Free Republic

Like communities around the country, Chicago is hemorrhaging cash to deal with the devastating consequences of Joe Biden’s border disaster. On Monday, the Budget and Government Operations Committee of the Chicago City Council voted 20-8 to send Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request for $70 million in additional City funding to care for illegals to the full Council. CBS News reports that the request is part of a spending plan announced by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in February. The State of Illinois and Cook County pledged a combined $250 million to help fund the crisis,...

Angry protestors fail to recognize that Murray is not a white supremacist. He’s a thoughtful researcher who has published more than a dozen scholarly books about things like the impact of welfare, the pursuit of happiness, and the meaning of libertarianism. Some of his work influenced presidents. One of his books influenced my way of thinking. The video above is my full interview with Murray. Transcript Follow along using the transcript. .....

In the debt ceiling agreement last spring, House Republicans passed legislation making modest changes to work requirements for certain government programs. Less than 12 months later, another congressional agreement could effectively undo that progress.Congressional leaders recently announced an agreement on a tax package, the rumors of which had been circulating for several weeks. The House Ways and Means Committee passed the agreement shortly thereafter. In so doing, committee members took another step toward expanding the welfare state, one that will lead to more low-income families on the government rolls than in work.Child Subsidy ChangesAs previously noted, the tax agreement made...

The greatest collapse of a mighty state, a large human so­ciety and a fruitful civilization of which we possess a reasonably ac­curate record, has been immortal­ized by Edward Gibbon’s histori­cal classic, The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire. Henry Adams remarked that Gibbon did not really explain the fall; but this criticism is not altogether just. As the following excerpts from The Decline and Fall show, the philosophic historian offered a number of reflections on the symp­toms and causes of the drama which he set out to describe: "This long peace and the uni­form government of the Romans introduced...

Lessons from Milton Friedman, Herbert Stein ... and Cloward-Piven. Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman scolded the Wall Street Journal for cheerleading an open-border immigration policy. "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state," he warned. This leads to a “transfer state,” as the Heritage Foundation describes, the government taxing the upper and middle classes, transferring money to lower economic classes via subsidies and benefits. In other words, “The transfer state redistributes funds from those with high-skill and high-income levels to those with lower skill levels.” Heritage makes the assumption, “It takes the entire net tax payments...

Starting Monday, California becomes the first state to cover health care for all income-eligible people regardless of their age or immigration status.

This is the shocking moment a 17-year-old shot a 14-year-old dead on the streets of DC while his mother stood by and did nothing - before he was caught bragging about the shooting online. Surveillance footage shows the teen, believed to be Lorenzo Thompson, 17, in a black hoodie and balaclava raising a gun outside the Crown gas station at 14th and Euclid streets NW in Columbia Heights at about 11:30pm on November 3. The woman with red braids and wearing a white coat, believed to be Thompson's mother, watches on but does nothing to diffuse the situation.

From all those lists of best books of 2022, here’s one with the potential to change public policy debate and discourse for the better. It’s The Myth of American Inequality, and the three authors are two Ph.D. economists, former Sen. Phil Gramm and his long-ago Texas A&M colleague Robert Ekelund, and former Bureau of Labor Statistics assistant commissioner John Early. Their subject is government statistics — and how they present a misleading picture.. the authors’ conclusion is that long-standing complaints about the American economy — that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, that we declared war on...

As I have written many times, I don’t think that the federal measure of “poverty” in the United States was originally created with fraudulent intent to deceive the voters. However, as the measure of poverty has evolved over the years, the thing deemed “poverty” by the statistics no longer bears any meaningful resemblance to what normal people think of as poverty. Rather than measuring anything that might resemble actual physical deprivation, the statistics have evolved into an artifact to manipulate the voters. In a post about a year ago I described what I call the “poverty scam” as follows: [T]he...

Here’s a question where I’ll bet you think the answer ought to be completely obvious: Should the purpose of government “anti-poverty” programs be to help the beneficiaries rise from poverty and become successful and independent, or alternatively should the purpose of such programs be to entice the recipients of aid into a life of permanent dependency upon government handouts? From the earliest days of the anti-poverty programs back in the 1960s, the programs were sold to the public as being a temporary boost by which the poor could be helped to escape from poverty and achieve self-sufficiency. And yet, about...

She’s got a bevy of baby daddies and she doesn’t care who knows it. A Tennessee woman has hit back at haters who have criticized her for having 11 children with eight different men, saying she’s not ashamed of her unconventional family. The Memphis mama, known on TikTok as Phi, is frequently fielding questions about her children’s fathers on the social media site, where she has clocked up close to 100,000 followers. In a viral video back in August, Phi said there were even advantages to having so many men around. “Let me explain it,” she said. “If you have...

NEW YORK (AP) — The Biden administration has officially undone a Trump-era rule that barred immigrants from gaining legal residency if they had utilized certain government benefits, allowing for a return to a previous policy with a narrower scope. The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday said a new regulation for the “public charge” rule would go into effect in late December, although the Biden administration had already stopped applying the previous version last year. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that the shift “ensures fair and humane treatment.” “Consistent with America’s bedrock values, we will not...

There are far too few workers in the U.S. to meet rising demand, a problem exacerbated by an aging population, low birthrates, and stifled immigration. It could become one of the biggest economic challenges of the next several decades.

Or you can buy the only grocery item that’s apparently inflation-proof: 99-cent AriZona iced tea. Context The annual Inflation rate currently stands at a 40-year-high of 8.5%, the highest level of inflation since December 1981. As prices surge, two categories have particularly hit Americans’ wallets. One is fuel, which reached an all-time record national average of $4.33 per gallon in mid-March, and fuel still remains at a near-high $4.12 per gallon as of this writing. Another is food, which as of February had experienced 7.9% year-over-year inflation. What the bill does The Food and Fuel Family Savings Act would give...

Democrats are doing their best to advance President Biden's $2 trillion "Build Back Better" agenda. The bill is being heralded as an engine of economic mobility for American families, and includes things like paid family leave and universal pre-K, which would be firsts for America. In making the case for these programs, progressives often draw on the Danish welfare state for inspiration, with its low levels of income inequality and high levels of mobility in income across generations... Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a staunch supporter of Build Back Better, regularly points to Denmark as the model welfare state. But Sanders...

The analysis exposed the inherently gimmicky nature of using permanent tax increases to pass temporary increases in spending.In the second installment of news the Biden administration didn’t want to hear about Friday (the first being the record-breaking inflation report), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an analysis of making permanent the programs in Democrats’ Build Back Bankrupt spending spree. Democrats immediately claimed the bill they want to pass through Congress doesn’t resemble the CBO’s parameters in the slightest. In that case, Republicans should respond by bringing a legislative proposal resembling those parameters to the Senate floor, and forcing Democrats to...

President Joe Biden’s administration has approved a significant and permanent increase in the levels of food aid available to needy families — the largest single increase in the program’s history. Starting in October, average benefits for food stamps — officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — will rise more than 25 percent above pre-pandemic levels. The increased assistance will be available indefinitely to all 42 million SNAP beneficiaries. The increase coincides with the end of a 15 percent boost in SNAP benefits that was ordered as a pandemic protection measure. That benefit expires at the end...

What is happening with unemployment benefits today? As part of the American Rescue Plan of 2021, the federal government authorized an extra $300 a week in jobless aid and extended pandemic unemployment assistance for the self-employed, with an expiration date of Sept. 6. However, governors in 24 states have pledged to cancel their participation in these programs early, leaving millions of struggling Americans in the lurch this summer. As the economy begins to recover from the pandemic, there are plenty of cries to hold on to that supplemental assistance. But the Department of Labor said the federal government won't intervene...

The dust has settled and the evidence is in: The 1960s Great Society and War on Poverty programs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) have been a colossal and giant failure. One might make the argument that social welfare programs are the moral path for a modern government. They cannot, however, make the argument that these are in any way effective at alleviating poverty. In fact, there is evidence that such aggressive programs might make generational poverty worse. While the notion of a “culture of dependence” is a bit of a cliché in conservative circles, there is evidence that this...

Democrats want to use stimulus money to make you into the people populating Disney's cartoon 'Wall-E.' Instead, turn it into a weapon for antifragility.Democrats’ fifth round of “coronavirus” “stimulus” will soon hand another $1,400 in government debt, plus interest, to every American man, woman, and child in 90 percent of U.S. households. It’s clear this is yet another round of hush money meant to keep Americans quiet and distracted while Democrats restructure the United States into a larger version of their failed uniparty state, California.While COVID times have been obviously worse than the four years of prosperity and freedom under...