Federal Budget
February 13, 2013 — John Hinderaker
President Obama has nominated Jack Lew, his Chief of Staff, to succeed Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury. Obama has made so many bad nominations that it is hard to keep track of them all, but Lew stands out in a bad crop. The Senate should reject his nomination. Today the Senate Finance Committee held its first, and probably only, day of hearings on Lew’s nomination. News accounts suggest
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February 12, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Conservatives have long been frustrated at Republican politicians’ seeming inability to strike back against the Democrats’ slurs by making the moral case for freedom. So it is great to see that the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee are preparing to do just that. Ranking member Jeff Sessions, who in recent years has emerged as one of the soundest and most important conservatives in Washington, has written a memo to
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February 10, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Critics of sequestration complain that it is a blunderbuss approach to cutting spending. They argue that “targeted cuts” — which operate line-by-line, program-by-program — are the smart way to rein in the budget without doing harm. But, as the Washington Post demonstrates, in practice “targeted cuts” frequently prove to be no cuts at all. Instead, they are a method through which legislators can claim to be slashing the budget while
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February 5, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Throughout the “fiscal cliff” drama, I argued that once the middle class tax increase was called off (as seemed almost inevitable), Republicans would have the upper hand because President Obama fears sequestration more than Republicans do (or should). The key, then, was to keep sequestration on the table or, as I put it, “to go over half of the fiscal cliff.” Now that we are about to take that plunge,
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January 20, 2013 — John Hinderaker
On Meet the Press this morning, Chuck Schumer promised that this year, Democrats will finally adopt a budget: The third-ranking Senate Democrat says Democrats will pass a budget proposal this year that includes new taxes and “our Republican colleagues had better get used to that fact.” Word is that the Republicans will agree to raise the debt ceiling for 90 days if the Democrats will agree, in return, to pass
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January 16, 2013 — John Hinderaker
I am generally of the view that a president has the right to staff his administration with like-minded people of his choice. He won the election, and is entitled, I think, to wide latitude in choosing the cabinet officers and others who he thinks can best advance his agenda. (Judges are different. They serve a co-equal branch of government, not the president’s administration, and they will be around long after
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January 15, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Our children are slated to drown under a tsunami of debt. Do they have any hope? Maybe, as the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee explain: Currently, almost 95 percent of spending on means-tested poverty assistance falls into four categories: cash assistance, health assistance, housing assistance, and social and family services. Welfare spending has increased on a year-over-year basis regardless of whether the economy has improved or unemployment has declined,
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January 15, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Much of the debt limit discussion is dishonest, like this statement from the Obama White House: There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default. This is wrong: under the 14th Amendment, the US cannot default on its bond obligations, and there is no need to do so. Federal revenues are
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January 14, 2013 — John Hinderaker
I had never been interested in guns until a little over a year ago, when I fired a handgun for the first time. To make a long story short, it turned into a hobby–the first I have ever had, as my wife points out. So when, by sheer coincidence, gun issues suddenly emerged in the same moment when I happened to know something about guns, the result was inevitable: I
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January 9, 2013 — John Hinderaker
News reports indicate that President Obama will appoint White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew to replace Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury. The Associated Press applauds Obama’s choice, telling us that Lew is a “pragmatic liberal” who “is well-liked in Washington by both Democrats and Republicans.” What the AP doesn’t tell us is that Lew has made signal contributions to the culture of lies, dishonesty and lack of
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January 8, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The current federal debt ceiling will be reached next month, and Democrats have been furiously posturing to limit the gains that Republicans can make in exchange for the House’s agreement to raise it. President Obama insists that he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling–not ever, not for anything–and Republicans should agree to raise it without getting anything in return. (This is much the same as his position on taxes.)
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January 7, 2013 — Scott Johnson
It’s not the Dynamo and the Virgin, it’s the ho-ho-ho and the head spin: What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: “At one point several weeks ago,” Mr. Boehner says, “the president said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’” Hey, maybe he gets his news from Meet the Press. It’s actually worse than
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January 3, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The genius of Michael Ramirez is brought to bear on our current fiscal situation–not for the first time, needless to say. The thing about Ramirez is that he is not only an excellent analyst of the political scene, he is a great artist. Who else could draw such a beautiful cartoon with such a pungent point, drawn from popular culture? There is a lot of talk about messaging on the
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January 3, 2013 — John Hinderaker
We have been arguing for a long time that Congressional Republicans should stop negotiating secret, back-room deals that are announced at midnight and voted on unread (which happened again with the “fiscal cliff” bill; Senators reportedly received a copy of the bill minutes before they had to vote on it). We and many others have said that, rather than taking the Democrats off the hook with jointly-sponsored back-room deals, the
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January 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Conservatives are generally unhappy with the deal that Mitch McConnell agreed to last night. But it never hurts to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, and it turns out that the left isn’t very happy with the outcome of the “cliff” negotiations, either. I am on lots of the Democratic Party email lists, including MoveOn’s. This is the hysterical email I got from them today: From: “Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn.org
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December 29, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Byron York passes on what he is hearing from Senate Republicans on the fiscal negotiations in DC. What he is hearing isn’t good: The word among some Senate Republicans is that a fiscal cliff deal is likely to be struck by Sunday, or Monday at the latest. … Those Senate Republicans hope the final deal will make permanent current tax levels — Bush tax cut levels — for everyone who
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December 28, 2012 — John Hinderaker
If there is one thing we know for sure about the federal government, it is that it spends way too much money–around $3.54 trillion in FY 2012, with a $1.1 trillion deficit. You would think that the man who presides over this mess, Barack Obama, would have the decency to be embarrassed. He has, after all, run up more than $4 trillion in debt in a mere four years. But
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