Free Republic

If there’s anything I have learned since returning to Congress, it’s that talk is still cheap, progress is still slow, and our liberties continue to erode .... (snip) . . . compelled me to return to Washington and get back in the fight to restore fiscal sanity. Since being sworn in, I’ve had the opportunity to survey our problems .... It’s not pretty. (snip) Sadly, far too many politicians in Washington lack the courage to do something to fix our problems. (snip) . . . by the time I left Congress in 2001 to honor my term-limits pledge, we had...

Budget: Now that President Obama's anti-sequester PR campaign has imploded, he's trying to sucker the GOP into a tax-hiking "grand bargain." They should refuse, and instead demand Obama produce his own budget. For months Obama traveled around the country warning that disaster lay ahead if Republicans refused to replace the $84 billion in sequester cuts with more taxes. Their obstinacy, he said, would cause a "series of dumb, arbitrary cuts" that would throw people out of their homes, deny women access to preventive care, cause monumental flight delays, and on and on. Obama's scare tactics failed to sway the public,...

Since President Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated into office just over four years ago, Obama, the democrats, and a few spineless republican "leaders" in congress have increased the total combined national debt by more than six trillion dollars: Date                   Debt Held by the Public         Intragovernmental Holdings   Total Public Debt Outstanding 01/20/2009        6,307,310,739,681.66          4,319,566,309,231.42          10,626,877,048,913.08 02/28/2013      11,822,436,182,671.08          4,864,852,997,544.29          16,687,289,180,215.37 In this time period, the debt has...

On Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Sessions touted a government report that blew a $6.2 trillion hole in President Obama's promise that his signature health reform wouldn't add a dime to the deficit. According to the report by the Government Accountability Office, that promise rested entirely on several cost-control mechanisms in ObamaCare that almost no one thinks will work. [snip] Still, bad as this $6.2 trillion deficit boost is, the real figure is likely to be much higher, since the GAO is still being far too optimistic about the rest of ObamaCare. Here are five big assumptions the GAO makes that aren't...

Sequester: In his State of the Union speech, President Obama is sure to issue dire warnings about the automatic spending cuts resulting from the "sequester." But look closer, and the cuts are far less than meet the eye. As the March deadline for the sequester draws closer, Obama's rhetoric about the cuts it will impose grows more overheated. In his radio address over the weekend, he said they would be "a huge blow to middle-class families and our economy as a whole."

While Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been arguing that now is not the time for us to be worrying about the federal government’s debt, he does admit that a long term solution is necessary. “In the short run we can always inflate the currency as a means of defaulting on federal obligations,” Krugman said. “But in the long term there are significant demographic problems that require a real solution.” One of the significant demographic problems cited by Krugman was the aging population. “As people get older they tend to need more medical services,” Krugman recounted. “With our advanced...

Obamanomics: The economy shrank last quarter, the deficit topped $1 trillion last year, U.S. debt shot up $5 trillion in the past four, and joblessness is at 7.8%. Boy, President Obama sure inherited an economic mess, didn't he? According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the economy "unexpectedly" declined 0.1% in last three months of 2012, the first decline since early 2009. The Obama administration, naturally, tried to look for scapegoats, this time settling on Hurricane Sandy and Republican-induced uncertainty over the "fiscal cliff" outcome. But if that were the case, why was the administration running around late last year...

Remember all those mainstream news reports before the election about how President Obama's expansive spending plans would require massive tax hikes on everyone, not just millionaires and billionaires? Neither do we. But somehow after the election, reporters are finally admitting that Obama's budget numbers simply don't add up and that new taxes on the middle class — including a European-style value added tax — are "inevitable."

Excerpted "After witnessing the fighting of undeclared never ending wars, passage of freedom destroying legislation like the Patriot Act & NDAA, approval of pork barrel spending to the tune of hundreds of billions, rule by Executive Order, using ZIRP to extract hundreds of billions from senior citizen savers and give it to criminal Wall Street banks, forcing the American people at gunpoint to replenish the Wall Street banks with $700 billion after they had committed the greatest financial fraud in history, and a continuing trampling of the U.S. Constitution, the American people continue to remain willfully ignorant of the truth....

At his press conference this week, President Obama made it seem as though the job of getting the government's deficits under control is nearly done. "The consensus is we need about $4 trillion to stabilize our debt and our deficit," he told reporters, "which means we need about $1.5 trillion more." [snip] But a closer look at the numbers shows that Obama is exaggerating how much deficit reduction he's actually achieved, and is being decidedly Pollyannaish about the nation's still massive long-term budget gap and what will be needed to close it.

Deficits: Apparently, President Obama never got around to reading the final report of his own deficit commission. How else to explain his belief that federal spending isn't the cause of the nation's debt crisis? That's apparently what Obama told House Speaker John Boehner during their recent "fiscal cliff" negotiations. "At one point several weeks ago," Boehner told the Wall Street Journal, "the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.'" [snip] When it comes to federal spending, Obama is like the alcoholic who says that the only drinking problem he has is when he can't get a drink.

KRUGMAN: Erskine Bowles, Alan Greenspan, And The WSJ Editorial Board Are All Basically Members Of A Doomsday Cult Joe WeisenthalDec. 24, 2012, 5:55 AM We liked this note that was sent out by SocGen's Kit Juckes this morning: It wouldn't be Christmas without Paul Krugman telling the US government it's OK to spend money. Krugman thinks that anyone who worries about a disaster coming from the scale of US debt is a doom-mongerer. Especially the WSJ. That's snarky, but that is what Krugman's Christmas eve column is about. Essentially it's a reminder of one of his favorite topics: That the...

(Washington, D.C.) U.S. Congressman Paul Broun, M.D. (GA-10) today released the following statement in reaction to President Obama’s dismissal of Republican efforts to provide a solution to the looming fiscal cliff: “Democrats have basically told Republicans to either raise taxes, or go to hell,” said Broun. “Forcing us to choose between hurting families and small businesses or going off the fiscal cliff is not only counter-productive – it simply doesn’t make sense for righting our nation’s fiscal crisis. The Democrats’ math just doesn’t add up; there is no way to tax our way out of this mess. Even if they...

Weekend Edition Why I don't vote… and you shouldn't either Saturday, November 10, 2012 My good friend and intellectual mentor, Doug Casey, recently shared the five reasons why he doesn't vote. He typically re-publishes these thoughts every four years. Perhaps you've seen them before. While I agree with Doug in principle… I have a wholly different rationale for not voting. Given this week's election, I thought I'd tell you about it. The reason I don't vote (and you shouldn't either) is… Our current system of governance is nothing more than tyranny, and it's on track to destroy our country. Like...

It has been two days since the US election where President Obama was re-elected and both the House and Senate remained in the same hands. In other words, nothing changed. The reaction? Dow Jones Industrial Average The reaction was decidedly negative since the election signals more of the same policies under which the economy if foundering. Ten Year Treasury Yields Ten year Treasury yields have dropped indicating a rush to safety. Gold Prices Gold prices have risen a heck of lot faster than the stock market, particularly today. Silver Prices Often used as a defense against vampires and werewolves, silver...

The GOP needs to use their one big chit in the tax negotiation. They need to demand that included in this deal is increasing the national debt limit. In return for increasing the national debt limit they need to get something tangible. Something like no tax increase. They can not accept illusions of spending cuts that will never happen. They could link the debt ceiling to the current tax code and everytime the debt limit comes up, the tax code would too.

Three interconnected forces brought the working-class, inland Southern California city of San Bernardino to insolvency: a burst housing bubble and lethargic economic growth; high police and firefighter salaries mandated by the city’s charter; and compounding pension obligations. Bankruptcy should give San Bernardino leverage to deal with the last two, but the big, structural changes required will not be easy or pleasant. Absent such changes, though, salaries and pensions will continue to grow faster than the city’s revenues, crowding out most other government functions and services. San Bernardino offers a telling illustration of austerity’s causes and effects: a tragic failure to...

President Obama often talks about the need for a "balanced" approach to deficit reduction, by which he means tax hikes in addition to spending cuts. At the recent presidential debate, for example, he said, "We've got to reduce our deficit, but we've got to do it in a balanced way. Asking the wealthy to pay a little bit more along with cuts." The only problem with this approach is that the massive projected deficits over the next 10 years aren't the result of too few taxes. They are entirely the result of too much spending. Here's the proof.

It looks like Mitt Romney was on to something when he promised to fire Big Bird during his first presidential debate: Big Bird makes big bucks! Tax returns from PBS's Sesame Workshop show that the television show shelled out at least $314,072 for the actor behind Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. That makes Caroll Spinney, who has played everyone's favorite yellow-feathered friend since 1969, a true blue member of the One Percent. But Mr Spinney isn't even the highest paid member of the puppetry staff. Jospeh Mazzarino, who plays Murray, Stinky the Stinkweed, the Two-Headed Monster, Papa Bear and...