Budget

The press has mostly gone off the rails in covering President Trump's proposal to rescind $15 billion in unspent funds, insisting on characterizing the move as "cuts." The competition for the worst coverage is fierce, but Andrew Taylor's story at the Associated Press, as carried at the Washington Post, probably wins the prize for the most incoherent headline: "Administration proposes cutting $15…

“Budget Hawk” Mick Mulvaney is the latest conservative in the crosshairs of the New York Times. The front of Wednesday’s edition featured a very long, quite hostile profile by Glenn Thrush and Alan Rappeport of Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director and current head of the Obama-era agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: “Budget Hawk Hones Claws at Consumer Bureau.” When he wasn't a…

When President Bill Clinton signed the welfare reform act in 1996, which he negotiated with then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, the left claimed people would starve. They didn't. According to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 1996 and 2000, the employment rate for single mothers increased from 63 percent to 76 percent. 

In a bipartisan vote on Thursday, the House passed a truly massive omnibus spending bill spanning 2,232 pages and some $1.3 TRILLION. The spending increases that the bill called for would help to jack up our already out of control $21 TRILLION national debt. But for both ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS Evening News, the bigger concern was that there was no solution for the Deferred Action for…

The media rarely complain about deficit spending when liberals are at the helm, doling out taxpayer dollars like candy from a parade float. But once Republicans are in control, journalists can’t wait to complain.

The panel of MSNBC Live With Stephanie Ruhle took a brief time-out on Wednesday from speculating about White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to take a few lazy swings at the President’s new budget proposal for the SNAP food assistance program. The proposed policy would function similarly to services like Blue Apron, with beneficiaries receiving packages of pre-selected nutritious food items. It…

A tale of two speeches: On Thursday, the New York Times Sheryl Gay Stolberg celebrated House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s marathon speech, “8 Hours, 7 Minutes and 1 Pelosi Soliloquy.” While not wholly laudatory, Stolberg fawned over Pelosi’s "heart-rending" defense of the so-called Dreamers. Sen. Rand Paul also delivered a delaying tactic of a speech, but Rand isn't nearly so highly regarded at…

Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That's a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017 -- our gross domestic product -- totaled about $19 trillion.

One reason Democrats seem so fixated on importing illegal immigrants and allowing their children to stay and become citizens may be the exodus from high-tax and traditionally Democratic states. Anecdotal evidence is usually not helpful in determining trends, but when stories begin to accumulate and sound the same attention must be paid. Two friends of mine, who are longtime California residents,…

The Associated Press reported early Thursday that the bill which ended the government shutdown contains Obamacare-related tax cuts, indicating that Republicans got even more of what they've wanted as a condition for ending the government shutdown. The AP's Marcy Gordon seemed quite unhappy about all of this, as she whined about a projected increase in budget deficits that isn't even a rounding…

Congressional Republicans and President Trump declared victory on Monday over the Democrats in the government shutdown, as the Resistance could hold out no longer and voted on the continuing resolution to fund the government. In exchange, they received a promise to negotiate and vote on DACA in the next few weeks. The three major network news outlets were notably disappointed and frustrated that…

On day one of the 2018 government shutdown, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) came out and claimed that he offered President Trump funding for his border wall in exchange for protection for so-called Dreamers via the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and he turned it down. Since then, the liberal media have been running around claiming that Trump was the reason an agreement couldn’t be…

ABC kicked off Sunday’s Good Morning America with five minutes dedicated to the government shutdown. And despite the fact that Democrats were bragging that they had the votes to do it, the liberal network trashed Republicans and touted how President Trump would take all the blame.

As the countdown towards a possible government shutdown began on Friday, Morning Joe’s pundits were already obsessed by the question of who would be to blame. Co-host Joe Scarborough was particularly set on holding both President Trump and congressional Republicans responsible for any failure to reach a deal on continuing to fund the government beyond midnight.