Free Republic

“Mr. Trump has promised working-class tax cuts and protection for working-class social insurance, such as Medicaid,” Hawley wrote. “But now a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans — call it the party’s Wall Street wing — is urging Congress to ignore all that and get back to the old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital and deep cuts to social insurance.” Hawley has consistently spoken up about his opposition to the House plan to use Medicaid cuts to pay for the party-line megabill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has been charged with finding at least $880 billion in federal spending...

Gold is in the middle of what looks like an unstoppable bull run. It has already punched through $4,000 an ounce. At the rate the price is rising, it may well go to $5,000 within a few weeks, and perhaps even $6,000 as the next year unfolds. There have been lots of different explanations for this, from the looming collapse of the dollar, to secret Chinese buying, to the conspiracy theories circulating on the wilder fringes of the internet, such a secret plot to re-establish the gold standard, or attempts to replace all the metal that is meant to be...

House Speaker Mike Johnson defended himself and fellow GOP leaders after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized them for lacking a plan to deal with the expiring COVID expansion of Obamacare subsidies. “There’s a lot of work that’s been done on that,” Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said Tuesday. “It’s implied as if this has been some sort of ignored issue. It’s not that at all.”Ms. Greene, Georgia Republican, took to social media on Monday to announce her support for extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies, which Democrats are demanding to reopen the government.It was a notable break from other right-wing lawmakers who...

Some estimates suggest that half of all white-collar jobs will disappear as artificial intelligence advances. How will older white-collar workers displaced in the AI revolution fare? Our recent book, “American Idle: Late-Career Job Loss in a Neoliberal Era,” summarizes interviews we conducted with 62 baby boomers who lost their white-collar jobs during another unemployment crisis: the 2008 Great Recession and its sluggish recovery. Statistics show that workers over age 50 experienced the highest rates of long-term joblessness. Their layoffs also coincided with a precarious stage of the life course: “too young to retire but too old to start all over,”...

Partisan bickering overshadows real questions about taxes and the size of America’s government.As the partial government shutdown enters its second week, neither party is leveling with the American people about the hard choices required to get federal spending off a fiscally ruinous trajectory.President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats used covid-19 to justify chasing the mirage of a European-style welfare state without raising the necessary taxes to pay for it. Now, prodded by the left, party leaders have shut down the government in a bid to permanently extend what was sold in 2021 as emergency subsidies to help people struggling during...

@SenRandPaul I joined @LlamasNBC on @NBCNews and made it clear: I refuse to add $2 trillion more to the debt, no matter which party demands it. Republicans and Democrats both flip-flop for politics. I won't back endless deficits or Biden-era spending levels.

Roughly 42% of younger working Americans — spanning Gen Z, millennials and Gen X — report having no spare savings after covering their basic living expenses, according to the analysis, which surveyed about 3,600 workers and 1,500 retirees. Among those just getting by, about three-quarters said they are struggling to save for retirement, the survey found. The share of U.S. workers in this precarious financial position has grown significantly since 1997, when 31% lived paycheck to paycheck, according to Goldman. The investment bank projects that figure could climb to well over half of Americans by 2033 as essentials like housing...

@RonPaul President Trump is considering "stimulus" checks (again). We should all remember the last time that President Trump sent out "stimulus" checks. It was the "CARES Act," which ignited the massive inflation that we're still suffering from today. How can a government that has no money, that racks up record deficits, be in a position to give out "rebates" anyway? They're not. Tariffs revenues (that Americans overwhelmingly pay) don't put the government into the black, and capable of giving "rebates." The government is way in the red. That means the "stimulus" checks will have to come from the Fed counterfeiting...

The Trump administration is planning to roll out the first tranche of bailout payments for farmers in the coming weeks, likely using billions of dollars in funding from an internal USDA account, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. But it won’t be enough: USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation fund — which President Donald Trump previously tapped to provide $28 billion in farm aid during his first-term trade war with China — has just $4 billion left in the account. Trump officials, including those at the Treasury Department, are looking at how to tap tariff receipts or other...

President Trump said Thursday he’s still weighing the idea of giving Americans up to $2,000 in rebates derived from the revenues his tariff agenda has generated. Trump’s proposal to share some of the hundreds of billions of dollars the federal government has collected since he slapped foreign nations with steep levies in April comes as the Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments in a case next month that will decide whether the president has the power to impose such sweeping global tariffs. “They’re just starting to kick in,” Trump said of the tariffs in an interview with One America...

THE PENTAGON — Shockwaves have rippled across Washington in recent days following surprise orders from Secretary of Defense (and also War and also Pew Pew) Pete Hegseth that the entirety of U.S. military leadership would muster aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday.“This gathering is of the highest secrecy and importance to our national security,” said Hegseth, “which is why I have ordered every general- or flag-grade officer assemble at a highly secure location on Tuesday, September 30, at 12:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, 10 digit grid 0033566203 on your Quantico 1:50,0000 special if you’ve got one. All hands, no...

The National Debt IssueAmerica’s national debt is a ticking time bomb, exploding right under our noses. As of September 2025, the gross national debt has ballooned past $37 trillion, a staggering figure that’s not just numbers on a ledger but a crushing burden on every hardworking American. Interest payments alone are gobbling up 17% of federal spending, sucking the life out of our economy like a vampire at a blood bank.But here’s the good news: President Donald J. Trump, in his triumphant return to the White House, is unleashing a crypto revolution that’s poised to slay this debt dragon. These...

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were accused of 'condescending and insulting' America's top generals and admirals at a highly anticipated summit on Tuesday. The president and Secretary of War hosted hundreds of military chiefs at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday, for a meeting they hoped would inspire the nation and revolutionize America's fighting force. But ex-Pentagon chiefs warned that the political speeches, which meandered through various topics from fat soldiers to Joe Biden's autopen, risked alienating the top brass. A former national security official told the Daily Mail that he found it 'incredibly condescending ... and a highly inappropriate...

WASHINGTON, Sept 30 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump warned congressional Democrats on Tuesday that allowing the federal government to shut down at midnight would allow his administration to take "irreversible" actions including shutting down programs important to them. "We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like," Trump said in remarks to reporters from the White House Oval Office."You all know Russell Vought," Trump added, referring to the director of the Office...

Peter Navarro, senior counselor to President Donald Trump for trade and manufacturing, during a special Founders Roundtable on Breitbart Fight Club said that President Donald Trump has proven the country could use tariffs to reduce its trade deficit.“We run chronic trade deficits which exceed a trillion dollars a year. Now, we’ve exported $18 trillion of wealth so far through the chronic trade deficit, and we’ve seen a reduction in our resilience, in our supply chains, our availability. It’s hurt our defense industrial base. It’s a national emergency in every possible way that you could think,” Navarro said in response to...

Hundreds of federal employees who were laid off following Elon Musk's cost-cutting measures through DOGE are being asked to go back to work. The employees were given until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement by the General Services Administration, which manages government workspaces. Anyone who accepts must report for work on Oct. 6 after what is being described as a seven-month paid vacation, during which the GSA has racked up high costs to stay in properties whose leases were slated for termination or were allowed to expire, reported The Associated Press. "Ultimately, the outcome was the...

The threat of a U.S. government shutdown surged on Friday, as the U.S. Senate rejected a short-term funding bill to keep federal agencies operating after September 30 and then left town for a week-long break. The lawmakers voted 44-48 to defeat a stopgap spending bill that would have kept federal agencies operating at current funding levels through November 21. The measure faced near universal opposition from Democrats, who demanded increased healthcare funding. Republicans said they could vote again on September 29, just a day before funding is due to expire, when senators return from a break.

Tariffs are rolling into the Treasury, but there is another source of rising revenue that is proving to be just as important: the stock market. On returns for tax year 2024 filed through mid-July, taxpayers reported $530 billion in net capital gains, up 65% from the prior year, according to new Internal Revenue Service data. The full effect of that on collections isn’t clear yet because of varying tax rates and returns that are still arriving, but there are strong signs that equity-market gains are turning into rising federal revenue. Individual income-tax payments outside of paycheck withholding—a category that includes...

The federal government's budget deficit reached $2 trillion for the current fiscal year as the deficit has widened by nearly $100 billion from last year. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its monthly budget update for August, which showed the deficit reached $1.989 trillion in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2025. That amounts to a $92 billion increase in the deficit when compared with the first 11 months of fiscal year 2024. Overall, federal spending was up by $391 billion from a year ago, an increase of 5%, while tax receipts rose $299 billion, or 7%, in...

Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War.