Free Republic

The President’s new budget has been unveiled. There are lots of provisions that deserve detailed attention, but I always look first at the overall trends. Most specifically, I want to see what’s happening with the burden of government spending. And you probably won’t be surprised to see that Obama isn’t imposing any fiscal restraint. He wants spending to increase more than twice as fast as needed to keep pace with inflation. What makes these numbers so disappointing is that we learned last month that even a modest bit of spending discipline is all that’s needed to balance the budget. By...

There are many things President Obama is consistent on. Lauding the woes of climate change is one. Income inequality comes to mind as another. And we should not forget spending reform. The current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue loves him some government spending. He likes to brag about reforming spending, but the reality of his actions speak much louder than his words. He has no intention of reforming anything to do with government spending and that includes entitlement spending. Any sane person who is capable of doing a little math knows there is no way we can ever dig our...

President Obama's policies continue to produce results that are the opposite of what he promises, yet he brazenly cites the abysmal state of his economy to announce -- indignantly -- that he will double down on his failures. Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven -- notorious leftist professors who devised a sinister plot to overburden the American economy to the point of collapse and then replace it with a socialist system -- would be quite proud of their understudy. Obama's policies are drowning America in debt, unemployment, dependency and despair, yet he blames us for his failures -- as if...

Minnesota isn't alone in wasting federal dollars on failing exchanges. ObamaCare exchanges built by Oregon, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Vermont also are suffering serious-to-fatal problems. These six states — all solidly Democratic — received $1.2 billion in ObamaCare grants, according to official tallies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those dysfunctional six are in addition to 35 states that initially accepted funds to build exchanges that never got built.

As was expected after the Paul Ryan/Patty Murray budget agreement was passed through Congress and signed into law by President Obama, a new spending bill is emerging in the House of Representatives. It is being written in a secretive process on the sub-committee level, for the time being. As outlined in the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, it is based on a $1.012 trillion spending cap. As also should be expected, it is opposed by many of the same Republicans who opposed the Ryan-Murray agreement because it raises the spending cap above the levels set by the sequestration legislation. There are more...

At the end of 2013, after serving five years, Barack Obama is a complete failure as President, by his own standards, as reflected in his own words. How many times has President Obama told us that he is “fighting for the middle class”? But real median family income has been in a continuous downward spiral since he became President, actually falling more since the recession ended in the summer of 2009 according to the National Bureau of Economic Research than during the recession. That has added up by now to the middle class losing a month’s pay a year under...

If there is one person I respect in Congress, it is Senator Tom Coburn, R-OK. Yes, he is one of my Senators and I voted for him gladly. That's not saying I haven't disagreed with him on issues before, but most of the time, I find myself in complete agreement. He is now being very vocal in his opposition to the budget deal worked out between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray. And unlike a lot of his colleagues in Washington, Tom Coburn is willing to highlight how government spending really works. He has consistently fought against wasteful government spending and...

Let's get something out of the way. I know we are in an era of divided government and that we can not expect to achieve all of our conservative goals. That's a given fact. If we expect to achieve anything, we must be willing to compromise on some issues. That's what Paul Ryan is already saying as he tries to sell the new budget deal he has reached with Democratic Senator Patty Murray to his fellow Republicans. I also know we have moved from government crisis to government crisis with predictable reliability. No budget deal has been reached for years. Our...

The subject of this post could be up for debate. I have written before about President Obama's denial that we have an actual spending problem. I've lost count of the number of times he has led the charge to spend more of our hard-earned money. He has been out in front, telling the Republicans he was tired of hearing them talk about how much money the federal government was spending. He really seems to believe that isn't a problem and he isn't bashful about telling anyone who will listen. He wants to talk about anything but government spending. That narrative...

A national network reporter, during an interview about about the government shutdown, actually told me: "Democrats believe government should do some things. Republicans don't believe government should be doing anything." Where had we heard that characterization of the GOP? "'Anarchist'? Why in the world wouldn't I use the term anarchy?" said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in a CNN interview. "That's what they are. They're anarchists. They don't believe in government -- at any level. ... They're anarchists, just like they were at the beginning of the 20th century. ... They're not blowing up buildings and they're not killing...

Assuming the position of “Supreme Leader” of the US government, President Barack Obama has named a new casualty due to the (partial) shutdown of the Federal Government: The Ocean.Over 1,100 square miles of ocean has been declared off limits to the public in the Florida Bay. Apparently, unknown to most Americans, allowing boats to meander into open water is a cost that has proven to be unsustainable in the event of a government shutdown. Well. . . At least that’s according to the National Park Service. Therefore, it only makes sense that the Federal Government allocate personnel and equipment...

I well remember my childhood best friend. Tony and I were the masters of construction for our class. We knew just how to maximize every component of the massive, industrial-strength wooden block set. No other kid in kindergarten could match the height of our buildings or the length of our bridges. Of course, we cooperated with the daily rituals of learning the alphabet and numbers, reinforced with campy songs. But free time was what we were there for. We were guys. We built stuff together. It was what we did. One afternoon while driving home from school in the family...

The Financial Times reports Muslim Brotherhood calls for uprising after Cairo violence  The political crisis in Egypt deepened on Monday when the Muslim Brotherhood called for an uprising against those who want to “steal the revolution” after at least 51 people were killed and 435 injured at a Cairo rally in support of the nation’s ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. Adli Mansour, the interim president, ordered the creation of a judicial committee to investigate the violence while an administration spokesman, told Reuters the violence “will not stop steps to form a government or a road map”. The interim administration earlier expressed “deep...

Initial Reaction  The establishment survey showed a gain of 195,000 and that is a very respectable number. However, the household survey shows a more modest gain of 160,000 jobs. The civilian labor force rose by 177,000 thus the unemployment rate was steady at 7.6%. Digging beneath the surface, the numbers do not look so good.  326,000 Full-Time Jobs Lost Involuntary part-time jobs increased by 322,000 while voluntary part-time jobs increased by another 110,000. Thus, of the 160,000 household survey gain, 486,000 of them were part-time jobs, a loss of 326,000 full-time jobs. This caused a spike of 0.5 percentage points...

I’ve never figured out why soccer is so popular in some parts of the world. What’s the point of watching people run up and down a field for 90 minutes when the result is usually a 0-0 tie? But non-Americans generally don’t get the point of baseball, so I guess it’s all a matter of background and taste. I mention soccer because it’s an excuse to write about competitiveness and taxation. Except I’m not going to write about low tax rates and job creation, orlow tax rates and capital formation. Instead, today’s topic is tax competitiveness and French soccer. And since...

In the past few week, China intraday lending rates as measured by SHIBOR got as high as 25% (See China Cash Crunch: 1-Day Interest Rate Spikes to Record High 25%). With rates spiking, global stock markets plunged. On Monday China insisted banks had significant liquidity sending a message that banks need to manage their own risks. A translated message by the People's Bank of China on liquidity states "Commercial banks should concentrate storage for taxes and statutory reserve deposit and other factors impact on liquidity in advance to arrange sufficient positions to maintain adequate levels of reserve ratio, to ensure the normal settlement" while...

dhensley813 wrote: The city of Chicago really had no option but to curtail the benefits of retirees. It's not as bankrupt as Detroit, but it was getting there. Obamacare wasn't so much the reason the city cut retiree insurance, as the excuse it gave them to say that they weren't really being dropped. - Obama Solves Mass-Layoff Problem by Laying Off Mass-Layoff Statistics Guys at BLS Dear Comrade 813, I think they had no choice once they negotiated a contract that allowed retirees to have benefits that the city knew it couldn’t afford. That’s outrageous enough. But to make matters...

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I’d say it’s official; President Obama’s Watergate has arrived.  And the witty question originally formed for Nixon’s big scandal can now be re-applied to President Plausible Deniability, “What did he not know and when did he not know it?”  While I do think that IRS-Gate spells the end of this President’s ability to effectively advance the liberal agenda, I do not see an impeachment on the horizon; at least not for Barack Obama – but perhaps for the Sixteenth Amendment.The recent parade of citizen witnesses to congressional hearings has laid bare the raw suffering that inevitably comes from tolerating the...

Despite surviving a number of threats, President Obama’s health care law remains harmful, unstable, and unpopular. It also remains vulnerable to repeal, largely because Congress and the Supreme Court have granted each state the power to veto major provisions of the law before they take effect in 2014. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) itself empowers states to block the employer mandate, to exempt many of their low- and middle-income taxpayers from the individual mandate, and to reduce federal deficit spending, simply by not establishing a health insurance “exchange.” Supporters of the law do not care for this...