“The problem isn’t that we haven’t agreed, the problem is that we’ve agreed way too much,” explained Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) in a recent interview with The Heritage Foundation. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have trillion dollar deficits, $16 trillion in debt, and unfunded liabiltiies of $113-131 trillion.” Senator Coburn visited The Heritage Foundation this week to discuss his new book, The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan to Stop Washington from Bankrupting America which makes the case that the biggest threat America faces is “Washington politicians who refuse to relinquish the intoxicating …
President Obama pushed for expanding wind energy and advanced energy manufacturing subsidies at the wind turbine manufacturer TPI Composites in Newton, Iowa, today. These subsidies have and continue to enjoy bipartisan support precisely because they benefit both Republicans and Democrats come election time, when they can say they helped create jobs for their district and state. But targeted tax credits and other subsidies are wasteful and economically destructive for four fundamental reasons: Subsidies destroy jobs elsewhere. If you subsidize anything enough, you’re bound to find producers to take advantage of …
It’s hardly rare for politicians in Washington to say things that make one wonder what color the sky is in their world. Vice President Joe Biden has offered a steady stream of examples, demonstrating again that sometimes an old dog can’t unlearn old tricks. But in the press gaggle yesterday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney dropped a doozy, suggesting anew that the Obama Administration is living in a fantasyland all its own. Carney broke off answering a question about Baghdad to insert the following: The rate at which spending …
As Americans across the country gear up for Memorial Day, they have welcomed the recent dip in gas prices. Although gas prices are down nearly 20 cents per gallon from one month ago, the average price in the United States remains uncomfortably high at $3.68 per gallon. AAA projects Memorial Day travel will be similar to that of 2011, slightly increasing by 1.2 percent. The news, really, is that these high gas prices aren’t news anymore. Consumers have grown accustomed to $3.50 or $4 per gallon on the signs at …
The Energy Department’s inspector general released a report recently highlighting the lack of financial oversight in the Department’s electric vehicle funding program. The report underscores problems with some of the program’s beneficiaries highlighted here at Scibe and under scrutiny by congressional investigators. The IG report focuses on DOE’s Transportation Electrification Program, which is part of the president’s stated goal of getting a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. The report states: the Department had not obtained and reviewed required financial and compliance audits and cost reports for the …
Spending has skyrocketed under President Obama, but of late some are claiming that the opposite is true. Case in point: MarketWatch columnist Rex Nutting wrote, “Obama spending binge never happened,” and Politifact rated this statement “mostly true.” But Mitt Romney this week said that “Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelrated at a pace without precedent in recent history.” So who has it right? Mitt Romney. What Politifact must have missed is a very important data point: President Obama signed most of the spending attributed …
Under current law, the U.S. Department of Defense faces significant spending cuts over the next 10 years—cuts that America’s civilian and military leaders have candidly described as “devastating” and “very high risk.” This precarious state of the Pentagon’s future fiscal affairs is due to the Budget Control Act (BCA), the controversial August 2011 deal by which Congress and the President agreed to raise America’s debt limit. The BCA placed ceilings to cap the defense budget and other forms of discretionary spending. The Obama Administration proposed in its fiscal year (FY) …
It’s not every day that a member of one branch of the federal government tries to be the boss of the leader of a separate branch. But last week, a senior Senator on the powerful Judiciary Committee weighed in to claim that, instead of striving to uphold the Constitution, the Supreme Court should simply follow his branch’s lead. “I trust that he will be a chief justice for all of us and that he has a strong institutional sense of the proper role of the judicial branch,” Senator Patrick Leahy …
Mitt Romney yesterday released his plan to reform America’s ailing education system. It goes big on school choice and parental empowerment and calls for increased transparency of results. Along the way, it admonishes education unions — and rightly so — for standing in the way of reform. Notably, Romney’s plan would expand D.C.’s embattled Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), which provides vouchers to low-income children in the nation’s capital. President Obama has been hostile toward the voucher program. Most recently he capped enrollment in OSP, after having agreed to its reauthorization …
The Obama Administration is piggybacking on claims made by MarketWatch’s Rex Nutting that Obama has not gone on the spending spree everyone thinks he has since taking office. As White House press secretary Jay Carney puts it, President Obama has exercised “significant fiscal restraint” and “acted with great fiscal responsibility.” Nutting writes: “Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.” So Nutting gives Obama a free pass for …
