Free Republic

Eight years ago, Nial Cox Ramirez stood up in a Raleigh conference room and bared her soul about the pain she endured after North Carolina forcibly sterilized her in 1965. "I tried so hard to bury this, but it just won't go away. It's like a cancer that eats you and eats you and eats you," she said on that March afternoon. On another afternoon 38 years before, in a building just a few miles away, five strangers had voted to have her sterilized. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina, a bureaucracy oblivious to the pain it caused its victims,...

Obama: And so, the test is gonna be what happens over the next several years, when it's not just an abstraction, but we have to start making serious choices. I've got a deficit commission that I've put forward that is gonna be releasing recommendations for how we can start reducing the deficit. And I don't know yet what they're gonna say, but I do know what the federal budget looks like. And if you eliminate all the earmarks. If you eliminate all the foreign aid. If you eliminate all the waste and abuse that people, you know, talk about eliminating...

"Tax reform means, 'Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.'" -Russel B. Long A new Marist poll (page 19) shows a majority support raising taxes on people making $250K and up to close the deficit. The same poll suggests we should establish an an individual mandate on MC Hammer pants because we are apparently also saying "can't touch this" to entitlements.What the hell is wrong with you America? Have we become a nation of teenagers? Rich people aren't our parents so put your damn hands away and get a job.Crap, I know I know...jobs...

VIDEO HERE.

<p>BS. Which here is short for Baseline Scenarios.Which could also refer to the book "On Bullshit", by Harry G Frankfurt, published by Princeton University Press.</p> <p>At first blush, Paul Ryan's Budget Plan made no sense to me, I didn't have time to read through it all, but now that the econ/finance blogosphere and financial sector media have gotten time to dissect and digest the plan, it's becoming increasingly clear that Paul Ryan has been extremely extremely disingenuous in regards to his budget proposal. I'm going to post a collection of links and excerpt some of them, you'll need to invest some time to digest this because it swings from economics professors, to global macro analysts, to finance guys, to financial journalists... etc.</p>

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama will set a goal of reducing the U.S. deficit by $4 trillion in the next 12 years or less in a speech Wednesday, a congressional source said. His plan would curb the U.S. deficit to 2.5 percent of GDP in 2015, and by 2 percent toward the end of the decade, the source said.

We have created suicidal government; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean government has promised more than it can deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can't easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government's very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest. Few Americans realize the...

Blah. Blah. Blah. Entitlements are way too big of a slice of the federal budget. Everyone knows that, but I propose a strategy for eventually eliminating them by privatizing them. This is a great time to do this. Send it to your elected representatives. 1. Cut all federal funding to entitlement programs possible by (5%-50% of FY 2010 budget, pick a politically viable level) and convert each program to a private non-profit organization. 2. Add a line item on everyone’s 1040 federal tax form for each of these entitlement programs under charitable donations on Schedule A for all those bleeding...

...Census Bureau data reveals that most U.S. families headed by illegal immigrants use taxpayer-funded welfare programs on behalf of their American-born anchor babies. Even before the recession, immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, according to the extensive census data collected and analyzed by a nonpartisan Washington D.C. group dedicated to researching legal and illegal immigration in the U.S...The majority of households across the country benefitting from publicly-funded welfare programs are headed by immigrants, both legal and illegal. States where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62%), Texas,...

It was certain to attract this sort of response, but Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan released his budget plan going forward that includes some sweeping changes to federal expenditures, including entitlement spending. One of those criticisms came from Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman New York Rep. Steve Israel. On Tuesday, immediately following Ryan’s release, Israel called it a “privatization scheme” and blasted it for addressing subsidies to oil companies. However, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday, Ryan fired back, admitting he saw this coming and called such criticisms “distortions and demagogueries.” Ryan specifically called out Israel...

Today House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan unveils his plan to save America’s future. I expect that three aspects will get a lot of attention: the proposal for Medicare, the reform of Medicaid, and the ten-year budget numbers. However, I think the most important feature of the budget is a vision for the role of government that restores the promise of long-term fiscal sobriety, economic growth, and intergenerational fairness. Imagine this: It will pay off the national debt by 2050. Critics from the left will quickly attack “premium support” for Medicare and “block grants” for Medicaid as cheap attempts to...

It should be obvious to every American that our entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – now represent the lion’s share of the Federal budget, and are growing at an unsustainable rate. Unfortunately, no realistic solution to this fiscal disaster has ever been seriously evaluated by Congress. Worse, no effort has ever been made by our leaders to honestly inform Americans of the dire severity – and ominous consequences – of our current predicament. Even when President Bush attempted to confront the issue of Social Security – for which he was mercilessly demonized by Democrats and their media...

In 2008, supporters of Barack Obama sub scribed to the view that his election would, not to put too fine a point on it, "change everything." Maybe they were right. For the last two years, the old ways of Washington have been crashing down like pillars of Mordor at the end of "The Lord of the Rings." Then-candidate Obama was himself fond of noting that the conventional wisdom -- or "CW" -- was that a black guy with a funny name could never be elected president. He not only won, he captured such "impossible" states as Indiana and Virginia. Obama...

Conservative Republicans are rightfully giddy about the results of the midterm elections. The enormous Republican wave washed away hundreds of Democrats at all levels of government, giving Republicans their highest number of seats in the House of Representatives since 1946, and their largest number of state legislators since 1928. More important, the currents that caused the wave clearly work to Republicans' benefit: Voters were expressing widespread opposition to the liberal direction in which President Obama and the Democratic Congress have taken the country. This has led many conservatives to argue that, on November 2, 2010, America returned to its normal...

In a sign of how frustrated members of both parties are with President Obama’s disengagement from the budget debate on Capitol Hill, a supermajority of 64 senators, including Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have signed a letter urging the president to “to engage in a broader discussion about a comprehensive deficit reduction package.” Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo., organized the effort. In a conference call with reporters today, Johanns said any hope for broad reform will require leadership from the White House, which the lawmakers haven’t seen so far.

The anti-government “throw-the-bums-out” crowds have had their chance to speak out on how to curtail the deficit and what to do with those hated entitlements that are the antithesis of the America they pine for. A recent WSJ/NBC News poll provided a glimpse of just how dependent on big government entitlements Americans have become–even among the Tea Party. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone watching the slow shift of the American mindset from citizen, to consumer, to ward of the State over the past century. According to the Wall Street Journal who co-sponsored the poll, “Americans across...

We know farmers work their own land while shared publicly owned land suffers; men work to their own advantage first. Common ownership removes motivation, that’s the famous Tragedy of the Commons in economics, the failure that collapsed the Soviet Union and the failure that’s now collapsing government welfare programs. Any cure awaits a change in basic human nature. Social Security was fine when 32 workers supported one pensioner in an expanding workforce. Now, there’s a pensioner for a little over every two workers in a shrinking workforce and an expanding retiree demographic of baby boomers with a worst-case yet, lengthening...

WASHINGTON – Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned on Friday that GOP senators will not vote to increase the government's borrowing limit unless President Barack Obama agrees to rein in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, laying down a high-stakes marker just weeks before the debt ceiling is reached. In an interview with The Associated Press, McConnell complained that Obama has refused his offers — both public and private — to work on a bipartisan plan to tackle the nation's massive benefit programs, which threaten to overwhelm the budget in coming years. "There will be no entitlement reform without President Obama,"...

America's fiscal need for entitlement reform is pushing the discussion about Social Security inexorably toward "means testing," a policy both the left and the right have long avoided. Both sides realize that means testing, namely reducing or eliminating payments from the program to higher income senior citizens, would recast Social Security from its current perception by citizens as a retirement program to one of outright redistribution or welfare. Many Americans see Social Security as a savings plan, albeit a coerced one, and a recent poll by the AARP (which certainly knows how to write poll questions geared to suggest as...

Government payouts—including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance—make up more than a third of total wages and salaries of the U.S. population, a record figure that will only increase if action isn’t taken before the majority of Baby Boomers enter retirement. Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data. “The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus,” said Madeline Schnapp, director of Macroeconomic Research at...