Free Republic

WASHINGTON - “Like grave robbers opening King Tut’s tomb, Congress can’t wait to get its hands on America’s retirement account assets,” the Wall Street Journal warned taxpayers last year. The warning was contained in an article written by Philip DeMuth, author of “The Overtaxed Investor: Slash Your Tax Bill and Be a Tax Alpha Dog.” He was writing about the House-passed Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act, known by its less than honest acronym, “SECURE.” If you have laid aside investment funds for your kids to inherit to help them out after you’ve passed away, there will be...

WASHINGTON - Writing a weekly, nationally syndicated newspaper and online column assumes that my readers understand how I arrive at the political positions I take on the issues of the day. And most of the time they do. But now and then, here and there, some of my readers have wrongly assumed I must be a liberal, left wing Democrat, if I criticize positions or actions taken by President Trump or his administration. That view especially comes through loud and clear in their online comments. And, yes, I read all your comments, critical or praiseworthy, and thanks for taking the...

WASHINGTON - This was the week when Republicans proved once again that they know how to tackle big issues and govern, passing the most significant tax overhaul in more than three decades. It will not only lure tax-battered corporations back home from abroad, it will also unlock capital investment to create stronger economic growth and better paying jobs, boost middle class incomes, and hand the GOP a winning issue heading into the 2018 mid-term elections. Left wing, tax-crazy Democrats complained that the bill would further enrich big business and the wealthy and do nothing to boost middle class paychecks....

WASHINGTON -- In the eighth year of Barack Obama's presidency, the liberal national news media continue their shameful cover-up of his failed economic policies. The latest and most stunning example of the media's duplicitous shell game came last Friday, the day the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its monthly jobs report. The Washington Post ran a front-page story, written the day before, under the headline "Job market, at long last, shows signs of resilience." The story's dubious lead said: "For the first time since the recession ended, America's job market has been firing on all cylinders: Workers...

WASHINGTON -- No matter what President Obama said about the state of our union Tuesday night, the economy's prognosis is not good. Who says so? A hefty majority of the American people in a new Washington Post/ABC News poll that sought their opinion about the economy's health. Roughly six in 10 said it was "not so good" or "poor." Six years into Obama's painfully slow recovery, jobs are hard to come by in many parts of the country and wages remain flat. Hourly earnings actually fell last month, the U.S. Labor Department reported last week. It's gotten so bad that...

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama continues to embrace low-tier, go-it-alone executive actions to pad out the last two years of his mistake-filled, agenda-less presidency in a hopeless hunt for a legacy. His arrogant decision this week to re-establish diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba is the latest example of a president desperately searching for something to do without having to deal with Congress. You can comb through all of the polling data for the topmost concerns of the American people, and renewing U.S. relations with Cuba's evil Castro dictatorship is not among them. But with his job-approval polls in the basement, and...

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama is getting a number of critical report cards on his foreign and domestic policies lately. Here at home, Janet Yellen, in her first monetary policy address as the head of the Federal Reserve Board, said the labor markets were still weak, and that it will likely take two years or more before the U.S. fully recovers from its recession. Ouch. If Yellen's forecast proves right, this means it will have taken Obama's administration nearly eight years to lift our economy out of its long and painful lethargy. She expressed grave concern that the economy's 6.7 percent...

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's failed job policies are facing bitter criticism from African-American leaders who say black unemployment has grown worse under his presidency. After four years of holding their tongues and remaining quiet in the face of sharply rising black unemployment and record poverty, political leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus to the NAACP have begun to open fire on the White House. Obama won 96 percent of the black vote in 2008 and about the same percentage in 2012, despite a worsening jobless crisis among African-Americans. At 14 percent for adults and 43.1 percent for 16-to-19-year-old teenagers, blacks...

WASHINGTON - If anyone still thinks President Obama is serious about putting our fiscal house in order, Exhibits A and B prove he's been playing political games with this issue from the beginning. Exhibit A: The White House high command saw the full sequester budget battle -- not as an effort to curb out-of-control deficit spending that's driving the government into unfathomable debt -- but as a relentless, politically-driven opportunity to bludgeon the Republicans in the upcoming 2014 midterm elections. Obama's campaign-style events in recent weeks were a carefully- crafted effort in demagoguery to blame the GOP for the sequester...

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has to do two things really well at his convention: Lay out in dramatic terms how bad the Obama economy is and demonstrate that he is the candidate who can fix it. After Monday’s front-page Washington Post/ABC News poll showing more than 80 percent of Americans now say the economy is poor, and 70 percent who say our country is seriously off-track, Mr. Romney’s convention has to pound that failed economy message into the minds of TV viewers and nail it to the door of President Obama’s Oval Office. This will be the clarion call...

Senate Democrats voted Wednesday to raise taxes on a struggling economy at a time of rising unemployment and slowing economic growth. Dismissing months of statistics showing the economy may be on the cusp of a double-dip recession, Democrats passed the tax bill by a thin 51 to 48 margin to show their support for President Obama's failed economic policies. The Democrats' action represented the triumph of their party's ultra-leftist, class warfare ideology over economic common sense. Two Democrats (James Webb of Virginia and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut) voted against it. No Republican voted for it. Think for a moment what...

WASHINGTON -- There's no chance the Senate is going to take up last week's House Republican budget cuts, yet they sent a loud, clear, muscular message to the other side of the Capitol that the Obama Democrats' spending binge days are over. The $61 billion the House will slice from this fiscal year's 2011 budget will cut much more deeply into the government's discretionary programs than anyone expects, eliminating or shrinking dozens of programs and offices, even axing some of the GOP's own sacred cows, and slashing agencies by up to 40 percent. But with the March 4 deadline looming,...

WASHINGTON -- The harsh economic reality for black Americans and their national leaders here is that black unemployment is worsening under the policies of the first black president. The sadder political reality is that these leaders, frustrated that blacks have the highest jobless rate among all other Americans, are going easy on President Obama, with polls showing virtually no decline in black support for him, at least not yet. Even more depressing, black leaders are still calling for more of the same old economic bromides to deal with black unemployment, unwilling to break with leftist Democratic policies that have made...

When President Obama turned his State of the Union address into an attack on the Supreme Court's ruling that ended the ban against corporate spending for political campaigns, the justices had to sit there motionless while encircled by Democratic lawmakers who cheered the president's scolding. Judicial scholars could not recall a president "taking a swipe" at the justices, as one of them put it, in such a venue, at least not since President Franklin D. Roosevelt did it in his 1937 address before he tried to pack the court with more liberals to rule in favor of his unconstitutional New...

A number of House Democrats have announced they are retiring, and party officials say more could follow in a tough midterm election year of high unemployment, a slow economic recovery and a very angry electorate. A growing number of Democrats have read the handwriting on the wall that tells of bleak prospects for their party in 2010 when Republicans are expected to pick up seats in the House and possibly in the Senate, too. Historically, the party out of power makes gains in an administration's midterm point, and that seems to be what is in store for the Democrats this...

As soon as Republican Rep. Michael N. Castle announced last week that he was running for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s open Senate seat, election analysts rated the contest a tossup favoring the Republican Party. Mr. Biden's seat had been rated safely Democratic by all the forecasters. However, the nine-term congressman and former two-term Delaware governor, who has never lost an election (winning vote totals in the 60 percent to 70 percent range) changed all that with his entry into the race. The Democrats were in danger of losing yet another Senate seat in 2010...

As it turned out, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based conservative advocacy group that was the chief organizer of the rally's arrangements, corrected an earlier estimate of 1 million to 1.5 million that it attributed to ABC News and put the figure between 600,000 and 700,000. ABC News denied it had reported a crowd that large and said its reports put the size of the demonstration in the "tens of thousands" range.

Protest set on Democratic health care plan The armies of "tea party" conservatives who packed town-hall meetings last month to oppose President Obama's $1 trillion government health care plan bring their protest movement to the Capitol on Saturday to urge its defeat. Those who thought the hundreds of April 15 tax-day rallies across the country were a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon had better think again. This is a grass-roots movement that has been gathering strength ever since, fueled anew by pending bills in Congress to enact a historic expansion of the government's power over the nation's private health care system. The tea...

When the "tea party" movement kicked off in April to protest record federal spending bills, trillion-dollar deficits and higher tax burdens, its members were fiercely independent and opposed any suggestion that they bond with a larger umbrella group, preferring to work within their local communities. But that go-it-alone approach is changing as a result of the war over health care, and the Tea Party Express tour is leading the way. The Tea Party Express - a caravan of buses, speakers and entertainers who have been holding protest rallies in cities and towns across the country - is heading to Washington,...

When the "tea party" movement kicked off in April to protest record federal spending bills, trillion-dollar deficits and higher tax burdens, its members were fiercely independent and opposed any suggestion that they bond with a larger umbrella group, preferring to work within their local communities. But that go-it-alone approach is changing as a result of the war over health care, and the Tea Party Express tour is leading the way. The Tea Party Express - a caravan of buses, speakers and entertainers who have been holding protest rallies in cities and towns across the country - is heading to Washington,...