Free Republic

President-elect Donald Trump is considering moving the Department of Veterans Affairs toward privatization, a transition team official said Wednesday, a policy decision major veterans’ groups have said they would oppose.

As president, Donald Trump would sell off $16 trillion worth of U.S. government assets in order to fulfill his pledge to eliminate the national debt in eight years, senior adviser with the campaign Barry Bennett said. "The United States government owns more real estate than anybody else, more land than anybody else, more energy than anybody else," Bennett told Chris Jansing Sunday on MSNBC. "We can get rid of government buildings we're not using, we can extract the energy from government lands, we can do all kinds of things to extract value from the assets that we hold." In a...

It was certain to attract this sort of response, but Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan released his budget plan going forward that includes some sweeping changes to federal expenditures, including entitlement spending. One of those criticisms came from Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman New York Rep. Steve Israel. On Tuesday, immediately following Ryan’s release, Israel called it a “privatization scheme” and blasted it for addressing subsidies to oil companies. However, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday, Ryan fired back, admitting he saw this coming and called such criticisms “distortions and demagogueries.” Ryan specifically called out Israel...

Faced with a dismal political climate, Democrats appear ready to revive the hoary charge that Republicans seek to dismantle Social Security. But what's the Dems' answer? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has run TV ads attacking his opponent, Sharron Angle, for wanting "to wipe the program out." In Kentucky, Republican senatorial candidate Rand Paul is being criticized for remarks he made in favor of Social Security privatization -- in 1998. Several strategists are calling for Democratic candidates to tie their opponents to privatization efforts, including President George W. Bush's failed efforts to reform the troubled program. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi...

by Governor Mitch Daniels (as printed in the Northwest Times of Indiana, January 2, 2007) This week, after two years of study, competition and negotiation, I signed a contract to reform Indiana's welfare system. Although this proposal has been under constant attack for weeks, it is one of the most straightforward and obvious decisions our administration has faced. Here's why. Today's welfare system, as run by the monstrous bureaucracy known as the Family and Social Service Administration, is totally indefensible. Its clients know it: In surveys more than two-thirds of them condemn its customer service as poor. The federal government...

Patients who are forced to wait longer than doctors would advise for NHS treatment can travel abroad for care and reclaim the cost after a landmark court ruling. The European Court of Justice said yesterday that the NHS must refund the cost of foreign care if patients endure ''undue delays'' for surgery in Britain.

Social Security reform could be for Republicans the kind of donnybrook that health care reform was for Democrats in 1994. The magnitude of the political risk is staggering. On Capitol Hill, many Republicans wonder if they are being led off a cliff. What does President Bush think he's doing? Well, he says, there's a Social Security crisis. "The crisis is now," Bush said in December. But he must know this isn't true. Economically speaking, stabilizing Social Security's long-term finances is a task of only middling difficulty and importance; it requires no fundamental change in the program and need not be...

One of the most important political issues that will be debated this year is how to prevent the inevitable insolvency of our Social Security system. Although it is difficult to know which "experts" to believe when it comes to applying a date to the event, the majority of credible sources I've managed to find expect the system to begin paying out more money annually than it takes in within the next 20 years, if things continue unchanged. Dorcas R. Hardy believes that Social Security will become insolvent by as early as 2018, and if this former S. S. Commissioner is...

Candidates looking for a winning issue in the 2004 elections should pay close attention to a new Gallup poll. It shows that American voters still strongly support proposals allowing younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through individual accounts. Indeed, despite the sluggish stock market of the last few years, relentless Democratic attacks, and the failure of Republicans to provide real leadership on this issue, a stunning 62 percent of voters support individual accounts, up five points since summer. Moreover, the support for individual accounts cuts across nearly all political, ethnic, and age groups. One...

<p>School social worker Eileen Gallagher meets with Nathaniel Boyston, 6, at Winship Elementary in Detroit. Students are better served by in-house social workers and psychologists, she said, because they are involved in the school and know the teachers.</p> <p>DETROIT -- A proposal to privatize social workers and psychologists in Detroit schools is drawing fire from union officials and district employees.</p>