Earlier today, the House voted to disapprove of Obama’s request for an additional $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. Needless to say, they failed to garner the requisite two-thirds majority to preclude Obama from issuing more debt. The total federal debt will inexorably rise to at least $16.4 trillion by the end of the year. But wait. Didn’t we pass a Budget Control Act | Read More »
“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 »
Like the proponents of Ohio’s Issue 2 tried to point out before the November vote, keeping the status quo for Ohio public union salaries, benefits, and pensions was unsustainable. A yes vote would’ve kept Ohio Senate Bill 5 as law, and tried to reign in the runaway spending and debt being heaped on the state. Unions spent over $50M to defeat Issue 2, as evidenced by | 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 »
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