• The Heritage Network
    • Resize:
    • A
    • A
    • A
  • Donate
  • Entitlements, Taxes & Spending

    Replace the culture of entitlement with the culture of mutual responsibility.

    The House and Senate Cloakroam: February 1-5, 2010

    The President will release his budget next week, kicking off weeks of hearings and discussions about funding our nation’s priorities. However, the real news will once again be what is happening behind closed doors. Private discussions will continue on yet another stimulus and liberals must try to find a way to move Obamacare, perhaps through the politically poisonous reconciliation process. Even after the President’s State of the Union address, many questions remain. More

    Senate Puts Politics Over Fiscal Responsibility In Debt Limit Vote

    On Thursday, the Senate passed a bill to increase the debt limit. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) amended version of the bill passed by the House will raise the ceiling on the federal debt by $1.9 trillion. This is a huge increase from the House version, which allowed an … More

    Tweet of the Week: Daily Kos Founder Disses Spending Freeze

    Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas weighs in on President Obama’s proposed spending freeze. It goes without saying that when even the Daily Kos fails to find merit in the President’s proposals, the Administration needs to step back and reevaluate its policies. More

    Rep. Ryan Presents Roadmap for a Sustainable Fiscal Future

    Our nation is on an unsustainable fiscal course. The three major entitlements – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – alone are set to eclipse historical tax levels by 2052 and a realistic assessment of the Congressional Budget Office baseline shows the government piling on an additional $13 trillion over the … More

    Baucus Commission Is No Solution for Spending

    The Senate this week is considering amendments to Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) legislation to raise the debt limit.  Reid’s bill is a substitute to the version that passed the House, which would add $925 billion to the federal debt ceiling, but his would hike the limit by $1.9 trillion … More

    Senator Coburn’s “Radical” Alternative to Raising the Debt Limit

    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 … More

    Is Obama’s Underwhelming Spending Freeze A Fakeroo?

    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 … More

    The Domenici/Rivlin Debt Reduction Task Force

    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 … More

    Obamacare Will Decrease the Deficit? Yeah, Right!

    The vote looming in the Senate to raise the debt limit should serve as a wake-up call that federal spending is out of control. Instead, Democratic leadership has tried to convince Americans that passing costly health care legislation is not only sensible, but requisite, and must be done now. Neither … More

    Morning Bell: A Nothing Burger, A Fig Leaf, and a Commission On the Side

    From the President who brought you unaccountable, constitutionally-questionable czars comes the latest innovation in pass-the-buck leadership: a White House executive commission designed to solve the behemoth of a spending problem plaguing the federal government.  Members of Congress have described the commission as a “nothing burger,” a “fig leaf” and “something … More