Free Republic

Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law on Friday that allows county workers across the state to collectively bargain. Senate Bill 22-230 was introduced by Democrats in April and given final passage on May 11, the last day of the 2022 legislative session. Polis’ office said in a news release that the new law ensures county workers “have a voice in their working conditions.” House Majority Leader Daneya Esgar, D-Pueblo, said in a statement that the law “allows county workers to unionize if they choose to so that they can have a seat at the table to discuss decisions...

During the July 2018 NATO summit, elements of the USA newsmedia focused on President Trump’s accurate attacks on Western Europe’s contradictory actions and positions in the arenas of defense and commerce. What the USA newsmedia covered much less was how welcome those points were to NATO members from Eastern Europe, whose memories of Russian aggression are much more recent, perhaps, than those of Western Europe, making them as wary of these issues as Mr. Trump is. Delegates from Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, for example, appeared just as happy about Mr. Trump’s comments as delegates from England, France and especially Germany...

When it comes to supporting families, paid parental leave is a solution to a number of problems. Studies show that paid leave can reduce infant mortality, increase breastfeeding rates, can improve maternal mental health and strengthen the connection between fathers and babies. There are a ton of benefits to parental leave, ones that American families should be seeing, but aren't. While some employers have been modernizing parental leave policies, federal policy lags behind. The last major policy change came in 1993, when the Family and Medical Leave Act passed with bipartisan support, guarantees more than half of American workers 12...

(CNSNews.com) - As job growth lags in the sluggish economic recovery, the Obama White House is pointing to climate change policies as a fix: Efforts to reduce carbon pollution, far from costing jobs, will create them, a White House spokesman told reporters on Wednesday: "Retrofitting buildings and modernizing them is one way to create jobs," Josh Earnest said. "It saves companies money in terms of their energy costs, but it also creates jobs in terms of people who are installing updated lighting, modern heating and cooling systems, and other things that make buildings more efficient." Earnest noted that President Obama...

The National Debt hit $15 Trillion today. Unfunded mandates are at $116 Trillion. After we hit $15 Trillion, I told my 17 year old daughter that as of now she owes the government $47,980. She replied back, "I don't owe the government crap."

Do insolvent states actually believe other states should bail them out? In June 2009, I was invited to introduce Michael Reagan at an event in Anchorage. In my remarks as Governor of Alaska, I warned against President Obama’s debt-ridden stimulus bill and its effect on all our state budgets. I believed that the bill’s benefits would be limited because government would grow exponentially, and I warned that the package was equivalent to a federal bribe with fat strings attached that created new unfunded mandates for state governments. At the time, most state legislatures, including Alaska’s, chose to ignore that warning....

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) seeks the chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee (CNSNews.com) – Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) may have some explaining to do to fellow GOP colleagues as he seeks the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, given the incoming wave of new conservatives who may not appreciate some aspects of Upton's voting record.Upton joined with Rep. Jane Harman (D.-Calif.) in  2007 to co-author the legislation that effectively banned indoor incandescent light bulbs in the United States. In the last Congress, he an Harman teamed up again to offer new legislation that would extend the...

There's an excellent Peggy Noonan column pointing out that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, not necessarily the Tea Party, is the model for conservative Republicans ought to follow. The entire column is really worth a read ... but this one paragraph stood out: "Thus the new DNC scare ad, which features the usual "Jaws"-like monster music, and then the charge that the Tea Party and the GOP are "one and the same." Not only that, they're cooking up a plan to "get rid of" or privatize Social Security and Medicare, repeal the 17th Amendment, and abolish the departments of energy...

Senate Democrats on Monday unveiled their plan to give counties greater control of state programs, potentially shedding $3 billion to $4 billion in ongoing costs to the state budget. Many of the programs are already delivered by counties but paid for through state coffers. Senate Democrats see their changes as a more appropriate "realignment" of services and costs over the next four years. Their plan would not cut taxpayer costs but rather give counties new forms of revenues to pay for the added responsibilities. The state would approve a tax on oil production, permanently extend the state's higher vehicle-license fee...

Under this act, any new legislation that proposes a mandate on state and local governments estimated to cost more than $50 million dollars must have a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate and provide the funding to pay for the mandates. How many states are going to have to deal with unfunded mandates that far exceed $50 million dollars and into the tens of billions of dollars each year and pertain to a host of services that will have to be funded by the federal gov't under ObamaCare? If the unfunded mandates are funded, that would skyrocket the actual cost of...

Nancy Pelosi told the public that we’d have to pass ObamaCare to find out all of the surprises Democrats had loaded into it. Since its passage, we’ve discovered a number of them, including the elimination of a tax credit that kept seniors on private medication coverage that has forced publicly-held corporations like AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere, and Verizon to take massive charges against this year’s earnings. Earlier this week, the Associated Press discovered a new mandate, this time on chain restaurants, that is at once petty, paternalistic, and anti-growth: A requirement tucked into the nation’s massive health care bill will...

Under this act, any new legislation that proposes a mandate on state and local governments estimated to cost more than $50 million dollars must have a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate and provide the funding to pay for the mandates. How many states are going to have to deal with unfunded mandates that far exceed $50 million dollars and into the tens of billions of dollars each year and pertain to a host of services that will have to be funded by the federal gov't under ObamaCare? If the unfunded mandates are funded, that would skyrocket the actual cost of...

Numerous California counties, including several in the Bay Area, will have to get tougher on polluters to meet strict new limits on smog proposed Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency. The tighter regulations, which would replace Bush-era rules, are expected to leave hundreds of counties nationwide out of compliance with federal standards and cost up to $90 billion a year to implement by 2020. In the Bay Area, four counties would have been out of compliance under the Bush rules, which were supposed to kick in between 2014 and 2020. The new rules would make it even tougher for those...

Government contractors are going to receive a nasty surprise on payments received in 13 months: their payments for goods and services provided will be reduced by 3%, thanks to: IRC SECTION 3402(t), "Required Withholding on Government Payments". That's right, folks. It's not bad enough that vendors have to wait from 30-60 days (or more) to be paid, but their cash flow will be further reduced as the feds want to retain 3% for income taxes. This will simply add more costs and more burdens to businesses throughout the nation. Basically, any federal, state, or local government agency or entity that...

Health Reform: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says it's constitutional to mandate insurance coverage. Congress, he insists, has "broad authority" to make us buy things to provide for the "general welfare." Democrats' Alice In Wonderland interpretation of what they consider to be a "living Constitution," where words mean what they say they mean based on political considerations, gets more bizarre by the minute. (snip) We've been down this road before. In 1994, Hillary Clinton's secretive health care task force was trying to nationalize health care. "A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of...

Minnesota and other states are worried that emerging plans to overhaul the nation's health care system could leave them facing a expensive new obligation to cover the poor without the money to pay for it. As the health care debate speeds toward a climax in Congress, cash-strapped state officials are running the numbers to gauge the impact on their budgets, which are already bleeding red ink from hard economic times. Minnesota's two U.S. senators, both Democrats, are taking notice. In a letter last week to Senate Democratic leaders, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken expressed general support for health care...

I'm going to go back to this quote by Barney Frank of the US House, because it says everything those in state and local governments need to know: Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview that the defaults were, in essence, worth it. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the bad loans occurred,” he said. “It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast. That’s a policy.” Got it? It's a policy to screw the state and local governments. Huh, you say? It's simple, really:...

RICHMOND — In a scathing letter to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, the chairman of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said no state has been slower than Virginia in putting federal highway stimulus cash to use. As of Aug. 31, construction had begun on only 16.5 percent of the $695 million Virginia received for statewide and local highway and bridge projects under President Barack Obama’s stimulus initiative, said the letter from U.S. Rep. James L. Oberstar, D-Minn. Nationally, nearly 43 percent of the billions of dollars a Democratic Congress approved for highway revitalization is already under construction, according to...

San Jose and other redevelopment agencies across California score a victory vs. the state — for now. California's redevelopment agencies have won a major victory in their battle to keep the state from grabbing hundreds of millions of tax dollars. Now a second legal skirmish looms that could blow a huge hole in the fragile state budget if the agencies win — or jeopardize everything from street repairs to major urban renewal projects if they lose. Last week, state officials dropped an appeal of a judge's ruling that their 2008 seizure of $350 million from the agencies — including $13...

The Congressional Budget Office delivered a couple of blows to President Obama's health care proposals last week. Fear of the trillion dollar costs and at least $240 billion in increased deficits are chasing away even Democrats. And that's not the worst of it. The price tag is actually much higher than reported because many of the real costs are paid for by others. The $219 billion of "savings" touted by House Democrats refers to hospital and doctors getting less for their services. This is what the government already does with Medicaid and Medicare, which on average pay 30 percent less...