Free Republic

The Congressional Budget Office’s warning that the Affordable Care Act will cause employment to fall by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers is just the latest of Obamacare’s negative surprises. Unfortunately, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s statement that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” is proving to be depressingly accurate. The law’s defenders legitimately argue that it is not sufficient merely to criticize the Affordable Care Act; responsible action requires proposing an alternative. Fortunately, Republicans have a good one, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for the past...

High-income families would be hit with a tax increase on wages and a new levy on investments under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul bill. For the first time, the Medicare payroll tax would be applied to investment income, beginning in 2013. A new 3.8 percent tax would be imposed on interest, dividends, capital gains and other investment income for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making more than $250,000. The bill also would increase the Medicare payroll tax by 0.9 percentage point to 2.35 percent on wages above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples...

A primary rationale of ObamaCare's insurance reforms limiting age-rating and precluding pricing based on health status has been to ensure that people will be able to afford health coverage when they need it most. An IBD analysis finds that middle-class households in their late 50s and early 60s could spend 25% or more of their income on health care — before their deductible is exhausted and ObamaCare's benefits kick in. Covered California's shop-and-compare tool shows that a 58-year-old couple in Los Angeles County with $65,000 in income buying a bronze plan would have to spend $19,400, including $9,400 in premiums...

In the budget proposal he presented to Congress last month, President Barack Obama called for what would be the highest level of sustained taxation ever imposed on the American people, according to the analysis published last week by the Congressional Budget Office. Under Obama’s proposal, taxes would rise from 17.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2014 to 19.2 percent in 2024. During the ten years from 2015 to 2024, federal taxation would average 18.7 percent GDP.America has never been subjected to a ten-year stretch of taxation at that level. In the twelve fiscal years preceding the Japanese attack on...

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama is getting a number of critical report cards on his foreign and domestic policies lately. Here at home, Janet Yellen, in her first monetary policy address as the head of the Federal Reserve Board, said the labor markets were still weak, and that it will likely take two years or more before the U.S. fully recovers from its recession. Ouch. If Yellen's forecast proves right, this means it will have taken Obama's administration nearly eight years to lift our economy out of its long and painful lethargy.

SHAMOKIN DAN — The plant in Shamokin Dam once produced enough electricity to power a city three times the size of Scranton. It is 65 years old, but few here thought the facility known as the Sunbury Steam Plant would be forced into retirement. “It’s sad to see it close down,” said Robert Hoffman of Sunbury. “The plant`s been there since I can remember. As a matter of fact when i was in high school we toured that plant.” “Since they put stack reclaimers on it, its been a fairly clean plant,” added Ed Quiggle of Shamokin Dam Sunbury Generation...

There’s a damning number regarding our economy that Obama doesn’t want to talk about. It’s a number, but for him, would be lower. And, lower, in this case would be a good thing for the economy. “Although estimates vary,” says Joel Kurtzman, a senior fellow at the Milliken Institute, “American companies have between $4 and $5 trillion in liquid assets, a sum greater than the size of the German economy.” How is it that companies can now have more cash than anytime in history, while unemployment remains so high, inflation in many goods so low, and national income grows so...

The USDA has managed to make school lunches stink even more. So why does the government continue?>School lunches still stink. But now unprecedented numbers of students are refusing to eat them.Last month I noted that a GAO report had found that last school year's disastrous rollout of the updated USDA National School Lunch Program helped drive 1.6 million paying students from the lunch rolls. The new rules led some schools to abandon the program, as I reported in 2012. What's more, the new rules, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, have also resulted in unprecedented mountains of food waste.As I...

Ahead of the April 15 tax deadline, a record-high 60% of Californians say that they pay "much more" or "somewhat more" in taxes than they should, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) (and noted by John Seiler of Calwatchdog.org and Stephen Frank of CApoliticalnews.com). However, as PPIC Mark Baldassare notes at Fox&Hounds, Californians still believe that the answer is to tax wealthy earners or corporations more--not to reform and broaden the current tax system. The PPIC survey, which was conducted in March among 1,702 adults, notes: While about half of Californians view the...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) As more and more Americans find jobs, it's having a chilling effect on potential new entrepreneurs, according to a new industry report. Last year, 476,000 new businesses were created each month, mostly in the construction and services industries.... That's down 7% from 2012, when 514,000 new businesses were being created monthly....

A Democratic blitz this week for new orders and laws promising equal pay for women is a key agenda item the party hopes will boost turnout this fall among its most loyal voters. President Barack Obama signed two executive actions, which will bar federal contractors from retaliating against employees for comparing salaries and require contractors to report compensation data to the government by gender and race. A McClatchy analysis in January found that women employees at the White House make 91 cents for every dollar men make. The female share of the federal workforce also has declined under Obama, while...

Carney's points make sense, but don't those exact same arguments apply to the big, bad corporations Democrats are targeting? Of course they do. But that's not the point. As we discussed yesterday, Democrats are hoping to replicate their successful 2012 playbook by shifting voters' focus onto ancillary issues, and away from the political fundamentals. This week they're trotting out equal pay for women in an effort to underscore their "Republican war on women" meme. President Obama is signing two executive orders related to the issue today, while the Senate will debate the Paycheck Fairness Act: Obama's latest foray into the...

Barack Obama’s presidency is failing. Despite what he and his cheerleaders in the press think, he is still losing the argument over ObamaCare. The program has posted a few non-catastrophic enrollment numbers lately, but a lot of the public has already made up their minds. They never liked the program much to begin with, and now that they know what’s in it, they like it even less. The economic recovery, such as it is, continues to be slow, painful, and jobless. The president’s foreign policy is spinning out of control in all directions. So the left is doing what they...

Despite advocates’ cheers about paycheck equity, the Obama White House has paid women less than men for years.

This was supposed to be the year the U.S. economy would finally break out of the doldrums — the year it would deliver the kind of robust growth that could lift President Barack Obama’s dismal approval ratings and help Democrats avoid a shellacking in November. It now looks like that dream is fading fast. So far, it’s been easy to dismiss weak economic news as the result of an awful winter. But those excuses ended with Friday’s March jobs report, the first of spring, which showed a lower-than-expected gain of 192,000 — Wall Street traders were looking for something closer...

Classy. During a visit to the University of Michigan today, President Obama said that the GOP’s alternative ecoonomic plan was a “Stinkburger”.

The world's two richest men have both lost a slice of their fortunes this year betting against the dollar. Microsoft's Bill Gates said with fulminating certainty in Davos last January that it was time to "short" the greenback. "The ol' dollar is going down. It is a bit scary. We're in uncharted territory when the world's reserve currency has so much outstanding debt," he said. His friend Warren Buffet kept pace, switching $22billion (£13billion) of Berkshire Hathaway funds into foreign currencies. He said it pained him as an American, and broke the habits of a life-time. But a country living...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The United States is already in a recession and it will be longer as well as deeper than many people expect, U.S. investor Warren Buffett said in an interview published in German magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday. He said the United States was "already in recession" and added: "Perhaps not in the sense that economists would define it" with two consecutive quarters of negative growth. "But the people are already feeling the effects," said Buffett, the world's richest man. "It will be deeper and last longer than many think." But he said that won't stop him from...

Here is video of Billionaire Warren Buffet in an interview with CNBC today saying in an interview that the U.S. Economy has "fallen off a cliff." Buffet says he has seen more drastic changes in American consumers than at any time in his lifetime. He believes the fear Americans have has changed their spending habits, and that will not be altered quickly. Buffet said the core of the problem goes back to the belief that housing prices could only go up and never down, a belief he said everyone had - including himself. Buffet said this economic disaster will end,...

[VIDEO] Excerpt: Then came Warren’s big but (which is totally unrelated to Michelle Obama’s big butt): “…Job one is to win the war, the economic war. Job two is to win the economic war. And job three. And you can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat. So I would, I would absolutely say for the, for the interim, till we get this one solved, I would not be pushing a lot of things that are, you know, are contentious. And I also, I also would do no...