Free Republic

Technology’s rapid advance over the past few decades has brought an era of unprecedented communication among Americans. With video chat, people separated by thousands of miles can interact as if they’re in the same room. Small business owners can pay bills with the click of a mouse. The original online communications technology—e-mail—has become so much more. And there’s a government agency that is not happy about this The U.S Postal Service is in crisis. Mail volume peaked in 2006, and they have been losing business—and more importantly, money—ever since. As an arm of the federal government, taxpayers should be worried...

Rep. Paul Ryan made a forceful case for his Path to Prosperity budget this morning and blasted the argument that President Obama outlined in a speech in downtown Washington, DC. He highlighted the irreconcilable differences between his plan and the President's, while admitting he'd been tricked into thinking that Democrats were ready to have a serious conversation about America's entitlement crisis and fiscal future. "We realized that this wasn't about building bridges. It was about partisanship. What we got yesterday was the opposite of what he said was necessary to is this problem." Ryan arrived, as usual, flanked by...

Mother Jones has obtained and released video of Mitt Romney saying some things that Americans and the media will no doubt take uncharitably. There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they...

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino wants to restrict a single private business, Chick-Fil-A, from opening any franchises in Boston. His reported remarks were, “Chick-fil-A doesn’t belong in Boston. You can’t have a business in the city of Boston that discriminates against a population. We’re an open city, we’re a city that’s at the forefront of inclusion.” Chick-Fil-A has come under fire from progressive groups for donating millions of dollars to pro-family organizations over the past few years. This, according to Mayor Menino, counts as discrimination. Meanwhile, the National Organization for Marriage is promoting "Eat at Chick-Fil-A Day" for Wednesday of this...

The Congressional Budget Office released their analysis of the group of deficit-fighting policies known as the "fiscal cliff." The big takeaway: completely averting the contraction that would occur in 2013 and 2014 would cost $1.16 trillion - entirely deficit-financed. There would certainly be some economic benefits to all of this, however. The CBO has a wide range of estimates for the positives - between 0.8% and 5% growth in real GDP, and between 1.1 million and 5.8 million new jobs. There are a lot of caveats here, as it's an incredibly wide range of estimates, but there would certainly be...

Joe Klein: "Bigoted" If You Don't Think Obama's Intelligent - The Chris Matthews ShowOn Chris Matthews' weekend talk show, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell and Time Magazine's Joe Klein teamed up to insulate President Obama from attack, insinuating that questioning the President's intelligence and work ethic in the wake of a lackluster debate performance is racist. First up, Andrea Mitchell recounted an exchange she had with Romney campaign co-chair John Sununu in which Sununu said Obama "revealed his incompetence, how lazy and detached he is, and how he has absolutely no idea how serious the economic problems of the country are."...

The Obama Administration proposal to fix the "fiscal cliff" coming at the end of the year called for $1.6 trillion in tax hikes over current policy. House Speaker John Boehner said he was "flabbergasted" when presented with the proposal this week. Boehner tells "Fox News Sunday" that after Geithner briefed him privately on Thursday, he looked at Geithner and said, "You can't be serious." Boehner called it "silliness" that the White House was, among other things, asking Congress to give up its power to set the nation's debt limit. Earlier today, Geithner insisted that the Obama Administration wouldn't relent on...

After a monumental 2010 midterm election that saw them swept from power, Congressional Democrats are fantasizing again about holding the levers of the House of Representatives. Politico's Arena has a discussion among both Democrat and Republican legislators that sees a surprising optimism for Democrats. This comes in the wake of John Boehner putting Dems' chances at about one-in-three. Democrat Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio thinks the Ryan budget will be the GOP's millstone, claiming they want to "dismantle" Medicare. (If only, right?) The hat-loving Rep. Frederica Wilson dips into delusion, saying that Republicans "are intentionally starving efforts to jump start...

President Obama proposed tax hike contains a lot to dislike, but what hasn't gotten much attention is the tax hike on savings and investments. While the marginal income tax rate will rise from 35% to 39.6% for top income-earners and small business owners, the proposed tax hike on capital gains and dividends could cause the most long-term economic damage. That's not to downplay the rise in marginal rates. It could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next few years. More universally acknowledged by economists, however, is the economic harm that savings and investment taxes do. In the Tax...

Sequestration Is the Worst Option Except for All the Other Options Both Democrats and Republicans have been roundly criticizing the security and economic effects of sequestration and, at the same time, taking very little action. The only logical conclusion is that both parties agree that sequestration is an awful, terrible, harmful set of policies - except the other proposed replacements are worse. President Obama said "these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy." Speaker Boehner, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said "there's nothing wrong with cutting spending that much... but the sequester is...

It's been eleven years since terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, and the lessons have not been forgotten. In the intervening years, the United States' foreign and domestic security policy has been revamped and improved, and we have not suffered another attack on American soil. President George W. Bush's words to a joint session of Congress mere days after the atrocities echo with a message of vigilince, tolerance and thoughtfulness. I will excerpt them here, but highly recommend reading them in full. On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country....

President Obama has been on a blitz while pushing what seems to be an evergreen priority for Democrats these days: "infrastructure investment." In his State of the Union speech, President Obama spoke of Merica's "deteriorating roads and bridges" and proposed what he called a "Fix-It-First" program that would see the government hire construction workers to work on America's infrastructure. This worry is overblown. The Reason Foundation put out a report this week that found America's infrastructure is in fine shape, though there's certainly work to be done. All 50 states lowered their highway fatality rates from 1989 to 2008...

President Obama cut his Hawaiian Christmas vacation short in order to come back to Washington, D.C. to, supposedly, hammer out a deal with Congress in order to address the looming fiscal cliff. There's only one problem: much of Congress won't be there. The House of Representatives adjourned Thursday afternoon, only hours after President Obama touched down in Washington, D.C. While it was initially reported that they wouldn't be back until Monday, December 31 - the last day to totally avert the fiscal cliff - Jake Sherman discovered they'd be back in an emergency on Sunday. House Republican leaders are bringing...

Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave an interview on Good Morning America in which he defended his tax plan from conjecture that it would force him to raise taxes on middle-income Americans. In responding to interviewer George Stephanopoulos, Romney said, "No one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is (to) keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers... No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less." The left-wing media sniffed out a storyline: by dropping the last two words from that statement, it looks like Mitt Romney thinks that middle-class Americans make...

Comedian Adam Carolla has never been one to censor what comes out of his mouth. The gift of gab took him from humble beginnings in economically destitute North Hollywood to dizzying heights inthe entertainment industry, where he could afford to move a few miles away. It's a story of hard work and success that comes through in his recent book Not Taco Bell Material, a chaotic tour that takes readers from Carolla's early years to how he finally found his calling - and his success. Carolla's disdain for the politically-correct culture of sensitivity has made him an unlikely but powerful...

The Obama campaign has a cringe-inducing propaganda slideshow called "The Life of Julia" intended to illustrate how the Obama Administration's policies will give government help to a young woman as she is educated, works, starts a family and retires. If you had to stifle a guffaw, you're not alone. Yes, the Obama Administration's policies alone can be the savior for American children everywhere - all it takes, apparently, are piles and piles of taxpayer money thrown around recklessly. And by the end, children will still be able to retire and live comfortably on the totally-stable programs of Medicare and Social...

This week, when speaking at children's toy K'NEX factory in Pennsylvania, President Obama urged the House of Representatives merely to pass what Harry Reid's Senate has passed and send him the bill. The Senate has already passed a bill to keep income taxes from going up on middle-class families. That’s already passed the Senate. Your member of Congress like Allyson and Chaka, other Democrats in the House, they're ready to go. They're ready to vote on that same thing. And if we can just get a few House Republicans on board, we can pass the bill in the House. It...

Internal polling leaked to the media today show a close but definitive lead for the Romney campaign. Toby Harnden at the Daily Mail got the scoop: Mitt Romney is ahead by a single percentage point in Ohio - the swing state that could well decide the election - according to internal polling data provided to MailOnline by a Republican party source. Internal campaign polling completed on Sunday night by campaign pollster Neil Newhouse has Romney three points up in New Hampshire, two points up in Iowa and dead level in Wisconsin. Most startlingly, the figures show Romney and Obama deadlocked...

While President Obama exhorts Americans to support tax hikes on high income individuals, families and businesses, he could stand to look inside the halls of the White House for some extra revenue. Andrew Malcolm over at Investor's Business Daily points us to the hard numbers: three dozen Obama executive advisers and aides owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes - and federal workers as a whole owe the IRS $3.4 billion in unpaid taxes. A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in...

A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reminds Americans that, contrary to the narrative that huge deficits and debt are merely a recent product of the Great Recession, the problem began over forty years ago. Daniel Thornton, the St. Louis Fed's Vice President and economic adviser, finds what conservatives have been saying all along is true: it's steadily increasing government spending, not a lack of tax revenues, that's causing all of this. [A]fter 1970, both revenues and expenditures increased on average relative to the previous two decades; however, revenue increased marginally while expenditures increased significantly... on...