that shuts out most GOP proposals to pare back the size of the bill. The main bill provides $17 billion in relief, and an amendment made in order would add another $33.7 billion, for a total of $50.7 billion. Late last week, Republicans offered amendments that would trim the bill significantly, but few of those were made "in order" by the Rules Committee on Monday. For example, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) proposed amendments that would have slashed $22 billion from the total package,...

When President Obama’s autopen turned the fiscal cliff deal into law, Americans might have thought that the federal government had begun to walk down the road to a balanced budget. But the 157-page American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 is business-as-usual. The backroom deal, chiefly engineered by Vice President Biden, fed the special-interest well while leaving the federal budget in crisis. The final bill includes some $68 billion in favors over the next ten years. The fiscal irresponsibility continues unabated. A look at the energy provisions alone shows why. For starters, the cliff deal renewed the twenty-years-and-counting “temporary” tax credit...

President Obama's latest news conference was further confirmation that his voracious appetite for spending was not satisfied but whetted by the fiscal cliff deal, which he views as an appetizer. We were told that the GOP achieved a coup in the fiscal cliff negotiations because they lured Obama into an agreement to lock in the Bush tax rates except for the highest-income earners. Never mind that Obama agreed to no spending cuts or entitlement reform after demanding a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction; they told us he'd be forced to address those matters in a couple of months in the...

Were you relieved when you heard on January 2nd that the House passed the Senate "compromise" bill to reinstate the Bush tax cuts for everyone making less than $400.000? People sighed, "At least my income taxes aren't going up!" The market reacted with immediate gains--the money keeps flowing. Like the drug addict in search of his next "fix"--Americans seem deluded into thinking that more spending is the solution. How many times have you heard the media comment on the next "solution" to deal with the crisis in Greece only to realize that the "solution" quickly failed leading to a new...

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...

As much as I dislike seeing my taxes go up, I can not help but smile a bit at all the liberals who tripped over each other running to the ballot box in November to vote for Obama now scratching their heads wondering why their taxes went up. On Twitter Friday, the subject #WhyIsMyPaycheckLessThisWeek was trending. In truth, I probably should feel like crying that people are so blind to the policies and the results of the policies they support, but I’d rather take a more light-hearted approach at the beginning of the new year. Payroll taxes just took a...

In its monthly statement for December, released Friday, the U.S. Treasury says the federal government balanced its budget during the month, bringing in roughly $270 billion in revenues while making roughly $270 billion in expenditures. Yet, the Treasury also says that during December it increased by $63.079 billion the national debt subject to the statutory legal limit set by Congress, thus dramatically bringing the debt to the legal limit on Dec. 31, just as Congress and the White House were involved in final negotiations on a deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff”—which would have canceled all of the lower...

You followed all of the debate over the fiscal cliff and were relieved to hear that taxes were only going up for the rich this year. Well, you were wrong. Because neither party wanted to defend it, the temporary payroll tax cut enacted under Obama died at the end of 2012, which means that everyone in the country will see a bigger tax bite out of their paychecks this year. So when you get your first check of the year, look at the amount charged under "FICA" – you're going to be paying more than you did in December. How...

With his usual flair, Donald Trump set the record straight on his feud with Bill Mahr, the Miss Alabama controversy, the recent handling of the fiscal crisis by Congress and the next presidential election, in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Trump explained that Mahr had appeared on the Jay Leno Show, said that Trump had been “spawned by orangutans” and made an offer of $5 million for Trump to produce his birth certificate. Since the money would go to charity, Trump accepted the offer and produced legal paperwork required to fulfill the obligations. “Why is it that somebody...

Three false arguments, pushed hard by the Obama administration and accepted on faith by the media and much of the political establishment, must be laid to rest if the American people are to understand the issues at stake in the federal "debt ceiling" debate. The first is that Congress's failure to raise the debt ceiling—the amount of money the federal government is authorized to borrow at any given time—will cause a default on the national debt. The second is that federal entitlement programs are constitutionally protected from spending cuts. The third is that the president can raise the debt ceiling...

Five Michigan Republicans in Congress joined all of the state's Democrats and voted to approve a plan that avoided the so-called fiscal cliff. Republicans voting “yes“ were U.S. Representatives Dan Benishek, R-Crystal Falls; Dave Camp, R-Midland; Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township.; Mike Rogers, R-Howell; and Fred Upton, R-St Joseph. The legislation, HR 8, called the "American Taxpayer Relief Act," is the latest stop-gap measure designed to tackle tax and budgetary issues in the absence of a real national budget. President Barack Obama has yet to get any support for his budget proposals. Over the past two years, the United States has...

We have junk food, junk mail and junk bonds. Now, thanks to our dysfunctional and devious Congress, we have junk laws like the “Taxpayer Relief Act.” Junk laws are really nothing new. The people we send to Washington to represent us have been passing legislation larded with pork or special privileges for their friends in business, agriculture and labor since the country was born. Insiders have always known how this cynical bipartisan game is played. But now, thanks to the failure of Congress to deal with the government debt crisis it in large part created, the average American is starting...

Sen. Ted Cruz says Barack Obama is acting like an “imperial president” and must think he can do “nothing wrong,” given his adversarial push to have Congress accept Chuck Hagel as his new defense secretary and extend the nation’s debt limit without a fight. … Cruz, however, indicated he was more concerned about Obama’s determined effort to avoid a fight with Congress on the debt limit, which could mean a move to invoke the 14th Amendment’s provision on the public debt and simply tell the Treasury to ignore the debt ceiling. …

A trend has taken shape in Washington, and it has put our country on a devastating path towards potential fiscal ruin. The trend is characterized by an unsustainable penchant for spending money we don’t have. It became crystal clear in last year’s debt ceiling negotiations and was further highlighted by the recent debate surrounding the fiscal cliff; our country is broke, yet our government continues to spend more, risk more and accumulate more debt. Entitlements are often blamed for the vast majority of our spending issues, but our tendency to overspend is not restricted to just these. Parallels exist...

The current state of the GOP brings to mind the surviving Marines in Aliens, with no shortage of demoralized hacks lamenting their inability to resist by channeling Private Hudson: “Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events but we just got our a**** kicked, pal!” So what? So we took a hit on the Fiscal Cliff. Stand up, brush off and get back into the fight. This is no time for self-pity, no time for weakness. Every combat leader knows that when you take a hit, you regroup, reorganize, and prepare to counterattack. The defense is but a temporary,...

If you are a conservative you probably did not like the fiscal cliff deal that just passed, but the mainstream media overlooked a few important things that help many people and the economy. The housing market will continue to get better because the politicians didn’t touch the mortgage interest rate deduction and the long term tax relief on mortgage debt. Housing is very important to lower and middle income people and the economic collapse in 2008 ruined peoples entire savings and future by sinking their housing value. If these two items weren’t extended many more would go “under water” and...

YES! He is!Apparently Obama truly believes there is absolutely no spending problem in our government.W-O-W...and now I have my second King Obama post in a month's time.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tells us the tax issue is behind us and that we can now move on to spending. Really? What makes him think the GOP will succeed this time when it couldn't last time? The just-concluded fiscal cliff deal included no material spending cuts, which the GOP justified by saying it had achieved locked-in rates for most of Bush's tax cuts, which would force Obama to seriously discuss spending cuts and entitlement reform as part of the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations. But a White House memo announcing the deal said that postponing the sequester for two...

The coming fight on the debt ceiling and gun control is an ideological one, one Republicans need to fight or else face oblivion. The New Year’s Eve deal to avoid the fiscal cliff isn’t just a lousy deal: it’s entirely corrupt. Obama insisted on what he called a “balanced deal,” but to him a balance is only between increased government spending and higher taxes. It allowed President Obama to pretend that the deal reduces federal spending by $732 billion over the next ten years though, in fact, it increases federal spending — by $332 billion — more than it cuts....

The deal that Congress came to on the fiscal cliff last week was a combination of half-measures, compromise, and kicking-the-can that nobody seemed to like but was overwhelmingly approved. Most of the meaures that constituted the cliff stood poised to harm the economy over the next two years - and Congress' failure to offset the cost of averting the cliff will result in a worse economy in the long run. As Americans everywhere found out with their first paychecks of the new year, Congress failed to reauthorize the temporary payroll tax cut that expired. This could result in between 300,000...