Free Republic

Modern government, at pretty much all levels, has become simply a jobs program that constantly seeks to increase its members. And of course 90+% of these members will vote for the Democrat party, the party of government. Anyone who isn’t a member of one of these jobs programs is a sap for playing

Americans are justifiably frustrated regarding what is going on in Washington, D.C. But let's not forget that we elect these folks. We may have a mess, but we can at least be proud that it's our mess. There is one unique problem. Unlike business, where change can be made quickly, government programs are so hard to change that it is almost a one-way street. It's not so easy to pass new programs, but once they're passed, we're stuck with them, generally, forever. Sure, technically they can be changed. But when is the last time we saw a major government program...

Some of the nation’s leading defense companies are declaring war on a powerful enemy — an obscure Pentagon official named Shay Assad who has helped cut more than $500 million from military contracts with his aggressive scrutiny of their costs. The industry’s tactics include blanketing congressional committees with proposals that would make it harder for Assad and his contracting officers to get detailed breakdowns of the companies' expenses, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. But Assad, the Pentagon's pricing director for the past five years, refuses to back down, saying: "We are going to be relentless in pursuing getting the...

The U.S. Senate, along with the U.S. House will discuss government funding. The bill before the U.S. Senate would fund amnesty, the Iran Nuke Deal, & even Planned Parenthood. GOP leadership has joined the democrat party & most of the media in the lie that government funding must be passed. /us-senate-debate-government-funding

Once again the crisis in Greece is threatening the unity of the entire euro zone. Many analysts are asking what must be done to restore viability to the Union's weakest link. Lost in this discussion is that modern Greece, formed in 1830, has never really been required to stand on its own. Generations of support from abroad, typically given for strategic reasons, has created a false sense of prosperity in the country and has prevented the Greeks from accepting the realities of their current situation. When Greece fought for its independence against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, the struggle...

The Washington Free Beacon happened to stumble upon an interesting factoid, and they published it. One day, the Obama administration spent $94,360 hiring a Democrat-connected event-management firm to build a stage for an 18-minute speech. The shock is not that it happened; it happens every day. The shock, to any who are paying attention, is how differently the political factions viewed the news. Conservatives were horrified, and liberals were offended that anyone would even care. A hundred thousand dollars in a country of our size? A hundred thousand dollars in a nation of fifty states, of 300 million people? A...

I thought TARP was the sleaziest-ever example of cronyism and corruption in Washington. The Wall Street bailout rewarded politically well-connected companies, encouraged moral hazard, and ripped off taxpayers. Heck, it was so bad that it makes the sleaze at the Export-Import Bank seem almost angelic by comparison. But I may have to reassess my views. One of the provisions of Obamacare allows the White House to give bailouts to big health insurance companies. You’re probably wondering why these big firms would need bailouts. After all, didn’t Obamacare coerce millions of people into becoming involuntary customers of these companies? That should...

During last year's budget negotiation meetings, President Barack Obama told House Speaker John Boehner, "We don't have a spending problem." When Boehner responded with "But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem," Obama replied, "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that." In one sense, the president is right. What's being called a spending problem is really a symptom of an unappreciated deep-seated national moral rot. Let's examine it with a few questions. Is it moral for Congress to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another? I believe that most Americans would pretend that...

The Census Bureau just released a report on America’s aging population. The big takeaway is that our population will be getting much older between now and 2050. And since I’m a baby boomer, I very much like the fact that we’re expected to live longer. But as a public finance economist, I’m not nearly as happy. As I explain in this interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network (and as confirmed by BIS, OECD, and IMF data), the United States is going to get deluged by a tsunami of entitlement spending. Dan Mitchell Discussing the Slow Motion Train Wreck...

As you can imagine, there’s a lot to choose from in the contest for the most spectacular waste of tax dollars. But the politicians in Oregon must really want the prize, because they managed to flush several hundred million dollars down a rat hole by putting together a state-run Obamacare website that has to be abandoned because it is so dysfunctional. And if the Oregon website is so bad that it’s switching to the much-derided Washington Obamacare website, it must be a disaster of unparalleled dimensions! Here are some excerpts from an AP report. After months of trying to get...

In the pre-World War I era, the fiscal burden of government was very modest in North America and Western Europe. Total government spending consumed only about 10 percent of economic output, most nations were free from the plague of the income tax, and the value-added tax hadn’t even been invented. Today, by contrast, every major nation has an onerous income tax and the VAT is ubiquitous. These punitive tax systems exist largely because – on average - the burden of government spending now consumes more than 40 percent of GDP. To be blunt, fiscal policy has moved dramatically in the...

As part of its campaign to step up efforts to address climate change, the White House on Wednesday announced the creation of a new website to serve as a one-stop location for the enormous amount of climate data housed at different federal agencies. In the administration’s most high-profile effort, the Environmental Protection Agency in September proposed rules to cut greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants. The president also plans to ask Congress for $1 billion in his 2015 budget to establish a “climate resiliency fund” that would finance research, preparation and infrastructure to adapt to extreme weather driven by...

My all-time most-viewed blog post wasn’t the parable about beer and the tax system. Nor was it the joke about California, Texas, and the Coyote. Those won the silver and bronze trophies. The gold medal belongs to the two pictures that explain how the welfare state begins and how it ends. Those images make a very serious point that the social capital of a nation gets eroded and the economy gets overburdened when there are too many people riding in the wagon and not enough people pulling the wagon. And I’ve been especially fond of the wagon cartoons because they...

Reaction to Obama Budget: Yawns, Spending Increases Won't Fly 08 March 2014 President Obama dropped his fiscal 2015 budget proposal on Congress March 4 to a chorus of yawns and indifference. The budget featured numerous massive new spending proposals — almost none of which are likely to become law — along with proposals for tax increases on “the rich” and fiscally unsustainable deficits through the rest of his presidential tenure. Even establishment press organs received the budget proposals with a reaction along a spectrum from yawns to cynicism about it's deployment as an election year wedge. Zeke J. Miller...

Fifty years ago last week, on Feb. 26, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the sweeping tax cuts that had been championed by his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. The law brought the top marginal income-tax rate down to 70% from 91% and the bottom marginal rate down to 14% from 20%. The 22 rates in between also were cut. The tax legislation of 1964 was one of three major across-the-board income-tax cuts in the 20th century. The others took place in the 1920s, during the Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations, and in 1981 and 1986 during...

The President’s new budget has been unveiled. There are lots of provisions that deserve detailed attention, but I always look first at the overall trends. Most specifically, I want to see what’s happening with the burden of government spending. And you probably won’t be surprised to see that Obama isn’t imposing any fiscal restraint. He wants spending to increase more than twice as fast as needed to keep pace with inflation. What makes these numbers so disappointing is that we learned last month that even a modest bit of spending discipline is all that’s needed to balance the budget. By...

There are many things President Obama is consistent on. Lauding the woes of climate change is one. Income inequality comes to mind as another. And we should not forget spending reform. The current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue loves him some government spending. He likes to brag about reforming spending, but the reality of his actions speak much louder than his words. He has no intention of reforming anything to do with government spending and that includes entitlement spending. Any sane person who is capable of doing a little math knows there is no way we can ever dig our...

President Obama's policies continue to produce results that are the opposite of what he promises, yet he brazenly cites the abysmal state of his economy to announce -- indignantly -- that he will double down on his failures. Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven -- notorious leftist professors who devised a sinister plot to overburden the American economy to the point of collapse and then replace it with a socialist system -- would be quite proud of their understudy. Obama's policies are drowning America in debt, unemployment, dependency and despair, yet he blames us for his failures -- as if...

Minnesota isn't alone in wasting federal dollars on failing exchanges. ObamaCare exchanges built by Oregon, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Vermont also are suffering serious-to-fatal problems. These six states — all solidly Democratic — received $1.2 billion in ObamaCare grants, according to official tallies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Those dysfunctional six are in addition to 35 states that initially accepted funds to build exchanges that never got built.

As was expected after the Paul Ryan/Patty Murray budget agreement was passed through Congress and signed into law by President Obama, a new spending bill is emerging in the House of Representatives. It is being written in a secretive process on the sub-committee level, for the time being. As outlined in the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, it is based on a $1.012 trillion spending cap. As also should be expected, it is opposed by many of the same Republicans who opposed the Ryan-Murray agreement because it raises the spending cap above the levels set by the sequestration legislation. There are more...