Free Republic

I went looking for an official source of information about the amount of US National Debt, and found a table maker that produces PDF's for each month end. Here's an example; https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-reports/mspd-entire/MonthlyStatementPublicDebt_Entire_202412.pdf That returns the US Treasury report on the balance as of 12/31/2024. Change the digits at the end (202412 change to 202503) and get March 31, 2024. And so on. So far, so good. According to the Treasury, the national debt at 3/31/2025 was $36,218,605. Then go to usdebtclock.org, and the national debt is shown as $36,720,xxx (the numbers keep changing as you watch). Since the Treasury website...

Wall Street is puking big time, and the sell buttons are working overtime whenever the word “tariff” passes from Donald Trump’s lips. If you listen to the fat cat community long enough, you’d think Trump has been in office four years rather than four weeks, and that a small trade surcharge on a car from Mexico is leading us into economic Armageddon. I’m no fan of tariffs for lots of reasons, including I hate paying too much for stuff, but I’ve also taken enough econ and studied markets long enough to know that they’re not the end of the world...

Carolyn Jones never thought it was controversial to herd her cattle to different parts of her 200-acre ranch in northeastern Mississippi to give the grass time to grow back between grazing. “This is really simple stuff we have been doing since the beginning of time,” said Jones, a lifelong farmer and the head of the nonprofit Mississippi Minority Farmers Alliance. About 40 percent of U.S. cattle ranchers already use this technique. It helps ranchers keep their grass healthier, but it also helps the environment. Last year, the Alliance won a USDA contract to educate other farmers about these long-standing conservation...

We’re only a little over one week into President Trump’s second term, and already the Press Secretary’s office has had to debunk three “fake news hoaxes.” “Debunking Latest Fake News Hoaxes,” reads the press release from The Office of Communications. “President Donald J. Trump has been subjected to more manufactured Fake News hoaxes than any president in history,” the memo explains, “and it hasn’t gotten any better in his second term.” It starts with the biggie: HOAX: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), and media outlets claim President Trump’s directive to pause radical, wasteful government spending means an...

California has invested a staggering $24 billion over the past five fiscal years to address homelessness, a figure that underscores the state’s urgent effort to curb this intractable crisis. Yet, as this spending has increased, so has California’s homeless population. In the 2021-22 fiscal year, when the homeless population was estimated to be 172,000, California spent $7.2 billion, which equated to nearly $42,000 per homeless individual. The spending includes housing and rental assistance, physical and mental health outreach, case management, and funds to purchase motels and other types of temporary housing. In a scathing report released in April, the California...

Russia's economy has defied sanctions in the two years since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022 — so much so that the World Bank is now classifying Russia as a "high-income country." On Monday, the World Bank announced it has upgraded Russia from an upper-middle-income country to a high-income country, according to a report from the financial institution's economists. "Economic activity in Russia was influenced by a large increase in military-related activity in 2023," World Bank economists wrote in their report. Russia's trade jumped by nearly 7% last year, while activities in the financial sector and construction grew by 6.6%...

The Congressional Budget Office reports the 2024 budget deficit will near $2 trillion.. In 2024, the federal budget deficit is estimated to reach nearly $2 trillion, according to new projections released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week. In February, the agency predicted that the deficit would only be $1.58 trillion. However, spending increases have caused the projected deficit to increase by $400 billion, a staggering 27 percent hike. According to the CBO, 80 percent of the spike in the deficit can be blamed on four sources of government spending. The largest source, responsible for $145 billion of the...

April 15 is usually Tax Day in the United States – the day by which your individual federal tax return has to have been filed, if you’re to avoid a late penalty. And if you’re in one of the many states with its own statewide income tax – 43 at last count – that usually shares the same deadline. By what right does the government take this money from us? That’s an easy one. The Constitution says it can. To be specific, the 16th Amendment authorized the federal government to collect income taxes, so it’s been legal for 110 years....

Wealth taxes are like a specter in search of a host, and an already overtaxed New England state may be the first to succumb. Vermont lawmakers want to tax residents’ unrealized gains, hoping to finally break the barrier that’s kept them from draining asset values year after year. The state’s top tax legislator has spent recent weeks pushing bills that would dial up taxes on high earners. The biggest reach is a proposal to tax the paper gains from assets above $10 million. The plan would slap Vermont’s 8.75% top income-tax rate on half of those gains. That means a...

For Tucker Carlson Colonel Douglas MacGregor lays out how much debt the federal government has pushed onto the workers of the US to pay for for foreign wars and open borders....

Former President Donald Trump swung left in his latest bizarre attack on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, on Tuesday accusing him of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare and calling him a “wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy” in an all-caps blast. ​Trump, 76, who announced Nov. 15 that he was seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and is expected to face his most significant primary challenge from DeSantis, initially touted his poll numbers showing him leading the 44-year-old governor before cribbing from Democratic attack ads of the past. “Great Poll numbers are springing forth for your favorite President,...

A top California lawmaker is proposing to spend $10 billion to help families buy homes in the state with some of America’s highest housing prices. Democratic State Senate Leader Toni Atkins on Wednesday unveiled details of a proposal she’s pushing to create a revolving fund that would provide interest-free loans for up to 30% of the purchase price of a home for low- and middle-income households. [snip] The median price for single family homes in California last year was $786,000, according to the California Association of Realtors, more than twice the nationwide average. [snip] Under the proposal, California would spend...

The bipartisan infrastructure legislation moving through Congress could end up on President Biden’s desk before we know it. The $1 trillion bill has reportedly cleared major hurdles in the Senate and will soon land before the House of Representatives. The president would almost certainly sign the bill, which has his support, and its bipartisan passage would represent a political victory for the Biden administration. At least, at first.The promised long-term economic benefits from the sweeping $1 trillion expenditure will likely never materialize, according to a new Ivy League analysis. This runs directly against the president’s promises that it would create...

... The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania a number of years ago developed a comprehensive and substantive platform for evaluating the federal budget. This model was built so that those who govern and those who are governed could have an accurate and reasonably unbiased analysis of federal fiscal activities. It is one of the most useful and effective tools around for figuring out just what the federal government and the various players who lead it in the Democratic and Republican parties are really up to. The conclusion, after reviewing the opening bids put forward by Biden and his...

Because of the coronavirus bailouts, the federal deficit is now expected to be $3.7 trillion for fiscal year 2020. This is a huge drag on Americans' earnings and retirement security. Coronavirus panic is hitting the global economy, and America is no exception. To patch over the shelter-in-place orders and compensate closed businesses, Congress has passed well more than $2.7 trillion in so-called stimulus, including subsidized loans to businesses, increased unemployment insurance, direct payments to Americans, and funding for hospitals and state and local governments.Because of this, the federal deficit is now expected to be $3.7 trillion for fiscal year 2020....

Title says all

<p>Congress and the media obsess endlessly over whether President Donald Trump should be impeached.</p> <p>Both ignore $23 trillion of bigger problems.</p> <p>That's how deep in debt the federal government is now, and because they keep spending much more than they could ever hope to collect in taxes, that number will only go up. It's increasing by $1 trillion a year.</p>

We don't care. You can check Pew or Gallup or any other polling company. We are running deficits that ought to make us nauseated with worry -- the federal deficit passed $1 trillion in September -- but we're not interested. Well, a majority of us anyway. About 48% of those polled by Pew in January said that reducing the deficit should be a top priority for the president and Congress. As recently as 2014, 72% of the public agreed with that statement. Republicans (54%) are in favor of reducing the deficit at higher rates than Democrats (44%), but concern has...

The more I follow the Democratic presidential campaign, the more I see how little I understand some people. After all, we can have differences when it comes to ideology, and we can aspire to different things in life. We can even have different understandings of what morality means. Still, there are things on which we should all agree: Because our government is $23 trillion in debt and its annual budget deficits are permanently heading north of $1 trillion, every American should agree that there isn't much space for more spending. And yet Sen. Elizabeth Warren promises that if she becomes...

There isn’t a dollar in existence that one or more of the Democrats running for president haven’t promised to spend on something. It doesn’t really matter on what, it’s already gone. Of course, your tax money is already spent, as is that of your children and a good chunk of what your grandchildren will earn; that’s what happens when you have a national debt surpassing $22 trillion. So what’s a few tens of trillions more? In the last debate, most of the candidates on the stage came out in favor of a wealth tax, under the banner of the rich...