Category — US Budget

This has not been a particularly joyful season inside the beltway. All we’ve seen is a lot of clamoring, to little effect. In the hinterlands, we hear the echoes of the politicians’ raucous debate about government spending, government borrowing, and government intrusion into our homes and business. One side yells that the only solution is to tax the rich until they squeal, while the other side of the aisle insists we must reform entitlements or go the way of Greece. What would the Founders think about all this? Here is what they said in their own words.

Concentrated political power frightened the Founders. They believed that only by limiting government could liberty survive the natural tendency of man to dictate the habits of other men. The balanced separation of power with checks was designed to prevent tyranny.

The first outsized words of the Constitution read We the People. It’s our document. It was always meant to be ours, not the government’s. It is each and every American’s obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

In the first of our Constitution Day (week) posts, Jim looks at the speed bumps specified by the nation’s charter document to restrain government.

If you read the financial press, you can almost hear the gurus scratching their heads. They study past business cycles and can’t understand why robust growth isn’t the order of the day. Since WWII, strong recoveries have always followed recessions. And the deeper the recession, the faster the climb back to prosperity. Considering the depth of our latest crash, we should be rip-roaring into the stratosphere by now. What’s going on?

Although the man in the White House is blaming everyone except the tooth fairy for the nation’s economic woes, he might consider looking in the mirror.

British blogger Ana The Imp is nearly always erudite and she has proven to be so again in her most recent piece on the “Debt Crisis.” We share her desperation and frustration.

The Founding Fathers recognized the burden of large debt and the importance of paying it off. After the American Revolution, the debt equaled 35 to 40 percent of GDP at a time when government spending and taxes were just 2 percent of GDP. Today the debt is more than 80% of GDP, taxes are about 25% of GDP, while spending is higher still.

One of the “Essential Documents” featured in The Patriot’s History Reader, is President Jackson’s veto message. Jackson’s words are perhaps more applicable to today than for his own time.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.  Winston Churchill

It’s time for Republicans to put their pants on.  When 47% of Americans “somewhat approve of Obama’s handling of the …

The proposed balanced budget amendment is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. We owe it to ourselves to look at it very carefully before we make it part of the Constitution.