Ryan Budget: A Good Start, but will it Matter?

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  March 20th at 04:38 PM  | 

The much-anticipated Ryan budget for FY 2013, which also contains a blueprint for the next ten years, has been released.  The headline figures of the proposal include the following factoids: it will spend $5.3 trillion less than Obama’s plan and cut $2 trillion more in taxes over the next ten years; it will spend $4.15 less than CBO baseline; spending will be reduced from 24% | Read More »

A Further Response To Avik Roy on Establishments

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  January 31st at 10:06 AM  | 

My original essay on the current divide between the GOP “Establishment,” on the one hand, and the Tea Party and other anti-Establishment factions, on the other, sought to explain the leading issue (the growth of spending and the size of government relative to the private sector), the proximate cause (the loss of trust that the GOP Establishment would make a serious effort to stem this | Read More »

What The Republican “Establishment” Really Means

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  January 17th at 11:29 AM  | 

There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about the struggle between the GOP “Establishment” and “Outsiders,” sometimes – but sometimes not – meaning the Tea Party, however defined. There are many fault lines, wheels within wheels, that divide different groups on the Right, but it’s time to clarify the core issue that has people of perfectly conservative temperament and ideology scratching their | Read More »

What Does $40,000 Mean to You?

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  December 22nd at 03:55 PM  | 

Obama has been running around all day making a fool of himself as he promotes his $40 Social Security tax cut.  Yes, the tax plan that will create a new class warfare Social Security Taxable Wage limit in order to accommodate his totally unworkable two-month extension.  Obama has even set up a new web page asking people “what $40 per paycheck would mean to you.” | Read More »

So This is It?

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  December 16th at 09:13 AM  | 

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 »

Annual Deficit Will Absolutely Top $1 Trillion in 2012

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  December 13th at 12:15 PM  | 

“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 »

Senator Coburn: The Agony of a Pragmatic Conservative Amidst Inflexible Liberals

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  November 15th at 08:00 AM  | 

Senator Tom Coburn released a report, Subsidies of the Rich and Famous, detailing a list of subsidies, transfers, and “tax breaks,” that are paid to individuals with Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of over $1 million.  The report found that millionaires have received at least $9.5 billion in “government payments” since 2003 and $113.7 billion in “tax breaks” since 2006.  Accordingly, Coburn concludes that many of | Read More »

The Fallen Men of A Failing Nation

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  November 8th at 11:00 AM  | 

“The young bloods of the South; sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will. War suits them. They are splendid riders, first rate shots and utterly reckless. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.” – General Sherman (HT:Rootsweb.com) The GOP not only has an | Read More »

Telling the Truth About Medicare

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  October 31st at 03:09 PM  | 

By far, our largest unfunded liabilities are Social Security and Medicare.  According to recent actuarial reports, Medicare faces a $25 trillion liability and Social Security has an unfunded liability of $21 trillion.  And those numbers are regarded as low-ball figures, due to their unrealistic accounting for cost-cutting measures.  They already represent the largest expenditures of the federal government, with Social Security and Medicare consuming 20.2% | Read More »

The CBO Has Been Occupied by OWS’s Intellectual Inequality

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  October 28th at 10:43 AM  | 

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 »

Time And Reality Are Rhode Island’s Deadly Enemies

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  October 24th at 01:30 PM  | 

Time waits for no one, no favours has he Time waits for no one, and he won’t wait for me – The Rolling Stones (HT:Sing365.com) If mathematics were as linear as the passage of time, Rhode Island would have a public pension inconvenience. This sadly does not hold true. Interest on borrowed money increases debt in an exponential fashion. The promises made to older working | Read More »

Barack the $15 Trillion Man

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  October 24th at 10:30 AM  | 

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 »

Republicans Should Stop Reauthorizing Stuff they Denounced

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  September 19th at 12:16 PM  | 

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 »

What is Karl Rove’s Plan for Social Security?

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  September 7th at 01:53 PM  | 

Karl Rove is joining the left-wing/Romney camp alliance against Rick Perry’s candid statements about Social Security in his book, Fed Up.  Even Baghdad Jim McDermott is praising Karl Rove’s broadside on Perry.  Earlier today, on Good Morning America, Rove had this to say about Perry’s condemnation of Social Security as a Ponzi scheme in his book: What they’ve done thus far is, I think, inadequate. | Read More »

Proposed Questions for the GOP Debate: Time for Specifics

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  September 6th at 08:00 AM  | 

Although a debate stage with eight candidates is inherently conducive to a circus atmosphere, the debate moderators need to focus on questions which elicit substantive answers to specific policy questions from the candidates.  Moreover, the liberal moderators from Politico and NBC should remember that they are overseeing a Republican debate.  As such, their questions should stem from conservative premises, and should provoke thoughtful responses from | Read More »