“If our goal is to be shielded from any cost of healthcare, we will ultimately be exposed to all costs of healthcare.” Nothing typifies the inane cycle of government dependency and poverty more than the issue of healthcare. Given that healthcare constitutes 18% of our economy and that millions of Americans are languishing under its crushing costs, it is important that we articulate healthcare reform | Read More »
As we forge ahead to the new legislative session, it is important that we internalize the lessons of the dismal failures from last session. Most of the dominant and sundry legislative battles last year can be explicated by the inane cycle of Republican capitulation. It goes something like this: Democrats propose some odious and profligate legislative idea or budget bill. Conservatives advocate that we uproot | Read More »
2011 was a disastrous year for our debt. Yes, the Republican Congress prevented Obama from passing his budget, which would have added $1.6 trillion in new deficit spending. Instead, they passed a budget that added an additional $1.3 trillion to the national debt. Overall, federal outlays in FY 2011 (which ended September 30) were $141 billion more than the previous year. For FY 2012, thanks | Read More »
In case you were wondering why we are doing nothing to slow our inexorable march towards Greek-style insolvency, look no further than those who are vested with the power of the purse string. Yesterday, Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) suggested that we are not spending enough “to invest in research and development, education and infrastructure that would allow America to compete in this increasingly global economy.” | Read More »
Today, the Treasury Department announced that Obama will ask for another $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, carrying our national debt to $16.394 trillion by next year. This will bring Obama’s total share of the debt to $5.77 trillion by the end of his tenure, far more than any other president. Unfortunately, there is not a darn thing we can do about it. Yet, | Read More »
Over Friday and Saturday, 61% of House Republicans and 34% of Senate Republicans voted for the omnibus megabus bill. In doing so, not only did they violate their pledge pertaining to bundled (1200-page) bills and the 72-hour layover rule and agree to fund Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, Planned Parenthood, the EPA, the PLO and the UN; they actually agreed to spend almost $9 billion more than last | Read More »
This is what we get from a new House Republican majority? Call me naive, but from the onset of this legislative session I really expected we would witness some transformational change in the way Washington does business. That was obviously a foolish expectation. GOP leaders agreed last night to pass the omnibus bill with largely the same provisions as the one they introduced yesterday. After | Read More »
“It’s going to take a lot more than a few accounting gimmicks and unrealistic assumptions to cure our budget ailment” Yesterday, the media was agog with glee over reports that CBO is projecting an annual deficit “below $1 trillion for the first time in four years.” How did they arrive at that conclusion? This projection was extrapolated from the Treasury Department’s report of the first | Read More »
The outcome of the impending payroll tax imbroglio seems to be clear. With Republicans offering spending offsets and Democrats demanding tax increases, my safe premonition is that, for better or worse, the simple tax cut extension will pass, albeit without either “offset” plan. Due to some divisions among conservatives, such an outcome seems to be intractable at this point. At this point, we must focus | Read More »
Here we go again. After a full year of grandstanding against another extension of unemployment benefits, some Republicans are ready to cave. “do we believe in free-market doctrine, which suggests that extended UI hurts the economy, or the Keynesian multiplier, which suggests that UI helps the economy?” If you ever wondered why it is so hard to cut spending, and more importantly, to downsize government, | Read More »
Yesterday, we observed the unique spectacle of a socialist president threatening to veto any bill that reinstates higher levels of spending. Did Obama just experience an epiphany? No. We are merely talking about cuts in defense spending. Those are the good kind of cuts. Throughout the entire supercommittee imbroglio, whenever Democrats or members of the media referred to spending cuts – to the extent that | Read More »
The day has arrived. Our total debt has surpassed $15 trillion. At the close of business on Wednesday, the debt stood at $15.033 trillion, and is on the cusp of overtaking our GDP. Overall, the federal debt has risen $4.41 trillion (41.5%) since Obama took office and $6.36 trillion (73%) since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007. Our GDP has grown by only | Read More »
We could have done a lot of good things with the $830 billion that was flushed down the toilet through the 2009 stimulus. That money could have been used to permanently transform our entitlement programs to free-market personal ownership accounts. It could have been used for massive pro-growth tax cuts. Instead, it was used to grow perennial dependency and for special interest handouts. But all | Read More »
By now, we are all intimately acquainted with the bromide that “Republican’s only control one-half of one-third of government.” Nonetheless, we must remember that, in the realm of appropriations, they control the most consequential body of government; the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, almost a year into their stewardship of that body, they have shown only a tepid inclination to defund Obamacare. Despite months of diligent | Read More »
One fundamental liberal desideratum is the achievement of equal results at the expense of equal opportunity. Conservatives believe in implementing policies that protect our God-given rights, which provide every human being with an equal opportunity to succeed. Liberals reject policies that foster unfettered equal opportunity because they invariably produce unequal results, being that human beings have different talents, capabilities, work ethic, and luck. On Tuesday, | Read More »
Senate Democrats (and all other Democrats, for that matter) have not passed a budget for over 900 days, yet they are planning to come late to the game and commandeer the appropriations process. After delaying the process for over two years, Harry Reid, with the help of some Senate Republicans, is planning to expedite appropriations bills in a way that disavows standard procedures of transparency. | Read More »
When Herman Cain proposed his 9-9-9 plan, many conservatives became energized, despite their misgivings with the fine print of the plan. It wasn’t so much the details of the proposal that excited the base, as most conservatives intuitively recoiled from a consumption tax; it was the boldness of the plan that resonated with them. Cain’s 9-9-9 brought some excitement to a race that was defined | Read More »
Amidst the hype concerning the so-called era of austerity and budget cuts, the national debt is rapidly marching towards the $15 trillion milestone. As of late last week, the national debt stood at $14.94 trillion. For those of you keeping score, that number has grown by $646 billion since the debt ceiling was raised on August 2, as part of the great bipartisan Budget Control | Read More »
For years, Democrats (and Republicans) have surreptitiously created dependency by manipulating the tax code. Liberals often refer to handouts as tax cuts, and tax cuts as handouts to the rich. To that end, they have perpetuated a travesty in which millions of people are able to obtain welfare payouts without ever applying for them. Most people don’t even realize that they are receiving handouts because | Read More »
No wonder Democrats casually disregard our budget crisis. They have a penchant to drop zeros from government expenditures! Last month, Democrat congressional candidate Dave Weprin thought that the national debt stood at $4.0 trillion. Now Harry Reid has filed cloture on his version of the FY 2012 CR that has a missing zero from some of the disaster aid expenditures. According to CQ Politics, Reid’s | Read More »
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