Free Republic

President Biden’s FY 2024 budget promises to reduce future deficits by $2.8 trillion over the next 10 years. That’s a big number. It is not enough, however, to prevent the debt from climbing to a record 110 percent of GDP in 2033, up from 98 percent this year and more than twice its average over the past 50 years. It is also not enough to prevent interest on the debt from doubling over the next 10 years and reaching a record high as a share of the economy by 2032. The record is 3.2 percent of GDP in 1991. It...

President Joe Biden is seeking to beef up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) budget to $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2024, a $663 million increase in funding compared to the end of the Obama administration’s fiscal year 2017 budget. Under Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2024 budget, the ATF would receive $1.9 billion in federal funding, an increase of roughly 50% or $663 million compared to the end of the Obama administration’s fiscal year 2017 budget of $1.237 billion. Biden’s budget coincides with several gun control measures, including pistol stabilizer rules, ghost gun rules and a “zero...

Its Gov’t Gone Wild! Insane spending budget by “Sloppy Joe” Biden, Yellen asking Warren Buffet for banking advice (seriously??), a war in Ukraine that America doesn’t seem to actually want to win, etc. But its the banking system where banks are getting crushed by rising inflation and interest rates (but failed to hedge). Sigh. As I always told my investments and fixe-income students at University of Chicago, Ohio State University and George Mason University, a 10 basis point change in the 2-year and 10-year US Treasury yield is a big deal. This morning, the US Treasury 2-year yield fell -32...

Do you believe in cautionary tales or think most things happen without warning? Your answer might reveal how your psyche processes information to which you are exposed. Everything you need to make good decisions is readily available, depending upon which sources you rely. Recently publicized topics should set your spidey senses twitching: Silicon Valley Bank suffers an abrupt collapse. Joe Biden resurrects the all-but-dead Willow Creek Oil project. Biden’s Energy Secretary praises China’s work on climate change. The president delivers his vision for his FY 2024 budget, with a $6.9 trillion price tag. 40,000 hours of security footage inside the...

As with many other states, New York is still in the process of attempting to sort out its overly-bloated budget for the fiscal year, but it’s not going well. Governor Kathy Hochul submitted a draft budget six weeks ago, but the state legislature has been bogged down, beset with infighting over the details. One of the chief complaints from the legislators (and many of you will find this hard to believe) is that Hochul has drifted “too far toward the center” since winning a full term of her own last year. With that in mind, the amendments that are currently...

The internet is divided over people ordering catering from chains like Chipotle to hack their weekly meal prep. We crunched the numbers. In a TikTok video from January, fashion influencer Madi Webb unboxes an enormous catering delivery from a nearby Brazilian restaurant. “I feel like I just cracked the code,” she says, explaining that the order of chicken and veggies cost only $100 for a week of lunches. Since then, all over social media, people like Webb are claiming they’re ordering catering from local restaurants and big chains to hack their weekly meal prep. They take the food home, portion...

California, which never allowed slavery, is nonetheless considering giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Black residents in reparations as a way to make amends for slavery, raising practical questions about how a state already facing a massive budget deficit could swing such an expensive program. The California Reparations Task Force, which was created by state legislation in 2020, is weighing a proposal to dole out just under $360,000 per person to approximately 1.8 million Black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S., putting the total cost of the program at about $640 billion. "If California can admit...

My former boss and mentor Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, used to quip that "liberals love jobs, but they hate employers." Based on his budget proposal released earlier this week, you would have to say that Biden flat-out loathes employers. Never before in American history has a president released a budget/tax plan that wallops American businesses with a bigger tax bill than this. The budget Biden proposes contains roughly $4 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade. He keeps saying that he just wants millionaires and billionaires to "pay their fair share," but this plan isn’t so...

ATLANTA – The economic slowdown in Georgia many economists have been predicting for this year hasn’t arrived yet. The state Department of Revenue collected more than $2.12 billion in taxes last month, an increase of 8.7% over February of last year, the agency reported Friday. For the first eight months of fiscal 2023, tax revenues were up 5.9% over the same period in fiscal 2022. Individual income tax receipts rose by 9.2% in February over the same month last year, as tax return payments increased by 31.3% while refunds were down 3.3%. Net sales tax collections were healthy last month,...

The US national debt will balloon by nearly $20 trillion over the next decade under the spending outlined in President Biden’s $6.9 trillion budget proposal released on Thursday.Under Biden’s budget plan for fiscal 2024, the gross national debt would surge to nearly $51 trillion as of the year 2033 — up from its current level of roughly $31.5 trillion. The federal debt as a share of US gross domestic product (GDP) would swell to a record 110% by 2033, up from 98% this year – shattering a dubious record that has stood since the end of World War II.The portion...

President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal contains nearly $4.7 trillion in new tax hikes on American individuals and businesses. Biden’s proposed tax hikes come just months after Democrats passed more than $700 billion in tax increases in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.Biden’s budget proposal is a direct violation of the President’s campaign pledge to not raise taxes on small businesses.Below is a list of tax hikes included in Biden’s budget proposal. This list will be updated as more details of Biden’s Budget become available.Highest Personal Income Tax Rate Since 1986. Biden’s budget calls for a top combined federal tax...

President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for 2024 includes billions of dollars spread across federal agencies to combat climate change, with a bulk of the investment going toward boosting conservation and disaster resilience, cutting pollution and advancing clean energy technologies. Some of Biden’s spending areas on climate include: $24 billion for climate resilience and conservation $16.5 billion for climate science and clean energy innovation $6.5 billion for energy storage and transmission projects $4.5 billion for jobs building clean energy infrastructure $3 billion for advancing adaptation finance $1.8 billion for environmental justice initiatives $1.2 billion for the Energy Department’s industrial decarbonization activities...

BIDEN EMPHASIZES FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY Biden’s budget covers the next 10 years. Overall, he expects an additional $4.7 trillion in tax revenues and $800 billion in savings from making changes to government programs. Biden also wants $2.6 trillion in new spending. That leaves him with an estimated $2.9 trillion reduction in the deficit. MINIMUM TAX ON BILLIONAIRES Biden frequently talks about making companies and the wealthy “pay their fair share,” and the budget is designed to further that goal. MEDICARE FUNDING BOOSTED A key trust fund that funds Medicare, which provides health care to older adults, is on track to become...

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s annual budget plan calls for roughly $5.5 trillion in tax increases over the next decade to offset proposed spending increases — including a massive 5.2% federal worker pay raise. The package, to be announced later Thursday, is headed for certain defeat in the Republican-held House of Representatives and comes as the GOP demands spending cuts without new taxes in a standoff with Biden over raising the federal debt ceiling later this year. “This is the start of a healthy dialogue,” White House budget director Shalanda Young told reporters on a morning conference call.

China announced it will boost its military budget by nearly $230 billion this year amid concerns it will launch an invasion of Taiwan. The money is set to 'boost combat preparedness and enhance military capabilities,' claimed Premier Li Keqiang ahead of a draft budget presented to the National People's Congress in Beijing. It means China's military spending will grow at its fastest pace in four years and take up a larger share of its economy, marking the reversal of a two-decade trend which has seen the nation prioritize growth over its military capabilities.

The Dollar-For-Dollar Deficit Reduction Act proposed by elected Republicans is a sham. It requires the executive branch to propose spending reductions over a ten-year period for the same amount the debt ceiling is raised. Let’s consider some cases for a minute. The deficit spending in 2022 was almost $1.4 trillion. In the first case, let’s assume the debt ceiling is raised by $1.4 trillion. This means the administration needs to have no spending reductions. And we continue to add to the debt by at least the $1.4 trillion. In the second case, let’s assume the debt ceiling is raised by...

California’s budget deficit may be billions of dollars larger than the already big number predicted by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, raising concerns about the Golden State’s fiscal future. Last month, Newsom announced that California faces a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the coming fiscal year. The figure represented a striking downturn from last year, when the state enjoyed a surplus of about $100 billion due to federal COVID relief and surging capital gains. While the predicted year-to-year drop-off seemed large, it may not have been large enough. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), a government agency that analyzes...

From the hardscrabble hills of western Pennsylvania to the hardknock blocks of Northeast Philadelphia, children are getting inferior educations in underfunded school districts with low property values and incomes. Crowded classrooms in the state’s 100 most poorly funded districts deny children, who may enter kindergarten a year behind their more affluent peers, the attention they need. Those districts, including South Allegheny, East Allegheny, New Castle, Sharon and Philadelphia, educate one-third of the state’s 1.5 million students, two-thirds of its Black students, and nearly 60% of its poor students. Leaky roofs, obsolete and unsafe buildings, and broken laptops plague many of...

Now it is the government's own numbers that show Joe Biden is misleading the American public when he boasts that he made a huge reduction in the nation's budget deficit. Biden repeatedly has claimed he has reduced the budget deficit by a trillion dollars – more than anyone else ever

Paxton filed the suit against Biden on Feb. 15 ... Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Joe Biden and his administration for breaking the Constitution in order to swiftly pass a trillion dollar spending package. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, claims that Biden unlawfully signed the Democrats' $1.7 trillion omnibus package into law in December because it was not legally passed in the House. Only 201 members were present when the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 was voted on by the House of Representatives in December 2022, and with half the members absent, the required quorum was not...