At Monday’s debt limit press conference, President Obama claimed: “With respect to Social Security, Social Security is not the source of our deficit problems.” This is simply false. The Social Security Board of Trustees 2011 Annual Report found that Social Security added $49 billion to last year’s budget deficit and is projected to add another $46 billion to this year’s deficit.
Read More
The House will vote on Rep. Joe Barton’s, R-Texas, Better Use of Light Bulbs (BULB Act) tonight according to Republican leadership sources. The BULB Act would repeal Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 which effectively banned the sale of most incandescent light bulbs. The incandescent bulb ban is blamed for closing the last ordinary incandescent light bulb factory in the United States and sending jobs overseas.
Read More
Last Friday, Harvard Law School Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence Tribe wrote an op-ed in The New York Times blowing apart the argument many on the left were advancing; that Section Four of the 14th Amendment granted Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner the authority to ignore the debt limit and sell unlimited amounts of Treasury bonds. Tribe wrote:
Read More
Friday’s dismal jobs report has significantly altered the landscape of the debt limit negotiations. Now that President Obama has been forced to acknowledge that the economy is not as strong as he hoped, he is desperate to win a long-term deficit deal. He badly needs Republicans to co-own both the debt and the economy. Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, even seemed perilously close to signing onto a deal that would have both guaranteed massive tax hikes and left all three entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, fundamentally unreformed.
Read More
Last month, David Gregory tripped up new DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz up with a chart detailing President Obama's economic record. It showed unemployment up 25 percent since Obama was inaugurated, debt up 35 percent, and gas up more than 100 percent. Wasserman Schultz lamely tried to argue that the economy was getting better, to which Gregory replied: "Americans don't believe that's the case."
Read More
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner again repeated his claim this morning on Meet the Press, that if Congress fails to raise the debt limit by August 2nd, he will be forced to default on U.S. debt. That is still simply false.
Read More
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, literally applauded this Thursday when Bruce Bartlett explained how Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner could use the 14th Amendment to justify ignoring the debt limit. Pelosi and her Democratic caucus may wish Geithner and Bartlett's reading of the Constitution is correct, but as Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, explains below, the 14th Amendment doesn't say what Bartlett and Geithner think it does:
Read More
Today's June jobs report from the Department of Labor is a complete catastrophe for the Obama administration. Unemployment, up. Job growth, non-existent. Percentage of adults with jobs, down. Job creation numbers for the past two months, revised down. Labor force participation rate, down. Number of hours worked, down.
Read More
Three charts tell you everything you need to know about the possible budget deal between President Obama and House Republicans this weekend.
Read More
Crossraods GPS, the 501c4 arm of American Crossroads, is spending $20 million over the next two months airing the embedded ad "Shovel Ready", nationwide (the initial $5 million ad buy covered nine swing states).
Read More
A constant claim among liberals is that government spends more on defense than anything else in the federal budget. The reality is that even after paying for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Washington spends twice as much on entitlement programs than on defense.
Read More
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., first television ad went up in Iowa this morning. It is mostly a bio/intro ad but she also manages to hit on the the debt limit. Speaking directly into the camera, Bachmann says, "As a mom of five, a foster parent, and a former tax lawyer, and now a small-business job creator, I know that we can’t keep spending money that we don’t have. That’s why I fought against the wasteful bailout, against the stimulus. I will not vote to increase the debt ceiling."
Read More
Last night, Politico reported that Republicans entered today’s debt limit negotiations with the White House without any back up plan should the talks fail. “We’re putting stock in the president realizing he has to come up with a solution,” Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), told Politico, “We’re waiting.” That isn’t good enough.
Read More
At Wednesday’s Twitter Town Hall, President Obama claimed: “We actually now have the lowest tax rates since the 1950s. Our tax rates are lower now than they were under Ronald Reagan. They’re lower than they were under George Bush — senior or George Bush, junior.” This statement is false.
Read More
President Obama is telling every news outlet that will listen that he now wants a “far reaching” debt-reduction plan that will stretch well beyond the next two years and would cover cuts to all three entitlement programs in exchange for tax hike concessions from Republicans. The move is a transparent effort at triangulation, as Senate Democrats are already saying they will not support any deal that includes cuts to Social Security.
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/user/6176/6176?page=5&field_author_value=&quicktabs_6=0
