Big Government

Three lessons from Hayek that helped a conservative reformer understand that authority should be devolved.

During the American Revolution, the Book of Samuel became a popular text for sermons. In particular the story of the people Israel begging for a king: “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles." Samuel…

Just as the hippies made peace with material prosperity, the Democratic party has increasingly reached out to corporate America. The potential alliance between progressivism and big business could have major implications for American politics. If Republicans fail to offer an optimistic alternative…

People in the United States are experiencing a level of political discontent unseen in decades. Partisans on the right have long fought against the inexorable growth of big government, just as those on the left have always railed against the growing power of big business. This year, the sides have…

In The Selling of the President, Joe McGinniss details how Richard Nixon’s handlers micromanaged every aspect of his public persona in 1968, to craft an image for a fickle public that had rejected the longtime politician eight years before.

After nine years and $247 million, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) new high-tech disaster relief system may not work as intended, according to a new report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Not only is the system unable to…

Congratulations to you, Tom Montag, named sole chief operating officer of Bank of America this past Wednesday. And first thing Thursday morning asked to sign a check to the government for $16,650,000,000 to settle complaints that the bank sold flawed mortgage securities in the days preceding the…

Vice President Biden's trip to Brazil in mid-June for the USA versus Ghana World Cup game and meetings the following day with the president and vice president of Brazil required rental of vehicles for Biden and his entourage costing over $900,000. Added to the $2.2 million cost of hotels we…

Publicly, President Obama loves to demonize insurance companies.  But behind the scenes, Big Government and Big Insurance maintain a cozy alliance that the Obama administration actively nourishes, often at taxpayer expense.  Indeed, as emails recently obtained by the House Oversight Committee show,…

Northern New England is in its glory; now and for the next week or so.  The leaves are nearing peak color and until yesterday, there has been a big high pressure zone parked over the area so the weather has been what would once have been described as "heavenly." It has been raining now but in a few…

Only "essential" employees of the federal government are still working during the shutdown. And at the Federal Election Commission that means practically no one is coming one. 

Are you feeling impulsive? Well, if you are in the District of Columbia there is nothing to fear—the government is doing all it can to protect you from yourself. D.C.’s health department has issued draft regulations that would require anyone seeking a tattoo to wait 24 hours to be inked. A…

In a blatant exercise of arbitrary rule, the Obama administration announced this evening that it has unilaterally decided not to implement a key provision of Obamacare on schedule.  By law, Obamacare’s employer mandate — its requirement that businesses with 50 or more workers provide federally…

As the sequester bore down on Washington, the dire warnings from the Obama administration gave the impression that wild horses couldn't drag another dime out of the treasury for a whole host of vital government services. Aircraft carrier refueling, the Head Start program, and White House tours were…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on President Obama's bad sequester calculus. Hosted by Michael Graham.

When it comes to deficit reduction, President Obama and the mainstream press seem to have a fascination with the figure of $4 trillion.  During last year’s first presidential debate, Obama falsely claimed, “I've put forward a specific $4 trillion deficit reduction plan,” even though he’d done…

The White House has released limited excerpts of President Obama's State of the Union Address: 

As Adam White discusses in detail, there’s nothing moderate or incremental about the increase in federal regulations — and hence in centralized executive power — under President Obama.  To the contrary (as White notes), according to figures published by the Obama White House (see table 2-1), the…

It has been a long climb for NASCAR. The sport's beginnings were in bootlegging. One of its finest drivers, fiercest competitors, and most successful owners learned his craft hauling moonshine on the back roads of North Carolina. They never caught Junior Johnson on the road, but they did nail him…

Spending will increase 55 percent over the next decade, if President Barack Obama's budget plan goes into effect. The finding comes from the Republican-side of the Senate Budget Committee, which notes that Obama's "Proposal Would Spend $880 Billion Over Already Projected Increases."

Since Washington and the mainstream press corps are pretending that our deficit woes are the result of a roughly equal blend of excessive federal spending and insufficient federal taxation, let’s review the evidence.  According to official government figures published by the Congressional Budget…

Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat from Alaska, is "pleased" to include more than $200 million in pork spending in the Sandy legislation, a bill meant to help those affected by Hurricane Sandy.

The federal government is now spending $110 billion on "all food assistance" per year, according to new analysis by the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee. The federal dollars spent on these programs has risen by nearly $70 billion in just ten years. 

The amount of money spent on welfare programs equals, when converted to cash payments, about "$168 per day for every household in poverty," the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee finds. Here's a chart detailing the committee's findings:

From December 1941 to August 1945, the United States of America joined the other Allied powers and fought against the Axis powers in Europe and the Pacific, during the greatest and most destructive war in all of human history.  Victory required the complete dedication of the American citizenry, as…

New data compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that, last year, the United States spent over $60,000 to support welfare programs per each household that is in poverty. The calculations are based on data from the Census, the Office of Management and Budget, and the…

A report from the Congressional Research Service released today finds that welfare spending is now the largest federal budget item. Presently, the federal government spends $745.84 billion to support 83 of these welfare programs.

A new report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service finds that the largest federal budget item is spending on welfare programs. To support the 83 programs that CRS identified as welfare programs, the federal government spends $745.84 billion. 

In the wake of the Treasury Department’s newly released summary of federal spending for 2012, it’s now possible to detail just how profligate the Obama years have been.  Here’s the upshot:  Under Obama, for every $7 we’ve had, we’ve spent nearly $11 (or, to be more exact, $10.95).  That’s like a…

Food stamps enrollment has hit a new record high. 46,681,833 are now enrolled in the social welfare program, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, the federal department that runs the program.

A new chart provided by the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee details the alarming fact that enrollment in federal social welfare programs like Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Disability have far outpaced job growth over the last four years. Here's the chart:

In a new television ad, the Obama campaign mocks Mitt Romney’s promise to end the federal subsidy to PBS:

During last Wednesday’s presidential debate, President Obama claimed that the private sector just can’t match the leanness and efficiency of the federal government. He was speaking specifically about privately covered health care versus government-run health care. Obama said, “Jim, if I — if I can…

Permit me to add two points to the comments on the first presidential debate. First, no one seems to have noticed that after extolling Americans for “their genius, their grit, their determination,” the president said that everything he has tried to do and will do if reelected is to see that these…

Just before breaking away for summer recess, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 26-3 to approve $61.3 million in spending to fix the Capitol Dome. Only 3 senators on the almost 30-person body voted against the measure. 

The latest CBO scoring of Obamacare, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision upholding the overhaul’s individual mandate as an allowable (although seemingly unprecedented) tax on inactivity, shows that President Obama’s centerpiece legislation would cost about $2 trillion over its real…

The federal government has been making the case that, with food stamps, "everyone wins," according to literature meant to promote the federal social welfare program. The argument is that accepting food stamp benefits helps to promote economic growth for the communities hosting those recipients.

While most of Washington is waiting around, nervously chewing on its fingernails in anticipation of the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision (may I have the envelope, please), there are some who are still in the fight. As Melissa Healy writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The eurozone might be cracking up, but as far as debt goes, America appears to be in worse shape than the entire eurozone in the long run. According to a new chart set to be released later today by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee, America is on track "to add three times more debt…

"We will lose some of our shareholders’ money — and for that, we feel terrible — but no client, customer or taxpayer money was impacted by this incident.  We have let a lot of people down, and we are sorry for it."  Mr. Jamie Dimon will utter these words to a panel of U.S. senators today. Nothing,…

The mayor of New York does not believe that a willing buyer in search of a 32-ounce soft drink and a willing seller of the same should be allowed to make the deal. This, in a city that is famous for deals that involve quite a bit more than a few pints of sugar water and do a whole lot more societal…

This month, the Los Angeles city council is expected to ban single-use plastic bags. “[T]he ban is an attempt by the city to reduce litter,” says the Los Angeles Daily News. But it is likely to reduce something else: jobs.

[A] regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, explained in 2010 that he understands the EPA policy to be to "crucify" a few oil and gas companies to get the rest of the industry to comply with the laws. So maybe it is better if the bureaucrats spend their time – and our money…

"Independent agencies" occupy an odd corner of American government. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Labor Relations Board, Federal Communications Commission, and others are nominally "independent" of the president's control—usually thanks to limits on the president's power to…

Until last week, Mitt Romney had trouble getting potential voters to care so much that they would crawl over ground glass to get to the polling station and vote for him.  But now, the man and moment may have come together, thanks to employees of the General Services Administration and the Secret…

Last Friday, President Obama asked Congress for the power to consolidate government agencies, saying he’d start by rolling Commerce and five lesser departments into a single business and trade department.

By his own account, President Obama is the champion and protector of the little guy. He said last week he wants no one left “in a second-class status in this United States of America.” He’s “determined” to “make sure that nobody out there is going bankrupt just because somebody in their family is…

The Hill: "Dems scramble to save face on jobs bill"

AFL-CIO president had a message for leftist activists today in Washington, D.C.: "We’ll make government create jobs, because government action is the only way to create jobs right now."

Via Ben Smith, a clever ad attacking government largesse from Bankrupting America: 

Last March the city council in San Bernardino voted 5-0 to kill their red-light camera system. Since the cameras were installed in 2005, the program had brought them little but grief. In 2008, the city was caught shortening the timing of yellow lights in order to gin up more citations. Later that…

Looking at Washington these days, one suspects that this is the way things will be for a long time to come. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day (and all that), the massive tangle of dependencies, entitlements, political payoffs, and perpetual pork barrel schemes that is our national government…

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley asked President Obama whether he “can tell the folks at home that, no matter what happens, the Social Security checks are gonna go out on August the 3rd?” President Obama replied that it wasn’t just Social Security checks that would need to go out and that “I…

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell challenged President Obama’s claim to support trillions in serious spending cuts as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling – cuts the president says show he’s ready to anger Democrats to get a deal.

There is something about big, splashy economic development (“eco-devo”) projects that causes even the most conservative politicians to lose their heads. On the stump, they rail against corporate giveaways and crony capitalism. In town halls, they decry backroom deals, preferential treatment, and…

Thanks to the Nanny State we have low-flow toilets, dishwasher soap that doesn’t work, encroaching bans on plastic bags, and a looming mandate outlawing good light bulbs. But wait—there’s more!

President Obama’s average annual deficit spending (including his proposed deficit spending for 2012) has been 9.7 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) — more than double the tally of any other president since World War II.  In the wake of Obama’s spending spree, it’s therefore a bit…

President Obama’s controversial plan for a high-speed rail system took a hit Tuesday as the top California member of Congress, House majority whip Kevin McCarthy, voiced strong opposition to building a new rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

As we celebrate Washington’s Birthday — the name of the holiday is not “Presidents’ Day,” which would be no more appropriate (less, actually, in a republic) than “Congress Day” — it is worth recalling what the father of our country had to say about deficit spending:

The latest video from Mary Katharine Ham, at the Daily Caller:

As we ring in the New Year, the Wall Street Journal reports, "The Credit Card Act signed into law last year [in 2009] was supposed to stop financial institutions from sleazy antics. But, instead, some retailers say, it may restrict stay-at-home moms."

From Monday's Washington Post Metro section, "Slashed budgets of Montgomery County libraries felt in readers' daily routines," we learn:

You know conservatives are winning when the most dogmatic and obdurate liberals (inadvertently) throw in the towel.

I can't believe the Democratic Congress will be foolish and hubristic enough to go ahead and jam though the omnibus appropriations bill with its 6,488 earmarks totaling nearly $8.3 billion. But if they do: Shouldn't the Republican House leadership commit to making H.R. 1 in the next Congress a bill…

Well, this is just depressing:

Today, the Senate is likely to vote on the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 (S510). But the bill is little more than an enormous grant of money and power to the Food and Drug Administration and a lot of reporting burdens imposed on the private sector. Those who favor a smaller, leaner…

The original sin of President Obama and Democrats was their belief in the theory that smashing victories by their party in the 2006 and 2008 elections represented a political realignment that would leave them in power in Washington for decades to come.

Motor Trend magazine's blog reported this week that Cadillac, the flagship luxury brand of our very own Government Motors, has engaged in a sponsorship deal with a state-owned Chinese propaganda film company to link its cars with a new film on the glorious history of the Chinese Communist…

When an economist such as Alan S. Blinder, a professor at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, writes on the relative merits of different forms of stimulus, as he did in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “Obama’s Fiscal Priorities Are Right,” isn’t it…

The first installment of the Washington Post blockbuster, “Top Secret America,” by Dana Priest and William Arkin, two years in the making, is finally out today. It paints a surprisingly unsurprising picture of duplication and triplication in the intelligence world.