Free Republic

Don’t look now, but we are just 16 days away from the December 13 deadline for House and Senate budget negotiators to reach an agreement on a 2014 budget and avoid another potential government shutdown. Okay, December 13 is less a deadline than a suggestion. The current continuing resolution (CR), the product of October’s government shutdown, doesn’t actually expire until January 15, giving Congress an additional month to come to an agreement. But the December 13 date is still important, because the House is scheduled to recess from the 13th until January 7, with the Senate getting back one day...

Federal workers look like they could be the big losers if House and Senate budget conferees reach a deal. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) are working behind closed doors to reach a deal that would replace some of the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester with other reductions. They are believed to be looking at hiking federal worker employee retirement contributions, which would effectively lower federal pay. The savings would be used to prevent sequester cuts to the Pentagon and non-defense discretionary spending. Unions representing workers are worried about the cuts already on the table....

WASHINGTON – The Department of Defense is seriously looking at eliminating all of the the military’s remaining commissaries as a budget-cutting measure, but the action, to begin in 2015, would cut one of the basic benefits allotted to military families. Since DOD efforts to shut down the 178 stores statewide and another 70 overseas require congressional approval, there promises to be stiff opposition among lawmakers who are reluctant to cut benefits for the military. There also is concern that elimination of the commissary benefit for service personnel who already receive comparatively lower pay when compared with civilian counterparts could negatively...

The Tea Party/Republican House majority was elected in 2010 to stop the runaway Obama Progressive Democrat big government spending spree........Federal spending soared from $2.655 trillion in 2006,when the Democrat Congress was elected to replace the Republican Congress, to $3.6 trillion in fiscal 2011, reflecting the last spending legislation adopted by that completely Democrat Congress in the prior year, an increase of 36% in just four years of control.But after the new Tea Party/Republican House majority forced a major budget showdown in 2011,total, actual, nominal federal spending actually declined in fiscal 2012 to $3.54 trillion. Such an absolute decline rarely ever...

If the budget negotiations succeed, Democrats should insist on a full-year appropriation for HHS, not just to smooth the rocky implementation of Obamacare but to restore funding to badly damaged programs and agencies like Head Start and the National Institutes of Health. “It’s a disaster. A disaster if we continue with the yearlong sequester and continuing resolution,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Labor-H bill, on the Senate floor during the shutdown. Failing a full-year HHS budget, Democrats should insist on restoring HHS funding to its pre-sequestration levels. Put another way, they...

President Obama told FBI agents on Monday that he would fight to reverse sequester cuts that have trimmed the agency's budget, declaring that the "least we can do" for those who put their lives on the line was make sure "operations are not disrupted because of the politics in this town." "I'll keep fighting for those resources because our country asks and expects a lot from you, and we should make sure you've got the resources you need to do the job, especially when many of your colleagues put their lives on the line on a daily basis, all to...

Republican harmony over new budget talks is already starting to break down, days before a negotiating committee is scheduled to meet for the first time. The split for the GOP is over whether they should put revenue increases on the table – a no-go for many in the Republican rank-and-file – as they shoot for their longtime goal of restraining entitlement spending. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), one of four House GOP conferees, said multiple times this week he could back new revenues if it helped to get a deal, most recently in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “The reality is,...

Saying there will be no grand bargain in the House-Senate budget conference involving spending cuts to entitlement programs, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed everyone is “willing to pay more” in taxes. When asked by a Nevada Public Radio host what Republicans would have to concede to get Medicare and Social Security cuts on the table, Reid made it clear he is more interested in getting rid of the only cuts to actual spending seen thus far — sequestration, as reported by Roll Call. “On sequestration, we’ve done one year of sequestration. It has been brutal,” Reid said. “The only...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: According to the Heritage Foundation, the regime's caught in a new Obamacare dilemma. "Remember sequestration? Those automatic budget cuts that went into effect when Congress failed to do real budgeting a couple of years ago?" Well, guess what? Sequestration is running into Obamacare now. "Both laws have been around for awhile, but the Obama Administration hasn’t done anything to prepare for their collision," which is beginning to happen. "The cuts are hitting a set of subsidies that were supposed to help pay deductibles and co-pays for lower-income Americans with Obamacare coverage." Did you know that? Yes! The...

Remember sequestration? Those automatic budget cuts that went into effect when Congress failed to do real budgeting a couple of years ago? It’s hitting Obamacare now. Both laws have been around for awhile, but the Obama Administration hasn’t done anything to prepare for their collision. The cuts are hitting a set of subsidies that were supposed to help pay deductibles and co-pays for lower-income Americans with Obamacare coverage. An Obama official pledged there would be a plan before the Obamacare exchanges opened on October 1, but that didn’t happen.

Sherlock Holmes famously solved a mystery by noticing the dog that did not bark. In the recent government shutdown/debt ceiling fight, there was a five-letter dog that didn't bark: T-A-X-E-S. Democrats insisted they wouldn't negotiate until they negotiated, and they insisted that a government shutdown was unprecedented although it was the 17th such shutdown since people started counting under the current budget rules in the late 1970s. But if you read their lips, the two words that were never enunciated, even silently, were "new taxes." This is something new. For more than 30 years, income tax rates have been...

America has shown that stimulus is pointless — how can a poor person spend himself to prosperity? All the drama coming out of Washington in the last few weeks has obscured some seriously good news: federal government spending is falling. And not at a trickle: think the White Cliffs of Dover. Not since the economic boom following 1945 have Americans seen such a rapid decline in the government’s claim on the nation’s resources — falling by a welcome $94 billion over two years. You need to go back to the end of the Korean war to find a time when...

The fight over the government shutdown may have come to an ignominious end, but the reprieve from Washington budgetary politics will be short-lived. The latest continuing resolution will expire on January 15, while we will hit our debt ceiling again on February 7. In the meantime, a budget conference committee, headed by Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.), is supposed to reach an agreement by December 13. While the shutdown fight was so traumatic that many Republicans may prefer that the budget debate simply go away, these negotiations are as crucial as ever. Yes, a...

The Republicans are desperately losing the government shutdown battle and they’re embarrassing themselves by continuing to fight. It begs many questions, but most importantly, why does the GOP continue to fight a battle with no clear goal at the expense of not just their party, but the fate of then entire U.S. government? Maybe it’s because they’re actually winning. Though the media has largely painted the GOP as the reckless, kamikaze caucus, Peter Beinart argues in a column for The Daily Beast that Republicans are not only in perfect control of the government shutdown fight, but that they’ll win in...

The sequester cuts are going nowhere. A "blue ribbon" committee was set up in the budget/debt ceiling deal to look at the sequester cuts. Yet another "blue ribbon" committee - like the joke of a committee, the Super Committee. Obama said on February 19, 2013 that he would VETO any attempts to change the sequester cuts. So, he himself would have to take the lead on getting rid of the sequester cuts. And he can't blame the cuts on Congress again, either. Woodward showed in a fantastically accurate Washington Post article that Obama and Lew were the architects of the...

The heads of the world’s largest defense companies are working to reclaim their clout in Congress after failing to push lawmakers to tackle sequestration as part of an agreement to end the latest standoff. The announcement of the deal to reopen the government and raise the nation’s debt ceiling made clear just how far the industry has fallen in its influence on Capitol Hill. Addressing the Senate on Wednesday, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) touted the accord as a victory for conservatives precisely because it continues sequestration, the automatic spending cuts that have hit the Pentagon and the sprawling defense...

I know the RINOS caved on debt limit and defunding Bastardcare™. But did we lose the sequester too? Anyone know?

House Republicans will vote Tuesday on a more conservative version of the Senate fiscal deal that would include a delay of Obamacare's medical device tax and scrapping of subsidies for members of Congress and top Cabinet officials, lawmakers and aides said. The bill would modify an emerging Senate plan crafted by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), but retain that deal's extension of the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. It would also keep the Senate measure's plan of funding the government through Jan. 15 and immediately end the shutdown. That's a shift from last weekend,...

So, a small part of the Federal Government is shut down, for how long I really do not care. Most of the EPA is shut down, so that is nice. Some parks I rarely visit are closed, but the ones I do visit normally close after Labor Day, so I would like to care, but I don't. Maybe the Obama Administration will close the ski slopes I use (they lease their land from the Forest Service), but nothing so drastic yet. Things are about the same, really, so the motivation to write a Shout Bits article is slight at best....

The terms: Government re-opens and is funded until mid-December, debt ceiling is raised for another six to nine months, and Democrats maybe agree to repeal ObamaCare’s medical-device tax and reinstate anti-fraud measures for O-Care applicants — depending upon what Republicans give them in return.Peace in our time? The proposal would set up a framework for larger budget negotiations with the House over the automatic sequestration spending cuts and and other major deficit issues, the sources said…McConnell is still reviewing the offer and is privately huddling with groups of GOP senators Monday who could be key to providing enough votes in...