Free Republic

The key to solving the biggest problems The United States has a lot of fiscal problems. We are carrying far too much debt. We are facing far too many long-term entitlement obligations. We can’t fund existing government operations without constant borrowing. Most of the time, entitlement programs alone eat up most or all of the tax receipts taken in by the Treasury, leaving short-term debt to fund pretty much everything else.

Alternate headline: A Democrat's best friend is people who aren't paying attention The deficit is soaring. Economic growth is still sluggish. Syria is a disaster. ObamaCare is imploding. The Supreme Court just informed the president that, much to his dismay, he does have to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. So how about that job the Barack Obama’s doing? What say you, America? Oh . . . OK:

Remember how after Baltimore was half destroyed by rioters last summer Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s made headlines by claiming she gave Baltimore rioters "Space to Destroy?" She tried to walk back the unfortunate statement—but it only half-worked. In any case, as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, last week she was in (totally destroyed by Communism) Cuba leading a mayoral delegation which also includes Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans (among the murder capitols of the U.S.) "These meetings and visits will provide U.S. mayors and Cuban officials the opportunity to share best practices for providing city services in...

This year's Republican presidential race has generated an unusual number of unusually bad ideas -- Donald Trump on Muslims, Ted Cruz on carpet bombing, Marco Rubio on male footwear. It has also has produced one of the best: Jeb Bush's 4 percent plan. No, that wasn't his desired share of the vote in the Iowa caucus, where he got less than 3 percent. It's his goal for annual economic growth, which he argues would "restore the opportunity for every American to rise and achieve earned success." When Bush said last June, "There is not a reason in the world why...

There was a remembrance march held in Ferguson, Missouri that was supposed to be peaceful in nature. It started as such but ended differently. I must first ask, why was there a remembrance march for the one year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown? Was the intention to mark how the community in Ferguson has turned the corner and made improvements to address the real issues underlying the problems in the community? I have no time to play a politically correct game but will ask, why was there a protest march to remember a young black man who assaulted...

WASHINGTON - America's sluggish economy still looms over our land like a stationary dark cloud that shows no sign of moving away under the Obama administration.Our nation's second quarter growth rate, as measured by its gross domestic product, came in at a mediocre 2.3 percent -- better than the first three months of this year when the economy barely grew at a sickly 0.6 percent, but nothing to write home about.Many economists were forecasting a stronger economic revival nearer to 3 percent or more. But the economy was still being pulled down by the economic undertow of anti-investment, anti-growth, anti-job...

This week President Obama rolled out his budget proposal, which again demonstrates how incredibly out of step the president is with the rest of the country. Just a couple of weeks after outlining $320 billion in tax increases during his State of the Union address (and quickly backtracking on a plan to tax 529 college savings accounts), President Obama rolled out a budget proposal that would increase taxes by more than $1 trillion. Keep in mind that these proposals follow an election cycle that ousted tax hiking governors and swept governors promising to reduce taxes in Massachusetts, Illinois and Maryland....

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently used his weekly column to take aim at pro-growth tax reform and the Rich States, Poor States ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index. Krugman pulled no punches while dismissing the pro-growth impact of tax reform—Kansas’ recent tax reform specifically—seeing it fit to call those he disagrees with “charlatans and cranks.” Issues of projection by Krugman aside, he is wrong on the economic evidence for tax reform and wrong on Kansas. His errors, omissions, and innuendo in the place of facts warrants correction. First and most broadly, Krugman is wrong on the economic evidence analyzing...

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report this week contained mostly good news, our economic statistics have been shaky over the past few months. A major downward revision to economic gowth has a report showing that the economy contracted by almost 3% last quarter. It's possible that Obamacare is holding back the economy. Jared Meyer, policy analyst at Economics 21, wrote about how Obamacare's hurting economic growth: The Employer Mandate. The Act originally required businesses with over 49 full-time equivalent employees to offer insurance that met government requirements by January 1, 2014, but President Obama has delayed the mandate....

French economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century" has been inspiring a lot of comment and controversy. The English translation published last month zipped to No. 1 on amazon.com. It has given a lift to economists on the Left who have cheered on Barack Obama's flagging attempts to make income inequality a voting issue. They have hailed it as "truly superb" and "extraordinarily important." Others, not all on the Right, have taken a jaundiced view. "All wrong" was the verdict of one. "The main argument is based on two (false) claims," concluded another. Piketty's title echoes Karl Marx's...

<p>Although we often hear about how China is in hot economic competition with the U. S., we don’t hear as frequently how eerily similar their education system is to ours. “The Chinese government has always been concerned about being outmaneuvered” by its opponents and as a result, their history books are “not even 5% correct” and “children grow up with a certain view of the world and of China,” author Timothy Beardson said at the Cato Institute on February 6, 2014.</p>

This much has been determined yesterday -- The Fed could not handle a 2.8% 10 year Treasury rate. Nor could it handle any further increases. But consideration of the impact of this policy on the common man, along with the destruction of purchasing power and outright theft from the people who produce the services (and few goods remaining) in this nation was damned -- exactly as has been the case for the last three decades. What Bernanke did yesterday was guarantee a crash. He guaranteed it because he took what was a clear opportunity to take what had been priced...

How would America ever survive without the central planners in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve? What in the world would we do if there was no income tax and no IRS? Could the U.S. economy possibly keep from collapsing under such circumstances? The mainstream media would have us believe that unless we have someone "to pull the levers" our economy would descend into utter chaos, but the truth is that the best period of economic growth in U.S. history occurred during a time when there was no income tax and no Federal Reserve. Between the Civil War...

In the 21st century, during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. economy has not shown the ability to grow that it did in the last two decades of the 20th century, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, real average annual economic growth has been nearly cut in half so far this century compared to the last two decades of the last century; and specifically during President Obama’s time in office it has dropped to an average of just over 1 percent. …

In the sixth year of Barack Obama's presidency, America's job-starved economy remains weak, insecure and undernourished. That's not the economic picture reported on the nightly network news, where anchors report only "good" numbers and ignore bad ones. But the painful reality is that the economy is slowing down, even from its widely acknowledged anemic levels. The economic growth rate (as measured by the Gross Domestic Product) has fallen, and many economists have lowered their GDP forecasts to a snail's pace 1.5 percent annualized rate of growth for the past three months. Some say it's slowed to less than 1 percent....

While an economic slowdown is looming over the global economy, no one seems to care, as stock markets continue to reach new record-highs—giving investors false hopes of economic growth. But how long can this mirage actually last? The economic slowdown in the global economy I’m talking about is a worldwide pullback in growth. Take India as the first example. According to India’s Central Statistics Office, the Indian economy is growing at five percent—its slowest pace in a decade! The director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry was quoted late last week as saying, “With no visible pick-up in any...

Texas outperformed every other state in the nation on jobs and growth over the past decade, according to the latest annual report on state economic performance released Thursday by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Michigan came in dead last. The rankings are based on state GDP growth, population shifts, and changes in non-farm payroll jobs between 2001 and 2011. The ALEC report also finds that Utah has the best economic outlook this year, and Vermont the worst.

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's failed job policies are facing bitter criticism from African-American leaders who say black unemployment has grown worse under his presidency. After four years of holding their tongues and remaining quiet in the face of sharply rising black unemployment and record poverty, political leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus to the NAACP have begun to open fire on the White House. Obama won 96 percent of the black vote in 2008 and about the same percentage in 2012, despite a worsening jobless crisis among African-Americans. At 14 percent for adults and 43.1 percent for 16-to-19-year-old teenagers, blacks...

What parts of America have been growing during these years of sluggish economic growth? Answers come from comparing the Census Bureau's just-released estimates of metropolitan area populations in July 2012 with the results of the Census conducted in 2010. The focus here is on the 51 metro areas with populations of more than 1 million where 55 percent of Americans live, most of them of course not in central cities but in suburbs and exurbs. Two growth champs stick out -- Austin and Raleigh. A half-century ago, neither of them amounted to much. The counties now in metro Austin had...

How can anyone take President Obama seriously when he tells us our national debt is no big deal? Well, we have to take him seriously, because, unserious thinking or not, he has serious power, including the power to obstruct progress on reducing the debt. I'm not making this up, of course, which is too bad because it illustrates why it is so hard for Republicans to work with this man. He neither views the fiscal world from the same lens nor shares the goal of significant debt reduction. In an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, Obama said, "We don't...