Free Republic

In Washington, the fight over the debt limit tops the list of bipartisan messes. So let's blame both sides and finally get to work. According to news reports, there are 24 GOP senators who want to do something. This is the story: Nearly half of the Senate Republican Conference has signed on to a letter to President Biden warning they will not vote for any bill to raise the nation’s debt limit unless it’s connected to spending cuts to address the nation’s $31 trillion debt.The letter, led by conservative Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Budd (R-N.C.), says it is...

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...

America needs a bold agenda to solidify the current economic expansion and return hard-earned money to taxpayers. That runs counter to the consensus of those on the left, who want large increases in federal spending and dramatic tax increases to pay for them. Their plans are so expansive that it will require both middle-class payroll tax hikes and broad new taxes on American savers, investors, and employers. Opposing that growth-killing agenda isn’t enough. Conservatives need to draw a stark contrast and push for a second round of tax relief that will let workers keep more of their money, make it...

Most voters support President Trump’s plan for major spending and staffing cuts in the federal government, but many still worry he won’t shrink the government enough. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters favor a proposal that would cut spending up to 10% and cut staffing up to 20% in some federal government agencies. Twenty-seven percent (27%) oppose such cuts, while 19% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Game changer Of all the excellent cabinet and staff picks Donald Trump has announced thus far, there may be none bigger than the choice of U.S. Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-South Carolina) as director of the Office of Management and Budget. The federal government faces no more urgent challenge than $20 trillion in debt and no existing plan but to add more of it through deficits as far as they eye can see. Mulvaney is not just a fiscal conservative in word. He was a fierce critic of former House Speaker John Boehner over Boehner’s unwillingness to stand up to Barack...

Madison— The state Assembly approved a budget late Wednesday, sending it to Gov. Scott Walker's desk for his vetoes and signature. The Republican governor, who is preparing to launch his presidential bid on Monday, is expected to sign it within days. The budget includes: ■ ​A $250 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System over two years, $50 million less than Walker had wanted to cut. Walker also wanted to spin the university off as a public authority that would be free of some state rules, but his fellow Republicans in the Legislature rejected that idea. ■ A prevailing...

A New Hampshire state representative exasperated by budget cuts to programs serving disabled people has mockingly suggested the next step would be euthanasia. NH1 reports that the comment by Democratic Rep. Michael Cahill of Newmarket came during Wednesday’s budget debate. Cahill said since budget writers “are refusing to raise revenues” to fund programs for the disabled, “have you looked at euthanasia?” …

The good news is that total net local, state and government spending dropped slightly from fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2012 (the latest year for which full state and local spending numbers are available from the Census Bureau). The bad news is that government spending nationwide still topped $6 trillion in fiscal 2012 and equaled more per earner than the nation's median earnings. There were 157,191,000 workers 15 years old or older in the United States who had earnings in 2012, according to the Census Bureau's Historical Income Table P-43. Their median earnings that year were $31,921 and their average earnings...

Recently, Republican leaders in Congress unveiled a "tax reform" plan that they claimed would provide the American people with a simpler, fairer, and more efficient tax system. While this plan does lower some tax rates and contains some other changes that may make next April a little less painful for Americans, there is little in it to excite supporters of liberty. Taxes may even increase under this plan for some Americans, as it eliminates some of those tax deductions labeled “loopholes.” When I served in Congress I opposed bills that “closed loopholes” because closing loopholes is just a fancy way...

While discussing federal spending and transportation funding, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said “there is absolutely no way we’re going to cut spending.” Boxer was discussing the Highway Trust Fund with members of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) in Washington on Feb. 26th, when she addressed various tax increases that may be used to raise money for the program. “I don’t see support for raising the gas tax and there is absolutely no way we’re going to cut spending, so it’s going to have to be a creative way to fund this in reality,” Boxer said....

Congressional budget negotiators have reached a two-year agreement aimed at avoiding a government shutdown on Jan. 15 and setting federal government spending levels through Oct. 1, 2015. Democratic Senator Patty Murray and Representative Paul Ryan scheduled a news conference for 6 p.m. EST to announce the details of the deal they worked out. … As details of a budget deal trickled out of Washington on Tuesday, conservative groups prepared to oppose any agreement that would alter the automatic spending cuts from the 2011 deal. Republican and Democratic negotiators’ budget agreement would stop as much as $65 billion in sequestration cuts...

Obama says he doesn't want to hear about spending cuts By Justin Sink - 10/25/13 04:41 PM ET President Obama told Republicans in Congress that he doesn't want to hear about additional cuts to government programs after the 16-day shutdown. The president said the country can afford to make investments in areas like education, and he noted that the shutdown cut into the economy. “Don't tell me we can afford to shut down the government, which costs our government billions of dollars, but we can't afford to invest in our kids,” Obama said at a school in Brooklyn. “This obsession...

The Obama administration dug in Sunday on its vow to reject proposed spending cuts by congressional Republicans in upcoming budget talks, but declined to say whether the president would veto their proposals or allow a government shutdown. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told “Fox News Sunday” that President Obama will neither sign government funding bills that slash domestic spending nor negotiate with Republicans over spending cuts to reduce the federal debt limit. He also said the president was not going to accept a budget in which domestic spending is further cut to soften the blow to Defense spending.

Two weeks ago I reported on the $250 million real estate boondoggle by the General Services Administration whereby the GSA is moving the Coast Guard out of an existing, below-market lease at the cost to taxpayers of $250 million dollars.  Today I’m reporting on another, MORE EXPENSIVE real estate boondoggle by the GSA, which leads me to believe that if Congress is really serious about making real cuts to federal expenses that they can start with some easy cuts on federal real estate and personnel costs at the GSA. That’s because according to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure,...

President Obama vastly exaggerated the spending cuts and deficit reduction his budget plan would produce, while dramatically undercounting the level of tax hikes, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of his budget released Friday. When Obama put out his budget in mid-April he said that it "will reduce our deficits by nearly another $2 trillion," and "does so in a balanced and responsible way, a way that most Americans prefer." But the CBO report finds that Obama´s budget will cut 10-year deficits by just $1.1 trillion, with annual deficits starting to rise again after 2017.

House Speaker John Boehner took a lot of heat in January when he rubber-stamped the president’s job-crushing tax increases. Indeed, an entire movement sprang up on Twitter -- symbolized by the hashtag #FireBoehner -- in the weeks prior to the “compromise” urging conservative members of Congress to oust him from his position of leadership in part because he publicly proposed tax hikes as part of the negotiations. The initiative failed, of course, but that didn’t stop Republicans from bristling at Boehner’s supposed betrayal and questioning his leadership. Now, it seems, that’s all water under the bridge -- at least for...

Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said if a debt limit increase is matched with federal spending cuts later this year, there will be “very little” of the “public space” left. During a Thursday press conference on Capitol Hill, Pelosi was asked about Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) who said any increase in the debt limit when it is met this August should be accompanied with “dollar for dollar” spending cuts. “Yes, that’s what the Speaker says, and that is certainly in keeping with the anti-government ideologues that are in his caucus,” Pelosi said. “If you keep cutting investments in...

There's a secret lurking behind all that weeping and wailing over those across-the-board cuts in federal spending now going into effect -- and beginning to filter through the economy: They're working. The emphasis in the news continues to be on the economic repercussions of Washington's meat-ax approach to reining in the federal debt. "But lost in the talk of Washington's dysfunction," to quote a story from the New York Times over the weekend, "is this fact: On paper at least, President Barack Obama and Congress have reduced projected deficits by nearly $4 trillion over a decade -- the widely embraced...

The Dow set a new high on Tuesday, but the larger economy is a different story. What if today's sluggish economic growth turns out to be the new normal? That's the unsettling question asked by some of our most creative economic thinkers. And the people asking it are not necessarily partisan opponents of the Obama administration. They argue that economic growth rates were disappointing even before the financial collapse and recession of 2007-09. Take Tyler Cowen, author of the e-book (belatedly published in print) "The Great Stagnation." Economic growth is the product of increases in the labor supply and...

Here we go again. And again. And again. ... For in Washington, every day is Groundhog Day. And now, once again, the country is speeding toward the dreaded ... Fiscal Cliff! Not to mention Catastrophe, Chaos and Collapse. Or maybe Stalemate, Train Wreck, Dysfunction or whatever your favorite clich may be. So quick, get the scare headlines back in type. The Great Tax vs. Spend Debate is on again, if it ever went away. With each side blaming the Coming and Constant Crisis on the other. . . But wait, haven't we seen this movie before? Like in 2011, 2012...