Free Republic

The White House tried Sunday to win support for President Obama’s forthcoming budget, arguing the plan is a balanced approach to economic prosperity and warning Republicans about stonewalling negotiations and pushing a “rejected” Romney plan. “Right now, the approach of many Republicans, particularly the leadership in the House, is my way or the highway,” senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer told “Fox News Sunday.” “Their view is the only acceptable plan is to try to … essentially enact the Romney economic plan. The American people rejected that, and Republicans shouldn't be doubling down on it.” The White House effort comes...

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham surprised many this morning on Meet The Press when he said he liked some of the provisions in President Obama’s expected budget. President Obama is expected to release have dinner with several Republican legislators next when he releases his new budget. Graham, who has shown openness to raising billions in new revenues in exchange for some austerity measures, is expected to be among the Senators that join the president for the dinner. One must remember, though, that the president’s budget is has no real teeth and is a blueprint on where to spend in a...

Fundamental changes to the federal budget will be needed to rein in unsustainable deficits, Congress’s budget watchdog said Thursday. “U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable, and unsustainable to an extent that it can't be solved through minor changes,” Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, plus defense programs and debt interest, will exceed the rest of the federal budget in 10 years if most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are extended, as President Barack Obama has proposed, Elmendorf said. “It's a matter of arithmetic,”...

What's often lost in the federal budget debate is that the amount of money consumed by the government also indicates the amount of time a citizen must devote his or her life to satisfy the government's want of money. To help illustrate this point, I've posted an online application (no registration required), that lets you balance the federal budget. You can either cut items, or, simply do nothing and implicitly choose to work more hours a year to pay for it. It has all the line items to a fairly good level of detail, down to Pentagon details, entitlements distributions...

Now that our government is daily dealing in trillions of dollars, my question is ... How big is a trillion?

AP's Andrew Taylor hits the media cyberwaves with the news that today's CBO analysis of Obama's 2011 budget plans would generate deficits totalling $9.8 trillion over the next decade.... $1.2 trillion more than predicted. But just as Harry Reid sluffed off a job loss of 36K last month as "a big day in America" Taylor also attempts to soften the blow. The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration's. That's because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House. The deficit picture has turned alarmingly worse since the recession that started...

President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall. The 10-year outlook released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama's budget request would produce deficits that would add about $8.5 trillion to the national debt by 2020. The CBO and the White House are in relative agreement about the short-term budget picture, with both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion...

The federal deficit would hit $1.5 trillion in 2010 under President Barack Obama's proposals, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected Friday. The nonpartisan budget office said it projected a deficit measuring 10.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, and a $1.3 trillion deficit in 2011 that would measure 8.9 percent of next year's GDP.

Obama's Call to Endeavour Astronauts Gets Awkward Traci Watson Contributor (Feb. 18) -- Astronauts flying in space are used to VIP phone calls that don't always go as scripted, but Wednesday's conversation was probably one of the most awkward. President Barack Obama used his chat with the crews of the space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station to declare that he sees space exploration as "so important." "My commitment to NASA is unwavering," Obama said. He emphasized "how proud we are of you ... and how committed we are to continuing human space exploration in the future." A few...

President Obama will name Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine B. Bowles, a top official in the Clinton White House, to chair a special commission to solve the nation's budget problems, administration officials said Tuesday. Obama plans to make the announcement Thursday, when he intends to sign an executive order creating the 18-member panel, which will be tasked with drafting a plan to significantly reduce soaring budget deficits by 2015. (snip) Simpson, who informed Boehner and McConnell of his decision to lead the panel, said he has little patience for such talk, especially since Republicans did...

WASHINGTON -- One Central Florida congressman has accused President Barack Obama of breaking the law for trying to cancel contract bids for the next generation of spaceflight. According to published reports, the administration notified contractors Friday it is cancelling contracts for the Constellation and Ares programs, because the president’s latest budget cuts funding for those programs. But U.S. Rep. Bill Posey said the administration can’t do that. Posey, whose district includes parts of Brevard, Osceola, Polk and Indian River counties, said cancelling contract bids is in violation of a provision Congress put in the Appropriations Bill last year. According to...

NASA's Constellation programme, which was going to fly manned capsules to the International Space Station in (maybe) 2015, to the moon in (maybe) 2020, and to Mars someday, is dead. Some people are mourning it. I'm not.

Among the most wasteful of the spending in- creases hidden in President Obama's 2011 budget proposal is his plan to create an army of government-funded community organizers at the shocking price of $1.4 billion. While the economy reels and many taxpayers are looking for ways to trim their personal spending, the president is demanding a whopping 59 percent boost for the Corporation for National and Community Service and its best-known program, AmeriCorps. It's time to pull the plug on both. The spirit of volunteerism has never been in short supply in America, and there is no need for a federal...

On a nightly basis, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pompously presents himself as being the smartest guy in the room as he belittles every leading Republican in the nation. But on Tuesday, the "Countdown" host exhibited a staggering level of ignorance as he claimed "federal budget debt" -- whatever that is! -- as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is "about the same as it was in 1970," and "far less than it was throughout the Reagan administration." To begin with, there is no "federal budget debt." There's a federal budget DEFICIT and federal DEBT. That this self-proclaimed genius doesn't know these...

"You can't be a great country without doing great things and a great thing would be to return to the Moon and build a laboratory there and open it up to the world," Hickam said on Tuesday's MetroNews Talkline. Hickam says he's angry about the cut. "It's really a foolish decision to take away the goal of going back to the Moon. I can certainly see figuring out a better way of doing it, but simply to take away the goal, I think, is so shortsighted and so foolish that it's almost breathtaking in its stupidity."

...In his first public comments since the release of President Barack Obama's proposed NASA budget last week, Mike Coats said the space center will have to find new missions besides the International Space Station to replace the waning space shuttle program and the seemingly doomed Constellation program... Of the 17,000 civil servants and contractors who are funded through Johnson Space Center's programs, 7,000 work under the shuttle and Constellation programs. ...Obama's proposed wholesale cancellation of Constellation — NASA's next-generation exploration program that entailed development of rockets to carry humans to orbit, the moon and beyond as well as a versatile...

NASA administrator Charles Bolden met with the media in advanced of the flight of the space shuttle Endeavour STS 130, now planned for Monday morning. Bolden offered some astonishing admissions about the Obama space plan.

Let's do away with pasteurized milk and stop using polio vaccines, stuff like that...

The president released his FY 2011 budget Monday, and his policy for NASA's human spaceflight program sets the nation on a course to second-class status in space. Instead of setting our national sights on the moon, nearby asteroids, or more distant destinations, President Obama is declaring that human spaceflight is unimportant to U.S. national interests. He's not saying so directly. But his budget actions speak loudly. He has cancelled NASA's next-generation Constellation Program, including the Orion spacecraft and both rockets planned to return American explorers to deep space, to the moon and beyond

Will the increased cost of base metals finally bring about a change to the composition of coins? President Obama's recently submitted 2011 Budget includes a proposal to allow the United States Mint greater flexibility in the material composition of coins for the purpose of reducing production costs. Since 2006, it has cost the US Mint more than face value to produce and distribute the penny and nickel. This has led many to debate the merits of eliminating the lower denominations or at least altering the compositions. In 2008 a bill was introduced known as the Coin Modernization and Taxpayer Savings...