Free Republic

The £32-billion high-speed rail line from London to Birmingham has been given final approval and will go ahead as proposed, ministers will announce next week. Justine Greening, the Transport Secretary, will disclose that the Coalition has rejected calls to abandon or alter its plans for the project, which will see trains travelling at 250mph through the Chilterns. The decision will be welcomed by business leaders but will dismay critics — including some senior Conservatives — who fear the new line will spoil some of the most beautiful parts of rural England. Construction of the 100 mile-long line to Birmingham will...

The U.S. Senate, in an unusual procedure, cleared the way Thursday for the U.S. to lift its borrowing authority by $500 billion to $15.19 trillion, enough to keep the support federal government borrowing through late January or early February. The action came under an unusual legislative procedure spelled out under the August agreement to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and avoid a U.S. credit default. In a 52-45 vote, the Senate blocked an attempt by Republicans to slow down the process that will result in the $500 billion debt-ceiling increase. The increase stems from a deal between Congress and the...

Thanks to Illinois governor Pat Quinn and the Illinois legislature Illinois Loses Most Jobs in the Nation. In a trend that continues to worsen, more Illinoisans found themselves unemployed in the month of July. Illinois lost more jobs during the month of July than any other state in the nation. ... When it comes to putting people back to work, Illinois is going backwards. Since January, Illinois has dropped 89,000 people from its employment rolls. A combination of high taxes, overspending and red tape do nothing but chase away job creators and leave too many citizens without jobs. Springfield needs...

  Our Ship Is Sinking − Stop the Leak David C. Stolinsky July 21, 2011 Some time ago, I saw a TV documentary about the cruise ship Oceanos, which sank off the coast of South Africa. The story is all too relevant to our current problems. At about 9:30 pm, sea water began leaking into the engine room. Power for the engines was cut, leaving the ship dead in heavy seas. Only emergency lights remained. The captain, officers, and many crew members began readying the lifeboats − for themselves. Portholes were not closed. The leaky bulkhead was not shored...

The New York Times Concedes 'Decades of Overspending' by State Governments William Kristol December 26, 2010 12:05 PM You know conservatives are winning when the most dogmatic and obdurate liberals (inadvertently) throw in the towel. In the midst of an otherwise predictable editorial today on "The Looming Crisis in the States," in which the New York Times calls for state tax hikes and more aid from Washington, we find this sentence: "Starved for revenue and accustomed to decades of overspending, many states have been overwhelmed."

It is not rumor, it is not wild conjecture, it is not racism, and it was a creditable news report out of India early last week that fixed the cost of the Obama trip to India at 200 Million dollars a day. The Obama administration seeing the PR nightmare this could turn into after the November 2 midterm election rebuke of the president’s Socialist agenda and Socialist ideology rushed to neutralize the negative impact of the news report by calling the report rumor and by attacking anyone who repeated this report as enemies of the president. But fact is this...

For state lawmakers, ringing in the New Year also means getting ready for what's shaping up to be another painful budget season. They'll return to the Capitol Jan. 4 to tackle a deficit that is expected to swell to $6.3 billion by the end of the fiscal year. Filling that hole -- and the $21 billion deficit projected for the next 18 months --tops Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg's list of priorities for the new year. Steinberg said in an interview with The Bee that while further cuts and new revenues will be needed to close that gap, the...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama on Monday touted a plan to cut back on wasteful spending on federal government contractors, a plan he said is on track to save 40 billion dollars per year by 2011. "Between 2002 and 2008, the amount spent on government contracts more than doubled. The amount spent on no-bid, non-competitive contracts jumped by 129 percent. This is an inexcusable waste of money," Obama said. Shortly after taking office in January, Obama set a goal for federal agencies to save up to 40 billion dollars per year in contracting costs by 2011. Since then, "24...

Oh yes brother, preach it to us, America is overspending, we need more financial responsiblilty, right? Well, let’s have a brief re-cap, shall we? Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus strong-armed through congress! Obama signed a $410 Billion Omnibus Spending Bill With Bipartisan Pork Obama signed a $3.4 TRILLION budget, with NO Republican support! AND NOW, congress is preparing for passage of the Obama MASSIVE Healthcare Entitlement program.

RIO VISTA, Calif. -- California may soon have more bankrupt towns on its hands. The city of Vallejo, Calif., gained national attention earlier this year by filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. Now, two neighbors are fighting to avoid the same fate, as the state's economic crisis spreads. Isleton and Rio Vista, small towns roughly 50 miles northeast of San Francisco, say they have begun consulting with bankruptcy lawyers as they draw up plans to deal with their mounting budget crises. The towns' leaders say they hope to avoid bankruptcy, but concede the move may eventually be their only option....

Three simple numbers explain how the state’s finances have been wrecked. We saw similar numbers just before the Davis collapse and they’re back. In this case, they’re 20, 29 and 33. During the four years of the Schwarzenegger administration, inflation and population have grown at a combined rate of 20 percent. Even after accounting for the recent revenue downturn, our revenues have still vastly outstripped this pace, growing 29 percent in the same period. Anyone who blames inadequate revenue for the state’s budget woes is obviously being driven by ideology and not reality. The problem is that while revenues have...

There is n-o m-o-n-e-y. California's state government is i-n d-e-b-t and the hole is getting deeper. We should change the name of this state to "Denial." Unless the politicians and voters are willing to raise taxes, forget all these grandiose new government programs Sacramento has been yakking about concerning healthcare and education. In fact, forget them anyway for now. Tax increases will be needed just to pay for what the governor, the Legislature and the voters already have saddled on the state. Nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth G. Hill confirmed Wednesday what previously had been leaked by the Schwarzenegger administration: The...

For the sixth time since the mid-1980s, an economic slowdown has left the state facing a decline in revenue over the previous fiscal year. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to order agencies to draft 2008-09 budgets with 10 percent cuts is a harbinger of a grim era likely to last until the housing slump and lending-debt crisis abate. We're already being told this bad news was inevitable in a state that relies so heavily on volatile personal income taxes. Don't believe it. If not for the grossly irresponsible budgets of recent years, the coming era would be mildly unpleasant, not grim....

<p>The car payment was due. Creditors kept calling. Every single credit card was at its maximum. Steve and Nicole Brown could barely scrape by living paycheck to paycheck, but they never expected to find themselves in such perilous financial shape. As probation officers, the Balch Springs, Texas, couple earn $80,000 a year. Like many, they believed surviving without savings shouldn't happen to someone in their income bracket.</p>

New figures from the Commerce Department's U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis show average compensation for federal employees to be double that of private sector workers for the first time. Federal workers earned an average of $106,579 in 2005, including benefits, or about twice the average private sector compensation of $53,289 with benefits included. This marked the first time federal compensation reached this point; for 2004 the bureau's statistics put it at slightly less than double the private sector's. Without benefits, the difference for 2005 is less. Federal employees earned an average salary of $71,114 while their private sector counterparts earned...

SynopsisIs the United States bankrupt? Many would scoff at this notion. Others would argue that financial implosion is just around the corner. This paper explores these views from both partial and general equilibrium perspectives. It concludes that countries can go broke, that the United States is going broke, that remaining open to foreign investment can help stave off bankruptcy, but that radical reform of U.S. fiscal institutions is essential to secure the nation’s economic future. The paper offers three policies to eliminate the nation’s enormous fiscal gap and avert bankruptcy: a retail sales tax, personalized Social Security, and a globally...

The D.C. Department of Mental Health in fiscal 2005 spent more than $30,000 on hand-held BlackBerry technology, prompting criticism from a D.C. Council member who says the money could have been put to better use. "I understand everybody likes these gadgets," said D.C. Council member David A. Catania, at-large independent and chairman of the council's Committee on Health, which oversees the mental health department. "I wouldn't buy myself a BlackBerry," he said of the wireless e-mail devices. Speaking at a council oversight hearing of the department last week, Mr. Catania told mental health officials he had concerns about several other...

For all Bush’s good qualities, the man can’t not spend money. This republican congress and president has spent an obscene amount of money. I find this behavior to be irresponsible during a time of war, to say the least. I know I’ve ranted about it before at length, but I’ll say it again: the federal government’s spending habits have far exceeded its constitutional mandate, and something has to be done.

George Orwell’s 1946 classic Animal Farm is a tale of the rising up of the long downtrodden animals to overthrow the hated humans and establish a new order. Under new management, the farm seems to move in the right direction for a while, but the pigs slowly decide that the lifestyle of their former masters was pretty good, and consequently morph into a ruling class indistinguishable from that which they displaced. Originally intended by Orwell to parody the Soviet revolution of 1917, one can now see parallels to the Republican Revolution of 1994. There is no better example of the...

...So what lessons might Americans draw from GM's decline and, perhaps, fall? Here are two. First, the government can sometimes play a role in the restructuring of industries. Exhibit A, interestingly enough, is Harley-Davidson itself. In 1983, the company was nearly bankrupt, but the Reagan administration slapped a protective tariff on imported motorcycles. Critics warned against a costly boondoggle, but the move proved productive. In the past two decades, Harley sales have jumped from $200 million to more than $5 billion; the increase includes stronger sales overseas. ...Second, more ominously, the federal government should see GM as a negative example,...