Free Republic

In three of her last four budgets, Gov. Jennifer Granholm cut state funding to K-12 schools. In Gov. Rick Snyder's first four budgets, he has increased state funding to K-12 schools, up to a record $12 billion in 2014-15, according to the Senate Fiscal Agency. So how is Gov. Snyder being tagged by critics as the villain who has cut funding to school children? The answer lies in how the complicated nature of school funding has been the most misunderstood story reported in the media, as well as a campaign to portray schools as underfunded. “If you repeat a lie...

There’s a saying among those who analyze public sector pension systems: “Pension don’t get funded – they get underfunded.” That is certainly true around Michigan. A review of the defined benefit pension systems for the 100 largest cities in the state shows that the vast majorities are underfunded – that is, that the municipality has promised more benefits than it has put away money for. But there is hope. Many cities have begun shifting new employees to a 401k-type, defined-contribution plan. For these plans, workers are given a (usually generous) match of money put into a fund. It is impossible...

The White House budget office launched USASpending.gov in 2007 to track federal spending after scores of lawmakers, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, successfully pushed through a bipartisan bill to ensure greater transparency with the funding. At last check, less than 8 percent of the site’s spending information was accurate, and federal agencies had failed to report nearly $620 billion in grants, loans and other forms of assistance awards, according to a recent report from Congress’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

On July 3, 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama infamously called President George W. Bush “unpatriotic,” and his polices “irresponsible” for adding $4 Trillion to the country's "credit card." This was almost more than all other US presidents combined, he argued, and therefore was putting America on a dangerous path to fiscal insolvency. Less than six years into his own administration, however, the president has failed to reverse the untenable course set by his predecessor; and, indeed, is making America's heavy debt burden even worse. CNS News reports: The total federal debt of the U.S. government has now increased more than...

A group dedicated to saving the planet by cutting runaway population increases is raising a new and shocking issue in Washington’s bitter fight over immigration reform: Most of the nation’s population growth is from immigrants, and they are consuming resources dangerously fast. According to Negative Population Growth Inc., 80 percent of the growth in U.S. population comes from immigration, legal, illegal and among American-born children of immigrants. “With increased population, we see a direct increase in the problems our nation faces on a daily basis: pollution, over-consumption, traffic gridlock, crowded schools and hospitals, overburdened social services, unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, urban

A recent report by JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest provides a fresh look at the problem of state indebtedness. Cembalest, global head of investment strategy, is best known for his writings on housing and for flagging Bernard Madoff’s fund and refusing to invest in it, even while other divisions at JPMorgan gleefully did so. Cembalest looks at state governments’ annual payments towards bonded debt interest and retirement liabilities (defined-benefit and defined-contribution pensions as well as retiree healthcare benefits) expressed as percentage of total annual revenue. In addition to assessing states’ default risk, this approach quantifies exactly how much debt expenditures are...

Social Security helps not only retirees but also roughly 9 million of people suffering from disabilities. Unfortunately, the trust fund that covers disability payments is in even worse financial condition than the trust fund that covers retirement benefits. What will happen when the disability program's trust fund runs out? In the following video, Dan Caplinger, The Motley Fool's director of investment planning, talks about the two Social Security trust funds, noting that the latest estimates give the retirement trust fund about 20 more years before it runs out of money, but the disability trust fund is slated to be used...

Debt: No sooner had the White House crowed about a smaller deficit than the Congressional Budget Office reported that the country is headed toward fiscal ruin driven by excessive spending, much of it the result of ObamaCare. Last Friday, in announcing the release of the administration's updated budget numbers, the acting White House budget director bragged that the deficit is undergoing "the most rapid sustained deficit reduction since World War II, and it continues to fall." What he didn't say is that it fell from all-time highs produced by Obama's spending spree. Or that deficits will soon stop falling and...

The $2.8 trillion Social Security Trust Fund is on track to be totally spent by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. That's one year earlier than projected in 2013 and a decade earlier than the CBO estimated as recently as 2011. The CBO delivered the warning in a gloomy long-term budget outlook that shows federal debt reaching 106% of GDP in 25 years, up from 74% now.

Although the U. S. spends more than half a trillion dollars on public schools, the Left still believes that raising that amount will somehow make students smarter. “Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States amounted to $638 billion in 2009-10, or about $12,743 per public school student,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics. “There must be a way to get enough dollars, public dollars to raise student achievement,” Carmel Martin, Executive Vice President for Policy at The Center for American Progress (CAP), said at a recent conference at CAP. At that same conference,...

Global military spending continued to decline last year. Although arms expenditure has actually increased in much of the world, military spending in the United States — which still accounted for 37% of total global military spending in 2013 — has declined in recent years.The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) measures annual military spending for most of the world’s armed countries. According to SIPRI, the U.S. spent $618 billion on its military last year, more than three times the $171 billion budget of second place China. Based on SIPRI’s 2013 data, these are the countries with the largest military...

Now that we have light rail, the progressives are ready to move on to the next step, streetcars along Seventh Street in St. Paul, with more lines to follow. The city council will vote Wednesday night to authorize a detailed study of a streetcar line between Arcade Street and Randolph Avenue on Seventh. That would be a second study, the first one being last year, your money paid out to a consulting firm from San Francisco. Progressives are dedicated to blocking the individual while encouraging the collective, but that offers no evidence of progress of any kind. There are already...

In 2012, Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed a massive tax cut into law, arguing that it would boost the state's economy. Eventually, he hoped to eliminate individual income taxes entirely. "Our place, Kansas, will show the path, the difficult path, for America to go in these troubled times," he said. National conservative activists raved. Patrick Gleason of Americans for Tax Reform said Kansas was "the story of the next decade." The Cato Institute praised Brownback's "impressive" tax cuts and gave him an "A" on fiscal policy. And the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol said that, if reelected, Brownback would be "a...

A rather exasperated President Barack Obama pressed Congress to find a solution to the looming Highway Trust Fund crisis, arguing "it's not socialism" to want to build new highways and bridges in the country. "It's not crazy. It's not socialism. It's not the imperial presidency," Obama said Tuesday afternoon during a speech in front of the Georgetown waterfront with the Key Bridge in the background. "We're just building roads and bridges, like we have for the past 50 years." The Highway Trust Fund is a transportation and infrastructure fund financed by gasoline taxes. It is headed towards insolvency because the...

It has been clear for at least a year that the focus of the nation on reducing the federal debt has vanished. The speeches of policymakers, the House and Senate legislative agendas, the content of the nation's debate forums, and the rhetoric of President Obama are all virtually silent on the nation's debt. You would think that the debt problem had been solved. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the intense, three-year focus on the debt that featured bitter inter-party battles and closing of the federal government while producing several laws that reduced the nation's debt in the short-term,...

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden has proposed a three-month transportation bill. Three more months, he says, will give Congress a chance to figure out a long-term solution. The only problem is that Congress had three months three months ago and did nothing. Meanwhile, Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn., have proposed to increase gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon. Considering that the gas tax hasn’t been increased in more than 20 inflation-filled years, this would seem to make sense.It doesn’t, however, because a gas tax increase assumes there is a shortage of funds for transportation. Instead, the real...

The Muskegon Heights School District has been in deficit nine consecutive years, dating back to the 2004-05 school year, according to the Michigan Department of Education. Mosaica Education, a national charter public school operator, ran the Muskegon County school district for two years, but made no progress in ending the cycle of debt and now is ending its contract with the district. This had a few state lawmakers and State Superintendent Mike Flanagan questioning whether the state should hand an entire district over to charter public school operators, according to an article posted on the Michigan Radio website. Muskegon Heights...

Airline ticket prices are soaring this summer. Prices are up 12 percent since 2009, even after adjusting for inflation. When customers of Spirit Airlines book their flights, they can see exactly what they’re paying for. Spirit provides a breakdown of individual factors that make up the total cost of an airline ticket, including the base fare, fuel prices, and taxes/fees (aka the government’s cut).

The United States spent more than $3 million on eight patrol boats for the Afghan police, according to an internal audit released Thursday. That sentence is surprising for a few reasons: 1. Afghanistan is landlocked. 2. Not a single boat has arrived in Afghanistan, even though the purchase was made in 2010. 3. That works out to be more than $375,000 per boat. Similar boats in the United States are typically sold for about $50,000.

Officials at all levels of government are banking that Metro Transit's $957 million investment will do more than simply shuttle existing bus riders in fancier vehicles between the downtowns of St. Paul and Minneapolis when it debuts June 14. They are counting on light rail to be a catalyst -- an economic game-changer for downtown St. Paul and much of University Avenue. Both areas have lost industry since the 1970s. The city as a whole lost 13.4 percent of its employment from 2000 to 2011, a period during which the U.S. shed 2.2 percent of its jobs, according to Wilder...