Tonight, President Obama held his third prime time press conference of his young presidency to mark his 100th day in office. This press conference was similar in tone and agenda to his previous pressers, down to the mammoth teleprompter hovering over the back of the room. It also continued a theme of government intervention in the lives of American taxpayers and of course, more government spending. He started off by asking Congress for $1.5 billion in additional emergency funding to combat the ‘swine flu’, which is a noble cause but …
It Must Grow on Trees The Stimulus Bill: In his first 100 days, President Obama signed a $787 billion “stimulus” bill that with interest totals $1.1 trillion in new spending. At no time during these 100 days did anyone on Capitol Hill read the entire bill, despite its rapid of growth of government in size and scope. Is Not Temporary: All projections on stimulus spending assume that none of the new government programs will continue ad infinitum, which goes against the Washington trend of making programs longer, bigger, but never …
Tomorrow, thousands of Americans across the country will organize on Tax Day to protest the tax, borrow, spend and bailout policies of Washington. Whether large or small, these demonstrations will all have one message in common: Enough! Over the past three months, Americans have seen an already out-of-control government spend their borrowed dollars as if a trillion dollars is a drop in the bucket. After the bailouts that put the White House at the head of a number of major corporations; after a stimulus bill that the Congressional Budget Office …
Taxing Every American Even Obama’s “95%”: President Obama’s energy policies will cost Americans more money, limit their access to America’s resources, and provide little, if any, environmental benefit. It is an extreme environmental agenda. Climate “Revenue”: The President’s budget proposes a $646 billion cap-and-trade tax that would cost each household in America between $650 and $1,200 annually. Superfund: The budget would reinstate unnecessary excise taxes that expired in 1995 to fund Superfund’s efforts to clean up toxic and contaminated areas, which may be admirable if these clean-up goals weren’t already supported …
Hitting the Federal ATM, Again Apparently, It Does Grow on Trees: After an $800 billion stimulus bill, the President’s budget increases spending by $1 trillion over 10 years, includes an additional $250 billion placeholder for another bailout, and calls for a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) law while astonishingly violating that rule by $3.4 trillion. More Deficits and More Debt: The President’s budget leaves permanent deficits averaging $600 billion even after the economy recovers and doubles the publicly held national debt to over $15 trillion ($12.5 trillion after inflation). To Pay for Historic …
The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberley Strassel reports today that the businesses in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership are beginning to realize that the cap and trade was never about global warming: “People are learning,” says William Kovacs, vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which has been cautious about embracing a climate plan). “The Obama budget did more to help us consolidate and coalesce the business community than anything we could have done. It’s opened eyes to the fact that this is about …
Americans have long viewed the Dow Jones as an index of measure when it came to the general economy. While it is by no means a perfect measure of the economy, it sits in its own highlighted box on all of the major news channels for a reason. Because Americans assess our economic strength by this average, it may be telling to see how it performs in certain situations. Earlier this week in The Hill, Dick Morris said of President Obama: President Obama, in his pursuit of liberal big-government spending, has …
Classic Tax and Spend Budget Increase, Raise and Hike: The President’s budget proposal increases taxes by $1.3 trillion; raises entitlement spending by $700 billion (including the health care fund), and hikes discretionary spending by a steep 12%. Creating Deficits, Not Eliminating Them: Given the budget deficit has already quadrupled in one year, the President’s pledge to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious. Even with the assumption of peace and prosperity, the 2013 budget deficit target of $533 billion would exceed any under President Bush. Taxes Spent: Before the recession, …
Rhetorically there was much to like in President Barack Obama’s speech to Congress last night. None better than this early statement: The answers to our problems … exist in our laboratories and universities, in our fields and our factories, in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. We couldn’t agree more. America has been “the greatest force of progress and prosperity …
George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux offered a grim assessment of the economic stimulus package that’s making its way through Capitol Hill, questioning President Barack Obama’s contention that government must do something. “Conventional wisdom in Washington is that we must do something regardless of how wise or prudent it is,” said Boudreaux, the keynote speaker at an economic recovery event cosponsored by Heritage and the Club for Growth. “It’s taken as a matter of course that we must spend wildly.” Instead, Boudreaux said, history offers a lesson that shows …
