Free Republic

Once again, the oh-so progressive, oh-so enlightened Seattle City Council is showing the rest of the country what not to do. The idealistic leftists who control the Council are wasting millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars in failed attempts to solve problems the Council members created. All this is turning Seattle into the poster city for the failure of Big Government. The city best known for fish markets, coffee stores, rain and flannel-wearing musicians is now becoming legendary for its incompetent leadership and its financial boondoggles. The latest example of Seattle senselessness is the Council’s costly and deeply flawed efforts to...

Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and was asked a simple question that any politician worth his salt would hit out of the park for a home run. How was she going to pay for the trillions of dollars in spending for all the free stuff she was proposing? Daily Caller: "This is an excellent, excellent question," she replied.  "I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week – I can't believe I can say that, it's really weird – But one of the things that we saw is, if people pay...

PODGORICA (Reuters) - Perched atop massive cement pillars that tower above Montenegro’s picturesque Moraca river canyon, scores of Chinese workers are building a state-of-the-art highway through some of the roughest terrain in southern Europe. The government has described the 165 km (103 mile) highway, with its imposing bridges and deep-cut tunnels, as the construction of the century and a pathway to the modern world. It is designed to link the port of Bar on Montenegro’s Adriatic coast to landlocked neighbor Serbia. But once the first, challenging 41 km stretch through mountains north of the capital is completed, the government faces...

The federal government collected a record $1,305,490,000,000 in individual income taxes through the first nine months of fiscal 2018 (October 2017 through June 2018), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today. Despite the record individual income tax collections, the federal government still ran a deficit of $607,099,000,000 over those same nine months, according to the Treasury statement. The approximately $1,305,490,000,000 in individual income taxes that the Treasury collected in October through June of this fiscal year was $71,815,310,000 more (in constant June 2018 dollars) than the $1,233,674,690,000 (in constant June 2018 dollars) in individual income taxes that the Treasury...

President Donald Trump on Thursday said NATO allies agreed to “substantially up their commitment” to the alliance after he told leaders he was “extremely unhappy.” “Tremendous progress has been made. Everyone’s agreed to substantially up their commitment. They’re going to up it at levels that they’ve never thought of before,” Trump said at his press conference in Brussels. “Commitments were made,” he said. “The commitment was at 2 percent, ultimately that’ll be going up quite a bit higher than that.” French President Emmanuel Macron denied that any NATO members had agreed to boost contributions beyond 2 percent GDP. “There is...

Despite some slowdown in the pace of growth, solid economic indicators, like a rise in consumer spending, point to positive signs for the U.S. economy. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Friday that disposable personal income (DPI), a key gauge for retail spending, rose 0.4 percent, or $63.2 billion, in May. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) grew 0.2 percent, or $27.8 billion, and was up 2.3 percent from May 2017. Real DPI, income adjusted for taxes and inflation, increased 0.2 percent in May, and real PCE decreased less than 0.1 percent, the BEA said. The PCE price index was up 0.2...

Republicans have had a rough week, mostly of their own making, and on Wednesday they added to their self-punishment with a spending fiasco in the Senate. Two GOP Senators blocked the Trump Administration’s rescissions package that would claw back $15 billion, much of which wasn’t even likely to be spent under current policy. A Senate procedural vote to move the rescissions package failed 48-50 after defections from Susan Collins of Maine and Richard Burr of North Carolina. From what we’ve heard Ms. Collins wanted to keep the money on ice so if it isn’t spent as part of its current...

Late Thursday the House passed President Trump's proposal to rescind $15 billion in previously appropriated funding by the government that was never spent.....Lawmakers approved the bill in a narrow 210-206 vote, which was close because 17 Republicans voted against it. The vote is meant to put conservatives at ease about the huge two-year spending deal lawmakers reached this year, which will increase spending by about $300 billion over that period of time. President Trump and the White House worked closely with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on the package, entitled the Spending Cuts to Expired and Unnecessary Programs Act....

<p>Acadiana lost $26.6 million in proposed construction projects with the stroke of Gov. John Bel Edwards veto pen Wednesday.</p> <p>Twenty-nine projects were part of the 40 items struck from the state’s annual construction budget by Edwards using his line-item veto authority.</p>

The House voted along party lines late Thursday to pass a White House proposal that would claw back nearly $15 billion in previously approved government funding. The House approved the measure in a vote of 210-206, with conservatives calling it a step in the right direction after they ripped into the price tag of the $1.3 trillion spending bill President Trump signed earlier this year

An honest teacher-pay debate requires careful attention to the facts. This spring’s teacher walkouts have spurred renewed attention to the question of teacher pay. The topic is a serious one, warranting the extensive reportage it’s received. At times, however, the media’s progressive sympathies, the allure of hard-luck tales, and concerted PR by teachers’ unions have yielded some questionable coverage. A recent case has been the spate of stories suggesting that teachers routinely reach into their own pockets to spend extraordinary sums on classroom materials. “There is no other job I know of where the workers subsidize what should be a...

WASHINGTON By Washington standards, it shouldn’t be that hard to get money for Interstate 73, a decades-in-the-making, $2 billion project to connect 75 miles of road from the North Carolina border to the tourist hub of South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach. But Rep. Tom Rice, R-S.C., the local congressman and the road’s key backer, is struggling to get the project going. He does have support from his state’s two U.S. senators. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently called the interstate the second most important economic priority for South Carolina behind dredging the Charleston Harbor. Al Simpson, a well-connected Washington lobbyist who was...

SACRAMENTO - Even in the wake of previous tax windfalls, Gov. Jerry Brown's announcement on Friday was breathtaking: The state has collected an unexpected $8 billion in tax revenue in recent months, even more additional cash than reported in January. The money is the latest installment in a fiscal winning streak of historic proportions in California. And, as in previous years, the governor's newly revised budget seeks to divvy it up either on short-term spending or long-term savings by putting it into government reserves.

“I will never sign another bill like this again,” President Trump said after signing last month’s 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill. President Trump is right. The omnibus bill Congress passed this March betrayed everything for which conservatives stand.Not only did it bust the spending caps conservatives worked so hard to secure in 2011 by more than $250 billion, but it also failed to build the border wall President Trump promised during his campaign. The bill also included language limiting the ability of federal law enforcement officers to enforce our nation’s immigration laws. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi identified...

It takes a lot of courage for a president to target almost a quarter of the federal budget for reform in an election year. But this is exactly what President Trump is doing with his executive order, "Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility." We're now spending more than $700 billion per year on low-income assistance, which is more than we are spending on our national defense. And there are plenty of reasons to believe this spending is inefficient, wasteful and counterproductive. Over the last half-century, some $22 trillion has been spent on anti-poverty programs and yet...

When President Trump signed the 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill last month, he was emphatic that it wouldn’t happen again.Referring to the fact that no one could possibly have had time to read this mammoth piece of legislation, he said, “I will never sign another bill like this again.”The implication, of course, was that nothing could be done about this latest round of massive overspending. Like it or lump it, there it is.But that’s not exactly true. The president can, in fact, do something. He can pursue what’s known as a rescissions package.Don’t let the wonky word cause your...

The political tide has turned against toll roads in Texas, imperiling a Tomball interchange project and hamstringing frustrated local officials, while setting an ominous tone for projects to come. For years, state officials relied on tolls to tackle some of TexasÂ’ biggest traffic messes as a way to build without adding taxes. Since 2016, however, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have taken hard-line stances against the mixing of Texas Department of Transportation money and toll revenues. Most Popular More men accuse former Texas judge, Baptist leader of sexual misconduct Breaking down 2018 Texas A&M football: Quarterback With...

Design-bid-build may still be the No. 1 project delivery method for U.S. construction, but other processes are rising that could challenge DBB’s stake in how some projects are carried out.One such arrangement, public-private partnerships (P3), is gaining steam with talks from Washington, D.C., about employing the method for President Donald Trump’s $1.3 trillion infrastructure spend. While more states and local entities are successfully turning to P3s to tackle major infrastructure overhauls and new projects, the method still runs up against a perception problem. Some elected officials are hesitant to employ P3s because they don’t want to let a private firm...

All you toll road haters, limber up your fingers for the flaming responses to this column.Because the toll road story here in Central Texas that I’m about to tell you, based on usage and revenue, is a good news story. The simple fact is that the nine toll roads here, other than the privately run section of Texas 130 south of Mustang Ridge, are being heavily used and are financially healthy.This is certainly not the uniform case around the country, where a number of toll roads in the past decade have gone bankrupt. In Central Texas, well over 1 million TxTags...

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. – An Oklahoma representative says that she has filed legislation this week that would increase the financial scrutiny given to the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority. House Bill 2530 would require the state auditor and inspector to perform an audit of the Turnpike Authority at least once every two years. “Taxpayers deserve to know where their hard-earned money is going,” Rep. Tess Teague said. “The Turnpike Authority has an annual budget of nearly $100 million, and lawmakers owe it to Oklahomans to track those dollars closely.” The legislation dictates that the audit will take no more than 90 days....