In a political culture based largely on hollow promises, it’s nice to know that there are some in Washington determined to follow through on their commitments. On January 12 U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who was elected in 2010 on his promise to do his part to reduce federal spending by shrinking big government, announced that his Senate office would return a whopping $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury — federal funds left over from his official operating budget.

The money represents around 16 percent of Paul’s Senate office’s official budget.

“I ran to stop the reckless spending,” said Paul at a press conference announcing the return. “And I ran to end the damaging process of elected officials acting as errand boys, competing to see who could bring back the biggest check and the most amount of pork.”

What make’s Paul’s actions so refreshing is that he was able to record the half-million-dollar federal savings while pursuing one of the most energetic (albeit conservative) legislative agendas of any freshman U.S. Senator. Focusing on his promise of fiscal responsibility, the Kentucky Senator offered spending cut amendments to nearly every relevant bill that came across his desk, while still representing his own constituency’s needs — working, for example, to stop the Environmental Protection Agency’s assault on Kentucky’s crucial coal industry.

According to a press release from his Senate office, Senator Paul was one of the only legislators to produce an entire fiscally responsible blueprint for the federal government, “a promise he made while campaigning in 2010. His plan, introduced in the first few weeks of his term, would balance the federal budget in five years.”

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Read more at TheNewAmerican.com HERE.

It was bad enough when President Obama bamboozled Congress into passing a stimulus bill that didn’t produce any jobs, then increased the federal deficit in the 2012 omnibus spending bill, then raised the debt ceiling, then bailed out the big U.S. banks, then tried to bail out his pal Solyndra in an attempt to save it from bankruptcy, and then appointed a jobs czar who only creates jobs in China.

But it’s over the top when Obama told the European Council president and the European Commission president that “the United States stands ready to do our part” to bail out Europe.

Bailing out Europe is absolutely not any “part” of “our” duty; we’ve already bailed out Europe more times than it deserves. Obama didn’t give specifics, but he was probably referring to recent proposals to pour more U.S. cash into the International Monetary Fund to be used to bail out Europe.

On Dec. 16, the IMF board of governors adopted a proposal to double its resources from its current $375 billion to $750 billion. Of course, other IMF member-states thought that was a nifty idea, since it would mean that the United States would donate another $100 billion in addition to our present $108 billion stake in the IMF.

The U.S. is the biggest contributor to the IMF; we pay about 17 percent of its budget. A European default could make U.S. taxpayers liable for 17 percent of the IMFs liabilities.

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Read more at StatesmanJournal.com HERE.

The percentage of Americans identifying as political independents increased in 2011, as is common in a non-election year, although the 40% who did so is the highest Gallup has measured, by one percentage point. More Americans continue to identify as Democrats than as Republicans, 31% to 27%.

These results are based on more than 20,000 interviews conducted in 20 separate Gallup polls in 2011. Gallup has computed annual averages of party identification since 1988, when it began regularly conducting interviews by telephone. The prior high percentage of independents was 39% in 1995 and 2007.

Gallup records from 1951-1988 — based on face-to-face interviewing — indicate that the percentage of independents was generally in the low 30% range during those years, suggesting that the proportion of independents in 2011 was the largest in at least 60 years.

In recent decades, Gallup has observed a pattern of increased independent identification in the year prior to a presidential election, and a decline in the presidential election year. The only exception to that was in 1992, when independent identification increased from 1991, perhaps the result of President Bush’s high approval ratings in 1991 and Ross Perot’s independent presidential candidacy in 1992.

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Read more at Gallup.com HERE.

Soon after becoming Massachusetts governor, Willard Mitt Romney retroactively imposed new taxes on non-residents, including Granite State citizens who work, conduct business, and/or invest in the Bay State. Romney’s higher taxes reached into New Hampshire and helped vacuum at least $95 million in marginal income back across the border.

According to Massachusetts Department of Revenue figures, the total amount that New Hampshire taxpayers surrendered to Massachusetts grew from $213.6 million in 2002 to $248.9 million in 2006, a 16.5 percent increase. (Data for 2006 are preliminary.)

Had 2002′s tax baseline remained flat, New Hampshire taxpayers would have kept $95 million in cumulative payments to Massachusetts since 2003. Higher revenues often are a supply-side effect of tax cuts. This is not so when taxes increase.

Massachusetts tax revenues from New Hampshire residents increased even as the number of New Hampshire residents who paid Massachusetts taxes fell 2.3 percent — from 89,304 in 2002 to 87,320 in 2006. The checks shrank in number, but swelled in value. The average tax payment from New Hampshire expanded $458 — from $2,392 in 2002 to $2,850 in 2006 — up 19.2 percent.

“That’s even more remarkable when you consider that the number of New Hampshire taxpayers who pay (as opposed to simply file) didn’t change in what appears to be any statistically significant way during this period, yet the average tax payment went up substantially,” says Cato Institute scholar Stephen Slivinski.

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Read more at Race42012.com HERE.

President Obama used his recess appointment powers Wednesday to name a head for the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members to the National Labor Relations Board — moves Republican lawmakers said amounted to an unconstitutional power grab.

The president acted just a day after the Senate held a session — breaking with at least three different precedents that said the Senate must be in recess for at least three days for the president to exercise his appointment power. Mr. Obama himself was part of two of those precedents, both during his time in the Senate and again in 2010 when one of his administration’s top constitutional lawyers made the argument for the three-day waiting period to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Obama tapped former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the CFPB, and named three others to the labor board — all of which had been stymied by congressional Republicans who said Mr. Obama is accruing too much power to himself through those two agencies.

In strikingly sharp language, Republicans said the Senate considers itself still in session for the express purpose of blocking recess appointments, and the move threatened to become a declaration of war against Congress.

“Although the Senate is not in recess, President Obama, in an unprecedented move, has arrogantly circumvented the American people,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.

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Read more at the Washington Times HERE.