Tag Archives: Government Shutdown

Boehner Cuts Deal With White House; National Debt to Reach $20 Trillion

Wednesday, 28 October 2015 04:39

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, October 27, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

After working privately over the past several weeks with members of the White House staff, as well as with Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner succeeded late Monday night in cobbling together a deal that gives everyone in Washington what they want but leaves the bill for the taxpayer. By the time the dust settles, the deal will cause the country’s national debt to reach $20 trillion within the next 18 months, if not sooner.

Doing an end run around usual House procedures, Boehner

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Paul Ryan is a pragmatist after all

Saturday, 14 December 2013 11:10

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, December 13th, 2013:

The old saying, “The measure of a man is the size of the thing that gets his goat” certainly applies now to the erstwhile conservative Republican from Wisconsin, Rep. Paul Ryan. Working in closed-door sessions with liberal Democrats over the past two weeks, Ryan has finally revealed the size of his goat:

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Lessons from the Republican Loss

Friday, 18 October 2013 13:50

This article first appeared at the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, October 18th, 2013:

The liberal media could scarcely contain themselves over the Democrat win and Republican loss regarding the budget battle, the debt ceiling, Obamacare, and government spending. The capitulation by the establishment Republicans was stunning. As expected.

The vote to preserve the status quo in the Senate was bad enough (81-18) but the collapse in the House made the earth move:

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Mixed Reactions to New Law Reopening Government

Thursday, 17 October 2013 10:27

Once the 11^th-hour vote to avoid the potential default was passed by the Senate and the House and signed into law by President Obama, key players in the game of fiscal chicken just ended began issuing their justifications and frustrations. That game, variously called “political brinkmanship”, a “temporary fix”, “a temporary ceasefire” and “a political achievement for Obama”, does everything the president wanted while

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Charges that the GOP is Caving on the Shutdown Prove False as President Drops Further in Polls

Thursday, 10 October 2013 11:35

Within days of the government shutdown pundits began to estimate just how long the hard-core Tea Party members in the House would maintain their stand against funding Obamacare. One even listed the names of eighteen members who were already “caving in” while noting another four

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List of Indignities Foisted on Americans by Obama during Shutdown continues to Grow

Wednesday, 09 October 2013 12:55

What was missing from nearly all the media coverage of the “immigration rally” on Tuesday on the National Mall was any mention of how the rally came to be held there in the first place. The National Mall is closed for the duration of the so-called government shutdown and yet

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The Press Release from the Treasury Department is Pure Propaganda

Monday, 07 October 2013 17:41

This article was first published at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, October 7, 2013:

The so-called “brinkmanship” press release by the Treasury Department reveals far more about the willingness of the media to report and repeat a canard that it does about the “crisis” facing the US if the government defaults.

Here are the title and just the opening paragraphs from the Treasury Department:

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Belgian Government Shutdown a Lesson for the US?

Friday, 04 October 2013 13:13

This article was first published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, October 4th, 2013:

With all the noise and rhetoric over the awful, catastrophic, world-ending US government shutdown, little has been said about the Clinton shutdown and nothing at all about the 589 days Belgium went without a national government in 2010 and 2011.

There’s no chance that the present US “shutdown” will threaten that record.

Belgium is a quirky little country with just 11 million people. Its government, when it has one, is a combination of

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Treasury Refuses to Sell Its Gold Even in the Event of Default

Friday, 04 October 2013 12:02

It took more than six months for the Department of the Treasury to answer Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch’s questions about how the Treasury would respond to a government shutdown or the failure of the Congress to raise the debt limit. But its response is revealing:

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US Government Shutdown Not Likely to Break Belgium’s Record of 589 Days

Thursday, 03 October 2013 10:51

With news that the partial US government shutdown won’t be resolved for at least the next two weeks, and will then only likely end when the debt limit crisis forces it, commentators have resurrected the history of the last government shutdown during the Clinton administration. But little if any media attention is being paid to the longest government shutdown,

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Congressional Stalemate Continues, Threatening Partial Government Shutdown

Monday, 30 September 2013 11:11

Hoping to put the onus back onto the Senate, the House of Representatives on Friday night passed two amendments to the pending Continuing Resolutions bill: one to repeal the Obamacare tax on medical devices (248-174) and the other to delay implementation of the controversial law for a year (231-192). As they were being passed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remained adamant that

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House GOP Leadership Thwarted by Tea Party Conservatives over Defunding Obamacare

Thursday, 12 September 2013 11:38

A vote on a bill to continue government spending offered by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) scheduled for Thursday was abruptly cancelled when it was clear that it would fail. Called a “trick” by some Tea Party conservatives, “hocus-pocus” by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), and “chicanery” by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Cantor’s bill clearly wouldn’t draw the 218 votes necessary for passage. Especially since some 80 House members have signed a letter drafted by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) demanding that

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“Defund Obamacare” Tours Begin, Putting Pressure on Reluctant Senators

Friday, 23 August 2013 05:25

On Monday the Heritage Foundation was joined by two Tea Party grassroots organizations, Tea Party Patriots and For America, on “Defund Obamacare” tours to bring political pressure on Senators who have not yet signed Senator Ted Cruz’s Defund Obamacare Act (Senate Bill 1292). The Heritage tour started in Fayetteville, Arkansas and will visit nine cities by the end of August. The tour backed by Tea Party Patriots and For America will start in Ohio and

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Government Shutdown in November?

Monday, 29 July 2013 15:00

This article was first published at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, July 29th, 2013:

Tuesday’s announcement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that he wouldn’t consider anything the House passed that didn’t repeal the sequester “cuts,” followed by Utah Senator Mike Lee’s letter that he and 11 other senators would block any budget that contained spending to implement Obamacare, have set the battles lines for October. So “sequester” and “Obamacare funding” are back in vogue. Like the battles line drawn at Gettysburg, the left and the right are lining up their cannons.

Reid said he has “no interest” in

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How likely is a government shutdown over the debt ceiling?

Friday, 11 January 2013 11:00

Not very, if David Harsanyi is correct. Harsanyi used to write for the Denver Post and I took a writing class from him several years ago. He referred to the newsroom at the Post – Denver’s liberal paper – as “the collective.” That brought a lot of laughs.

He says that Washington faces three more “cliffs” – the “debt ceiling” cliff, the “sequestration” cliff, and the “balanced budget” cliff. He thinks that the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling cliff is

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Will Congress force a government shutdown over the debt ceiling issue?

Monday, 07 January 2013 05:54

Two bright guys writing for the Washington Times think so. They write that Republicans in Congress are beginning to grow a backbone, that they’re upset about being steamrolled by Obama and mad that now he wants more:

The appetite for a government shutdown is growing among Republicans, who shied away from one during the debt and spending fights in the last Congress but now say one may be needed.

Then they quote various people to

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Minnesota Shutdown Ends with Compromise Pleasing No One

Thursday, 21 July 2011 06:03

Minnesota State Representative Mindy Greiling

Image via Wikipedia

Now that the Minnesota state government shutdown has ended, details of the compromise between Governor Mark Dayton and the Republicans are now public—and no one is happy.

At issue was the $5-billion shortfall between revenues and spending. Liberal Governor Mark Dayton had his own plan for bringing in more revenue: “I believe the wealthiest Minnesotans can afford to pay more taxes,” he commented. Conservative Republicans in the state House and Senate, including House Speaker Kurt Zellers and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, dug in their heels on any tax increase whatsoever. In the end, both sides lost. As noted when the Minnesota state government shut down, the real bottom-line question had

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Insider Scoffs at Default Concerns, Blasts Geithner, Bernanke

Monday, 16 May 2011 16:58

Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner

Image by Downing Street via Flickr

Although Monday, May 16th is the day the financial world was supposed to end as the federal government’s spending hit the debt ceiling, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (left) announced that he was able to put off that day of reckoning until August 2nd. In a letter to Congress, Geithner said that by borrowing from a pension fund belonging to federal workers and from an emergency fund set up to “help deal with foreign financial crises” coupled with slightly higher tax revenues than expected, he is able to stave off the inevitable until

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Impact of a Government Shutdown

Wednesday, 06 April 2011 22:59

The Delicate Arch, a natural arch in Moab, Utah

Image via Wikipedia

As the rhetoric is increasing, so are the chances for a government shutdown. Following a meeting with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate leader Harry Reid, President Obama expressed his exasperation: “As I’ve said before, we have now matched the number that the speaker originally sought. The only question is whether politics or ideology are going to get in the way of preventing a government shutdown.”

To clarify, the original “number” was $61 billion in cuts, passed by the House in March. The Democrats offered $10 billion in cuts initially, and then raised it to $33 billion. Boehner suggested he could “sell” $40 billion in cuts to the House as a compromise, $7 billion more than the Democrats are offering, but $21 billion less than the House wanted. And so, pick a number. It’s a game.

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What If the Debt Ceiling Isn’t Raised?

Tuesday, 11 January 2011 07:42

Image by elston via Flickr

Following the petulant pronouncement from the Obama administration’s chief economics advisor that any suggestion of not raising the debt ceiling was engaging in a “game of chicken,” two other establishment types noisily concurred.

Timothy Geithner, the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury, said that failure to raise the ceiling “could make it impossible for the U. S. to access global credit markets,” while Bill Gross, the co-CEO of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund manager, plainly implied that unless the ceiling were raised promptly, the U.S. could lose its coveted AAA credit rating: “Ultimately, if we continue a trillion-dollar-plus [annual deficit] then, yes, your credit rating will be threatened.”

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