Free Republic

Congressional Spending Goes Full WeimarIt has become a speculative game in the blogosphere to predict what black swan calamities could lead to a breakdown in civil order and the imposition of some form of martial law. Wars and rumors of war abound. We have already seen a container ship mysteriously knocking down a bridge and closing a key port. Other such scenarios include massive cyber-attacks that shut down the grid and block communication and transportation networks nationwide. The speculation on the variations of such events is virtually endless.However, one crisis is no black swan and is entirely expected, already happening,...

For Joe Biden, government spending has no bottom. There's always a student loan to 'forgive,' a green scheme to lose money on, or an illegal alien to offer a 'free' lifetime service package to. And bureaucrats to hire, lots and lots of bureaucrats... As a result the U.S. deficit has hit record levels. According to the Treasury Department:A deficit occurs when the federal government’s spending exceeds its revenues. The federal government has spent $1.06 trillion more than it has collected in fiscal year (FY 2024, resulting in a national deficit.And the national debt? The Treasury Department says:The national debt ($34.60...

An equation to understand the current confusion: National debt = issuance of Treasury bonds = printing dollars (Q.E.), and increasing the supply of money = federal spending. Therefore, national debt = federal spending. It’s the principle of equivalency. All those who work for a living, and who make their own way, pay this debt. The recipients of this spending, like welfare and entitlement beneficiaries and federal subsidies like E.V. credits, ride on the effort of those who work. Corporations don’t pay debt; they increase the price of their products and pass it along to buyers. Bottom line: Every citizen bears...

Washington continues to spend like deficits and debt don’t matter, and the politicians would rather you don’t know. For the record, the Congressional Budget Office reported Monday that the federal budget deficit for the first six months of fiscal 2024, ending in March, was $1.064 trillion. Enjoy it, because you’ll eventually pay for it in higher taxes. The problem isn’t a shortage of tax revenue, which rose 7% from a year earlier to $2.19 trillion. Individual income-tax and payroll-tax revenue both rose 6%, while corporate income taxes rose 35%. Is a 7% increase what President Biden would call a “fair...

President Joe Biden is spending more than $1 trillion on his climate agenda, but it does not seem to be resonating at all with voters in battleground states, according to new polling from The Wall Street Journal.Only 2% of registered voters surveyed named climate change as the most important issue in the 2024 election, compared to 25% who identified immigration as the top issue and 22% who indicated that the economy was their top concern, according to the WSJ’s poll. The White House has touted Biden’s massive green agenda as “the most ambitious climate, conservation, and environmental justice agenda” in...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is planning to devote much of his energy in the remaining months of his term as Republican leader, as well as the next few years of his term, to ensuring Ukraine is supported as its war with Russia rages on. "It may not be fashionable now, but I’m a Ronald Reagan Republican: peace through strength," the longtime Senate GOP leader said during a speech in Shelbyville, Kentucky, per local outlet the Kentucky Lantern. McConnell has been a proponent of continued support for Ukraine, even after members of his party began to push back.

In a recent tweet, a talented financial analyst and investor stated: “The “debt is unsustainable” narrative has been around for 40 years plus. What’s astonishing to me is how the people who push this narrative never ask themselves, “Why has it been sustainable for so long?”.There is a widespread idea that the fiscal imbalances of a world reserve currency issuer would end in an Argentina-style bankruptcy. However, the manifestation of unsustainability did not even appear as drastic in Argentina itself. Hey, Argentina continues to exist, doesn’t it?Excessive public debt is unsustainable when it becomes a burden on productive growth and...

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus secured nearly $450 million in earmarks from recently passed government funding legislation, with the average member getting almost twice as much as far-left “Squad” members. The taxpayer watchdog OpenTheBooks released a report this week cataloging the pork-barrel spending totals for more than a dozen Republican members who voted against the $1.66 trillion in fiscal year 2024 spending as part of two packages in March. The report found 17 current Freedom Caucus members, as well as now-former member Randy Weber (R-Texas). secured $25 million per member — far higher than the $13.9 million that...

Most readers regularly consume staggering numbers about our debt and deficit, but not all those that report this news will put those numbers in a perspective that provides meaningful context. I will try to do that here. The USA is on track to have a national debt of $35 trillion very soon, which is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days. That’s $3.6 trillion every year. We’re no longer doling out free cash for COVID, so it’s a good assumption the $3.6 trillion additional annual debt is this administrations “business as usual.”According to Financebuzz total private wealth in the...

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore came as quite a shock. After a massive container ship struck one of the bridge’s pillars, the entire span quickly fell apart, costing several lives. It’s hard to overstate the bridge’s importance, particularly for the automobile industry. In addition to handling 11 million vehicles per year, it provided a vital way for trucks to access the Port of Baltimore while avoiding the dense city core. The impact on the region will be felt for months, if not years. The question is, what now? President Joe Biden has said that the...

WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - U.S. prices moderated in February, with the cost of services outside housing and energy slowing significantly, keeping a June interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve on the table. The report from the Commerce Department on Friday also showed consumer spending rising by the most in just over a year last month, underscoring the economy's resilience. The United States continues to outperform its global peers despite higher borrowing costs, thanks to persistent labor market strength.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk urged European nations to step up investment in their defense, saying the continent isn't ready for the current "prewar era." Tusk made the remarks during a recent interview with various European newspapers. "I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past," he said before referring to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "It’s real and it started over two years ago." On Friday, Italian news agency AGI reported that Italian fighter jets at a Polish military base in Malbork intercepted two Russian spy aircraft in the Baltic Sea. The Russian...

President Biden on Saturday signed a $1.2 trillion government funding bill to stave off a government shutdown, capping a frenetic sprint by lawmakers to pass the final batch of appropriations measures. Biden praised the measure as a compromise, and “good news for the American people.” “This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted,” Biden continued, emphasizing that it rejected “extreme cuts from House Republicans and expands access to child care, invests in cancer research, funds mental health and substance use care, advances American leadership abroad, and provides resources to secure the border that my Administration...

The swamp is back in full force we have a thousand-page Bill of $1.2 trillion filled with all manners of spending priorities that are at odds with the American people. This bill is over a thousand pages long, contains hundreds of pages of report language, 1,400 ear marks, and we've had about 24 hours to review it. That is not the way to do business, and the American people and American families are the ones left holding the bag. This is business as usual in the swamp, and here's the deal to my Republican colleagues: You will own every single...

The average American 65 years of age and up earns an annual pre-tax income of $55,335, and that same group spends $52,141 yearly, or $4,345 a month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That income doesn’t leave a lot of extra cash for unexpected expenses or emergencies. The average American aged 65-69 has about $200,000 in retirement savings, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data, and might still need to work even when they reach retirement age. High expenses often play a role. These four categories of spending tend to eat into monthly expenses — here’s how...

During an interview with the Fox Business Network on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen answered a question on record credit card spending by stating that we still have strong credit quality and delinquencies have gone up a small amount from a historically low level and while “particularly lower-income households are borrowing again on credit cards. I see that as a normalization, rather than a disturbing new trend.” Fox Business White House Correspondent Edward Lawrence asked, [relevant exchange begins around 4:05] “Last year, many economists predicted a recession this year. We haven’t seen it. It looks like we may not see...

New York City is forking out an average of $387 per day to put up a single migrant household in taxpayer-funded shelters, the latest data from City Hall show. That number — known as the “cumulative per diem” — is the average of what the city has spent to house and feed each migrant household per day every month since the start of the crisis in spring 2022. The daily bill has slowly been dropping as the city desperately continues to try and slash asylum-seeker spending amid the ongoing crisis, with about 64,800 migrants in its care as of last...

WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Poland’s president on Monday called on other members of the NATO alliance to raise their spending on defense to 3% of their gross domestic product as Russia puts its economy on a war footing and pushes forward with its invasion of Ukraine. President Andrzej Duda made his call both in remarks in Warsaw and in a piece published by The Washington Post. His appeal came on the eve of a visit to the White House, where U.S. President Joe Biden will receive both him and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Tuesday. “Russia´s imperialistic ambitions and...

The House of Representatives approved a “minibus” spending bill on Wednesday to avert a partial government shutdown this weekend — despite opposition from conservative Republicans. The $467.5 billion package was supported by 207 Democrats and 132 Republicans and keeps funding levels roughly the same through Sept. 30 for the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Transportation, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development and Justice, as well as military construction. Senate and House appropriators released the 1,050-page bill on Sunday afternoon, with Republicans celebrating the domestic spending levels as a budget cut for federal agencies like the FBI and Democrats touting the protection...

Buddy, can you spare one quadrillion, 750 billion dimes? Because that's how many it's going to take to plug the hole in America's entitlements programs. That's 175 trillion-with-a-t dollars. That's six-and-a-half times the entire economic output of the nation for a whole year. If we spent six years devoting all of our energies — no new cars, no new houses, no FARMING, no eating, no nothing — for six years, we'd still be a hole roughly 12 trillion dollars deep. The gross product of every nation on Earth is only $109 trillion. Even if we imposed FICA taxes on China...