Free Republic

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said “the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path” in an 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley released Sunday. “The U.S. federal government’s on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. So, it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s at all controversial,” Powell said when asked if the national debt is a danger to the economy.

Neil Oliver does a great monologue this week, generally following the arc of our current situation as constructed by a network of political elites. Oliver takes the continuum to its logical conclusion and then asks, what then? The political people and corporate institutions, those protecting themselves inside compounds and behind walls, cannot self-sustain. What happens when they need the proles they have diminished?

Former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said his former employer presented an “unsustainable” workplace after the 2020 election and he “just no longer felt comfortable with the programming” at the media giant. “I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Wallace told the New York Times in an interview published Sunday. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”

On the campaign trail for the Democratic presidential nomination, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg tries to portray himself as a moderate politician. By running ads against implementing a single-payer health system, Buttigieg would have voters believe he rejects the radical leftism of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Don’t you believe it. Buttigieg recently released an aging and retirement plan that proposed massive amounts of new entitlement spending, including a program that the Obama administration couldn’t implement in a fiscally sound manner, with very little in the way of specifics to pay for all his ideas. It’s but the latest example of...

CAIRO (AFP) — Ali Abdelaziz sees children as a “gift from God”, so much so that he has 10 of his own, even as Egypt’s government struggles to stem a “catastrophic” population boom. Abdelaziz works in the capital as a doorman, but his children stay in a village with their mother in the southern province of Minya where life is cheaper. Egypt’s overpopulation is adding pressure on the economy, already reeling from the political and security turmoil since the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak. With 96 million inhabitants — and 9.4 million expatriates — the Arab world’s...

Is it possible that a toll road could price itself right out of its market? That's essentially what the Pennsylvania Turnpike is prescribing for itself. Last week the Turnpike Commission informed us that tolls will go up a ninth consecutive year in 2017 — and stay on a steadily upward trajectory until 2044. And of course, there's no guarantee after that. By then, we can only hope, the turnpike will have morphed into a giant solar-powered car-train — for self-driving cars, of course. "Unsustainable" is an overused word these days, but it applies to the toll road's future. The turnpike...

Harvest should be the time for celebrations, weddings and full bellies in southern Malawi. But Christopher Witimani, Lilian Matafle and their seven children and four grandchildren had nothing to celebrate last week as they picked their meagre maize crop. Last year’s drought, followed by erratic rains, hit the village of Nkhotakota hard. But this year the rains never came and, for a second year running, the family grain store is empty. If they manage their savings carefully and eat just one small meal a day, they may just have enough food for two more months. By August, said Irish charity...

UnitedHealth, the nation's biggest health insurer, will cut its participation in public health insurance exchanges to only a handful of states next year after expanding to nearly three dozen for this year. CEO Stephen Hemsley said Tuesday that the company expects losses from its exchange business to total more than $1 billion for this year and last. He added that the company cannot continue to broadly serve the market created by the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion due partly to the higher risk that comes with its customers. UnitedHealth Group Inc. said it now expects to lose $650 million this...

...The unprecedented scale and speed of the autumn’s refugee crisis has forced even the Swedish political class to acknowledge that the ground beneath its feet has shifted forever. There is simply no more money, and no more housing, for everyone who wants to come, and for everyone who was entitled to do so under the old rules.

The beleaguered New York City Housing Authority said it faces a $98 million budget gap this year that will grow to $400 million by 2025 ... the "financial model for pubic housing is unsustainable." Meanwhile, the Daily News also reported that NYCHA sold off supplies that were needed for repairs and cleanup at its complexes across the city.

The Associated Press reported today that 28 percent of households that receive food stamps are headed by someone who has at least "some" college experience. In 1980, this figure was eight percent. Seven percent of households who receive food stamps are headed by someone with a bachelor's degree. In 1980, this figure was only at three percent....

It was with some dismay that I read this morning of the impending end of The Oil Drum, perhaps the leading “peak oil” blog … … due to scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors. Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles. Because of this and the high expense of running the site, the board has unanimously decided that the best course of action is to convert the site to a static archive of previously published material as of 31st July...

Those who work for a living might want to put away shoes, hammers, and other hard objects to keep from throwing them through the computer. A new study shows that on average the government spends $168 per household on various assistance programs, one-fifth more than the median income of $137. As the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee reported (after all, who else in government is going to do it?), welfare spending per hour per household in poverty is $30.60, which is higher than the $25.03 median income per hour. The Weekly Standard points out that direct welfare payments...

Comprehensive immigration reform could make millions of people suddenly eligible for assistance under President Obama's healthcare law, assuming a final deal paves the way for undocumented immigrants to receive papers. Illegal aliens are now prohibited from purchasing coverage through the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges, which will launch next year. They are also ineligible for Medicaid under most circumstances, making the law's expansion of the program fruitless for people without documents. Even young illegal immigrants with "deferred action" status, known as "DREAMers," cannot access the law's benefits. But the picture could change completely if Hispanic lawmakers get their wish —...

Oh Really Mr. Reptilian Republican? By Karl Denninger (8/30/2012) Last night was a spooge-fest at the RNC; one of the more-common lies was Ryan's: “Before the math and the momentum overwhelm us all, we are going to solve this nation’s economic problems,” Ryan said. “And I’m going to level with you. We don’t have that much time. But if we are serious, and smart, and we lead, we can do this.” Oh really Paul? Paul Ryan, for those who have been living in a cave for the last couple of years, has put forward two separate "budgets" that are nothing...

The head of the world's largest food producer believes high prices are due to the growing of crops for biofuels."The time of cheap food prices is over," says Nestle chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. He is highly critical of the rise in the production of bio-diesel, saying this puts pressure on food supplies by using land and water that would otherwise be used to grow crops for human or animal consumption."If no food was used for fuel, the prices would come down again - that is very clear," he says. "We are now in a new world with a completely different level...

EU: Staring down the abyss of isolation offered by the far left, Greece's voters had the sense to pull back, electing a pro-bailout center-right party in Sunday's vote and staying in the euro. But are they ready for real austerity? As surprising and relieving as it was to see Greeks vote for the New Democracy party which took 29.4% of the votes in Sunday's multiparty election, the result is the best of bad alternatives. Voting in New Democracy for a second time since the government failed in May bought time, but the real issue is whether Greece has the will...

We may never know how he did it. It could have involved some sort of broad scale mind control experiment. Perhaps he brought in somebody from over the border in Delaware to cast a spell on the state legislature. But in New Jersey – a state generally defined by partisan warfare between liberal Democrats and really liberal Democrats – Governor Chris Christie has met the public workers unions on the field of battle and sent them running like pigs from the gun. New Jersey lawmakers on Thursday approved a broad rollback of benefits for 750,000 government workers and retirees, the...

George Monbiot of the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian has a must-read column in which he admits that because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed. Read the whole piece for a thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one of the smartest people in it. This is what I’ve been getting at for more than a year here: regardless of what is happening to Planet Earth, the green movement does not have coherent and workable solutions.

Are you ready for the next massive taxpayer bailout? Many of the same lawmakers who infuriated taxpayers by bailing out Wall Street, the auto companies, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently created a new program virtually guaranteed to require bailouts. And unlike those one-time bailouts, this one will become an annual taxpayer expense. The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act is a new long-term care insurance program. The concept had floated around Washington for years before Congress inserted it into the Obamacare health law — most likely to provide a $70 billion piggybank that could be raided...