Free Republic

The United States Senate has passed a stop-gap piece of spending legislation meant to buy legislators another week, as Congress seeks to hammer out details of a second set of appropriations bills in March. via ABC News:The final vote tally was 77-13. The measure now heads to the president's desk.[...]The new funding deadlines for the government spending bills are now March 8 and March 22.Congress will now return next week to finish working on the first tranche of six funding bills that are due by March 8.As we wrote earlier on Thursday, the House passed a similar bill by Republican...

A Lubbock, Texas federal judge ruled Tuesday that lawmakers unconstitutionally passed the $1.7 trillion government funding bill in 2022 when they did so under a pandemic-era rule allowing members of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote on the matter by proxy instead of in person. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, requested the courts to block a provision of the funding bill that gave pregnant workers stronger legal protections. U.S. District Judge Wesley Hendrix reviewed the request and gave a "limited" ruling on one of two provisions Paxton sought to have blocked. Hendrix, who was appointed by former...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now estimates that, this year, 2024, the U.S. federal government will spend more on interest on the national debt than on national defense. Or Medicare. You read that correctly. The CBO says that the federal government will spend $850 billion on defense, as opposed to $870 billion on debt interest. Moreover, interest payments on the national debt are the fastest-growing part of the preposterously bloated yet still fast-growing federal budget … and are projected to reach a mind-blowing $5.4 trillion by 2053. So, effectively, taxpayers are going to have their hard-earned money confiscated to pay...

A fourth-generation farmer and president of the National Black Farmers Association, John Boyd, Jr., joined Stuart Varney on Fox Business’s “Varney & Co.” to discuss the devastating impact of Joe Biden’s policies on American farmers.He criticized the administration for prioritizing others, including illegals and foreign governments, over Americans.All farmers are suffering under Biden, but Boyd asserts Black farmers are ‘facing extinction.’Boyd told Varney there are now only 40,000 black farmers in the United States, down from a million at its peak. And while American farmers are suffering, with land ownership drastically declining, Biden launched a $100 million initiative to provide...

State records show that Massachusetts is spending about $64 per migrant per day to feed those in state care, a cost that is contributing to the expected one billion dollars in expenses to be spent by the Bay State by 2025. The latest numbers show that the state is paying out $16 for breakfast, $17 for lunch, and a whopping $31 for every dinner every day, according to WBZ-TV. All of this is an commercial for Donald Trump at this point. Illegal immigrants are living good while taxpayers have to get up at 6:30 in the morning to go jobs...

The conservative House Freedom Caucus is actively pushing House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to attach a House-passed border security bill that's sitting in the U.S. Senate to the next spending bill that Congress must pass to avoid a government shutdown. H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023, passed the House in May. The bill would end the Biden administration's "catch and release" policy at the border as well as force the administration to restart construction of the border wall along open areas of the border, among other actions."I think we ought to be willing to have a fight...

Federal tax revenue increased 33% since Congress passed the Trump-era tax reform bill in 2017, while spending increased more than 50% over that same time frame. The data is contained in the Congressional Budget Office's recently released 10-year budget outlook. "Measured as a share of the economy, tax revenue averaged 17% of gross domestic product in the years since the TCJA was passed, the same share as in 2017, and would have been higher if not for the pandemic and associated economic shutdowns," wrote Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of the Job Creators Network. "The CBO projects the tax share...

While catching up over the holidays, my father and I began to talk politics, as we often do nowadays. We bemoaned recent government financial blunders such as the Green New Deal, two proxy wars, and welfare for the unprecedented number of illegal migrants pouring across the Southern border. My father concluded our talk by saying, “And our tax dollars are paying for it!” [SNIP] But, in reality, it’s questionable if much of our tax dollars are really being spent on political misadventures. Looking at historical metrics, it’s clear that taxes have been relatively static for almost two decades, which cuts...

CV NEWS FEED // An agency of the federal government “flagged” Bible purchases as an indication of “extremism” in communications with banks following the events of January 6, 2021. “We now know the federal government flagged terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘TRUMP,’ to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-OH, wrote on X. “What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.” Jordan serves as the chairman of both the House Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal...

In the shadows of economic prosperity, a quiet crisis brews as tens of millions of Americans succumb to “Doom Spending.” This phenomenon, where one spends beyond their means to cope with stress, is not just a financial dilemma but a reflection of broader societal shifts. Especially pronounced among the younger generation, this trend tells a story of forsaken dreams. Young Americans, instead of investing in homes or starting families, are opting for instant gratification like cruises, signaling a departure from traditional aspirations.

To quote Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation, “That there’s an RV.” Recreational goods and vehicles (aka, RVs) were second in Personal Consumption spending after America’s overpriced healthcare. Spending on RVs makes sense since housing has become unaffordable for millions of households under Bidenomics. The increase in real GDP reflected increases in consumer spending, exports, state and local government spending, nonresidential fixed investment, federal government spending, private inventory investment, and residential fixed investment (table 2). Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased. The increase in consumer spending reflected increases in both services and goods. Within services, the...

Since 2000, U.S. government spending has increased from $1.7 trillion to more than $6 trillion, the national debt has surged from $5.6 trillion to $34 trillion, annual interest payments on the debt have climbed from $350 billion to $1 trillion, and the national budget has gone from a $240 billion surplus to a $1.7 trillion deficit. In other words, over the span of nearly two decades, the U.S. government’s fiscal situation has gone from good to bad; however, it will only get worse unless drastic changes are made sooner rather than later. The primary reason for the rapidly deteriorating fiscal...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spent nearly $1,500 per vote in Iowa only to see his dreams of winning the Hawkeye State disintegrate with former President Donald Trump's blowout victory in the state's GOP caucuses on Monday. According to data from AdImpact, DeSantis and his allied super PACs spent approximately $35.06 million in Iowa through January 15 and received roughly 23,000 votes during the caucuses. The result was DeSantis spending $1,497 per vote in Iowa. (The DeSantis campaign spent $3,021,449, while affiliated PACs spent $32,037,828, per AdImpact.) Meanwhile, Trump and his allies spent nearly $18.5 million on advertising in Iowa through...

In many ways, Speaker Johnson didn’t bail out Democrats from a tough political predicament as much as he did his own Republican members.The outline of the spending agreement House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., cut with Democratic leaders sounds bad on its face. But the underlying reasons for that agreement seem far worse.As I wrote last week, “Speaker Johnson and Republican ‘leadership’ … bailed the Democrats out of the predicament they put themselves in last May.” To which I should make an important addition: In many ways, Johnson didn’t bail out Democrats from a tough political predicament as much as he...

A group of just over a dozen House Republicans helped bring the chamber to a screeching halt on Wednesday in yet another stand against leadership. Thirteen GOP lawmakers joined with all voting Democrats to help defeat a resolution that would have allowed consideration of a trio of measures that were scheduled for debate this week. Votes for the rest of the day got cancelled. “The House is essentially frozen again. The GOP leadership cannot bring up any bills that are not already noticed on the suspension calendar. and conservatives just killed leadership’s ability to bring up any bills under a...

In 2021, your federal government spent $6 million every single minute. That’s $9 billion every day, almost $3 trillion per year.For just a glimpse of that insanity, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the enormous Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS), has 27 Institutes and Centers (I.C.s), and in fiscal year 2020 had a budget of $41.6 billion (plus a separate $3.6 billion for COVID-19 that year). President Biden’s request for fiscal year 2023 was almost $49 billion...plus the new “mandatory” budget items ($5 billion for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency — Health, $12.5 billion...

California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed slashing climate change, housing and clean energy programs in the state to plug an estimated $38billion deficit. The Democrat, 56, released details of California's new $291billion state spending plan for the 2024-25 budget year on Wednesday. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office predicted last month that California's budget deficit would be $68 billion but Newsom said it was much lower. He proposed covering the financial shortfall by tapping $13billion from reserves, trimming $8.5billion from programs, deferring some spending to the future and spreading it out over more years. Newsom's plan includes $8.5 billion in spending...

Republicans had significant leverage to demand spending concessions from Democrats but let them increase spending in the latest deal anyway.With “friends” like Mike Johnson, do conservatives really need enemies?That question, harsh as it sounds, should echo in the minds of individuals and groups who want to restrain Washington’s inflation-causing spending. The agreement House Speaker Johnson cut with Democrats over the weekend would actually raise spending compared to what would happen under the status quo. That additional spending binge might constitute the kind of change Democrats believe in, but it shouldn’t persuade fellow Republicans to sign off on this ill-conceived plan.Debt...

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and congressional leaders have struck a spending framework deal that may avert a government shutdown; however, it may frustrate conservatives who want more drastic cuts. The bipartisan framework would set defense funding at $866 billion and non-defense spending at $704 billion for the current fiscal year, which is in line with the spending levels set with the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), the debt limit deal struck by President Joe Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

Congressional leaders have reached a topline spending deal to fund the federal government for the rest of 2024. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced the deal reached with the Senate and the White House in a “Dear Colleague” letter to members on Sunday. “The topline constitutes $1.590 trillion for FY24 – the statutory levels of the Fiscal Responsibility Act. That includes $886 billion for defense and $704 billion for nondefense,” Johnson said in the letter.