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 »
Oh for crying out loud. For all that Washington talks tough about getting Americans access to high speed Internet, the “supercommittee” wants to tax new spectrum licensees. That’s just what we need: make it more expensive to build out America’s wireless infrastructure in order to pay for the President and his Cabinet to hand out money to their friends and political supporters. Isn’t that special? | 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 »
There is an old adage that defines insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” What’s worse than insanity is hypocritical insanity, which may be defined as doing the same thing that your opponent did over and over again, while expecting different results. Unfortunately, that is an apt description of the House GOP leadership of late. During the 2010 | Read More »
Let’s forget the fact that Obama’s entire Stimulus 10.0 is a counterintuitive proposal that doubles down on the very failures that precipitated this speech. Let’s also disregard the fact that enshrining unemployment insurance as a permanent handout will perpetuate unemployment. And more union-induced, short-term money drops on infrastructure will do nothing but stimulate traffic jams. Let’s focus purely on the very numbers that the administration | Read More »
Earlier today, Barack Obama decried the gridlock that has prevented Congress from passing a long-term surface transportation bill (highway bill) as unacceptable and inexcusable. He also asserted that we must formulate a policy in which funding would be directed to those districts that need it the most, instead of politically motivated pork, such as the bridge to nowhere (which he supported in the Senate). Well, | Read More »
The latest CBO budget and economic outlook is using baseline assumptions that are as realistic as flying unicorns. Although they project a decade of mediocre growth and moderate deficits, even such a dismal projection is a pretentious view of reality. On the budget side, CBO’s baseline outlook portends a $1.284 trillion deficit this year, and $3.487 worth of deficits over the ten-year budget frame, from | Read More »
Immediately prior to breaking for the August recess, Congress passed a bipartisan agreement to cut spending. Well, sort of. Leaders in both parties got together to do something evil and stupid; they agreed to the largest increase in the debt ceiling, without solving our debt problem. They cut discretionary spending by $6.67 billion for FY 2012, from $1.0497 trillion to $1.043 trillion. That’s a bit | Read More »
When members of Congress return to Washington in September, they must confront the next budget challenge; a Continuing Resolution for FY 2012. While the top line discretionary spending level has already been agreed upon through the debt ceiling agreement, the specific levels of funding for each department and agency are still up for debate (or closed-door negotiations, in this case). Unfortunately, instead of prudently analyzing | Read More »
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