by Hans Bader
November 17, 2009 @ 1:18 pm
President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package creates imaginary jobs, while destroying ones in the real world.
Billions from the stimulus are being spent on creating tens of thousands of imaginary jobs in 440 phantom Congressional districts, according to the government’s own web site:
Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. . . . The web site…
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by Greg Conko
October 13, 2009 @ 3:58 pm
Earlier today, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) announced that she would vote in favor of the health care reform bill authored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). And, just about 30 minutes ago, the Finance Committee reported the bill out to the full Senate by a 14 to 9 vote, with all the Democrats and Snowe voting in favor.
As I wrote two weeks ago, however, Snowe may be getting more (or less) than she bargained for. Once a bill is…
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by Hans Bader
October 07, 2009 @ 6:33 pm
When the Senate Finance Committee votes on President Obama’s health care plan, it won’t even have the text of the bill in existence. It will just be voting on a summary of what the bill will supposedly contain. Senate Democrats voted down Republican proposals that the bill’s text be made available to Senators and the public 72 hours before the vote.
And the bill itself is likely to be changed by Senate leaders at the last minute, right before the Senate…
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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host William Yeatman and special guest commenter Ryan Radia to the program for Episode 61 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the FCC’s just-announced proposal for “net neutrality,” Treasury documents that reveal the true cost of cap-and-trade legislation and the plan for getting over California’s great depression. We then move on to the G20 Summit’s potential path to prosperity and the ever-expanding scandal that is ACORN.
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by John Berlau
July 31, 2009 @ 10:20 am
After the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculated the enormous costs of an all-encompassing health care scheme with a bloated public option, members of Congress from both parties asked for more due diligence before rubber stamping the plan.
Yet today, the U.S. House of Representatives may rush through another piece of poorly designed command-and-control legislation that the CBO just yesterday said could have its own tremendous costs. Though advertised as giving shareholders more “say” over CEO pay, the “Corporate and Financial Institution…
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by Fran Smith
July 27, 2009 @ 4:13 pm
Robert J. Samuelson has a hard-hitting column in today’s Washington Post on the non-reform elements of the health care reform package. He points out the inherent contradictions in the Administration’s claims that health care can both be expanded to cover the uninsured and reduce costs. As the Congressional Budget Office noted in its devastating assessment, the proposals don’t represent fundamental changes and won’t reduce future health spending.
Samuelson says that in the president’s advocacy for the Democrats’ health care proposal, Obama has demonstrated…
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by Hans Bader
July 27, 2009 @ 11:41 am
CNN notes that there are “5 freedoms you’d lose in health care reform” as promoted by the Obama Administration: the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.
Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as…
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by Fran Smith
April 09, 2009 @ 10:40 am
Well. The Congressional Budget Office has finally caught up with what CEI has been saying for years – misguided ethanol policies cause higher food prices without providing significant environmental benefits. In a report released yesterday, CBO noted this about food prices:
CBO estimates that the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008.
And what about ethanol’s highly touted reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions? Here’s what CBO found:
Last…
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by Julie Walsh
March 27, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
President Obama and Congress need an intervention.
Here are the guidelines for an individual’s debt to income ratio:
What’s a good debt-to-income ratio?
36% or less
This is where you want to be.
37% to 42%
You may want to start paying your debts down before you incur financial difficulties.
43% to 49%
This is a high debt-to-income ratio. You may want to take immediate action to reduce your debt.
Above 50%
You should seek professional financial advice to reduce your debt.
Perhaps China is available?
…
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