Free Republic

“Failure on a massive scale” – that’s what one Member of Congress called the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. The Department of Defense (DoD) markets the F-35 as a stealth fighter jet that can do it all. The real truth is the project is an abysmal waste of money which does not work as advertised. Both parties, for once, need join together in a bipartisan manner to stop the crony capitalism which has led the Pentagon to allow the taxpayers to be ripped off.Congress needs to find ways to terminate the F-35 program today. The program is a money pit...

The earmark vote shows that far too many purportedly conservative lawmakers want to partake in the big-government excesses of the Biden era.It appears House Republicans need to become re-acquainted with the late Democratic Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and humorist Mark Twain. Both men famously commented on the lack of educational value of the second kick of a mule, which aptly describes the actions of the Republican conference in endorsing a return to congressional earmarks.These earmarks—or, as lawmakers now wish to rebrand them, “community project funding”—bred corruption and scandals during their heyday in the 2000s. Just as important, they...

This week there is the likelihood that we will be presented with a new spending proposal from the Biden administration, meant to cement his overreaching agenda. This will be the effort to both spend heavily on infrastructure and domestic economic plans, as well as establish the green energy pipe dream Biden and his cohort Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have planned. This new spending plan will be divided into two prongs as it promises to be so large that the term "omnibus" will be rendered quaint upon its reveal.This is a proposal, unseen at the moment, that already is being veiled with euphemisms,...

Washington’s welfare-industrial complex both discourages work and leads people to expect that government will solve the problems government has created.Even before President Biden’s new $1.9 trillion COVID “stimulus” package goes into effect, multiple news stories make clear the flaws in its approach. Washington’s welfare-industrial complex, which the “stimulus” will bloat even further, both discourages work and leads people to expect that government will solve the problems government has created.The coronavirus pandemic caused very real economic hardship for millions of American families. But many of the well-meaning efforts to address those hardships—along with welfare expansions Democrats proposed long before COVID hit...

The problem with free money is that it leads to an addiction much like an addition to drugs. In the case of the $1.9 trillion "relief" bill that has no Republican support, Congress is the supplier, while those on the receiving end become increasingly addicted to government and less self-reliant. In my lifetime, the U.S. has gone from a creditor nation to a debtor nation. History shows that massive national debt is a major cause of decline, even extinction, of nations that refuse to live within their means. The quickest way to help the economy is to re-open businesses utilizing...

Christmas in California has effectively been cancelled by Emperor Gavin Newsom. And now it looks like here in L.A. we're going to be locked in our basements by the local yahoos in charge until February. But the continuing destruction of normal social and economic life in California in the name of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic is old news. Instead, let's talk about the yahoos in Washington who are continuing to screw up the whole country. The federal yahoos, it's no surprise, are the slippery politicians in Congress. Mostly Democrats but also some Republicans, for a decade they haven't had the...

I am not in the habit of quoting leftist Noam Chomsky, but this line seems relevant when one considers our growing national debt: "When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think." Perhaps now is not the time in the middle of a pandemic, job losses and threats of even higher unemployment, to mention the national debt. Or, perhaps it is. One of the common characteristics of the fall of past empires and superpowers is massive national debt. Ours is currently at $26.5 trillion and growing by the second. Americans should regularly consult...

With the next round of Democratic presidential candidate debates upon us, we will surely hear more about government activism to fix racial inequalities. Inequality is real and needs attention. According to the Urban Institute, average white household wealth in 2016 was $171,000 compared with average black household wealth of $17,409. Sen. Cory Booker wants government to make deposits into savings accounts for low-income children to the tune of up to $50,000 each. Sen. Kamala Harris proposes $100 billion in government subsidies for black homeownership. These kinds of proposals may win some black votes, but should they? Will they really make...

A big tax bill is all it takes to see how perverse and dysfunctional our government has become. Why are the halls of Congress now crawling with special interest lobbyists looking for opportunities to carve out some new benefit, or to protect existing special interests in the tax code? The objective of the tax bill Republicans want to piece together is noble. Make the code more simple, logical and easy to use. The tax code should be an exercise in civic responsibility in which all participate to pay for the legitimate functions of government. But what are those legitimate...

The good news is that there's a debate in Washington about how to make the tax code less destructive. The bad news is that lawmakers will be able to achieve much less than they otherwise could because of bad policy priorities. It's obvious that Congress and the White House are unwilling to cut or even restrain spending to pay for tax reform. Indeed, the budget resolution that passed the Senate calls for a tax reform bill that would increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion over ten years with no savings worth mentioning. As a result, there's little leeway to mix...

resident Barack Obama presented a budget to Congress on Tuesday that if enacted would add nearly $10 trillion to the national debt, according to the White House's projections. The president's final budget, widely considered to be dead on arrival due to the Republican-controlled Congress, projects the nation would face a $27.4 trillion debt in 2026.The budget set the actual total debt for 2015 at $18.1 trillion, projecting an increase of $9.3 trillion. When President Obama took office the debt stood at $10.6 trillion.The White House budget for fiscal year 2017 includes old and new items of the president's agenda, including...

In Finding Nemo, a whale helps a clownfish find his son; at SeaWorld, killer whales helped me dismantle PETA’s lies. Last week, I had the opportunity to tour SeaWorld Orlando behind-the-scenes. I observed how the theme park’s animals are trained, treated, rescued, rehabilitated and—in over 25,000 cases so far—returned to the ocean. On my first day, I had the pleasure of meeting four-month-old “Tenacious,” a petite Gentoo penguin, who let me pet her silky head. I also met “Jasper,” a four-year-old female penguin who is so friendly that she has a following of super-fans who regularly seek her out at...

The folks over at the New York Times are keeping up their tradition of shilling for big government spending. In a recent column, the Times suggests that a recent uptick in government spending is creating prosperity, and boosting the economy. According to the Times: For a long stretch, government spending cutbacks at all levels were a substantial drag on economic growth. Now, finally, relief is in sight. For the first time since 2011, local, state and federal governments are providing a small but significant increase to prosperity.Yeah… Government is taking your money, spending it on redistributive welfare programs and special interest...

Well that’s great. The question is how useful will this audit actually be, and how truthful? In the 3 years since the birth of this site we have chronicled plenty of examples of waste in the military. It is PERVASIVE. The level of waste speaks frankly to a culture of accounting negligence at the Pentagon which is perhaps only rivaled by the chicanery at the Federal Reserve. Heads (and many many heads at all levels) should have rolled long ago. But, because a large portion of the American people have given the US military a pass on waste (Republicans) nothing...

I’m very worried about the burden of government spending.Moreover, I’m quite concerned that poorly designed entitlement programs will lead to fiscal disaster.And I’m especially irked that Obama made the problem worse by ramming through yet another misguided and costly health care entitlement.Given this background, you can imagine that I was very interested (and depressed) to see that Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center put together some very important charts and analysis based on new fiscal policy projections.After crunching the new numbers from CBO, here’s her bottom line conclusion. …data from the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) recently released update to its...

The bill is coming due for ObamaCare and it’s a whopper. According to Medicare Care’s own actuaries U.S. health care spending is about to rocket. Federal meddling in what was once the finest and cost-effective health care system on the planet is nothing new. Back in the 1960s, many Americans paid for doctor and hospital services out of pocket or through modestly priced private insurance. Health care spending was about 6 percent of GDP. Enter President Johnson and Medicare. He bought millions of votes by giving seniors free health care that they never paid for through payroll taxes during their...

In April of 2013, I introduced a Moocher Hall of Fame to “celebrate” some very odious examples of welfare dependency.Since that time, I keep thinking that it’s time to do something similar for government bureaucrats. This compilation from last December would be a good place to start, though I’d have to figure out whether to have group memberships so that we could include the bureaucrats at the Patent and Trademark Office who get paid to watch TV, as well as the paper pushers at the Department of Veterans Affairs who got big bonuses after creating secret waiting lists that led...

After President Obama in his 2013 State of the Union address called for a new federal entitlement for taxpayer-funded free preschool or pre-K for all 4-year-olds, we thought his idea would be quickly discredited, not only by its enormous cost, but even more importantly by the overwhelming weight of research proving the lack of any long-term benefit from such programs. Now we are dismayed to learn from Politico that a dozen Republican-governed states are expanding state-based pre-K programs or are planning to do so next year. And in Washington, some Republicans are offering bipartisan support to a pre-K bill drafted...

The "recovery" news in Spain keeps piling up. Via translation from El Economista, Government has already taken 37% of the total 'pensions piggy bank'. If extractions continue at the current rate, the fund would be exhausted in 4 years. The Government of Mariano Rajoy has released 24.65 billion euros of the Social Security Reserve Fund in less than two years. Such amount represents nearly 37% of the total 66.815 billion fund accumulation. That figure marks the highest cumulative piggy bank draw-down in history, following its commissioning in 2000 and after eleven years in which successive governments did not need to...

I had a very bad lunch today. But not because of what I ate. My lunch was unpleasant because I moderated a noontime panel on Capitol Hill featuring Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and my Cato colleague Chris Edwards. And I should hasten to add that they were splendid company. The unpleasant part of the lunch was the information they shared. The Senator, in particular, looked at budgetary projections over the next 30 years and basically confirmed for the audience that an ever-expanding burden of federal spending is going to lead to a fiscal crisis. To be blunt, he showed...