Free Republic

Coburn is sticking to his fiscally conservative principles, even after a twister killed at least 24 of his constituents On Tuesday morning, emergency responders began dealing with the aftermath of a tornado that killed at least 24 people in Moore, Okla., and injured at least 140 more. The White House has announced that "the administration and FEMA stand ready to provide all available assistance in response to the severe weather." However, one of the state's two Republican senators, Tom Coburn, wants to put a stipulation on that offer: No federal aid without corresponding federal budget cuts.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Friday urged congressional leaders to raise the debt limit and insisted that the White House is not going to negotiate over the increase because lawmakers have "no choice." "We will not negotiate over the debt limit," Lew wrote. "The creditworthiness of the United States is non-negotiable. The question of whether the country must pay obligations it has already incurred is not open to debate." Lew said that while President Obama is willing to discuss plans to reduce the nation's deficit with Congress, those talks must be kept separate from any effort to raise the nation's...

President Obama vastly exaggerated the spending cuts and deficit reduction his budget plan would produce, while dramatically undercounting the level of tax hikes, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of his budget released Friday. When Obama put out his budget in mid-April he said that it "will reduce our deficits by nearly another $2 trillion," and "does so in a balanced and responsible way, a way that most Americans prefer." But the CBO report finds that Obama´s budget will cut 10-year deficits by just $1.1 trillion, with annual deficits starting to rise again after 2017.

<p>“I believe if we want to know what happened in Benghazi, it starts with the fact that there was not enough security. There was not enough security because the budget was cut.”</p> <p>Sen. Boxer, in a speech that echoed an opinion article she published in The Huffington Post, this week tried to turn attention back to reductions in State Department funding that Democrats sought to highlight at the first congressional hearings into the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.</p>

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its budget forecast from 2013 to 2023. Their forecast? Deficits as far as they eye can see … and then some. Here is the CBO’s budget forecast from 2008. The budget forecast was actually rosy! Here is a comparison of the two forecasts: Why the change from a rosy forecast to a gloomy one? Healthcare and interest costs. Both are expected to rise until 2013 (and beyond). A recent study by Congress revealed that Obamacare (aka, the Affordable Healthcare Act) will increase healthcare insurance premiums by 100% up to 400%. “Affordable” health care?...

Israelis will have to cut down on their expenses due to the planned austerity measures but at the same time, according to figures released on Monday, the budget of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Residence has increased by 80% over a period of four years. The figures, which the Prime Minister’s Office had to release to the public following an appeal to the Jerusalem District Court by the Movement for Freedom of Information, show that the budget of the Prime Minister’s Residence was 3 million shekels in 2009, but jumped to 5.4 million shekels by 2012. The numbers show an increase...

Since 2008, Detroit’s spending exceeded its budget by about $100 million annually. Detroit also borrowed $80 million last March to avoid running out of money. Clearly, Detroit has a deficit spending problem … much like the US Government. Here is the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr’s, Orr Report. city-of-detroit-final-financial-operational-plan-45-day-plan5 Orr’s solution? Cut back on pay and restructure the debt (a coy way of say default). “Without a significant restructuring of its debt, the city will be unable to break the cycle of damaging cutbacks in essential municipal services and investments,” according to Orr’s report. He also cited the need for...

In a twist of irony, “Big Government” Bloomberg has admitted that NYC is at the edge of a fiscal precipice. There is no practical ways to pay our workforce given the current environment, current tax structure, current other obligations we have more than what we have been doing, with the possible exception of dramatically raising taxes”. Bloomberg points to public service unions as being among the biggest roadblocks to any meaningful fiscal health in the city. Currently in NYC, most of the unions are refusing to negotiate contracts right now. This is completely legal. If the contract is not re-negotiated,...

The Mini-Golf Tax. The “Iron Man” Tax. The Burning Man Tax. I’m pretty sure most Nevadans enjoy one or more of those activities, which means if Democrats in the Legislature pass their new Nevada Entertainment and Admissions Tax, every Nevadan will curse them when they try to enjoy themselves on the weekend after a long workweek. Wow, this is stupid. So, instead of imposing a corporate tax on Wal-Mart like nearly every other state in the country, you’re going to tax me when I go to the movie theater? So I’ll pay $11.88 instead of $11? I love carrying 12...

Israeli police say protesters are marching in Tel Aviv over proposed tax hikes and benefit cuts. … Protesters are angry over the proposed decrees by Israel’s new finance minister Yair Lapid who started his job several weeks ago. Lapid ran in January’s election on a ticket vowing to help the middle class. The proposed budget hits that demographic deep in their pockets with raised taxes and slashed benefits. …

With furloughs looming, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter this week paid tribute to the job done by the Pentagon's civilian work force while warning that there soon would be fewer of them doing it. In a series of appearances that fell during Public Service Recognition Week, Carter said the department had yet to come to a decision on how many furlough days to impose to meet the budget-cutting demands of the Congressional sequester process in the current fiscal year. Carter called the across-the-board sequester cuts "stupid," and said they would result in the loss of five to six percent of...

The good Senator lays a little bit of hurt on the not-so-good Sen. Reid.

We have had a tax increase implemented. Now, with the additional revenues (taxes) added onto what we were previously taking in each year ($2.3-2.4 trillion dollars), we will still be able to make the interest payment (about $425 billion annally or $35 billion per month) on the federal debt outstanding... And thus we cannot default. After that, we use the remaining tax dollars to pay for Social Security, then Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps and a very large portion of our military budget. So... why do we need to borrow another $1 trillion plus in May?

Defense Department leaders spent months warning Congress that military readiness would begin to erode if sequestration went into effect on March 1. The Navy and Marine Corps are telling lawmakers that it's now happening and that things will only get worse from here. Across government, agencies say the impact of sequestration will be somewhat insidious. But in the case of DoD's two sea services, they're already feeling it, officials told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness. "Due to reduced training and maintenance, almost all of our non-deployed ships and aviation squadrons are soon going to be less than fully...

Yesterday, I linked Liz Peek’s column from The Fiscal Times pointing out that Barack Obama’s new budget has oddly stringent caps on tax-deferred savings in IRAs and 401Ks. Liz asked why Obama wants to punish savers. Today, Allen Sloan asks in the Washington Post why Obama wants twice as much in retirement benefits than the rest of Americans can build in tax-deferred savings, at least under the budget Obama proposes: For starters, the point at which Obama wants to eliminate the ability of you and your employer to deduct contributions to your retirement account isn’t actually the $3.4 million in his...

The path for a bill to become law in Michigan is long and winding. And the complexity of the process turns many citizens away from getting involved. There are resources available to help, like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy's MichiganVotes.org, a website that translates every bill and every vote in plain English and can be sorted a number of ways. But the process still is difficult to navigate. For example, when the state House and Senate fail to agree on every aspect of a bill it is sent to a conference committee. This happens on virtually every budget bill....

Medicare Already Means-Tested, Retirement Expert Says 01 May 2013 The Obama administration's controversial proposal to "means-test" Medicare recipients is ostensibly aimed at generating more cash for the government from those who can afford it - or squeezing more money out of upper-income seniors, depending upon one's point of view. But according to a University of Illinois expert on retirement benefits, the Medicare program is already means-tested. Law professor Richard L. Kaplan says whenever the issue of cutting Medicare emerges, one of the first ideas to "fix" the program is to make its upper-income beneficiaries pay more. "Indeed, the claim is...

How many times have you read financial-advice stories lecturing you to max-out on your IRA, save as much as you can in your 401(k), and even pay taxes now to change your regular IRA into a Roth IRA that will be tax-free until you die? Well, be careful how much you save. That's the message in President Obama's budget for fiscal 2014, which for the first time proposes to cap the amount Americans can save in these tax-sheltered investment vehicles. The White House explanation is that some people have accumulated "substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of...

The National Deficit, along with the lack of demand for Treasury Bonds, leaves the government with no other option!And what you don’t know can hurt you!Goldworth Financial first uncovered the early blueprint of our government’s plot to seize retirement accounts in early 2009. Since that time, we have come up with 10 Basic Questions that people have about this issue: 1. Who’s behind the plot to confiscate retirement accounts?The government takeover of private retirement accounts is a concept first drawn up by Teresa Ghilarducci, who was funded by the White House, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. President Obama’s...

Once again, the Pentagon wants to scrap a weapon – in this case, the Abrams tank – that Congress has an interest in preserving. But with 'sequester' cuts, the tradeoff will be civilian furloughs. Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno testifies on Capitol Hill on April 23. The Army’s hulking Abrams tank, built to dominate the enemy in combat, is proving to be equally hard to beat in a budget battle, because of a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on tanks, which the Pentagon does not want. Even as the Pentagon struggles to make some tough, congressionally...

SEOUL — The Army’s chief of staff has warned Congress that steep military budget cuts and canceled training exercises are hurting the Army’s readiness, including the ability to respond to a potential conflict on the tense Korean peninsula. While troops in South Korea are “obviously at a high state of readiness,” Gen. Ray Odierno told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that sequestration has led to a reduction in training for 80 percent of the Army. Among the cuts: 37,000 flying hours, impending furloughs for civilian workers, and six brigade maneuver combat training center rotations. The cancellation of...

WASHINGTON, April 27 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama said Saturday Congress should replace "dumb" federal spending cuts before the so-called sequester "causes further damage." In his weekly radio and Internet address, the president said the sequester -- a series of automatic, across-the-board federal spending cuts -- was a bad idea when Congress adopted it and "as the country saw this week, it's a bad idea now." Obama said the cuts are affecting families whose children are being "kicked out of Head Start programs," and "seniors who depend on programs like Meals on Wheels to live independently." "There are military...

<p>WASHINGTON, April 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate late on Thursday approved legislation to provide enough funding for federal air traffic controllers through Sept. 30 to end furloughs that have brought widespread airline delays. Several Senate aides said an agreement had been reached on a bill giving the Department of Transportation new flexibility to use unspent funds to cover the costs of air traffic controllers and other essential employees at the Federal Aviation Administration.</p>

The White House on Wednesday backed a proposal to temporarily eliminate spending cuts disrupting U.S. air travel, while politicians in Washington scrambled to avoid blame as the effects of the cuts started to be felt around the country. White House spokesman Carney on Wednesday blamed Republicans for underestimating the negative impact of the spending reductions. "Republicans in Congress made a political tactical decision to embrace the sequester," he said. Cuts proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan would bite even more deeply than those under the sequester, he added. "We share the frustration and we warned about these very...

Army could lose 100,000 soldiers due to sequestration. Of all the military services facing budget pressure this year, the Army is in the direst of straits. The budget Congress finally passed a month ago will help matters, but the service says it's still more than $15 billion short of funds in fiscal 2013. Army senior leaders told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that the elimination of a continuing resolution and the passage of a formal budget only fixed about a third of the funding problem they face this year. The sequestration cuts that Congress left in place will force...

Illinois nets almost $6 billion more in taxes in 2012 Article posted: 4/24/2013 5:30 AM By Jake Griffin Illinois collected nearly $6 billion more in taxes and fees in 2012 than in the year before. That's the greatest increase of any state in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's annual State Government Tax Collections report released a few days Rising from $30.6 billion in 2011 to $36.4 billion in 2012, Illinois' state tax increase largely comes on the backs of workers who saw individual income taxes climb by nearly $4.5 billion, thanks to the first full year of...

... In effect, the president's budget would violate his pledge not to raise taxes on those making less than $200,000. "The president stepped over his no-taxes line-in-the-sand for those making less [than $200,000], but not by much more than the length of his big toe," wrote TaxVox blog editor Howard Gleckman.

Rolling flight delays. Cancellations. Heavy sighs and grim smirks in packed airport concourses. Has the sequester, Washington’s much-debated automatic spending cut package, finally landed? In response to the sequester deal struck by President Obama and Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration this weekend began to furlough its entire 47,000-person workforce (including 13,000 air traffic controllers) to abide by some $637 billion in automatic spending cuts that have to be made by October. The cutbacks mean each employee has to stay at home, unpaid, one day every other week. The furloughs had an immediate impact on travel on Monday, contributing to two-hour...

Pentagon civilian leaders, contractors and lobbyists who would like to see more predictability in the military’s budget should start looking beyond the parochial interests of the defense sector and take a broader view of the nation’s fiscal troubles, a veteran Washington insider advised. Since the president unveiled last week his $526.6 billion military budget proposal for fiscal year 2014, one of the story lines has been the administration’s refusal to lower spending in accordance with the caps set by Congress in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Another dominant topic has been the impact of automatic sequester cuts on the military...

Buried deep within President Obama’s $3.77 trillion budget is a tiny little proposal to increase Medicaid spending by $360 million. In a budget as large as this one, $360 million is scarcely worth mentioning. It amounts to less than one-hundredth of one percent of total outlays. But this 0.01 percent is worth mentioning, because it proves the president’s health-care law will not work.While many uninsured patients pay their medical bills, the Medicaid program offers “disproportionate share hospital” payments to hospitals that treat lots of patients who don’t. The president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act cuts Medicaid’s DSH payments,...

According to a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News, the latest budget proposal from Barack Obama has about as much support as his previous two proposals. Only 52% of Democrats approve of his budget, which turns out to be twice as many as do independents: President ObamaÂ’s courtship of Republicans hit a critical point last week when he unveiled a budget proposal pitched as an effort at compromise. But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds AmericansÂ’ initial reactions to the framework tilting negative, with broad opposition from Republicans and little public support for a key idea...

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean clearly doesn’t like President Obama’s budget. Moments ago he tweeted his dismay, actually saying, “If this is true I may have to become an independant [sic]” …

The White House on April 10 released a budget proposal that includes a $100-per-flight user fee—a charge AOPA warns could be disastrous for general aviation. “We are disappointed to see this misguided idea resurfacing after it has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected in the past. This is the wrong way to fund our aviation system,” said AOPA President Craig Fuller. “Congress has said it will not tolerate user fees, and neither will the general aviation community.” Two previous budgets from the Obama administration have included similar user fee proposals, but in each case Congress has rejected the idea. And opposition...

The Obama administration has taken great pains to cultivate the impression in the media that the president’s 2014 budget plan is a genuine effort at compromise. According to the president’s team, if the GOP were to reject this offer, it would be a sure sign that Republicans were not interested in budget-cutting, or entitlement reform, or preventing a debt crisis — because that’s what the president’s 2014 budget would supposedly deliver. The budget’s numbers betray a far different reality. Consistent with Obama’s prior budget submissions, this one embodies the president’s statist governing philosophy and his indifference to the urgent need...

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration on Wednesday renewed its request for Congress to let it restore funding to the first United Nations agency to grant full membership to “Palestine,” arguing that defunding runs contrary to U.S. interests. Complying with U.S. laws dating back more than a decade, the administration in late 2011 reluctantly cut funding to the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), depriving the Paris-based agency of 22 percent of its operating budget. UNESCO head Irina Bokova described the resulting financial crisis as the “worst ever” in the agency’s history, but rather than urge member-states to reconsider the...

Jon Prior at Politico reports that according to budget projections released Wednesday, taxpayers could see “a $51 billion profit on the $187 billion in federal funds that have been pumped into” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “since they were taken over by the government in 2008.” The catch? Fannie and Freddie would have to remain under government control for another 10 years. Wait a minute. If taxpayers spent $187 to bailout Fannie and Freddie, a $51 billion profit over ten years still leaves taxpayers in the hole for $136 billion. Politico is making it sound like a tremendous return on...

When President Obama released his first budget — entitled with no hint of irony, “A New Era of Responsibility” — he projected that deficit spending over the next five fiscal years (2010-14) would total $3.767 trillion. Now, Obama has released his fifth budget (which doesn’t seem to have a name). In it, he says that deficit spending over that same 5-year span (2010-14) will instead total $5.398 trillion. (This includes three years that are already on the books — see Table 1.1.) So Obama now admits that his original 5-year projection was off by $1,631,000,000,000.00 — or 43 percent.

The president has released his budget, with the usual threats to refuse to negotiate with Republicans in the co-equal branch of government called Congress. The proposal is monumental, with total spending in the budget totaling $3.778 trillion. Or, as the average accountant would write it: $3,778,000,000,000 !!! Looking at it another way, we currently have a national debt in the $16-trillion range. This sum has been accumulating since George Washington was first sworn in as president and on through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict, Vietnam, the...

Fiscal Policy: Shorn of its accounting gimmicks, the president's budget isn't a "balanced" plan to get the debt crisis under control. It's a monument to fiscal irresponsibility. With much fanfare and a lot of media hype, President Obama unveiled his latest budget plan — two months late. An IBD review of Obama's budget finds that, among other things, it: • Boosts spending and deficits over the next two years. Obama's own budget numbers show that he wants to hike spending over the next two years by $247 billion compared with the "baseline," ...

President Barack Obama removed some language in his budget, released Wednesday, that restricts the ability of the federal government to regulate the firearms industry. The pair of provisions ban law enforcement from requiring gun dealers to conduct an inventory once a year and defining antique firearms, which are not subject to federal firearms licensing procedures or background checks. --snip-- "By eliminating these unnecessary and dangerous gun riders from his budget proposal, President Obama took an important step forward in strengthening the federal government’s ability to regulate the firearms industry and fight gun-related crime," said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at...

As federal departments and agencies deal with automatic budget cuts and the possibility of furloughs for federal workers, those forced pay cuts have now arrived on Capitol Hill, as Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) became the first lawmaker to officially announce staff furloughs due to the $85 billion sequester. "Begich’s staff began mandatory furloughs in mid-March and more than half of his staff will experience a cut in their salary this year," said a press release issued by Begich's office on Wednesday. The same release also said that Begich would be returning some of his salary to the Treasury to match...

Obama’s budget proposal is dead on arrival from want of realistic solutions. The budget serves as a pie-in-the-sky fiscal trainwreck that reaffirms conservatives’ perception of the president as a tax-and-spender whose understanding of the realities of our nation’s dire fiscal situation takes a distant backseat to his radical push for punishing the wealthy and continuing big government spending...

The federal budget that President Obama will propose today is expected to contain a provision limiting IRA and defined contribution plan accumulations to $3 million. Alternatively, it seeks to accomplish the same goal by imposing a limit based on the cost of purchasing an annuity equivalent to the top benefit allowed for defined benefit plans. Even before the plan was unveiled, the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) began analyzing its possible impact. At the same time, the proposal has been blasted as a “plan killer” by Brian Graff, Executive Director and CEO of the American Society of Pension Professionals and...

President Obama announced his budget today which is likely DOA in The House of Representatives. $3.77 trillion spending for 2014, alleged $1.1 trillion in cuts (a massaging of the already passed sequester). Who are the winner? Teachers and administrators for Pre-school and K-12. The big loser? Defense. Here is a chart of spending by mandatory and discretionary. And deficit spending seems to be the strategy of Washington DC with no end in sight. $7.3 trillion in new debt, expansion of infrastructure spending, universal day care for pre-k, etc. Obama’s budget removes any rules governing spending cuts and replaces them with...

As the Senate prepares to produce its first budget since the FY2010 cycle four years ago, Barack Obama will finally submit his own budget proposal — two months late, of course. The last actual normal-order budget passed by Congress spent, according to the White House’s own figures, $3.456 trillion dollars on revenues of only $2.163 trillion. With even the President talking about fiscal discipline and deficit control, we must be seeing some cuts in this budget cycle, no?No: President Obama plans Wednesday to unveil a $3.77 trillion spending plan that proposes modest new investments in infrastructure and education, major new...

The Obama administration released an outline of its fiscal 2014 budget to reporters on Tuesday, forbidding its release until 6:00 a.m. Wednesday. The preview promises that President Barack Obama's budget 'reduces the deficit and puts the Nation on a sound fiscal course.'

Federal budget cuts enacted March 1 st have sunk plans for this year’s Fleet Week Port Everglades. Navy warships, which have docked at Port Everglades as part of Fleet Week festivities for the past two decades, will not take part this year.

White House spokesman Jay Carney “not disputing” Obama budget would “raise taxes on middle class Americans.” The White House has confirmed that President Obama’s forthcoming budget contains an income tax increase on middle class Americans. During a Friday, April 5 White House press briefing, spokesman Jay Carney replied “I’m not disputing that” when asked if a particular Obama budget proposal would raise income taxes on the middle class. The proposal in question is known as “Chained CPI.” The term is a Beltway euphemism for measuring inflation at a different, slower pace. Many tax and budget items are indexed to inflation,...

(Adds comment from Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.) Ahead of Wednesday’s release of the Obama administration’s budget for fiscal 2014, a fair question can be raised: how much does it matter, given that Republicans hold the House in any event? Here’s a look at how much of the administration’s last budget matched up with what the U.S. actually is due to spend in the current, September-ending fiscal year. Before the budget cuts under the so-called sequester are tallied, both congressionally approved discretionary spending — as opposed to mandatory spending on entitlements — and the president’s original discretionary request match each other....

While most regular people don’t really know or care who he is, Rupert Murdoch is among a small handful of individuals who is most despised by the far left in this country. Unlike many others, he also has the great distinction of being loathed by exponents of socialism worldwide. After reading (or watching) the speech which he recently gave to an Australian think tank called the Institute of Public Affairs about the moral superiority of free markets, it’s not hard to see why those who would enslave markets because they believe them to be based on greed would despise Murdoch,...