Two weeks ago, CBS News filed a story on the over 100 people (including Senators, Representatives, their spouses, and staff) that flew to the failed United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen on the taxpayers dime. At the time, Congress had not yet filed their expense report. CBS has now followed up on the story. Watch CBS News Videos Online From CBS’ report:
In a report titled, “Long-Term Implications of the Fiscal Year 2010 Defense Budget,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) points out that this year’s Department of Defense (DoD) budget will exceed the real dollar equivalent of the Pentagon’s budget at the time of the defense build-up in the 1980s. Specifically, CBO calculates that this year’s defense budget will total $664 billion, compared to roughly $500 billion in 1985 — an increase of one-third. This comparison is no surprise to Congress or the American people because the U.S. is currently fighting two …
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has a radical alternative to raising the debt limit: spend less money. In an amendment introduced last week Senator Coburn proposed saving approximately $120 billion by, “consolidating more than 640 duplicative government programs, cutting wasteful Washington spending, and returning billions of dollars of unspent money.” The vast majority of the savings, $100 billion, would come from rescinding discretionary federal funding that has been unused for over two years and remains unassigned for a specific purpose. The remainder would result from the consolidation of hundreds of duplicative …
Liberals in America are mad because they have had a difficult time implementing an unpopular far left agenda, especially with regard to Obamacare. One of the results of this rage is for liberals to attack one of the rules in the Senate that protects unlimited debate and amendment – the Filibuster Rule. Rule 22 of the Senate’s rules governs the conduct of a filibuster and requires that a “Cloture Petition” be signed by 16 Senators to commence the process of shutting off debate on a nomination or legislation. The left wants …
According to multiple reports, President Barack Obama will announce a “spending freeze” in his State of the Union tomorrow night. While we definitely have our doubts about the efficacy and reality of these proposed cuts, what there is no doubt about is that President Obama’s past Defense budget was entirely inadequate to protect our nation. The Congressional Budget Office correctly notes that total inflation adjusted Defense spending “exceeds the peak of about $500 billion (in 2010 dollars) during the height of the Reagan Administration’s military buildup in the mid-1980s.” However, …
This weekend three different White House advisers speaking on three different Sunday shows gave three different answers as to how many jobs President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus had been “created or saved.” This coming just two weeks after the White House issued a memo supposedly ending the administration’s use of the jobs “created or saved” phrase. And that memo was inspired by several dozen reports that many thousands of the jobs the Obama administration had claimed were “saved or created” by their stimulus were entirely fake. So really it …
Internet outreach is the hottest new item in the U.S. government’s array of public diplomacy tools. While international broadcasting is in disarray, the focus has moved to Internet outreach through social networking and websites to promote America and its allies abroad. The Internet can be a great tool for the advancement of freedom and the empowerment of individuals. Yet it is not immune to the designs of state actors, nor does it exist in a policy vacuum. After having tangled with China over its internet censorship policy, Secretary of State …
The wheels have been falling off the global warming bandwagon well before Climategate and the recent hole-poking of the much trumpeted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report. In a national survey last January by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, global warming ranked 20th out of 20 as far as top priorities for 2009. Only 30% of Americans felt global warming should be a top priority while 85% rated the economy as a top priority. It’s 2010 and not much has changed except that global …
The President has the right idea with his proposal to freeze spending. Unfortunately, after driving spending to a record $3.7 trillion—nearly 26% of GDP—last year with the accompanying $1.4 trillion deficit, the proposal is at best a bit….underwhelming. According to the administration, only $447 billion in spending would be subject to the freeze with a total of $15 billion to be saved. So this freeze would reduce the deficit by 1.1 percent or less than half a percent off of last year’s spending. Details have yet to be announced, but those that have …
Today in Washington, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) launched its new Debt Reduction Task Force, chaired by former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and former OMB director and CBO director Dr. Alice Rivlin. The task force will aggressively address the abysmal fiscal outlook of the United States economy due to government spending. As Domenici and Rivlin displayed, the amount of debt held by the public is set to reach 100% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2019. Under the same trajectory, the debt would reach 400% of GDP by 2049. As …
