President Barack Obama’s 18 member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (commission) just voted 11-7 in support of the commission’s official report. This is three votes short of the 14-vote mark President Obama said would be needed before the report could be sent to Congress. While the commission deserves …
After yesterday’s Senate vote against an earmark ban, we again made the case that the damage earmarks do to our nation’s deficits go far beyond the nominal amounts spent on the earmarks themselves. The problem is that the votes earmarks secure from the sponsoring legislators then allow for ever higher …
President Obama just announced a partial two-year pay freeze for civilian federal workers. Under the President’s plan, federal employees will not receive cost-of-living increases in their pay in 2011 and 2012. However, most federal employees will still receive seniority-based pay increases over the next two years. The President’s decision is …
President Barack Obama announced today that he will ask Congress to freeze federal worker pay for the next two years saving $5 billion through 2012. Good for him. This is a welcome acknowledgment on two fronts: 1) that, as Heritage research has definitively shown, federal workers are paid more than …
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) Debt Reduction Task Force – a highly diverse group of private individuals – has laid out a comprehensive approach to closing the deficit and slowing the rise in national debt. They do this through a combination of spending reductions, many though not all of which …
The results of Tuesday’s election sent a clear message about the direction voters want the federal government to take. The recently released 2010 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll What Americans Said about the Public Schools is illustrative. Whether it’s paying the bills, setting standards, deciding what should be taught, or holding …
On October 15, 2008, well after the financial collapse had begun, President Barack Obama promised the American people during the third presidential debate: “What I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.” The verdict is out on how many Americans believed President Obama then, but the …
Sen.Tom Coburn (R-OK) put out a report today documenting one billion in your tax dollars given to dead people. Zombies only exist on Halloween, yet dead people received checks from the federal government in the form of stimulus checks, aid to heat homes, housing subsidies, claims for prescription drugs, and …
