It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.

The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits…

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Today, I was on the G. Gordon Liddy Show, to discuss the current prospects of the misleadingly named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which, as the Washington Examiner reported today, has put some centrist and swing-state Democrats in a difficult position. To date, the more that people learn about the details of EFCA, the less they like it, as a recent poll shows.

Also on the show today was former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney, discussing earmarks in the gargantuan stimulus…

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On behalf of my distinguished colleague Iain Murray, who is busy speaking at a very important press conference this morning, let me present his prepared remarks on the impending stimulus bill:

Remarks of Iain Murray, Director of Projects and Analysis, Competitive Enterprise Institute

Good morning. Others have already told you what an unutterable waste of money this so-called stimulus package is. I just want to make two points. First, that the American people have been misled about the nature of the bill, and…

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The House of Representatives has just passed the $800-billion stimulus package which President Obama hopes to make a centerpiece of his administration’s early economic policy. The bill failed to get Republican support, which is a hopeful sign that GOP lawmakers will not seek bipartisanship at all costs. Such an enormous spending bill deserves more debate than it’s gotten.

The Senate should be in no hurry to rush this through.

For more on stimulus, see here and here.

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Also at Heritage today, FreedomWorks chief economist Wayne Brough described his organization’s legal analysis of the constitutionality of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. “There is a very strong non-delegation argument against the TARP,” he said. “They basically took all the debate out of the Congress and put it all in the Treasury in the Executive branch…They gave the Treasury a $700-billion blank check to spend at whim.”

For more on bailouts, see BeyondBailouts.org, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the…

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I have heard several Republican congressional leaders say that the party has learned its lesson from their disastrous losses in the past two elections. From now on, it’s back to being the party of limited government, fiscal discipline, lower taxes, and against pork barrel spending.

Sounds good, but Senate Republicans have blown their first opportunity to demonstrate that they mean what they say. The first bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brought to a vote in the 111th Congress…

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President-elect Obama’s proposed economic stimulus package (on which Doug Bandow commented recently) isn’t even in Congress yet, and the the rent-seeking has already started. ClimateWire reports:

As lawmakers and President-elect Barack Obama mull another economic stimulus package, businesses and congressional leaders are jockeying to be in position to receive the first trickles of federal cash intended to stem losses of jobs and raise energy efficiency.

Two sectors, in particular, stand to benefit, judging by the debate so far. Labor unions are pressing for…

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In his Examiner column today, former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney explodes the myth of AIG as a stalwart defender of free markets that caved in at the sight of federal dollars coming its way:

AIG in 2007 joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a group whose purpose is to lobby for federal restrictions on greenhouse gases. Specifically, US-CAP lobbies for a scheme of mandatory federal caps on greenhouse gas emissions with tradable emission allowances—a “cap-and-trade” policy pushed hard by Enron…

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