The House of Representatives plans to vote Wednesday on repealing Obamacare.

If Congress does not repeal the health care law–repeal also requires approval by both the liberal-controlled Senate and President Obama–what happens then?

Obamacare will affect everyone. Not only does it centralize power in the federal government and create  a one-size-fits all healthcare system, it also breaks President Obama’s tax promises by massively increasing taxes on middle-class Americans.

No one is shielded from the effects of this massive, over-reaching legislation, and The Heritage Foundation wants you to know how this legislation could impact you, your family, and your neighbors. Continue Reading »

On Monday, President Obama unveiled his 2013 budget, filled with tax and spending increases.

“The Obama budget submitted Monday all too predictably repeats the stale and unsuccessful policies of the past three years” and increases spending nearly 50 percent over the next decade, The Heritage Foundation’s Patrick Knudsen explains.

To no one’s surprise, the budget contains a multitude of tax increases that total $1.8 trillion in new levies over 10 years. As Heritage tax expert Curtis Dubay writes,

Included in the President’s tax hikes are his old favorites, such as raising tax rates on families making more than $250,000 a year back to their level prior to the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. President Obama would also curtail their deductions and personal exemptions, hike the capital gains tax to 20 percent (23.8 percent when including the new Obamacare surtax), and raise the death tax.

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On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released its federal budget outlook through fiscal year 2022. And as one would expect, the news is not good.

Congress has spent recklessly for more than a decade. We have seen three years of high unemployment. Our national debt has increased tremendously on President Obama’s watch. In fact, 2012 will be the third straight year with a deficit of more than $1 trillion. Worse, spending on entitlement programs will increase out of control unless Congress acts now to reform them.

As lawmakers prepare the 2013 budget, they should keep in mind a few oddities in the CBO’s projections. For example, they seem to ignore the economic consequences of liberals’ favored policies, as The Heritage Foundation’s J.D. Foster explains:

By and large, the economic forecast that the CBO uses for its baseline outlook appears reasonable. Projected growth for 2012 of about 2 percent is certainly in the ballpark of other estimates. As the baseline assumes a massive tax hike in 2013, a resulting decline in growth in 2013 is appropriate whether one is a Keynesian or a supply-sider, though the CBO forecast of 1.1 percent growth under those circumstances seems very optimistic.

Another peculiarity is that there appears to be no reflection in the forecast for interest rates of the massive increase in national debt effected thus far under President Obama or projected in either baseline. If deficits matter, they matter first and foremost through higher interest rates, but these consequences seem to be wholly missing.

Read Foster’s full report here.

Meanwhile, Heritage’s Patrick Knudsen reports that

the President and Members of Congress are still considering a large, thoroughly bogus “savings” option to help cover their profligate spending: They intend to claim war spending that was never going to be spent as “savings”—and then spend it on something else. It is one of the most embarrassingly transparent gimmicks in town, and it should be shunned permanently.

When President Obama took the podium last week to address the nation, he offered few concrete ways to fix the dismal state of the nation’s finances. The solution is obvious: it starts with getting spending under control. Heritage’s Saving the American Dream plan offers ways to do just that.

With yet another CBO report outlining the fiscal nightmare this country is facing, are you hopeful Congress and the President can turn this country around?

Most presidents preside over deficits, as shown in the Heritage Foundation chart above. Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen deficits both big and small. But President Barack Obama beats out his predecessors when it comes to the size and scale of the federal deficit.

According to the White House Office of Management and Budget, the country ran a deficit averaging 8.3 percent of GDP for the first two years of the Obama administration—the largest deficit in the past 50 years. That’s nearly double the deficits run by presidents fighting the Cold War.

As Heritage’s Rob Bluey points out, “Political party doesn’t tell the whole story, however. President Bill Clinton leads the pack of presidents since 1961.”

Check out this chart and several others in our Budget Chart Book.

The United States can no longer run this sort of unsustainable debt. There has to be a dramatic policy change at the federal level. Read Heritage’s plan to save the American dream and fix the debt crisis.

Yesterday, the United States national debt surpassed the $15 trillion mark and is expected to exceed $23 trillion by 2015 if drastic measures aren’t taken to cut spending. With two-thirds of the national debt held by the public, every man, woman, and child’s share is $48,000 each.

The Heritage Foundation’s Alison Fraser, Patrick Knudsen and Mackenzie Eaglen put the overspending problem in perspective: Continue Reading »

With the deadline for the “Super Committee” to find $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions rapidly approaching, our nation is racking up $2.2 billion in new debt daily.

And if the Super Committee doesn’t act, or if Congress doesn’t enact its proposals, our military’s fate may be at stake.

One bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives has urged the committee to “go big” and enact $4 trillion in deficit reduction—reductions to be achieved in part by massive tax hikes. Meanwhile, 33 Senators last week urged the Super Committee to recognize the reality that America has a spending problem, not a tax problem, and to cut down on the size of government.

But just how large is the challenge?

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While taxing the rich to pay for future deficits isn’t exactly a new idea, it is the latest scheme liberals and the Obama administration believe is the cure all to our economic woes.

The Heritage Foundation’s Rob Bluey reports that Democrats on the deficit-reduction “Super Committee” met last week and “floated a proposal that includes massive tax increases on wealthy Americans.” Bluey credits the proposal for including some cuts to entitlement programs, the increase in taxes on the rich made up a significant portion of the plan’s “savings.”

In our 2011 Budget Chart Book, we point out that relying on revenue from these taxpayers to close the deficit would require increasing their tax rates to mathematically impossible levels.

Brian Darling

Three simple reforms could go a long way to improving the transparency of the “super committee” debt-reduction process, The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling writes in Human Events.

These reforms would allow the American people to engage with the committee’s work, he explains: Continue Reading »

In a policy speech today at The Heritage Foundation, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered harsh criticisms of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, dubbed the “super committee,” and proposed an alternative approach to achieving a meaningful deficit reduction.

The super committee approach is “irrational,” said Gingrich, who called for scrapping the committee entirely.

Watch the video of Gingrich’s remarks at Heritage: Continue Reading »

Photo: Wikimedia/Gage Skidmore

Today at 9:00 a.m. Eastern in a public policy speech at The Heritage Foundation, former Speaker Newt Gingrich will flesh out his criticism of the deficit-reduction “super committee” and propose an alternative approach to achieve meaningful deficit reduction.

His remarks will be carried live on C-SPAN 2. Or watch Gingrich’s remarks live online.