Free Republic

Milton Friedman was an extraordinary Nobel Prize-winning economist whose ideas helped underpin modern conservative economic theory. His contributions to economics and the conservative movement cannot be underestimated. Sadly, Milton Friedman passed away a little more than five years ago at the ripe old age of 94. Although Friedman is no longer with us, his words, his ideas, and his legacy live on. In honor of Friedman, here are some of his best quotations. 10) "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." 9) "I am in favor...

enate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are heading to the White House Saturday to strategize on the debt ceiling, after a tough day of discovering Reid’s plan is several votes shy of overcoming a Republican filibuster in the Senate and watching the measure go down in defeat in the House. In a letter to Reid, 43 Senate Republicans vowed to block his latest debt-ceiling plan — assuring Reid will fall short of capturing the 60 votes needed in a vote scheduled for Sunday at 1 a.m. -snip- Four Republicans didn’t sign the McConnell letter - moderate...

A week ago, the United States House of Representatives sent a bipartisan measure to the United States Senate where it fell five votes short of a majority. Today, John Boehner sent over legislation that couldn’t even get all the Republicans to support it, didn’t get any Democrats to support it, and will get less support in the Senate than last week’s plan. And now the Democrats have a talking point they didn’t have with last week’s plan — that this plan is not bipartisan and also that Boehner had to appease the far right, all of which was lined up...

"If we do not come to an agreement, we could lose our country's AAA credit rating. Not because we do not have the capacity to pay our bills. We do. But because we did not have a AAA political system to match our AAA credit rating. Make no mistake, for those who say they oppose tax increases on anyone, and lower credit rating would result potentially in a tax increase and everyone in the form of higher interest rates on their mortgages, their car loans, their credit cards, and that is inexcusable," President Obama said on Friday morning.

(Reuters) - All 43 Republicans in the Senate have signed a letter, released on Saturday, saying they will not vote for a Democratic plan to raise the debt limit in a sign that the measure does not have the support it needs to advance in Congress.

As Americans watch the House battle with the Senate over Obama's desire to raise the debt ceiling, one important thing the MSM refuses to report is that the Senate under Harry Reid has not passed a budget bill in over 800 days. Yet the government has spent $7.3 trillion over that same period of time. Plus, Obama and the Democrats have added $3.2 trillion to the debt since the Democrats last passed a budget over 2 years ago. In the meantime, the House has voted on and passed two budget bills in the last 30 days. Boehner and the...

President Obama may have lost a direct hand in the debt-limit negotiations, but some of his liberal base is still seething at the concessions he was willing to make to Republicans — especially Social Security and Medicare cuts that may yet be in the offing. When a few hundred liberal activists protested outside the Capitol on Thursday, they vented most of their frustrations at Republican lawmakers — especially the Tea Party caucus — who called for deep cuts to safety net programs in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. But they also blamed Obama for agreeing to put entitlement programs...

Washington -- California gets $79 billion a year from the federal government - nearly 40 percent of what it spends. The money goes to everything from highways to universities. So when the federal government sneezes, California catches a cold. Washington's frantic debt-ceiling negotiations are about to let loose a $1 trillion-plus sneeze. The cuts headed California's way are unknown as yet, because no deal has been reached in Washington to increase the debt ceiling and prevent the Treasury from running out of cash to pay its bills Tuesday. But it is obvious from the cuts revealed so far in Democratic...

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said on Friday his budget legislation would increase the nation's borrowing authority until March, 2013 and reiterated that he would not accept a short-term debt limit increase as Republicans are insisting. Earlier in the day, Reid called on Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to sit down with him to work out a compromise for cutting federal spending and raising the debt limit by the August 2 deadline.

I just got off the phone with a source on Capitol Hill who has spent the past few days trying to convince Republicans to vote for a debt ceiling hike. He told me that the biggest obstacle he faces has been "market complacency." "Frankly, a bit of panic would be very helpful right now," he said. As he explained it, lots of people in Washington, D.C. expected that this would be a week marked by panic in the markets. Stocks would tank. Bonds would get clobbered. The dollar would do something dramatic. And all of this would help convince reluctant...

Senate Democrats started Saturday short of the 60 votes needed to advance Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to raise the debt ceiling, setting the stage for frantic hours of negotiations before the threat of default early next week. Senior officials in both parties believe that Reid’s latest plan — which would allow President Barack Obama to raise the debt limit in two separate stages of $1.2 trillion each without congressional approval and slash up to $2.4 trillion over the next decade — appeared unlikely to break a filibuster early Sunday morning — a vote currently scheduled for 1 a.m. ET....

Returning to 2005 Spending Levels Would Match Current Revenues of 2.5 Trillion dollars. Outlays in 2005 were 2,472.2 Trillion. This solution would result in no rise the debt limit and we would have a balanced budget. This would also secure our AAA credit rating. This idea probably has too much common sense for the "Inside the Beltway Crowd."

10:56am | Good Saturday morning. The House and Senate will convene at 1pm today. The House will likely go out of session after a vote on the Reid plan to raise the debt limit, while the Senate will stick around until 1 am Sunday to vote to end debate on the plan. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/live-coverage-congressional-debt-ceiling-showdown-2011-7#ixzz1TbPkr4wi

After yesterday’s embarrassing plea to Mitch McConnell to save him from a cloture vote, Harry Reid went back to the drawing board.  The Hill reports that Reid has altered his plan to raise the debt ceiling by borrowing more from the plans of McConnell and John Boehner, hoping to shake loose enough Republicans to get past the procedural hurdle: The biggest change is that Reid would give the president almost unilateral power to raise the debt limit, borrowing an idea introduced by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).Reid would have President Obama request a $2.4 trillion debt-limit increase in two...

WASHINGTON — House Republicans have engineered the defeat of their own proposed $2.4 trillion increase in the debt limit, a political gambit designed to reinforce a demand for spending cuts to accompany any future increase in government borrowing. The vote Tuesday was 97-318, far below the two-thirds majority needed for passage.

The Grand CompromiseRepublicans are right not to budge on taxes until serious spending cuts are in place. The most serious charge against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is not the risible claim, made most prominently by President Obama in his George Washington University address, that it would “sacrifice the America we believe in.” The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions of dollars of debt and doesn’t balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, they say, Ryan never...

Did someone move the 2012 election to June 1? We ask because President Obama's extraordinary response to Paul Ryan's budget yesterday—with its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions—was the kind Presidents usually outsource to some junior lieutenant. Mr. Obama's fundamentally political document would have been unusual even for a Vice President in the fervor of a campaign. The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record...

We thought tax reform meant lowering rates and broadening the base by eliminating or cutting back on various deductions, credits, and loopholes. That’s what the Bowles-Simpson commission proposed. That’s what Paul Ryan and David Camp are working on. And that’s the pro-growth model. But President Obama unveiled a much different tax-reform vision in his much-anticipated debt speech on Wednesday. He would raise tax rates on upper-income earners and small businesses. He also would eliminate deductions and credits, or so called “tax expenditures.” The president referred to these tax-expenditure reductions as “spending cuts.” In his context, they most certainly are not....

Republicans have always hated Medicare, but most Americans have always loved it. Now, led by Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republicans are trying to kill it once and for all. Only among Beltway elites is it considered courageous to deny ill and infirm seniors the health care they deserve -- while giving oil companies billions in taxpayer subsidies. Most Americans have a different definition of courage. They think courage is taking on oil companies, corporate special interests and billionaire polluters. But that's not in the GOP playbook. And so we know where Paul Ryan stands: He wants to abolish Medicare. And...