The Archives

Supernanny Cass Sunstein’s ‘Friendly Paternalism’: It’s For Your Own Good, America
  12 Apr 2013     4:58 pm      Warner Todd Huston

Cass Sunsetein, one of President Obama’s leading left-wing, university eggheads, has penned an interesting piece in New Republic explaining how the nanny state is really a very important and useful aspect of today’s modern Democrat scheme. It’s for your own good, don’t you know?
Launching his April 8 piece, “Why Paternalism Is Your Friend,” Sunstein evokes New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (mostly failed, not that Sunstein says so) nanny state efforts to take away his constituents’ freedom on such things as trans fats, sodas, and guns. Sunstein points out that to …

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Tax, Spend, And Blame
  11 Apr 2013     12:01 am      Robert Cleveland

President Obama has unveiled his budget proposal (only two months late, but who’s counting?), and he presented it with the same gravity and urgency that informed Americans have come to know and love from Dear Leader.  Each and every time the president makes the decision to engage in smear tactics to push his next bad policy through the legislature, he necessarily takes a dramatic stand in front of the media and points his finger at the Republican bogeyman.  It is the same politics of divisiveness, the same vilify-and-conquer strategy he …

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Rep. Maxine Waters Inflates Sequester to ’170 Million’ Jobs Lost
  2 Mar 2013     4:43 pm      Warner Todd Huston

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) had a dire prediction for America due to sequestration claiming that 170 million jobs would be lost as a result of the policy. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are only about 140 million jobs in the whole country.
During a press conference on February 28, Waters told reporters of a visit by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who told members of congress that sequestration is not the optimal way to cut the federal budget.
Talking of Bernanke’s comments, Waters claimed that “if sequestration …

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The Dignity Of The Undignified
  21 Feb 2013     12:01 am      Robert Cleveland

One lesser-known fact about the upcoming Sequester cuts is that it includes a pay cut for Congress.  This, without a doubt, is a good thing, if only because, despite their near constant bickering about how the other side needs to be more bipartisan, both Houses of Congress have proven to be utter failures during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Our nation has not had a budget for almost four straight years now, a failure that primarily lies at the feet of the Democrat-controlled Senate.  Congress’s debt commission failed to identify sufficient cuts to …

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Food Stamps Recipients Increased 11,133 Per Day In Obama’s First Term
  23 Jan 2013     4:00 pm      Warner Todd Huston

One way to mark the legacy of a presidency is to tally statistics and at least one stat is not very flattering for this president: Americans on food stamps have grown by 11,133 every day during his first term.
In 2009, when Obama took office, recipients of SNAP, the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program, stood at 31,939,110 but by the end of his first term the latest tally numbered 47,525,329.
That is a growth of 11,133 per day between January of 2009 and October of 2012.
The Congressional Budget office reports that SNAP enrollment …

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Looking Forward To A Shutdown
  15 Jan 2013     12:02 am      Robert Cleveland

President Obama’s press conference yesterday showed America just exactly what he meant when he said he would not negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. He will not negotiate. He will take no prisoners. He will accept nothing less than complete and total surrender to his agenda.
Once again, the President of the United States seeks to blind the American people to reality, giving them instead a convenient collection of sound bites that place all blame this crisis he created at the feet of Republicans in Congress.
President Obama came out with a …

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Temporary Fiscal Cliff Compromise Full of Pork, Tax Hikes and Spending Increases
  3 Jan 2013     2:38 pm      Rachel Alexander

Temporary Fiscal Cliff Compromise Full of Pork, Tax Hikes and Spending Increases

Congressional Republicans caved in to the Democrats this week, surrendering their principles in order to pass a bill that merely delays the looming fiscal cliff by two months. This is the first time Republicans have voted for a tax increase in 20 years. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) strong-armed Republican members of the House into supporting it, no doubt by threatening them with loss of their committee positions should they dare to oppose it. The Wall Street Journal described …

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Fiscal Face Plant
  2 Jan 2013     12:02 am      Robert Cleveland

It is now 2013, and I can unequivocally state that I am sick and tired of all of the Fiscal Cliff crap…mainly because crap is all that we are getting from Washington. After all of the angst and hand-wringing and closed-door meetings and finger-pointing and bloviating for the press, all the White House and the Senate have managed to produce is yet another spending bill.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the deal struck between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden, which passed in the Senate in …

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Building The Fiscal Cliff, One Dollar At A Time
  26 Dec 2012     6:02 am      Robert Cleveland

To hear the politicians tell it, you would think that the Fiscal Cliff negotiations were a case of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. President Obama and the Democrats won’t budge on their oh, so essential tax hikes on the evil rich, and those stiff-necked Republicans won’t budge on their insistence that tax rates not be raised.
But as is the norm in modern American politics, the truth tells a different story.
Republican leadership has been quite malleable in the Fiscal Cliff talks, willingly abandoning the “no new taxes” standard. First …

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Let “progressives” Own the Fiscal Cliff
  12 Dec 2012     5:56 pm      Michael Fell

The Federal Reserve plans to keep short-term interest rate near zero until unemployment drops below 6.5 percent and inflation reaches 2.5 percent.  This means given the current equations used to calculate those numbers, Fed interest rates will remain at current lows until mid-2015 or beyond.
The Fed will also continue spending $85 billion a month on bond purchases to keep long-term borrowing costs low and to stimulate the U.S. economy.  They will also spend $45 billion a month on long-term Treasury purchases and continue buying $40 billion a month in mortgage …

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The Communication Cliff
  10 Dec 2012     12:01 am      Robert Cleveland

Republicans should be less worried about the Fiscal Cliff than about their own Communication Cliff. It seems that the GOP leadership has been gripped by a great communicative ineptitude, and until they escape from its grasp, they will continue to languish in political poverty, taking blame for fake crisis after fake crisis manufactured by the Democrats for the express purpose of placing blame for our nation’s continuing economic woes at the feet of the Republican Party.
Our nation’s leaders have been focused on this Fiscal Cliff for weeks now, and it …

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