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Obama administration travel and vacation documents were released yesterday by Judicial Watch, and they reveal an unprecedented level of executive branch leisure spending. According to public information: “As of 2001, the president earns a $400,000 annual salary, along with a $50,000 annual expense account, a $100,000 nontaxable travel account, and $19,000 for entertainment. The most recent raise in salary was approved by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1999 and went into effect in 2001.” Obtained via a Freedom of Information request, here are some of the Obama presidency’s spending items: Since 2009, a total of $40,000,000 has been spent....

Give it a little time and it’ll be $530,000. We’re heading down a rabbit hole with people who print money for a living. Taxpayers will pay over $53,000 per each person newly insured under Obamacare, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of the Congressional Budget Office data.The CBO predicts that on average, federal taxpayers will now pay over 95% of the total cost of the Medicaid expansion. Fewer than expected Americans who were already eligible for traditional state Medicaid programs signed up for coverage while programs received free publicity due to the furor over the Medicaid expansion, leading...

As President Obama so peevishly informed us all earlier this month, that the debate on repealing/replacing ObamaCare is now absolutely beyond contestation, so it would be really great if we could all just shut up and move on to more important things — like, say, the economy, because “the fifty or so votes Republicans have taken to repeal this law could have been fifty votes to create jobs by investing in things like infrastructure, more innovation.” That’s why the White House is leading by example and contrasting itself with Congress’s deliberately light legislative schedule — by proposing the same old...

Spending on health care grew an astounding 9.9% in the Bureau of Economic Analysis' advance estimate of first-quarter GDP. It's the biggest percent change in health-care spending since 1980, when health-care spending jumped 10% in the third quarter. Analysts said it's primarily due to a consumption boost from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Adjusted for inflation, America is spending more on health care than ever before.Personal consumption grew by 3.0%, about half of which was due to the growth in health-care spending, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. "If health-care spending had been unchanged, the headline GDP growth number would have...

The St. Paul teachers’ contract may have an unwanted side effect: Limiting school spots for the city’s integration effort. The class-size lim­its her­ald­ed as a key fac­et of the new St. Paul public schools teachers contract are com­pli­cat­ing ef­forts to boost en­roll­ment and blunt­ing an in­itia­tive de­signed to in­te­grate some of the district’s most popu­lar schools. That initiative, Re­flect­ing St. Paul, was launched this school year and seeks to open seats in 11 schools to stu­dents from neighborhoods with low­er in­comes, high­er per­cent­ages of non-Eng­lish-speak­ing families and low­er test scores. Under the program, the stu­dents, many from mi­nor­i­ty groups, are...

Mother Jones does love found footage, doesn't it? The progressive mag's airing of Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comments at a fundraiser definitely hurt the former Massachusetts governor in his attempt to boot President Obama in 2012. Now Mojo is back with the vid above, which the mag must hope will discombobulate Republicans and help put the brakes on a libertarian-leaning senator whose anti-war and anti-NSA stances draw long looks from disaffected liberals and lefties."Rand Paul: Jimmy Carter was better on the budget than Ronald Reagan" is how the vid begins. It shows the Kentucky senator in a variety of settings...

Breitbart News and others have chronicled the "Unmatched failure" that Cover Oregon has now officially become. As was pointed out on March 20 of this year, "The Oregon Obamacare exchange has received $305 million in taxpayer-funded federal grants, spent $160 million on its busted website, dropped $10 million on hipster promotional ads, erroneously enrolled 4,000 illegal immigrants in full Oregon Health Plan coverage contrary to federal law, and has not enrolled a single Oregonian online." Oregon was even given "a $48 million "early innovator" grant for states whose exchanges were intended to serve as models for the nation." While the...

Failed government subsidies have existed in U.S. history from George Washington to Barack Obama. But what's especially remarkable about the stream of government aid — subsidies to the fur trade, steamships, railroads, airplanes, and even ethanol today — is that private citizens, with no federal funds, almost always outperform the men whom the government endows with large chunks of cash. In the first years of the American Republic, John Jacob Astor owned a fur company that defeated a government-funded rival — supported by George Washington himself. Astor actively traded with Indians instead of trying to tell them what they wanted...

Remember President Obama's vow that, if re-elected, he'd pursue "balanced" deficit reduction? Either he forgot, or he hopes voters have, because a new report shows his latest budget is entirely unbalanced. When Obama released his budget this March, he said it included "smart spending cuts" and closed "tax loopholes" that benefit only "the wealthiest Americans." Obama added that his budget would put "our debt on a downward path as a share of our total economy, which independent experts have set as a critical target for fiscal responsibility." As with just about everything Obama says, none of these claims turns out...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A report released Thursday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says President Barack Obama's budget request would mean significantly larger budget deficits than the White House claims. CBO says the budget plan proposed last month by Obama would produce deficits of $6.6 trillion over the next 10 years — $1.6 trillion more than the White House estimates. The main reason is that the White House has a rosier estimate of the economy's performance over the decade than CBO. That means the administration predicts higher tax revenues. The president's budget is just a proposal; it has gained little...

(CNN) – Hoping to help close the gap between workers' skills and the needs of businesses, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce he's putting hundreds of millions toward job training programs that produce highly skilled workers. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will head to a community college in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to make the announcement. The funding will come in two parts: $500 million toward a new job training competition that pairs community colleges with businesses, and $100 million for new apprenticeship programs to train workers. The White House says the new initiatives are meant to combat a...

The federal Medicare health insurance program winds up paying the fare for many of the ambulance rides provided by the city of St. Paul. That's why the city in 2012 was one of the largest single recipients of Medicare payments among non-hospital health care providers in the state, according to data released this month by the federal government. Out of more than 19,000 health care providers during 2012 who cared for Medicare patients in Minnesota, the city's take of more than $2 million was the ninth largest individual sum. Whether they were providing ambulance rides or treating illnesses, the state's...

A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and AgenciesHouse Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Republican-led efforts to rein in government spending are pointless because there is nothing left to cut in the almost $4 trillion-a-year federal budget.“The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make. It’s really important that people understand that,” Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”September 22, 2013

And, for good measure, Microsoft has more cash at hand that Uncle Sam does. [snip] It’s a very fun number, to be sure, but it’s not quite right for a number of economic reasons. It’s true that when you look at the balance sheets then Apple, say, has $160 billion in cash available, that Microsoft MSFT has a little under $85 billion and the Treasury only has $49 billion to hand to keep the government working. But it’s not really true for a couple of reasons that we’ll get to. [snip] The first and most obvious being that the government...

Are we seeing a renaissance in public transit use by Americans? The answer is yes, if you believe a new report from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), the transit industry's lobby group. In fact, APTA's report is a textbook example of how deceiving statistics can be. The report states that in 2013, the number of transit trips was nearly 10.7 billion nationally--the highest since 1956, according to APTA. Michael Melaniphy, APTA's CEO, hailed what he called "a fundamental shift" in how Americans choose to get around. But even strong supporters of public transit like Michael Manville, David King and...

DFLers, who generally frown on grandeur as part of their ideology, are going to build themselves a marvelous new office building. They have been deaf to the idea that it is wasteful and that there are countless ways to accommodate the few of them who are going to be displaced by renovation work on the Capitol. To save a few bucks -- cutting it from $94 million to $77 million -- they claim they are going to eliminate an adjoining parking ramp. But that was to have been principally for the public anyway, and the public has been ignored in...

The Obama administration wants to spend $400,000 on a camel sculpture for a new embassy building in Pakistan, according to a report Monday. BuzzFeed broke the news that the State Department has plans to commission the camel sculpture from John Baldessari, an American artist. The art is called, “Camel Contemplating Needle.” According to a government document posted by BuzzFeed, the sculpture is a “large 500lb fiberglass aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic and painted contemporary art piece.” “Public art which will be presented in the new embassy should reflect the values of a predominately Islamist country,” the document states. While the United...

Whatever objections anyone might have to various details in Rep. Paul Ryan's bold new plan to cut $5 trillion of government waste, one fact trumps all else: Unlike Democrats, he offers solutions, not denial. The one thing that stands out in the long-term budget plan unveiled Tuesday by House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan, R-Wis., is his acceptance of a fact Democrats want to hide: You can't squeeze enough extra money out of the rich to pay for our endlessly expanding entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Tax revenue over many decades has been relatively unchanging . And it...

I wish that this were just another bad April Fools' Day joke, but sadly, this story is all too real. Since President Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated into office a little over five years ago, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have doubled America's publicly held debt, an increase of more than 6.3 trillion dollars: Date                   Debt Held by the Public         Intragovernmental Holdings   Total Public Debt Outstanding 03/31/2014        6,307,310,739,681.66          4,319,566,309,231.42          10,626,877,048,913.08 8/19/2011          12,619,319,113,193.99 ...

"Tighten the belts" is one tired takeaway from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget proposal, released today. The budget proposes to cut $5.1 trillion from projected spending over the next 10 years, getting a lot of its savings from repealing the president's health care law and changing Medicaid. The document, titled again, "Path to Prosperity," is largely for show, as the bipartisan budget agreement authored by Ryan, R-Wisc., and his Senate counterpart, Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., already set discretionary spending levels for the 2015 fiscal year. The budget agreement passed in both the Senate and the House...