Free Republic

I’ve seen plenty of commentators worried about Michael Bloomberg trying to buy the election. But the money Bloomberg has spent on his campaign is a rounding error compared to the new spending Bernie Sanders is promising his voters in the form of free tuition, free health care, etc. if he is elected. A group called the Progressive Policy Institute now estimates that Sanders has proposed an additional $53 trillion in new spending over the next ten years. In January, the Progressive Policy Institute published comprehensive cost estimates of the proposals offered by each of the leading candidates for president...

Liberal billionaire 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is willing to spend $2 billion to defeat President Donald Trump, and he continues to put his money where his mouth is. Advertising Analytics, which provides information on advertising spending, said in a tweet that “@MikeBloomberg is the highest spending presidential candidate of all time.” Bloomberg has apparently spent a jaw-dropping “$338.7M on traditional media, surpassing @BarackObama's 2012 record of $338.3M,” Advertising Analytics said Feb. 18.

Chiu’s bill comes as the state and local governments are ramping up their spending on homelessness, but the number of people on the street continues to rise. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed spending more than $1 billion on homelessness in his 2020-21 budget, including $750 million to build housing for the homeless and help prevent struggling families from ending up on the streets. His last budget also included about $1 billion to fight homelessness — including $650 million for cities and counties. Meanwhile, the crisis keeps getting worse. The homeless population grew by 42% between 2017 and 2019 in San...

No wonder liberal billionaire 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg does not want his own news outlet investigating him. They might have to do journalism and risk exposing where his money has been going all these years.The liberal New York Times chose to do some actual journalism by digging up records on Bloomberg’s enormous spending between 1977 and 2019 in a report Feb. 15. Bloomberg spent "at least" a whopping $10 billion split between charitable and political causes. Some of those causes included: abortion, climate change and gun control. As of now, the billionaire has poured an unheard of $401 million just...

The Bernie Sanders campaign spent just under $1.2 million on private jet travel last quarter, outpacing the entire 2020 Democratic presidential primary field. The most recent filing from Sanders reveals $1,199,579 in spending during the final three months of 2019 to Apollo Jets, LLC, a "luxury private jet charter service." The campaign spent an additional $23,941 for transportation to Virginia-based Advanced Aviation Team. The candidate who comes closest to matching Sanders in private jet spending was former vice president Joe Biden, whose campaign spent $1,040,698 to Advanced Aviation Team last quarter. Traveling by private jet is estimated to produce roughly...

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 31 (C-Fam) Last November at a summit in Nairobi, the UN Population Fund announced that it would take $264 billion to reduce global maternal deaths and protect women and girls from violence. The agency just released a publication outlining the details of how the billions would be spent—and the fine print includes abortion. One of the enduring legacies of ICPD in 1994 is the compromise that was struck among nations: that the legal status of abortion was for national governments to determine, and that where legal, it should be “safe.” In the past quarter century, the same...

President Trump signed the SECURE Act this week (January 8, 2020) as part of the government’s spending bill and it will inevitably affect most retirement savers, for better or worse. The SECURE legislation — which stands for “Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement” — puts into place numerous provisions intended to strengthen retirement security across the country. Part of the bill addresses the grim outlook for many workers who don’t have access to workplace retirement accounts. It offers small businesses tax incentives to set up automatic enrollment in retirement plans for its workers, or allows them to join multiple...

WASHINGTON - The U.S. economy will grow at a “solid” rate of 2.2% this year, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office forecast on Tuesday, but with federal budget deficits hitting $1.015 trillion. While the economy will be on good footing during this presidential election year, CBO also noted that conditions will lead to “higher inflation and interest rates after a decade in which both remained low, on average.” The inflation and interest rate rises will be noticed this year and continue through 2022 before settling down beginning in 2023, under the forecast. In its updated budget and economic outlook spanning the...

Donald Trump’s inaugural committee spent more than $1 million to book a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel in the nation's capital as part of a scheme to “grossly overpay” for party space and enrich the president's own family in the process, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The District of Columbia's attorney general, Karl Racine, said the committee misused nonprofit funds and coordinated with the hotel’s management and members of the Trump family to arrange the events. He said one of the event’s planners raised concerns about pricing with Trump, the president's daughter Ivanka Trump and Rick Gates, a...

The decade that just ended saw a period of uninterrupted economic growth. In the decade to come, we'll pay for squandering it. Since the so-called Great Recession officially ended in the third quarter of 2009, the United States has enjoyed 42 consecutive quarters of solid if unspectacular economic growth. That's the longest run of uninterrupted growth since government economists began tracking the business cycle in the 1850s, far outpacing the average economic expansion of 18 months. Employment has increased by 12 percent, the jobless rate reached record lows, and America's gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by more than 25...

A proposed change to federal disability assistance would result in millions of more case reviews, likely cutting off many disabled recipients, if the changes are enacted. The federal government is accepting public comments on the proposal until the end of January. Under the proposal, millions more reviews would be conducted and hundreds of thousands of people would have reviews more frequently. “We think the real intent of this is just to be a backdoor cut to the program,” said Jen Burdick, a supervising attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, who assists people applying for disability benefits. Anyone applying for...

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan repeatedly steered state transportation development money to projects that would increase the value of his real estate holdings, according to a lengthy investigation by Washington Monthly’s Eric Cortellessa. Cortellessa reports that Hogan, who ostensibly left his brother in charge of his real estate brokerage firm when he was elected, has, in fact, maintained ownership and control while serving as governor; the trustees he handpicked to run his company have continued to keep him apprised of its business dealings. And as governor, he has advanced highway and road construction projects that directly boosted the value of land...

At the end of 2009, the total federal debt was $12.3 trillion—a staggering amount of money. Now, it stands at an astonishing $23.1 trillion. That’s roughly $180,500 of debt for every U.S. household. It is important for Americans to understand how we got here, and what lawmakers can do to bring back fiscal sanity. Poor Handling of the Financial Crisis The federal government entered the 2010s with sky-high annual deficits. This had two primary causes. First, the Great Recession reduced incomes and profits, which meant a sharp decrease in tax revenue. A slow economic recovery kept tax revenue relatively low...

SANTA FE — New Mexico state spending would rise significantly for the second consecutive year under a budget proposal unveiled by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Monday that would boost state spending by $596.3 million — or roughly 8.4% — over current levels. The nearly $7.7 billion spending plan includes a proposed 4% salary increase for New Mexico teachers and more money for school districts with a large number of “at risk” students, as the state continues to grapple with the fallout of a landmark legal ruling about its public education system. It would also provide additional dollars to hire...

Some politicians running for federal office make it sound as if the biggest problem facing our country is that we don’t send enough of our paychecks to Washington, D.C. They propose increasing or creating new federal taxes on income, payrolls, business profits, carbon emissions, financial transactions, wealth, and more. Before they start trying to spend more and more of our money, they would do well to consider just how much they’re already spending. Looking back over the last decade, it’s clear they’ve already entered the “drunken sailor” stage. From 2010 through 2019, U.S. households sent an average of $228,000 to...

Federal agencies spent $100 billion on “use-it-or-lose-it” spending in September, a practice that occurs every year, according to Washington-D.C.-based nonprofit OpentheBooks.com. Instead of returning unused taxpayer funds to the Treasury Department, “savvy bureaucrats know that if they don’t use up the rest of their allotted budget, they may not receive the same bloated funding the following year,” OpentheBooks.com argues. Federal spending in fiscal year 2018 equated to a 16-percent increase from fiscal year 2017, and a 39-percent increase from fiscal year 2015, ... On average, the federal government spent $3.2 billion per day on contracts throughout the month of September,...

A long-dormant commission charged with planning major road construction opted not to advance any projects after a five-year hiatus that ended Friday. The Transportation Projects Commission met for the first time since 2014 on Friday. The commission is charged with advancing planned highway projects to the Legislature and directing the study of others as part of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s Major Highway Development program, typically among some of the biggest in the state. “This committee has been un-functioning for several years and we want to have an opportunity for a good group of people to think through transportation issues...

Advocate Aurora Health Care is accelerating its initiative for hiring diverse contractors on major construction projects and set a goal of 25% for a showcase $228 million campus in Mount Pleasant. The diversity program builds on goals Milwaukee-based Aurora Health Care previously instituted for spending 15% of construction costs with contractors owned by minorities, women, veterans and other groups, said Daryl Hodnett, Advocate Aurora’s director of supplier diversity and inclusion. “This is an important part of how you help grow and build and develop underserved communities,” Hodnett said. “We’re helping make healthier communities economically — helping create jobs and economic...

Are you already familiar with OpenTheBooks.com? It’s a nonpartisan private group dedicated to transparency in government spending. For the past six years, they have been requesting and publishing the spending records of all fifty states so taxpayers can be made aware of where their money is going. Well… make that 49 states. The lone holdout is California which has consistently failed to turn over the records. Their excuse? Apparently, the Golden State isn’t sure where all the money goes. (Free Beacon) California is the only state in the country that has refused to reveal public spending records to a...

The U.S. Senate, hoping to meet a looming deadline, on Thursday advanced legislation to fund an array of domestic programs through Sept. 30 in a bid to prevent government agency shutdowns when existing funds expire at the end of this week. The Senate voted 71-21 to limit debate on the bill, which is one of two massive fiscal 2020 spending measures it hopes to pass either Thursday or Friday. Rushing to begin a Christmas recess, the Senate is expected to vote later on Thursday to pass the measure, which would appropriate new money for an array of domestic programs as...