Free Republic

Here is an interesting Gallup poll that came my way today from a friend "BC". The poll was taken last month. It shows European Countries Lead World in Distrust of Banks.   Thirteen percent of Greeks said they had confidence in their country's banks or financial institutions in 2012, leading the nearly all-European list of countries where trust in financial institutions was among the worst in the world last year. Seven European Union countries had trust levels lower than 30%, far below the median 55% across 135 countries. Even in the EU's largest funder of the eurozone bailouts, Germany, fewer than four...

In my last column, I argued that for all the undeniable woes of the Republican Party, the unfurling of Obamacare represents a huge vulnerability for Democrats. The Democratic health reform bill is economically nonsensical and politically unpopular. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent believe the law will damage the U.S. health care system. Even among Democrats, support for the law is ebbing. In February, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 57 percent of Democrats (compared with 72 percent in November of 2012) support the law. The battle over health care reform is not over. Yes, the...

By now, most people have concluded that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obamacare) does not reduce the cost of healthcare for the majority of Americans, and certainly does not protect them. Healthcare costs - both insurance and out of pocket expenses - have more than doubled for many and will continue to increase. What is difficult and confusing to most of us is attempting to understand how this all fits together and why. Just a few months ago, the Obama administration had serious concerns regarding formation of state health insurance exchanges. This vital component of the ACA...

Sheldon Richman and I spent a lot of time last week running through numbers from the Congressional Budget Office in order to gauge sequestration’s effect on federal spending. In the resulting column, Richman lays out the numbers and asks a pertinent question: How the $#!?% is the average voter supposed to have a clue about this stuff?  From Richman’s column:  I subjected myself to this pain because I’m a professional masochist. I’m paid to do it. How many people who are not so rewarded are likely to search for, locate, and download CBO spreadsheets to see the numbers for themselves?...

In his recent book, Fixing the Moral Deficit, Ron Sider argues that deficit spending by the federal government is one of the most important moral challenges that Americans have ever faced. I disagree with some of Sider’s proposed solutions, but he’s right. Every year, the federal government spends well over a trillion dollars more than it takes in. As a result, it has racked up seventeen trillion dollars in debt, most of it in the last decade. In seven years at current rates, the U.S. will need almost a fifth of the GDP from the rest of the world just...

WASHINGTON -- I do not know about you, but to me this sequestration imbroglio is getting interesting. Last week, I wrote of my surprise that a basic untruth was being repeated over and over again by the White House, to wit, that the Republicans were responsible for the monstrosity of sequestration. I wrote that, as I recalled it, sequestration was an idea introduced by the White House to coax the Republicans and the Democrats into a deal in the summer of 2011 to raise the ceiling on the national debt. Remember that deal? And another thing, there would be no...

The Broadway musical "Annie" is enjoying another revival on Broadway. The show opened during the Carter administration when America was in need of some optimism. "The sun'll come out tomorrow," sang Annie, and with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, for a while, it did. Now we're back in "Hooverville," the name given to shanty towns that popped up during the Great Depression. It isn't that bad yet, though the Obama administration is forecasting gloom and doom if Republicans don't cave on another tax increase. "We'd like to thank you Herbert Hoover for really showing us the way," sang...

The Dow set a new high on Tuesday, but the larger economy is a different story. What if today's sluggish economic growth turns out to be the new normal? That's the unsettling question asked by some of our most creative economic thinkers. And the people asking it are not necessarily partisan opponents of the Obama administration. They argue that economic growth rates were disappointing even before the financial collapse and recession of 2007-09. Take Tyler Cowen, author of the e-book (belatedly published in print) "The Great Stagnation." Economic growth is the product of increases in the labor supply and...

The recent political entanglements over the budget have focused more on political maneuverings and who is right about what statement, rather than what the policies mean to average, everyday Americans. It might be standard politics, but it does not create the right framework. The right framework includes thinking about the impact to everyday Americans and to future generations of Americans. When our founders fought for freedom, they did so for future Americans as well as themselves. Our nation has long led the world's fights for freedoms -- freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms. Our founding document,...

Responding to the Obama administration's operatic warnings of catastrophe for Meals on Wheels for the elderly, Head Start, meat inspections, air traffic controllers, and police, fire, and 911 operators if the government reduces the rate of increase of federal spending by 2 percent, radio host Chris Plante offered the following suggestion: "Since this two percent obviously covers all essential government spending, let's cut the other 98 percent!" Even if these "draconian cuts" are implemented, the federal government will spend more this year than it did last year. Another way to think about it is this: In 2007, the government was...

Rather than seethe over President Obama's ongoing sequester-related demagoguery, Crossroads GPS has produced a web ad that duly notes that the cuts were Obama's idea to begin with, and pokes fun at his apocalyptic scare-tactics:   Crossroads GPS: "Obama's Mess"I especially enjoyed the audio clip at the tail end in which Obama laments the exhausting merry-go-round of "manufactured" crises, for which his party is almost exclusively responsible.  And how does the president behave during these standoffs?  New York Times columnist David Brooks -- a long-time admirer of Obama's, all the way down to his sartorial elegance -- identifies a pattern of...

The media’s harboring of a pro-government spending bias isn’t exactly news. But an article in Politico is notable because it illustrates the tendency for local newsrooms to push human interest stories that emphasize the pain of spending cuts. According to the article, it’s pervasive:  Journalists from Florida to Washington state told POLITICO that their editors are hungry for stories that turn bureaucratic doublespeak about automatic cuts into a human story of real-world pain—from layoffs to cutbacks in treasured hometown programs.  Ask Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, who got hit with a question about the Blue Angels during a Jacksonville TV station...

Before this column is done I’m going to make a point on federal spending that really should open your eyes. Actually, you will think that it’s so basic and simple that it’s a wonder nobody has presented it to you in this manner before! You’re soon going to learn that the way we’ve been addressing our spending problem --- and it most definitely IS a spending problem – is all wrong. You’ve been a newborn puppy long enough. Time to open your eyes. But first …. I’ll address YOUR spending problem, and present a solution that will surprise you. It’s...

Americans live in a consumer culture. We like to buy things. When we can’t afford to purchase something we really want, we turn to credit cards and loans, even though we end up paying more due to interest payments. Over half the population paid interest on credit cards in the past year. “Buy now – pay later”. This mindset has resulted in the plague of personal debt many families struggling with. Unfortunately the “buy now – pay later” mentality is not limited to the individual consumer, Americans are also inclined to incur debt to fund government projects we can’t afford....

The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) Summary of Operations for fiscal year 2012, released last week, shows an agency that is significantly over-funded. In 2010, the Obama Administration increased the agency’s budget even though it previously operated with a fiscal year-end surplus. Now, the operating report reveals that the agency’s business continues to erode with the decline of unionization in the private sector making its increased appropriation even more unnecessary than it was in 2010. According to the report, issued by Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, total case intake decreased by three percent; unfair labor practice case intake decreased by...

Whether he's publicly recapitulating the hallucinations of an imaginary friend, or wrongly assuring the public that various government programs are "fully funded," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tends to struggle with the truth.  The recent high-octane bout of partisan wrangling over whether to pass a porked-up Sandy relief bill is finally complete, and Reid is unhappy that Congress didn't spend more money.  To emphasize his frustration, he downplayed the severity of Hurricane Katrina's destruction in order to cast Sandy as far worse -- thus indicting those who opposed even one cent of unrelated "relief" spending as uncaring, heartless bastards:  ...

Following the fiscal cliff melodrama, Senator Richard Shelby appeared on television to declare that we are becoming European. "We're always wanting to spend and promise and spend and borrow but not cut. We've got to get real about this. We're headed down the road that Europe's already on." There's no "heading" about it. We're there. Prof. John J. DiIulio, writing in "National Affairs", outlined the true size of American government. When state and local government expenditures are added to federal outlays, government spending as a share of GDP easily competes with European nations. In fact, per-capita government spending in the...

At the Potsdam conference with Harry Truman and Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill learned that the voters of the nation he had led for five years through World War II had just voted to throw him out of office. "It may well be a blessing in disguise," said his wife Clementine. "At the moment, it seems quite effectively disguised," replied Churchill. Republicans must feel that way today. For they have survived their own Dunkirk. They may have left their helmets, canteens and rifles behind, but they did finally get off the beach. That Republicans suffered a rout, as the British did...

By all accounts, President Obama won the fiscal cliff showdown. Why anyone would take much pride in this kind of "win" is beyond me. It's a bit like being the least filthy toddler in the mud pit. One of the main reasons Obama won, according not only to Obama but an at times cheering press, is that he had a mandate. He ran on the need for the wealthy to "pay their fair share." To his credit, Obama never said raising taxes on the "rich" will solve all of our problems. What he did say, however, is that he couldn't...

Tourists in downtown Washington, D.C. may have been confused by a small, colorful gathering on the mall on Saturday, as a group of activists came together for the “Million Puppet March” with a message of government support for PBS. While the Count may have been disappointed – the assembled crowd for this million-strong march was a few hundred at most – the activists in their cobbled-together homemade costumes did their best. Big Bird, Grover and the Wild Things took pictures with fans in a sea of Obama/Biden signs and ‘Puppets Unite!’ posters. For anyone walking to the Smithsonian museums, they...