Free Republic

The White House on Friday issued a memo to state and local governments warning of potential consequences should Congress fail to raise the nation's debt ceiling in the coming days. Biden administration officials warned billions of dollars in state aid and federal funding for state-run programs could be stopped if a deal isn't reached, including disaster relief money, Medicaid programs and child nutrition benefits. "The U.S. economy has just begun to recover from the pandemic and a manufactured debt ceiling crisis would threaten the gains we’ve made and the future recovery. If the U.S. defaults on its obligations, the ripple...

Renowned economist Laurence Kotlikoff recently testified at the U.S. Senate about the runaway U.S. budget. How bad is it? Kotlikoff says, “I told them the real (2014) deficit was $5 trillion, not the $500 billion or $300 billion or whatever it was announced to be this year. Almost all the liabilities of the government are being kept off the books by bogus accounting. The government is 58% underfinanced. Social Security is 33% underfinanced. So, the entire government enterprise is in worse fiscal shape than Social Security is, but they are both in terrible shape.” So, how much is America on...

"It is critically important that Congress act before the limit is reached so that citizens and investors here and around the world can remain confident that the United States will always meet its obligations," Geithner said. Oh, thank God! Our leaders have finally - FINALLY! - recognized the critical need to bring in some semblance of fiscal sanity to our federal government. Treasury Secretary Geithner is at last demanding that Congress put its clown-shoe-clad foot down and insist that we finally begin coming to grips with our $11.6 trillion debt. I take it all back. Everything I said about these...

n Part I, I made the argument that any woman who is married to a good man and who wants a happy marriage ought to consent to at least some form of sexual relations as much as possible. (Men need to understand that intercourse should not necessarily be the goal of every sexual encounter.) In Part II, I advance the argument that a wife should do so even when she is not in the mood for sexual relations. I am talking about mood, not about times of emotional distress or illness. Why? Here are eight reasons for a woman not...

This is the pension squeeze companies aren't talking about: Even as many reduce, freeze or eliminate pensions for workers -- complaining of the costs -- their executives are building up ever-bigger pensions, causing the companies' financial obligations for them to balloon. Companies disclose little about any of this. But a Wall Street Journal analysis of corporate filings reveals that executive benefits are playing a large and hidden role in the declining health of America's pensions. Among the findings: • Boosted by surging pay and rich formulas, executive pension obligations exceed $1 billion at some companies. Besides GM, they include General...

We can usually sympathize with one or another party to a dispute: one is usually more in the right—or less in the wrong—than the other. But with the breakdown of accepted conventions, it increasingly happens that neither side arouses our sympathies. Take a recent case in Sweden, where a lesbian couple wished to have children. An understanding and liberal-minded male friend agreed to donate his sperm, and three children were born to one of the two women between 1992 and 1996. But then relations between the two women deteriorated, and they split up. The mother of the children found herself...

Warnings of a financial crisis in the nation's worker pensions system are overstated, an industry group said Friday as Congress prepared legislation to overhaul the system to protect future retirees' benefits. The liabilities of the federal agency that guarantees worker pensions, estimated at $23.3 billion at the end of 2004, are inflated by excessively low interest rate assumptions and overly conservative investment strategies, according to a report prepared for the American Benefits Council, which represents companies with defined benefit pension plans. There's no dispute that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. has inherited large liabilities in recent years and a change...

The REAL ID Act has many Americans, especially civil libertarians, up in arms. They are concerned that "Big Brother" has crossed the fine line between security and intrusion. While we are all well advised to guard against an ever-intrusive government, it serves no good purpose to denigrate a piece of legislation simply because special interest groups are attempting to persuade us into believing there is something sinister afoot. "We the People" have a responsibility to ascertain the facts about any given issue before we storm the village square, flaming torches in hand. This concept is called civic responsibility and our...

US: Iran is in breach of nuclear obligations September 09 2003 at 01:21PM Vienna - The United States said on Tuesday that Iran had clearly violated its United Nations nuclear safeguards obligations, but has agreed to give Tehran one last chance to come clean about the full extent of its nuclear programme. "The United States believes that the facts... would fully justify an immediate finding of non-compliance by Iran," US Ambassador to the UN in Vienna, Kenneth Brill, said in a written text of a speech to the UN nuclear watchdog's governing board. Brill was referring to Iran's UN Safeguards...