Decrying “a decade of deficits” on Monday, President Obama declared that “my budget lays out a path for how we can pay down these debts.” It is hard to see how that can be true, since his plan would add $6.7 trillion to the national debt during the next decade. Obama thus begins his fourth … Read more
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama used billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, as a prop to illustrate the unfairness of our tax system. “Right now,” he said as Bosanek sat near first lady Michelle Obama, “Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.” Commentators spent … Read more
Winning Our Future, a “super PAC” that supports Newt Gingrich’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination, is spending more than $1.2 million on ads in South Carolina, which holds its primary on Saturday. That fact requires some explanation. First, why would anyone want Newt Gingrich to be president? Second, what is a super PAC? … Read more
“I don’t think Ron Paul represents the mainstream,” says Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich, another of the Texas congressman’s opponents in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, uses stronger terms, declaring, “Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American.” As the results in Iowa suggest, the “mainstream” to which … Read more
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network last March, shortly before he announced that he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich reflected on his sins, which include cheating on his first two wives with women he would later marry. “At times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I … Read more
Reporters routinely describe Ron Paul’s foreign policy views as “isolationist” because he opposes the promiscuous use of military force. This is like calling him a recluse because he tries to avoid fistfights. The implicit assumption that violence is the only way to interact with the world reflects the oddly circumscribed nature of foreign policy … Read more
The first time Newt Gingrich disgusted me was in 1995, when the freshly installed speaker of the House proposed the death penalty for drug smugglers. Fifteen years later, I had a similar response when Gingrich demanded government action to stop Muslims from building a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center. From … Read more
A couple of months ago, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Beth Brinkmann was standing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, defending the federal law requiring Americans to buy government-approved health insurance, when Judge Laurence Silberman asked her about broccoli. Specifically, he wanted to know whether a law requiring Americans to buy … Read more
Presenting his fiscal plan in USA Today last week, Mitt Romney said he wants to “eliminate every government program that is not absolutely essential.” That sounds good until you realize that Romney’s goal of cutting $500 billion from projected federal outlays in 2016 would, at best, leave the budget about 8 percent higher than it … Read more
Next month, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, a 12-member subset of Congress that Congress created to make the hard fiscal choices Congress itself has failed to make, is expected to propose $1.2 trillion in cuts from projected spending during the next decade. This week, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who is seeking the Republican … Read more