Free Republic

High hopes for tax money isn’t as expected as the state’s legal marijuana industry isn’t bringing in as much money as anticipated. In fact, tax revenue is way below expectations. When voters approved recreational marijuana sales the state predicted it would pull in more than $33 million in new taxes in the first six months. The actual revenue came up more than $21 million short. The problem is that buying pot is less expensive on the streets where people don’t have to pay taxes or fees. Medical marijuana is also less expensive than recreational pot, so those with medical cards...

Amid all the emotion over same-sex marriage, the limited-government argument for marriage as uniting a man and a woman keeps getting short shrift. It fell to me to make that case during a discussion of marriage law and the Supreme Court with the worthy S.E. Cupp on a recent installment of “Real News from The Blaze,” and I’d like to flesh out those thoughts here. For starters, virtually every political community has regulated male-female sexual relationships. This is not because government cares about romance as such. Government recognizes male-female sexual relationships because these alone produce new human beings. For highly...

Poor Women are Not "Pork" By Ruth Rosen - January 28, 2009, 5:22PM Responding to President Obama's request, House Democrats cut a provision from the stimulus package that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaid patients--usually poor women and girls. He, in turn, was responding to Republicans' opposition to expanding Medicaid family planning for poor women and girls. Why did this happen? For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historic rupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century. I understand...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional leaders are racing to push through an array of election-year housing measures that already have stirred up much political wrangling and the White House is examining its own plan to further help homeowners caught in the mortgage meltdown. With foreclosure signs prevalent and a Wall Street rescue reverberating, majority Democrats want the government to step in and back up to $400 billion in troubled loans. The goal is to help strapped borrowers and thaw a credit market plagued by uncertainty about the value of subprime mortgages made to people with spotty credit or low incomes. As...

Jan. 9 - Lieutenant Governor Garamendi, Speaker Nunez, Senate Leader Perata, my fellow servants of the people, ladies and gentlemen... I am honored to stand here once again. I want to thank the legislature, as I did in my Inaugural, for putting the people above politics last year--an election year. The federal government was paralyzed by gridlock and games. But you here in this chamber acted on infrastructure, the minimum wage, prescription drug costs and the reduction of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. What this said to the people is: we are not waiting for politics. We are not waiting...

HARD-WORKING families face crippling new bills as the Government fights global warming with a raft of stinging taxes. Shadow Environment Secretary Peter Ainsworth said last night: “We don’t need a programme of green taxes: We need a green programme, full stop. He was speaking after it was revealed that Environment Secretary David Miliband had already drawn up sweeping green tax plans which he has put to Gordon Brown. The move came on the eve of today’s publication of a major study on climate change — which some experts blame on harmful man-made emissions. Tony Blair describes the report — drawn...

There is always a good excuse for big government. I thought I would spend some time to catalogue some of those excuses, just to put them down on the record. Whether it is on the floor of the Senate or Assembly, in budget or other committee hearings in the Legislature, these excuses pop up from time to time. In this era of term limits, it is rare for those in decision making positions to hang around long enough to hear these excuses repeated, so this article can act as a chronicle, since I have now heard many of these excuses...

Freedom is a fragile thing. A candlelight in a windstorm, if you will, requiring constant vigilance to preserve. It is never safe, as the old saying goes, as long as the California Legislature (or Congress, for that matter) is in session. That is because the ruling class, that is, elected officials, bureaucrats, and their allies in the private sector, get money, power and prestige from bigger government, and bigger government is an anathema to freedom. Therefore, those who are in charge of protecting our freedom, (i.e. government officials) have a vested interest in taking it away. Human nature being what...

Dear Friend, Earth Day this Saturday offers us a moment to think about our environment and of the world around us - the air we breathe, the water we drink, the great natural treasures that we have inherited. I hope we will think of it as a day to rededicate ourselves to protecting our planet: our home for our children and their children. Because the threats to our environment and way of life are real and growing. In the last five years, the Bush administration has left no major environmental law untouched in their push to deregulate, undermining or rolling...

<p>WASHINGTON — Big government is back.</p> <p>Since President Bush took office, the federal government´s domestic civilian work force has increased by more than 79,000 jobs, nearly a 5 percent increase. And the number of government workers paid at least $130,000 annually has tripled.</p>

George Bush has broken a Clinton record, though not one to be proud of. The Federal Register – the publication that lists all proposed and enacted federal regulations – increased to 75,606 pages in 2002. That breaks the previous record set by Bill Clinton in 2000. You need to know that these federal regulations cost businesses (and, ultimately, the consumers) in America more than all business income taxes combined. During 2002 Congress passed 269 new laws. During the same year regulatory agencies passed 4,167 final rules. Not one of these rules was then subjected to congressional oversight. Some more things...