Free Republic

The numbers speak for themselves. Rather than "give" 6,000.00 per person to the individuals to use as they see fit, Washington demands their cut: 1,000.00 back (maybe) IF you have less than 90,000.00 income limit, otherwise nothing. And the rest going to the people the Washington political class selects and the democrat's ABCNNBCBS press corpse approves! 2 trillion is roughly 1/10 of the entire US economy. How will they spend all of that in two months?

On Tuesday, President Obama signed an agreement that equates to a $1,300 impact on every family in America — one of the largest stimulus packages in history. The only problem is that this money is not going to help put food on the table of struggling Americans. In fact, quite the opposite. This money is the $150 billion signing bonus that the Obama administration is giving Iran as part of the nuclear deal. And what is worse, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said on Wednesday’s Situation Room on CNN, “We should expect” that some of the money Iran gets as...

Remember 2009? The Obama regime promised a miracle economic recovery if only Congress would pass their mammoth economic stimulus bill. Shovel-ready jobs. Green, renewable energy. Smart Policies. Yada, yada, yada. This occurred to me as I saw some of the new Democrat ads blaming the GOP for Ebola. “Cuts Kill,” or something. Some $80 BILLION in the stimulus package was devoted to green energy, much of which was directed to campaign donors and other friends of the regime. In short order, many of those same companies began to fail. As Ashe Schow notes: So far, 34 companies that were offered...

Negative Nominal Interest Rates: Highway to a Cashless, Statist Hell I warned about this in part two of my 2.5 hour Economics Video Presentation back in November of ARSH 2012, and, sure enough, it has now happened. Because, as I have been saying all along, for anyone who knows ANYTHING about ANYTHING having to do with economics, finance and/or banking, and who does not have their brain bucket completely and firmly inserted up their rectal vault, it is obvious what is happening and how the chain of events will unfold. If a mouthy broad with a mere bachelor’s degree in...

A major peculiarity of Obama's recent promises involving his upcoming "Year of Action" is that the chief enemy he's sworn to overcome is none other than... Barack Obama. Consider "income inequality." As far as this can be said to actually exist, it's a function of certain sectors of the financial industry reaping massive windfalls over the past few years while the rest of the country has stagnated under the burden of the recession. So who is responsible for this state of affairs? Consider the trillion and a half dollars handed over to the banks and other financial institutions shortly after...

I'm writing this from Australia, so, if I'm not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me — the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law, and recently testified before Congress. Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn't a Congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn, and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of...

A few months after Sen. Claire McCaskill was entwined in a scandal over the use of her personal plane for campaign travel, the Missouri Democrat has released amended campaign finance reports dating back to 2006.According to the new filings with the Federal Elections Commission, McCaskill’s campaign committee had failed to account for 143 contributions in the ‘06 cycle, totaling nearly $277,000. The committee also missed about $277,000 in disbursements. During that cycle, McCaskill raised $11.5 million.The discrepancies, her campaign said, could be attributed to the fact that donations were coming in at a furious clip at the end of the...

Demos reportedly told reporters in a conference call this week that their new stimulus plan would create 8.2 million government jobs over two years while lowering unemployment from 8.9 percent to 4.5 percent.

Malt liquor and marijuana -- quite a combo. Mix in hundreds of thousands of dollars in stimulus money and you've got a project at the University at Buffalo that has raised a lot of eyebrows. And yes, if stimulus money is being spent -- that means you paid for it. $390 thousand dollars -- your federal tax dollars -- are going to study the effects of marijuana and malt liquor on young adults. Test subjects are being paid to drink the malt liquor and smoke the marijuana.

Who is the largest single political contributor in the 2010 campaign cycle? You can be pardoned if you answer, erroneously, that it's some new conservative group organized by Karl Rove. That's campaign spin by the Obama Democrats, obediently relayed by certain elements of the so-called mainstream media. The real answer is AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union's president, Gerald McEntee, reports proudly that AFSCME will be contributing $87.5 million in this cycle, entirely or almost entirely to Democrats. "We're spending big," he told the Wall Street Journal. "And we're damn happy it's big." The...

CARSON CITY – Federal government efforts to create jobs through stimulus funding have expanded to encompass an urban Clark County tree planting effort and related activities, including tree care training for Spanish-speaking workers. The Nevada Division of Forestry has received funding from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to make 2,500 trees available for free for planting by nonprofit organizations, government entities and others on urban public lands in Southern Nevada. Money for the Nursery Greening Project comes from a $490,000 grant the U.S. Forest Service has allotted for Clark County urban tree projects, said Adria DeCorte, who is...

Lovely! It’s the 1 year anniversary of our stimulus bill. Having a year to look back and evaluate, I have come to the conclusion that the results would have been far more effectual if our elected swindlers decided to print $10 trillion dollars in $100 denominations, strapped it all to the space shuttle and released it about 45 seconds before hitting our atmosphere (give or take a few seconds). I’m no engineer and I don’t know how much that would weigh so perhaps $1,000 dollar Federal Reserve notes would be in order. For the obtuse, yes I am being deliberately...

Vice President Joe Biden marked the 200-day point of the stimulus package today with a speech at the Brookings Institution, where he spent nearly an hour ticking off its achievements so far. Among other things, Biden said some economists had given the $787 billion stimulus bill credit for creating 500,000 to 750,000 jobs and boosting the gross domestic product in the two most recent quarters. The administration has benefitted from rosy economic numbers in recent weeks. The Federal Reserve, in minutes released Wednesday night, credited the stimulus with playing a role in stabilizing the economy. But any assessment of the...

Hundreds line up outside a Chase Bank in Jackson Heights, Queens, N.Y., to take advantage of the free funds aimed at helping underprivileged children. Every child between 3 and 17 was eligible for $200. (John Taggart/New York Daily News) Word of the money spread quickly. New York state had put hundreds of dollars in federal stimulus money into food stamp accounts, and if it wasn’t withdrawn by 4 p.m., 9 p.m., midnight—depending on the version of the rumor—it would disappear. So on a sultry August day, lines stretched at ATMs all over the state, a literal run on the bank....

By now, everyone knows that the Obama administration's stimulus bill is designed to get the economy moving again. However, you may not know that most of the bill's $70 billion for education will go to low- to middle-income individuals. A major part of the bill is a $13.8 billion tuition tax credit boost called the American Opportunity Tax Credit. This tax credit reimburses 100 percent of the first $2,000 of educational expenses for lower income students. For the next $2,000, students will receive a 25 percent reimbursement. In short, lower income students will receive $2,500 in education reimbursements per year....

"Based on the $3.25 billion [in federal stimulus money] already allocated," The New York Times reports, "the city estimates that 30,776 jobs will be created by early 2011." That's a little more than $100,000 per job, a bargain compared to Obama administration estimates indicating that the cost per job "saved or created" will be more than twice that high nationwide. It's rather surprising that jobs would be so much cheaper in New York City, where everything else is more expensive. It gets better. Last month New York Gov. David Paterson said $33.1 million for highway and bridge repair in the...

Millions of stimulous dollars spent on sex studies, including effect of meth on rats having sex

Remember when policymakers at the Federal Reserve told us in 2007 and 2008 that the credit problems were “contained” to the subprime mortgage sector? Or when then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spouted the same line? Oops. We’ve already established how those guys were dead wrong about home loans. Indeed, the delinquency rate on U.S. mortgages surged to a record 9.12 percent in the first quarter of this year. Late payments rose in ALL categories, including prime fixed-rate loans, the absolute “cream of the crop” in the mortgage world. Now, it’s clear they were dead wrong about the entire credit market! Credit...

Wrapped in the cloak of environmentalism, suddenly T. Boone's business maneuvers aren't despised. This week the Senate unveiled a new piece of legislation aimed at getting natural gas powered vehicles on the road. Guess who was on hand to help the Senate promote this piece of legislation? T. Boone Pickens, the biggest booster and investor in natural gas vehicles. This got Tim Carney* at the DC Examiner all in a lather. It's not just that T. Boone stands to gain from this legislation, but it's the fact that Pickens was once thought of as a bad guy for this kind...

The Barack Obama administration is pressing states to spend more of their transportation stimulus money in poor and distressed areas. U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wrote to state governors Thursday encouraging them to allocate money they are getting from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to “economically distressed areas.” Fifty-two percent of ARRA money is earmarked for such areas. LaHood is encouraging states to fast-track stimulus money to those areas and to try to go above and beyond that threshold. The stimulus has been slow to jump-start the national and local economies. ARRA money will fund expansions of...