Budget

With the deadline for a budget to fully fund the federal government fast approaching (Friday), a major sticking point in the negotiations has been President Trump’s insistence of $5 billion for a border wall. But that may have changed Tuesday after the White House signaled it was open to compromise. Despite that glimmer, ABC and NBC both used their evening broadcasts to stoke fears of a looming…

Reporter Patrick Kingsley followed in the left-foot only footsteps of his New York Times colleague, Peter Goodman, in finding child “hunger” in the United Kingdom and blaming it on “gleeful” austerity by the ruling Conservatives, in Wednesday’s “Touring World’s Fifth-Richest Nation for Lessons on Poverty.” A Times’ front page from September warned, “Warning Sign in Leaner Times: Hungry Children.”

As difficult as it may be to believe, there was a time when Republicans were known as the anti-debt and balanced budget party. Now, the GOP prefers to tout low unemployment as the debt soars and they are co-conspirators in its rise. It's not that Republicans (and once-fiscally responsible Democrats) lack a way out of debt; it's that they lack the will. Both parties, but especially Republicans,…

It was the $40 trillion question.And once again, Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to answer it. Like other Democratic socialists and many progressives, Ocasio-Cortez has a long list of government giveaway programs. But even when confronted with a price tag, wouldn’t say how they’d be paid for (or who would pay).

The New York Times can be relied upon to push government spending everywhere, in all situations, which explains how a story from Northampton, England makes it to its front page on Saturday. The online headline: “As Austerity Helps Bankrupt an English County, Even Conservatives Mutiny.” It’s part of the paper’s series, “Britain’s Big Squeeze,” whose chief villain is spending limits aka “austerity…

Poverty is no mystery, and it's easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairly simple. Here's the road map: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before…

Several recent polls, plus the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders, demonstrate that young people prefer socialism to free market capitalism. That, I believe, is a result of their ignorance and indoctrination during their school years, from kindergarten through college. For the most part, neither they nor many of their teachers and professors know what free market capitalism is.

The front of Monday’s New York Times featured socialist-spouting economics reporter Peter Goodman using Prescot, a struggling town in northwest England, as a cudgel for Margaret Thatcher bashing worthy of a Marxist professor: "After Years of Fiscal Belt-Tightening, England is Feeling the Pinch – Prolonged Budget Cuts Reshape British Life.” Goodman started hot and didn’t let up: "A walk through…

UPDATE, May 27: A writer at the BreakingDefense.com website estimates that Mainland China's defense spending on a Purchasing Power Parity basis is $434.5 billion, and that its spending plus Russia's PPP spending of $157.6 billion is only about 2 percent below the USA's $606 billion. On Friday's The Five on Fox, Juan Williams sharply criticized President Donald Trump's speech that morning at the…

In its April 2018 Monthly Treasury Statement, the federal government reported that it ran an all-time single-month record $214 billion surplus, primarily because it took in a record $510 billion in receipts. The Associated Press's Josh Boak ignored the collections record, even though the AP noted the previous record when it occurred in 2015. Instead, Boak presented a different and far smaller out…

On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, in a report on Louisiana's budget battle which the piece suggested could "kill people" with cuts to Medicaid, correspondent David Begnaud seemed to think it was only important to identify the party affiliation of the Republican state legislators involved, even though the governor whom he also spoke with, John Bel Edwards, is a Democrat.

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.