Free Republic

President Vladimir Putin is set to extend his 24 years as Russia's paramount ruler in an election on March 15-17 and has promised more than 11.5 trillion roubles ($126.5 billion) in infrastructure and social spending over the next six years. "This is the programme of a strong, sovereign country that confidently looks to the future," Putin told Russia's elite including lawmakers in a speech on Feb. 29. "We have both the resources and tremendous opportunities to achieve our goals." Russia's total budget spending in 2024 is planned at 36.6 trillion roubles, with military expenditure set to exceed social spending for...

As you dig into your expensive turkey after having spent a ton of cash filling up your SUV to get to grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner, take heart. We’re winning. Yeah, I know – conservatives are Eeyore/Cure fan centaurs, always ready to see the despair, always ready to detect the doom coming at us. And let’s not sugar-coat it – there’s a lot of bad stuff going on. Our alleged president is only allegedly mentally competent. His understudy is a half-wit who got with Montel Williams. His party wants to spend trillions we don’t have and is convinced that printing more...

A Senate-passed war funding bill cleared the House Thursday night but only after Democrats added nearly $23 billion in new domestic spending that will require time-consuming negotiations with the Senate before the measure can go to the White House. President Barack Obama escaped without any serious restrictions on his Afghan policy and the Pentagon’s $33 billion request for military operations was upheld on a lopsided 376-25 vote. But a succession of anti-war amendments—pressing Obama to clarify his plans for withdrawal—testified to a growing split between the president and rank-and-file Democrats over the cost of the war at a time of...

Keith Yost, writing in the MIT Tech, has perhaps inadvertently revealed the real motivation behind the Obama space plan. Keith Yost likes the Obama new approach to space, but not for the reasons that most supporters articulate. Most supporters of Obamaspace maintain that the cancellation of the Constellation space exploration program will actually lead to more, better, and cheaper space exploration at some indeterminate time in the future. The idea is that the research and development program proposed under Obamaspace will lead to "game changing" technology that will open up new ways to explore space that some future President will...

The economic stimulus package dramatically ramps up spending for a broad array of social programs for needy Americans in a way not seen since the launch of the Great Society programs. "We are seeing a paradigm shift," said Paul L. Posner, a former Government Accountability Office official who teaches at George Mason University. The bill includes billions in new money for food stamps, expanded child care and services for the homeless. It funds long-sought increases in education funding for low-income and special education students, new refundable tax credits for low-income workers, stepped-up job training, expanded health-care coverage, and an increase...

As Congress struggles to complete work on the 2006 budget, the White House tells the Pentagon to cut between $13 billion and $15 billion from the 2007 defense budget and billions more in coming years. The military is in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, has what Robert Kaplan calls "imperial grunts" in scores of countries fighting terrorism and protecting American interests and must prepare against increasingly dangerous and assertive rogue states, unstable alliances and rising or resurgent powers. The Bush administration proposing defense cuts raises serious questions about both its fiscal policy and military strategy. The administration wants to reduce...

Jill Stewart is the pre-eminent journalistic truth-teller about California politics. Naturally, she is a free-lancer, who lives column-by-column, without the benefit of s fulltime job for one of the state's newspapers or TV stations. Fortunately, the San Francisco Chronicle has been buying a lot of her columns lately, including today's number, headlined "Victimized by the poor." She methodically lays out the structure of self-interested parties who have ensured that California become a chronically deficit-ridden state, starving its infrastructure of necessary repairs, and lavishly funding all kinds of welfare for the poor, and even the middle class. Although she never uses...

WASHINGTON - The government's deficit ballooned to $326.6 billion in the first nine months of the 2004 budget year, according to a snapshot of U.S. balance sheets released Tuesday. That's more than 20 percent larger than the $269.7 billion shortfall for the corresponding period last year. For the current budget year which began Oct. 1, this spending has totaled $1.73 trillion, 6.4 percent more than the same period a year ago. Revenues came to $1.40 trillion, 3.5 percent more than the previous year. So far this year, the biggest spending categories are programs from the Health and Human Services Department,...

Bush Prescription Drug Program Biggest Social Spending Plan In 40 Years June 16, 2003 The proposal to add a prescription drug Medicare benefit keeps growing. This leads me to an Associated Press story by Tom Raum, who writes that President Bush has a tradition going back to his days as Texas governor of taking a firm stand, holding fast - but eventually making crucial concessions to opponents and then claiming victory. This goes back to "The BIG Theory" I exposed in recent weeks, about Bush taking Democrat issues away from them by passing 20%, 30% or 40% of what they...