Free Republic

I received still more emails from French and Canadian readers on preserving culture. Since it's a slow news day, let's take a look at them. Olivier writes "Wouldn't a true conservative pay at least some respect to local cultural norms instead of trying to impose some economic diktat from on down?" Talk about getting things ass backwards. It is the social police attempting to impose cultural and economic diktats to preserve the local bookstore and the local farm to the point of absolute absurdity. Email From Canada Reader Mike from Canada writes ... Hi Mish, I totally agree with the...

Republicans blame Barack Obama for the national-debt explosion, and for good reason; about a third of the existing national debt has accrued in his four years in office. Democrats blame George W. Bush for it, as deficits returned during his eight years after a momentary respite under Bill Clinton and a (briefly) fiscal-conservative Republican Congress. A few Democrats still blame Ronald Reagan, whose defense spending supposedly first delivered big deficit spending.However, a new study from the St. Louis Fed argues that the problem began farther back — in 1970, when the federal government began to implement benefit programs that decoupled...

Three false arguments, pushed hard by the Obama administration and accepted on faith by the media and much of the political establishment, must be laid to rest if the American people are to understand the issues at stake in the federal "debt ceiling" debate. The first is that Congress's failure to raise the debt ceiling—the amount of money the federal government is authorized to borrow at any given time—will cause a default on the national debt. The second is that federal entitlement programs are constitutionally protected from spending cuts. The third is that the president can raise the debt ceiling...

Throughout his perpetual campaigning, President Obama has made a big point about being the champion of students and young people in helping to make college more accessible and affordable and helping out with student debt --- and yet, miraculously, here we are with student-loan debt and college tuition prices both quickly ballooning, and no end in sight. Could it be that perhaps the government trying to do more to "help" prospective-and-past students is actually what's dramatically worsening the student-debt problem? From the WSJ: Nearly all student loans—93% of them last year—are made directly by the government, which asks little or...

We can get back to discussing GOP minority constituent recruitment soon, but in the meantime, we have a fiscal cliff issue that beckons -- the real fiscal cliff (America's imminent financial collapse), not the government shutdown molehill everyone is agonizing over. Congressional Republicans should look at their party's loss in the presidential election as liberating. They surely now understand that the strategy of soft-pedaling Obama's record and agenda doesn't work. They surely grasp that its fear of calling President Obama out on his real intentions and the disastrous consequences of his destructive policies just plays into his hands and enables...

KRUGMAN: This Is The Chart That Debunks What Everyone Says About The National Debt Joe WeisenthalNov. 25, 2012, 11:05 AMPaul Krugman posts a simple chart that makes a profound point. It compares the yield on UK debt vs. US debt. What should stand out for you, instantly, is that the two countries borrow at virtually identical rates, and have for years. What this should show to people is that much of the popular stories that people tell about sovereign debt is a myth. Countries that borrow in their own currencies and can "print" at will don't have default risk, so...

“After putting $803,436 in Obama’s re-election campaign, a media giant attempted to keep Americans from seeing the video by banning it from their sites,” stated Aaron DeHoog, the financial publisher who is unapologetic for the release of controversial footage that has gained international attention. The video DeHoog is referring to is a stunning interview with famed economist Robert Wiedemer, author of the New York Times best-selling book Aftershock. Wiedemer, best known for correctly predicting the collapse of the U.S. housing market, equity markets, and consumer spending that almost sank the United States during the “Great Recession”, provides disturbing evidence in...

[Note: This editorial published on Nov 10, 2012] We are now rushing down a course that is going to create incredible economic hardships for millions of Americans. The increase in the amount of debt that has been added to our economy is astronomical. And there is no end in sight. We now have over $16 trillion of debt, and with Obama’s policies it will be almost impossible to reverse that course. Debt is the problem. Big debt is a big problem. There are only four ways to tackle it: increase taxes to bring in more dollars, reduce spending to save...

When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what might knock his administration off course, he famously responded, "Events, dear boy, events." There's a lot of truth to that. At any point in time, an unexpected event can throw the political world into turmoil. However, more often than not, it's not the blindside hit that gets you so much as the freight train you've seen coming for miles. When Barack Obama came into office, he had a number of serious challenges to deal with and not only has he effectively addressed very few of them, many of them have worsened...

20) I can tell you that if you were to elect President Obama, you know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a repeat of the last four years. We just can’t afford four more years like the last four years. -- Mitt Romney 19) We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through. We don’t have to settle for gasoline at four bucks. We don’t have to settle for unemployment at a chronically high level. We don’t have to settle for 47 million people on food stamps. We don’t have to settle for 50 percent of...

Sometimes a few facts tell important stories. The American economy now is full of facts that tell stories that you really don't want, but need, to hear. Where are we now? Did you know that annual spending by the federal government now exceeds the 2007 level by about $1 trillion? With a slow economy, revenues are little changed. The result is an unprecedented string of federal budget deficits, $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and another $1.2 trillion on the way this year. The four-year increase in borrowing amounts to $55,000 per U.S. household....

We do not know who will win the White House in November. But we do know that American politics has crossed the Rubicon on spending and entitlements, and these issues will at long last complete the journey from a forbidden third rail to a central element of national politics. Even if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan lose this year’s battle to Barack Obama, they will win the war on the challenge of our generation. Congressman Paul Ryan is best known for his budget, the Ryan Roadmap, which ties together the two sides of our fiscal-crisis coin: First, the major entitlements...

In a not-so-subtle rebuke of President Obama’s tendency to offer unsolicited recommendations on how Europeans should handle their debt crises on Sunday evening, Germany’s finance minister suggested that perhaps His Munificence should focus on his own problems before trying to fix everybody else’s. Wolfgang Schaeuble told public broadcaster ZDF in an interview late Sunday that “people are always very quick at giving others advice.”He says: “Mr. Obama should first of all take care of reducing the American deficit, which is higher than in the eurozone.” An unfortunate and embarrassing truth — the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is well over eighty percent,...

Trading in the securities of Spanish lender Bankia has been suspended "due to circumstances that may affect the normal share trading," stock market regulator CNMV said on Friday. Bankia will ask the state for more than 15 billion euros ($19 billion) to bail it out when its new management team presents a restructuring plan on Friday, a financial sector source said late on Thursday.

Your credit card's been stolen- and the punk that  did it has been running hog-wild ever since Every American voter needs to see this stuff...  please help to drill reality into some of the thicker skulls within your own personal sphere from now until the election.  Just look at the charts, what's to debate unless you're talking to some hard-core, incurable Cloward-Pivenist?  We're doomed if we don't 86 this guy... period More at Reaganite Republican... RightChange  SodaHead   PoliticoMafioso   FinanceWand   Oddhammer.com One Conservative Voice   TownHall   DittoRush   The Roanoke Slant    TerrellAfterMath   Cartoon-a-Day   Two Minute Conservative   BabylonToday

In 2008, the financial world as we know it changed. Many of the principles we were taught were invalidated, it seemed. Save for retirement and live happily ever after was the conventional wisdom. Then the market crashed! In his book The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan discusses the importance of the rule of law in a healthy economy. Dr. Greenspan notes that the vast majority of business transactions go through normally because of trust and the "rule of law." But what if the rule of law changes such that the circumstances under which normal commerce is undertaken become disrupted? In...

We in America today live in a country circumscribed by entitlement policies devised by an America that has steadily been disappearing. Those policies established over a generation ago cannot possibly in mathematical or demographic terms support the America of the present much less the America of the future. That is the stark reality. We need to reform those policies or we shall go bankrupt, and raising taxes on the so-called rich will not fix things. Even raising taxes on the middle class will not fix things. Nor will spending a trillion dollars more than we have on hand fix things....

As large parts of the world turn green to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has been flying the green, white and gold flag on a charm offensive around the world. Kenny is packing in trips to London, China and New York within a couple of weeks in an effort to carry forward the country’s gradual return to economic health, which has been based largely on attracting foreign investment. He opens the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, after visiting at the White House over the weekend. “This is a very important push for Ireland,” Irish...

This is a stunner. In the new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, journalist Noam Scheiber uncovers this tantalizing tidbit: In May 2009, the president asked [White House budget director Peter Orszag] to draft a secret memo laying out the government’s options in the event of a fiscal crisis, in which a runaway deficit sent interest rates spiraling upward. No other member of the Obama economic team was even aware of the assignment. OK, let’s take this step by step:1. The Obama administration has already conceded it has no long-term plan to deal with rising U.S....

Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011 Time for IMF to save Europe By LAURENCE H. SUMMERS The Washington Post WASHINGTON — European leaders met last week for yet another "historic" summit at which the fate of Europe is said to hang in the balance. Yet it is clear that this will not be the last one convened to deal with the financial crisis. Given that Europe is the largest component of the global economy, the rest of the world has a stake in helping to avoid major financial accidents. It also has a stake in aiding continued growth in Europe and ensuring...