Posts

GOP Squishes Dig Their Heels in against President Trump’s Budget Cuts

/0 Comments/in , /by

President Trump’s team is seeking “dramatic” cuts to government spending. If you voted for the president and for Republicans in Congress with the belief that they would support an agenda to reduce the size of government, you are likely thrilled with this news.

The plan being considered by the newly inaugurated president would reduce federal spending by an estimated $10.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

But it could run into a wall of opposition in the GOP-controlled Congress.

Several Republican senators are voicing opposition to provisions in Trump’s plan that would cut their favorite pet-spending projects.

For example, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah (F, 33%) told The Hill that eliminating the Legal Services Corporation – a move that would save $400 million – would not get through the Senate.

“I think that would be hard thing to do. Even if you wanted to do that, you couldn’t get it through the Senate,” he said.

President Trump’s plan closely resembles proposals from the Heritage Foundation and from the Republican Study Committee. According to The Hill, Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska (F, 20%) will “pull out all the stops” to oppose any cut to the essential air service program, a subsidy for rural airports in areas with low populations that the Heritage Foundation and RSC propose to end.

Senator Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. (F, 15%) unapologetically dismissed cuts to discretionary spending as a means of tackling the debt. “Any effort to balance the budget by cutting discretionary spending is not a straightforward approach,” he said. “The part of the budget that is creating the debt is the entitlement part of the budget.”

While it is true that entitlement programs are the largest drivers of the near-$20 trillion debt, President Trump has previously indicated that he has no interest in touching entitlement spending.

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told The Daily Signal in 2015. “Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. (F, 28%) has pledged to fight the elimination of a catfish inspection program the Heritage Foundation argues is redundant and ripe with government waste. The Mississippi Republican, whose home state is the nation’s leading producer of catfish, said ending the program “would be a problem and wouldn’t save any money.”

The long story short is that given the president of the United States opposes reigning in entitlement programs, any cuts to come from this administration must come from discretionary spending. And while Republicans can talk a great game on government spending on the campaign trail, once they’re in office, no one wants to end their personal favorite pork projects.

If President Trump is serious about cutting government spending, he’s going to have to fight for every penny. (For more from the author of “GOP Squishes Dig Their Heels in against President Trump’s Budget Cuts” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

No Budget? This Senator Says That Should Mean Pay Cuts for Politicians, Staff

/0 Comments/in , /by

After less than two years in Congress, Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., thinks he’s figured out what’s needed to fix the cumbersome way lawmakers fund the federal government: teeth.

More specifically, the freshman senator from Georgia wants members of both the Senate and the House and their staff to suffer “severe consequences” if Congress fails to pass a budget. He proposes mandatory pay cuts and canceled recesses as a way to keep the lawmakers on track.

A successful businessman, Perdue admitted that a smaller paycheck probably wouldn’t hurt him or many of his wealthy Senate colleagues. But he told reporters Thursday that lawmakers “don’t want to see their staff blown up.”

That’s a harsh but necessary consequence for Congress as the nation faces a looming debt crisis, Perdue said as he released the broad strokes of his plan to overhaul the budget process.

A member of the Senate Budget Committee, Perdue says his proposal is more of a prerequisite than prescription for dealing with the nation’s $19 trillion in debt.

“Right now, we have a budget crisis,” he said. “Fixing the budget process will not solve the debt crisis, but we will not solve the debt crisis unless and until we address the dysfunction in our budget process.”

Perdue would scrap the 1974 Budget Act—which he says has worked correctly only four times in over 42 years—by breaking down the wall between authorizing and appropriations committees.

That would mean merging appropriations subcommittees, which allocate funds, with committees that work on the policy.

Other proposed big changes include transforming the budget into a piece of legislation that must be signed into law. Currently the budget serves as a sort of spending blueprint that Congress agrees to but never sends to the president for his signature. As a result, the budget isn’t binding.

And Perdue’s plan would require Congress to add nondiscretionary spending—such as Social Security and Medicare—to the budget.

To deal with the increased workload, the plan would give lawmakers more time by moving the start of the fiscal year from Oct. 1 to Jan. 1.

The Daily Signal obtained a fact sheet of the proposed plan, though the text of the coming bill hasn’t been finalized.

Perdue’s office said the senator has been working on the plan for months with the blessing of Senate Budget Chairman Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., and the cooperation of House Budget Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga.

But the initial details were met with skepticism from some budget experts on personnel and policy grounds.

“I think Sen. Purdue is exactly right to call for reform and shift focus to the major spending categories on autopilot,” said Paul Winfree, director of the Thomas Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

“However, I worry that moving the budget year to coincide with the calendar year will only reduce transparency by shifting the annual appropriations debates to between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a procrastinating Congress,” Winfree said.

“It’s a terrible, terrible, terrible idea to think that you can somehow produce legislation by docking the pay of staff,” Jim Dyer, formerly the top Republican aide on the House Appropriations Committee, told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. “What you will do is send the staff off looking for other jobs.”

Shortly after the Senate passed a stopgap spending measure known as a continuing resolution Wednesday afternoon, Perdue previewed the plan from the floor, followed by eight senators including Enzi and Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

“We really don’t have a budget process. I mean, to even call what we do a budget, per most human beings’ understanding of what a budget is, is obviously not realistic,” Corker said. “We have to, in essence, get a process in place that actually works. It’s impossible for the process we have today to work. Today is a perfect example of that, right?”

In the Senate, Perdue has tried to leverage his business acumen during the legislative process, regularly mentioning his commercial background.

A former Fortune 500 executive at Reebok and Dollar General, Perdue said that when developing the plan he looked to the examples of businesses, states, and foreign countries.

In a floor speech, Enzi said of Perdue:

I remember introducing him the first time we had a Budget Committee meeting, and I said, ‘Sen. Perdue knows how to balance a budget, he’s been working in the private sector.’ And he said, ‘No, in the private sector you have to show a little bit of a profit.’ Well, we’re going to have to show a little bit of profit around here if we’re ever going to get rid of the debt.

(For more from the author of “No Budget? This Senator Says That Should Mean Pay Cuts for Politicians, Staff” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Congress Must Close New $10 Billion Gap in Government Spending, Report Says

/0 Comments/in , /by

To meet current obligations, the government will need $10 billion more next year, forcing Congress to make new cuts, according to lawmakers’ nonpartisan budget office.

The Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary new projections, obtained by The Daily Signal, show current government operations without changes would cost nearly $1.08 trillion, up from $1.07 trillion.

Lawmakers returning to Washington after Labor Day are in for a rude awakening, because the new report means hard decisions ahead.

Put another way, last year’s budget deal between President Barack Obama and House Republican leadership mandated spending levels that were $10 billion less than the CBO’s new projections.

The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, is the nonpartisan agency charged with providing economic and fiscal information to lawmakers. And the gap identified in its new analysis makes the already arduous political task of funding the government even harder.

With government spending authority set to expire Oct. 1, Congress was expected to pass a makeshift spending measure known as a continuing resolution.

To avoid breaking the $1.07 trillion spending caps established in the budget agreement of October 2015, negotiated by the president and then-House Speaker John Boehner, Congress now must find $10 billion to trim or endure a round of automatic, politically painful spending cuts called the sequester.

That task of identifying the cuts under the Obama-Boehner caps will fall to members of the House and Senate appropriations committees.

GOP aides told The Daily Signal that Congress has found itself in similar situations before, but rarely of this severity.

In the past, appropriators applied across-the-board spending cuts to reduce any funding shortfalls. But following that precedent, a senior House aide told The Daily Signal, could lead to severe defense cuts because of the way Boehner and Obama negotiated last year’s deal.

“Funding for our national defense would be cut significantly below the spending limits signed into law,” the aide said, “and non-defense spending would be allowed well above those spending limits.”

While defense hawks will balk at those reductions, another senior Republican aide said they’re not inevitable. Appropriators will “utilize whatever tools they have in their toolbox” to close the funding gap, the staffer said.

“This is just a preliminary CBO analysis,” the staffer said. “It’s a carbon copy of what this year’s bill would look like based off of last year before any policy decisions are made, changes are built in, and before any final decisions are made about right spending levels.”

The funding gap throws gas on a long-burning debate in Congress.

And now leverage wrests with appropriators. They could turn to budget gimmicks such as offsets, anomalies, and “changes in mandatory programs,” which they call CHIMPS.

House conservatives have traded barbs with leadership over top-line government spending levels all year. The conflict already derailed a proposed $1.07 trillion budget pushed by Boehner’s successor, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Two caucuses of GOP members in the House, the Freedom Caucus and the Republican Study Committee, have spearheaded the opposition. They called for $30 billion worth of cuts and a return to the $1.04 trillion spending level established by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

Fear over the possibility of a lame-duck spending bill, one passed between the Nov. 8 election and the swearing-in of the new Congress in January, has persuaded many conservatives to reconsider.

Several members of the Freedom Caucus say they could swallow a continuing resolution for $1.07 trillion if it extended government funding until next year. That way, outgoing lawmakers wouldn’t be making spending decisions after they’ve been booted from office. (For more from the author of “Congress Must Close New $10 Billion Gap in Government Spending, Report Says” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Say What? The House Just Passed a Bi-Partisan Bill With No Spending Increase

/0 Comments/in , /by

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved mental health reform legislation Wednesday afternoon. The Washington Examiner reports that a bill to reform mental illness programs sponsored by Rep. Tim Murphy, R-PA (F,49%) was approved 422 to 2.

Instead of a sweeping overhaul, the measure makes incremental changes to how 112 government agencies coordinate with each other, compensate providers and make care available to those suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety and other illnesses.

Its provisions include making some changes to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – requiring its director to have a clinical background and changing the way it reviews grants — and calling for studies and reviews that could lead to future reforms in the way mental healthcare is delivered and patients are treated.

Murphy, a clinical psychologist, applauded the passage of this bill, which he introduced in its original form in 2013.

“We’re here finally to speak up for the last, the lost, the least and the lonely — that is, those who suffer from mental illness that is untreated,” he said.

The bill does not increase federal spending and actually reduces net Medicaid spending by $5 million over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The bill heads to the Senate next. (For more from the author of “Say What? The House Just Passed a Bi-Partisan Bill With No Spending Increase” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

After Big Promises, House GOP Facing Reality of Not Passing Budget, and Backlash

/3 Comments/in , /by

Few people in Washington think House Republicans this year will complete a budget . . .

Republicans have batted around dozens of ideas. They’ve conducted closed door meetings. Entertained options. And still, House Republicans aren’t much closer to solving the budget riddle than they were when conversations began over the winter.

“The leadership has been on a listening tour for three months,” said Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va. “We have to go back to constituents and say we made up for the crap sandwich. Made up for the barn cleaning.”

What Brat refers to is a plan President Obama forged last fall with then-House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to “clean the barn” for the next speaker.

Both houses of Congress approved the package, and Obama signed it into law. Only 79 House GOPers voted in favor of the measure in late October — including new House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. (Read more from “After Big Promises, House GOP Facing Reality of Not Passing Budget, and Backlash” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Did Alaska Learn Anything From Its Last Great Recession?

/0 Comments/in , /by

The Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly just passed a resolution asking the Legislature to implement a sustainable budget. I voted against it since it specifically asked for taxes, and those aren’t helpful or necessary for the present situation. During the testimony it was shown that there were a lot of misconceptions about our State budget situation, so I wanted to clarify some of the details.

First, the state will be entering an economic downturn, or recession. It has nothing to do with the legislature making cuts; the state spending more dollars will not stop the recession. We should all be prepared for this natural response to low oil prices. Please understand that the lingo about “don’t cut too much or we’ll get a recession” is just a political ploy by big spenders in the legislature who don’t want the gravy train to stop. They’ll use it in the elections the next few years to try and sell the voters that any legislator that made cuts caused the recession. Please think for yourself and don’t buy it. Remember, if taxes or PFD cuts go into effect, that money will be taken out of the economy. So any government spending from that was with money already withdrawn from the economy, so it gives no help to the economy. Actually, it makes it worse because government can’t redistribute money without using some, so less gets back to the economy than came out of it.

Second, most of the proponents of taxes or PFD cuts are targeting a goal of having a zero deficit. This isn’t needed, and in fact goes against having a sustainable budget, since it has a mindset that we should spend all we get. Since the large money started coming in from high oil prices the state has budgeted based on high oil. The Governor’s plan is now reacting to that and budgeting based on low oil. To achieve a sustainable budget, we need to realize that oil prices are cyclic, the will rise and fall over and over again. We can therefore create a budget that is the same (indexed for inflation) ongoing by knowing that fact. Once you get to this sustainable budget number (around $4.3 billion now), you can have a structured deficit in the lean years, and build your savings back up in the good years. Isn’t that why we have savings accounts, to handle unexpected crises?

Third, a sustainable budget plan I’ve described has already been worked out by Economist Scott Goldsmith with ISER (UAA Institute of Social and Economic Research). It is based on using our two current primary revenue streams, oil and investment income. With that revenue and cutting to a sustainable budget number, we won’t have to implement onerous taxes or PFD cuts.

Fourth, the investment income is mostly put into the Earnings Reserve of the Permanent Fund. It doesn’t affect the Permanent Fund, and it doesn’t have to touch the PFD at all. We can completely protect the PFD while implementing this plan.

I agree that we need to appeal to the Legislature to implement initiatives to achieve a sustainable budget, and I would encourage everyone to do that. Please remember when doing

so, that it can be done with a structured deficit, without taxes of PFD cuts, by using our existing revenues. I was here in the late 80s when we had our last big recession, and while it was miserable, we survived, and we can do it again. Hopefully this time we learn our lesson and stop increasing government spending constantly in the future.

____________________________________

Lance Roberts is an engineer, born and raised in Fairbanks. He is a member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent the assembly or borough administration.

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Budget Deal Passes House, Republican Party Is Dead

/6 Comments/in , /by

Yesterday, the GOP-led House passed a budget bill and debt ceiling increase that countermands every principle they campaigned on when pursuing majority control of that chamber in 2010. The policy and political outcomes of this vote will be far reaching and gravely consequential.

How ironic that on the final day of Boehner’s tenure, he passes a wretched bill that represents everything his leadership embodied, which engendered the coup against him in the first place. How ironic that this bill only garnered support of 79 Republicans, yet 200 of 247 Republicans voted to replace its sponsor with Paul Ryan – the man who supported this very budget deal.

1. INCREASES DEBT CEILING UNCONDITIONALLY

This bill suspends the debt ceiling through March 2017, granting this president another $1.5 trillion in debt authority after already amassing $7.5 trillion in debt. This, at a time when revenue is at record highs. There are now no external constraints on the amount of debt this president can accumulate in his final year.

2. BUDGET CONTROL ACT PERMANENTLY TERMINATED

The bill increases spending by $112 billion, thereby permanently overturning the only meaningful spending victory secured by conservatives over the past five years. There will be little leverage to preserve these cuts in the future. Spending was already slated to increase by $250 billion for the new year (from $3.677 trillion to $3.928 trillion); this bill will bump that increase to over $310 billion for 2016 alone. This is why Republicans have never cut spending. Despite record projected revenue of $3.5 trillion for 2016, they can’t balance the budget and will spend $4 trillion annually for the first time ever. In the era of “austerity,” the federal government is now growing by 8.4% despite the fact that the private economy is averaging 2.5% growth.

3. RUBBER STAMPS OBAMA’S BACKWARDS FOREIGN POLICY

Included in the increased spending is an extra $32 billion in war spending on top of existing appropriations. This comes on the heels of reports that Obama is commencing ground operations involving our military in the Islamic civil war in both Iraq and Syria. It is cowardly of Congress to not issue a declaration of war with specific policy demands from Obama dictating our strategic goals. Nobody can identify the mission – who we are fighting and with whom we are allying? Yet, this is Congress’ backdoor means of greenlighting this tepid and aimless effort without taking responsibility for supporting it or blocking it. As we’ve noted before, much of the money we send to the Middle East has wound up in the hands of Al-Nusra in Syria and Iranian-backed Shiite forces in Iraq. This budget allows Obama to invest more in failure, and worse – our enemies – because much of the OCO funds go to the State Department.

4. PAVES THE WAY FOR MORE SPENDING WITH ENRON STYLE ACCOUNTING

It would have been better had Congress not deceived the public with Enron-style accounting gimmicks to “offset” the cost of the bill. As Congressional Quarterly noted today, “Budget Deal Pay-Fors May Provide Template for Future Accords.” The political class thinks that a hodgepodge of notional and intangible offsets spread out 10 years from now are so clever. They will be emboldened to use the same gimmicks to bust even more spending caps, even in areas of the budget they’ve been cautious to do so until now.

5. WE ARE AT THE MERCY OF OBAMA WITH NO LEVERAGE

The most under-reported aspect of this deal is that it completely “clears the decks” of any budget bill for the remainder of Obama’s presidency, thereby taking the power of the purse off the table. As bad as the increased spending is for our fiscal solvency, the Obama policies are worse. There will be no budget to leverage against Obama’s growing amnesty, EPA overreach, foreign policy disasters, prison break, and dangerous clemencies. For example, Obama released 66,000 criminal aliens in 2013-2014, who had accrued a total of 166,000 convictions: 30k DUIs, 414 kidnappings, 11,000 sex assaults, and 395 homicides. They went on to commit at least 121 murders after being released. Who knows how high those numbers will go now that Obama has completely suspended deportations. Yet, conservatives will not have an opportunity to leverage DHS and Justice Department funding against his amnesty, which will likely grow more dangerous and lawless in his final year.

6. PAUL RYAN OWNS THIS BUDGET

Even if one buys into Ryan’s defense that he had nothing to do with the budget, a dubious assertion in itself, he clearly owns this deal for two reasons.

First, the notion that the Speaker-elect cannot speak out against this travesty and demand it be halted is like saying that a newly elected fire chief is powerless against ordering his men to put out the flames of an arson that began the day before. Even if we accept that the debt ceiling deadline was sprung on him and cannot be stopped, there is no reason for him to agree to the budget deal, which does not come due for another six weeks. He certainly doesn’t have to agree to take the debt ceiling AND budget off the table for the rest of Obama’s presidency; he could have opted for a shorter-term bill so that he can show us the magic of his budget work and his amazing messaging skills. Now he will have no leverage to enact all of the fiscal reforms he will so eruditely articulate in the coming months.

Second, Paul Ryan forged the original Ryan-Murray bill in 2013, which established the precedent that breaking the budget caps is a “must-pass” initiative. Until that point, Republicans had held firm. In that sense, this deal is merely the grandchild of Ryan’s original betrayal.

The fact that Ryan supported this excrement sandwich shows that he has no desire to actually force important conservative changes. He relishes the opportunity to “clear the barn” of any meaningful leverage so that he can discuss policy reforms in the abstract without having to fight for them in any significant way.

7. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS DEAD

Republicans have checked out from the fight against the consequential societal transformational issues for years: marriage, religious liberty, immigration, law and order, etc. They have made it clear now they will never fight for fiscal conservatism. Unless a true conservative is elected as president, the party is done. (For more from the author of “Budget Deal Passes, Republican Party Is Dead” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

A Decade of State Budgets

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Tax CreditsAn old proverb says to “Redeem the Time”, letting us know how precious time is. If you examine the last decade of state budgets, you’ll see a real story of time and timing. In light of the current revenue situation, the future of our budgets is a matter of great concern.

Governor Frank Murkowski’s term ended having almost doubled the state budget over four years, though with surpluses because of the rising price of oil. Governor Sarah Palin took over and with those good prices and the newly enacted punitive tax scheme of ACES had a large increase in her first year’s budget, but with the largest surplus ever. Oil prices then dropped, but her next two budgets maintained that spending level with small surpluses.

From a legislative perspective, the democrats had control of the Senate those three years, and the following three, through a democrat-led coalition. It’s said that in order to get anything done in a divided legislature, you have to spend your way past your differences. That’s exactly what happened, with the Senate becoming the bipartisan spending coalition and driving budgets to ever greater heights. Those three years (FY11-FY13) ended up $2.6 billion over FY 10 numbers, an increase greater than the FY04 general fund budget.

Sean Parnell had his first budget as governor that year the democrat-led coalition formed. He made record line-item vetoes of $336 million in FY11 and $412 million in FY12. In FY13, he cut another $66 million. At this point, oil revenues started to really decrease because of declining production.

Those six years of liberal dominance in the Senate, from FY08 to FY13, saw an increase of the day-to-day operating budget (no non-formula programs) from $1.531 billion to $2.246 billion, an increase of $715 million. The average spent in the capital budget was $1.147 billion.

In 2012, the citizens of Alaska pulled together and replaced the spending coalition, with the driving issue being the decline in oil production. The legislature passed oil tax reform, and the voters confirmed their prior vote this last August, upholding the More Alaska Production Act (MAPA). This reform didn’t have any effect on the FY14 and FY15 budgets, but was fortuitously timed since oil prices have just started dropping, and we’re bringing in a lot more money under the low price protection that MAPA gave us than we would have under ACES, to the tune of $150 million+.

The last two years since the spending coalition was replaced, the day-to-day operating budget increased a scant $27 million, most of which came from inherited labor contracts. The average of the capital budget for those two years was $839 million, and a large portion of that was to finish projects partially funded before and to address significant needs that have been ignored up until then, like the UAF Power Plant. The governor worked with the legislature to reduce state spending in FY14 from $8.0 to $7.1 billion, and again for FY15, reducing it to $5.9 billion (reference the Unrestricted General Fund Authorization to Spend, with Supplementals).

There are a few ongoing problems in the budget that will just have to be lived with; formula funding increases, and the debt service payment which went from $103 to $243 million per year due to voter approved bonding packages in 2008, 2010 and 2012. One issue that will start to go away is the $300 million per year we were paying for ACES tax credits. Also a large fix was done to the PERS/TERS unfunded liability, by paying down the principle by three billion dollars, thereby taking pressure off of the operating budget, with estimates being a savings of $400 to $600 million per year. This was critical since those payments had been looking to increase over the next five years to over $1 billion. Please note, that the FY15 budget didn’t include the usual payment for PERS/TERS because of that paydown.

Governor Parnell was in the legislature in the 90s when the oil prices dropped so low as to threaten the state, and was instrumental as co-chair of Senate finance then in getting the budget under control. He showed his foresight this last year, by turning down the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which while initially paid for by the Federal government, would soon have the State paying a portion that would have put us in dire straits in the future. Recently, Governor Parnell publicly stated the following:

My pledge to Alaskans is that we will continue reducing the state budget so individual Alaskans’ liberty and economic opportunity can grow. I will remain the same steady, consistent governor Alaskans can count on.

I can see that the governor’s main opponent has gone back and forth on what he will actually do with the budget, with nothing specific except that he would accept the Medicaid increase and its consequences. So what’s a fiscal conservative to do? I’ll be voting to cut spending by voting for Sean Parnell, a consistent fiscal conservative.

Lance Roberts is an engineer, born and raised in Fairbanks. He is a member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent the assembly or borough administration.

Palin on Budget: Rep. Paul Ryan Has ‘More Faith in Politicians Than I Do’ (+video)

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is standing firm in her objection to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget proposal, which she told Sean Hannity will raise spending over 10 years nearly $1.2 trillion.

“That’s trillion with a T, and that stands for trouble. Trouble for our nation because it still is involving deficit spending, increasing debt and we can’t afford that,” Palin told Hannity.

Hannity told Palin that he’d had Rep. Paul Ryan on his radio show, and Ryan was adamant that Palin would come around to his budget if he could only explain it to her.

“Bless his heart. He probably has more faith in politicians than I do, because I’ve been in this political arena on the local, state and now national level for a long time,” Palin said.

Read more from this story HERE.

President Obama’s Budget Sends $286,479,000 to Planned Parenthood Abortion Biz

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: LifeNewsPresident Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood have been bosom buddies since his election — and the president has kept flow of taxpayer funds on ever since entering the White House in 2009. This year’s budget proposal is no exception.

Obama wanted God to bless Planned Parenthood and, this year, he wants them blessed with hundreds of millions.

As Tom Minnery of March for Life explains:

The good news in President Obama’s budget is that Title X funds (p. 434) that generally give money to entities like Planned Parenthood have gone down from $297,400,000 to $286,479,000. (That is still higher than the figure in 2007 ($283,146,000.))

Also it appears that $5,000,000 is set aside for true abstinence education (p. 490) while almost six times that amount is reserved for “comprehensive” abstinence education that does everything from encouraging young kids to shower together to helping fund online “How to BDSM” videos for teens.

Read more this story HERE.