Free Republic

Oregon Treasurer and Portland mayoral candidate Ted Wheeler issued a statement last week noting that the state pension fund’s investment returns were 2.1% in 2015. That beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and topped the performance of 88% of comparable institutional investment funds. What Wheeler’s statement didn’t mention was that investment returns for the year still fell 5.6 percentage points below the system’s 7.75% assumed rate of return for 2015. That’s terrible news for public employers and taxpayers. It means the pension system’s unfunded liability just increased by another 20% — growing from $18 billion at the end of...

Politician Tell a Reporter She's a B**ch on Camera VIDEO ONLY ON LINK warning language.

The president of the Detroit Public School teachers union made what has now become a clichéd and erroneous claim when she said the state has been cutting money to state education. Ivy Bailey, the interim president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, wrote in a Jan. 15 column that appeared in The Center for Michigan’s Bridge magazine: "State lottery money for education just replaces (but doesn’t add to) state education funding. The state has been cutting school funding for years." ForTheRecord says: State funding for K-12 schools has increased every year under Gov. Rick Snyder. And the state lottery is...

The Bank of Japan is stepping up its efforts to kick-start the country's struggling economy by taking interest rates into negative territory. The central bank announced Friday that it will introduce an interest rate of minus 0.1% and will go even lower if needed. In theory, negative rates encourage consumers to save less and spend more. They can also weaken a country's currency, helping exporters. ...

The Dow plunged 540 points on Wednesday after crude oil plummeted another 7% and crashed below $27 a barrel. The S&P 500 slumped 3.5% to its lowest intraday level since October 2014. The Nasdaq is down another 3.5%. It's the latest blow in what's already been the worst start to a year on record for the stock market. The Dow is now down more than 11% in 2016. "Despite improving valuations, global equities continue to get hammered," Bespoke Investment Group wrote in a client note. The firm said the appetite for risk remains "awful." Turmoil in China and the crash...

Iranian military forces seized two U.S. Navy boats Tuesday and are holding them in custody on Iran's Farsi Island in the middle of the Persian Gulf, senior U.S. officials told NBC News. Officials said it's unclear whether the 10 American sailors aboard one of the small riverine boats had strayed into Iranian territorial waters before they were captured. The officials said the Americans were on a training mission around noon ET when their boat experienced mechanical difficulty and drifted into Iranian-claimed waters and were seized by Iranian Coast guard. The crew was described as being safe. Following reports of the...

HOUSE SPEAKER Paul Ryan and other Republican congressional leaders are being pilloried by GOP activists for pushing through a $1.15 trillion spending bill laden with pork and a bewildering array of tax credits (including one for plug-in motorcycles). This junks up an already mind-numbingly complex tax code even more. "This is what we get from a Republican-controlled Congress?" they angrily ask. Alas, with Barack Obama still in the White House, a divided GOP in the House (which gave Democrats bargaining leverage, since their votes were needed for passage) and the specter of a government shutdown if no bill was passed...

Two questions. One: Is he right? Two: Given that he’s been pounded for weeks for missing Senate votes, does it matter?On the first question, the answer is “depends.” You all know that it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture, i.e. prevent a filibuster, and move to a final vote on a bill. That number doesn’t change depending on how many senators show up for the vote. As people who know Senate rules better than I do pointed out to me on Twitter, the rule on cloture says it can only be invoked “by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen...

Senate Democrats on Friday boasted that they successfully managed to get just about everything they wanted in a massive spending and tax cut bill, despite being the minority party in both the House and Senate. "Months ago, Democrats called on Republicans to work with us to craft a budget agreement. We wanted to get rid of sequestration, we were able to do that," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. [Snip] "The legislation caps off a successful year for Senate Democrats," Reid said.

Sen. Marco Rubio missed Friday's Senate vote approving a massive $1.8 trillion end-of-the-year spending bill and tax package - a day after he suggested that he could try to slow the legislation down. The Florida Republican, who is running for president, was the only 2016 contender to miss the vote, which is the Senate's final vote of the year. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), three other presidential candidates, all voted against the the legislation.

(CNSNews.com) - The White House objects to a few Republican provisions in the omnibus $1.1-trillion spending bill, but overall, "We succeeded," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Wednesday. "So we walked into these negotiations focused on making sure that Republicans would not succeed in advancing their ideological agenda through the budgetary process, and I think, based on all of the solid reporting work that you have done over the last several weeks, there were a variety of attempts that Republicans undertook to try to do exactly that, and we did succeed in fighting off those efforts. What is...

Paul Anthony Gosar is an American Republican politician and member of the United States House of Representatives from Arizona since 2011, representing Arizona's 4th congressional district. Yesterday, Gosar took to his Facebook page to expose the reality of the massive Omnibus Spending Bill... and who is to blame... Why I Am Voting NO on the Massive Omnibus Spending Bill: Once again I find myself shaking my head at the wasteful spending in DC and a flawed process that drops thousands of pages of text on us with 48 hours to "read" and understand. I wish I could put all the...

There are certainly some good things in the Omnibus Spending/Tax Extenders bills that dropped early this morning (though I thought this Congress was elected to stop this kind of legislation-by-crisis). Unfortunately, what's not in the bill suggests Congress missed several opportunities to rein in the Obama administration's regulatory overreach. My tax policy colleagues think the good outweighs the bad. The provision preventing taxation of Internet commerce is good. The oil export language is good. There are some very good things reinforcing First Amendment rights (which shouldn't need reinforcing in the first place). Yuval Levin has written about the complexities of...

Republican and Democratic negotiators in the House clinched a deal late Tuesday on a $1.1 trillion spending bill and a huge package of tax breaks. Legislative drafters, racing a midnight deadline, met the time limit for issuing the tax package but apparently missed it for the spending bill. That could push back a vote on the House floor by one day, until Friday. The late-hour tension emphasized the deep disagreements over an array of policy provisions that have left weeks of negotiations tinged with acrimony. Since the Republicans took back control of the House in 2011, a majority in the...

Government spending on the elderly continues to climb. Fueled by rapid growth in the number of Americans over age 65 and increased spending on benefits per person, public expenditures devoted to the elderly continue to edge up. A crucial question for future policymaking is whether rising outlays on programs for the aged will squeeze out spending on programs for children, especially investments in their schooling. Many pessimists think this outcome is inevitable, and they urge us to reduce government commitments to the elderly to make room for spending on the young. Federal spending is especially concentrated on the elderly. The...

A measure introduced in the Michigan House earlier this year could start the process of making an exception to the state constitution’s ban on taxpayer support for nonpublic schools. Specifically, the end result would be allowing parents to send their children with special needs to private or religious schools using tax dollars. The state would cover the cost for each child, up to the amount it would have paid for educating that at a public school. Such a change would require the approval of voters in a statewide election, and if the Legislature approves HJR B, voters would face that...

Consumers confidence fell in November to the lowest level in more than a year, a survey shows. The consumer confidence index dropped to 90.4 from a revised 99.1 in October, the Conference Board said Tuesday. That's the lowest level since September 2014. Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected the index to rise to 100. The present situation index, a measure of current conditions, dropped to 108.1 from 114.6. .... "The decline was mainly due to a less favorable view of the job market," said Lynn Franco, director of economic indicators at board. The number of people who said jobs were...

When Congress left town for the August recess, it did so without coming to an agreement on a long-term transportation bill. Instead, the president signed a three-month extension that set the stage for another showdown this fall. More than 30 such temporary extensions have passed since the last multi-year transportation bill expired in 2011. The inability of Congress to come together to pass a transportation package has frustrated the myriad special interests whose lobbyists want assurances that the dollars will keep flowing for years, and not just months, to come. And the media, which seldom miss an opportunity to push...

olorado Springs police officers will not be required to take a physical fitness test this year, and those who failed it last year will no longer face penalties, pending the outcome of a discrimination lawsuit 12 female officers have filed. The city of Colorado Springs and its police department agreed on Friday to all conditions the plaintiffs sought in a preliminary injunction, and on Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch ordered the demands be met.