Free Republic

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn has released a breakdown of how much the federal government forgoes in tax revenue due to various credits and deductions that benefit everything from NASCAR owners to gamblers. It's a fairly comprehensive analysis that should get bipartisan support, but one of the categories that Sen. Coburn targets to raise taxes from may be surprising: "the rich." Coburn highlights $100 billion in tax revenue that could be raised over the next ten years by ending some of these deductions only on millionaire households. Over the 2006-2009 time period, Coburn notes, millionaires deducted over $20 billion in gambling...

Speaker of the House John Boehner has recently touted a list of 88 economists who warn against the expiration of tax cuts on high-income earners. These economists came together from some of the country's top universities, think-tanks and business organizations to write that the expiration of the tax cuts pushed by President Obama "will hurt the economy and must be stopped before it goes into effect." Speaker Boehner also touted a study from Ernst and Young conducted for the National Federation of Independent Businesses that found that allowing tax rates to go up on high-income Americans could destroy up to...

President Obama is on his way back to Washington, as the Associated Press reports that he's "cutting short his traditional Christmas holiday in Hawaii, planning to leave for Washington on Wednesday evening... expected to arrive in Washington early Thursday." Most Americans probably won't sympathize that the President has a short vacation - after all, at work, he didn't get that big project finished in time for the holidays. The elements of the fiscal cliff can be roughly divided into four categories: defense spending cuts, non-defense spending cuts, income tax hikes, and payroll tax hikes. Of these, what has gotten the...

The deal that Congress came to on the fiscal cliff last week was a combination of half-measures, compromise, and kicking-the-can that nobody seemed to like but was overwhelmingly approved. Most of the meaures that constituted the cliff stood poised to harm the economy over the next two years - and Congress' failure to offset the cost of averting the cliff will result in a worse economy in the long run. As Americans everywhere found out with their first paychecks of the new year, Congress failed to reauthorize the temporary payroll tax cut that expired. This could result in between 300,000...

Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) introduced an alternative gun bill this morning that would replace the current Senate proposal from Chuck Schumer and would replace the Manchin-Toomey background checks legislation. The proposal is the "Protecting Communities and Preserving the Second Amendment Act." This Cruz-Grassley proposal would "improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, increase resources for prosecutions of gun crime, address mental illness in the criminal justice system, and strengthen criminal law by including straw purchasing and illegal firearm trafficking statutes." Grassley put an emphasis on the mental illness part of the bill. "We’ve put together...

The high-profile American prison camp in Cuba used to house what the U.S. government considers to be some of the world's most dangerous terrorists also happens to be the world's most expensive prison, as Reuters reports: The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner. By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about...

Over at Investors Business Daily, Jed Graham writes about "the deficit chart that should embarrass budget hawks," which shows that the federal deficit has been shrinking in the last two years and is projected to shrink further this year: Graham writes that the draw-down in federal spending puts a precarious economic recovery at risk. That's certainly a take in line with conventional Keynesian economic analysis - the Congressional Budget Office has similarly projected this year's sequester to knock 0.6% off of projected GDP growth and cost 750,000 jobs by the end of the year. Indeed, the current policy environment sees...

Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee finally received yesterday what they had demanded for months — and it may have turned into an anti-climax. The White House allowed access to internal e-mails of the Obama administration regarding the preparation of talking points for Susan Rice after the attack on our Benghazi consulate, which some suspected would show that the Obama administration had changed the information to downplay terrorism as the basis of the attack. According to Chad Pergram at Fox, though, the e-mails don’t show anything like that (via Kevin Glass): Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee today received a...

Throughout the debate over if and how to replace the sequestration spending cuts that have officially gone into effect, President Barack Obama pushed for what he called a "balanced" plan of spending cuts and tax hikes to attack deficit reduction, and scolded his Republican antagonists for not agreeing to his proposed tax hikes. It's been a common theme for the President for a couple of years now - acknowledging that deficit reduction is a priority while continuing to push for "balance." Expect to see it further in the coming debate over an operating budget for the federal government. Barack Obama...

The Congressional Budget Office released updated projections today to find that the federal budged deficit is smaller than at this point last year, and smaller than at any time since the 2008 financial crisis. There are three main reasons for that: the slowly-improving economy is putting more people back to work, which means fewer safety net payments and more tax revenue; defense spending cuts; and the tax hikes from January 1 2013 have gone into effect. Indeed, it's not the spending side of the ledger that has shrank the budget deficit, but the tax side. Projected outlays for the first...

It went largely unnoticed at the end of last week due to the Obama scandalpalooza, but the Congressional Budget Office's score of President Obama's budget was released on Friday afternoon. The short summary is that a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts would decrease the budget deficit over the next four years, but the Obama budget does very little on entitlement reform and the coming tsunami of entitlement spending pushes the government ever more into the red. The Associated Press' summary led with "Obama budget cuts deficits by $1.1 trillion" but, as Nick Gillespie points out, delving down into...

Obama's 2009 inauguration was bolstered by the feelings of "hope and change" that boosted the President to electoral victory. His official inauguration committee eschewed corporate donations back then, but times have changed dramatically. The Presidential Inauguration Committee set a goal of raising $50 million for Barack Obama's second inauguration, but have turned to big corporations and big labor unions in order to make it there. AT&T, Bank of America, FedEx, Microsoft and Coca-Cola are all on the official list of inauguration donors this year. Joining those corporations are the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Postal Workers Union, the...

As the Senate moves toward a comprehensive gun control bill that would include extensive background checks that would threaten the legality of private transactions, House Republicans are taking a different tack on a gun bill: House Republicans' focus on mentally ill criminals has become sharper in recent days, as a bipartisan plan to expand background checks on prospective gun buyers gained momentum in the Democrat-led Senate - thanks in part to emotional calls for action in Washington by family members of victims of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting. Boehner has pledged that the House will act on any gun bill...

Paul Ryan, former GOP Vice Presidential nominee and author of the landmark "Path to Prosperity" GOP budget proposal, has been working behind the scenes to try to persuade both GOP leadership in the House of Representatives and members of the conservative rank-and-file to take up the Senate comprehensive immigration proposal that's on the cusp of a final vote. With Senate passage of a sweeping immigration bill imminent, Ryan has been meeting with House conservatives to persuade them that reform of the immigration system, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, is an economic necessity and critical to fixing the...

Two weeks ago a Sonoma State University student was ordered by one of the Seawolves’ lunatic supervisors to remove her cross necklace because some tender moron, who goes to that liberal madrasa, might get their panties in a wad. Yep, the overseer thought the cross accoutrement was vulgar. This is the same school that, with their easily offended students, put on The Vagina Monologues last March 9th, 2013. Let me see if I have this right: a pretty gold cross necklace on a blonde co-ed is nasty and a yarbling, six-foot feminist yapping about rape, mutilation, masturbation and orgasms is...

Campaigning in Puerto Rico today, Rick Santorum said that Puerto Ricans needed to adopt English as their official language if they wanted to make a serious push for U.S. statehood. Santorum is in Puerto Rico making his pitch for the GOP's primary on Sunday. "Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law," Santorum said. "And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal...

>Yes, we lost. But I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to say that ACORN stole the election, do you? PPP's first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard...and also declining in numbers. 49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore. Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they...

Modest spending cuts that were put into place March 1 due to sequestration have mostly failed to result in the economic doom predicted by Keynesians. Now the defense industry is working to undo those cuts. Jeremy Herb of The Hill has reported on lobbying industries going up to Capitol Hill, redoubling their efforts to restore budget cuts: Cord Sterling, vice president of legislative affairs for the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), said his group is working to articulate the damage from the cuts that are now beginning to take hold. They remain hopeful that a fix is on the horizon. ......