United Liberty

You’ve no doubt heard about Sen. Marco Rubio’s stopping his speech for a few seconds to take a couple swigs of water — now known as “Rubio-ing,” because what the world needs is yet another meme. However, the substance of Sen. Rubio’s speech, in which he tried to present a distinction between the Republican Party and the vision of President Barack Obama, is vastly more important.

After the pleasantries and offering giving his extraordinary background, Sen. Rubio went right after President Obama’s economic agenda.

“Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity,” Sen. Rubio explained. “But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems. That the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough and control enough.”

Sen. Rubio added that President Obama’s “solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.”

He went right after the heart of President Obama’s proposed solutions to economic problems facing the country, explaining that more government isn’t going to get Americans ahead nor will it create more opportunities or inspire new ideas.

President Barack Obama will give the State of the Union address this evening where he will lay out his agenda for the next year. Since taking office in 2009, President Obama has told used the address to sell Americans a big government agenda that has ultimately left the worse off.

As this new video from the House Republican Conference shows, President Obama has made promises during past State of the Union addresses from cutting the deficit in half to ObamaCare not affecting current insurance coverage and reducing costs to enacting an energy policy that reduces our dependence on foreign oil.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, all of these promises have been broken — budget deficits have gotten completely out of control, some 7 million are expected to lose their employer-based coverage and costs for coverage have skyrocketed because of ObamaCare, and he has already rejected Keystone XL once to please his radical environmentalist base.

Check out the video below. It’ll make you wonder, given the broken promises of the last four years, what President Obama has in store for tonight:

Washington doesn’t have a spending problem, according to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). During an interview yesterday on Fox News Sunday, the former Speaker of the House told Chris Wallace that Congress has already cut spending and called for more tax revenue to flow to Washington:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says the tens of billions of dollars of spending cuts under sequestration that kicks in on March 1 can be avoided through eliminating tax subsidies for oil companies.

“The fact is we’ve had plenty of spending cuts, $1.6 trillion in the Budget Control Act. What we need is growth,” Pelosi said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Slashing spending indiscriminately, she said, would hurt growth prospects for the U.S. economy.

“It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem,” the California Democrat asserted.

As you can see in the chart below from the Heritage Foundation, there is still a river of red ink following from Washington, Despite what Pelosi said yesterday:

What planet is Pelosi living on?

While President Barack Obama continues to twiddle his thumbs, a new report from Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that the nation’s fiscal outlook for the next 10 years remains bleak.

While the report, which was issued yesterday, estimates that the deficit for the current fiscal year will come in under $1 trillion for the first time since 2008, unsustainable spending will have deficits soaring once again by the end of the 10-year window:

The federal budget deficit will fall to $845 billion in 2013 before rising again over the next decade as an aging population and soaring healthcare costs lead to an explosion in entitlement spending, the Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday.

The budget deficit would fall below $1 trillion under President Obama for the first time in 2013 and would drop to $430 billion by 2015, according to CBO’s annual fiscal outlook.

But CBO’s long-term forecast projects that budget deficits will near the $1 trillion mark again by 2023, when it forecasts a $978 billion budget deficit.

What’s behind these perpetually large budget deficits? The CBO attributes the spending growth to the “pressures of an aging population, rising health care costs, an expansion of federal subsidies for health insurance, and growing interest payments on federal debt.”

More specifically, the problem is entitlements. Unless action is taken — meaning that President Obama actually puts forward a plan — the CBO notes, “The aging of the population, increasing health care costs, and a significant expansion of eligibility for federal subsidies for health insurance will substantially boost spending for Social Security and for major health care programs relative to the size of the economy.”

President Obama’s plan to fix the deficit and national debt? Call for more tax revenue:

President Obama insisted Sunday that additional tax revenue will need to be part of future deficit deals, but said hikes in tax rates may not be necessary.

In a pre-Super Bowl interview with CBS, the president outlined his vision for further deficit reduction, which he said was essential, but in a way that preserves the government’s ability to continue spending on key programs.

He also emphasized that the seemingly continuous stream of Washington standoffs was wreaking havoc on confidence in the U.S. economy.

Republicans have insisted that the revenue side of the deficit equation was dealt with during “fiscal cliff” talks, which resulted in a compromise that saw rates climb on the nation’s top earners. But Obama flatly rejected the notion that future talks would explicitly focus on spending.

“There is no doubt we need additional revenue, coupled with smart spending reductions, in order to bring down our deficit,” he said.

Uh, no, Mr. President. What we need is not additional revenue; what we need is to reduce spending across the board. We need to cut defense spending, which is the highest in the world. We need to cut and reform entitlements. We need to drastically scale back federal education spending, which has done absolutely nothing to educate our children. We need to acknowledge that the federal War on Poverty has been useless and reform our welfare system. We need to end foreign aid. We need to cut back on environmental spending, since that has done nothing useful. What we do not need is “additional revenue.”

The House of Representatives will vote today on a three-month extension of the nation’s debt limit, which the White House has said President Obama would sign. While there will be some dissent from conservative members, the vote shows that House Republicans have completely caved to the White House.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who is thought to be a potential candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, sharply criticized House Republican leadership during a speech in South Carolina on Monday, according to Politico:

In remarks to the Charleston Meeting, a gathering of conservative leaders in the first-in-the-South presidential primary state, Paul rebuked the House for its plans to delay the debt limit fight by a few months. Republicans intend to vote this week on raising the country’s statutory debt limit to delay a spending standoff with the White House by about three months.

“I saw the speaker on TV handing the newly sworn-in president a flag. I am afraid it was the white flag of surrender,” the Kentucky Republican said, according to a GOP source present at the meeting.

Alluding to the House GOP’s gathering last week in Williamsburg, Va., Paul jabbed: “They came out of their retreat and retreated.”

House Republicans are at a retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia for a few days this week hoping to find a strategy that will help the rebuild before the 2014 election and deal with President Obama during his second term.

Perhaps one of the biggest rumors that has come out of the retreat — noted yesterday afternoon on Twitter by Erick Erickson — is word that they will not put up a fight on raising the debt ceiling, which is set to be reached at some point in mid-February.

While he wasn’t that straightforward in comments to the media yesterday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has urged unity from his party on fiscal issues, said that a short-term hike would be passed if a large agreement on spending couldn’t be reach with the White House:

“We’re discussing the possible virtue of a short-term debt limit extension so that we have a better chance of getting the Senate and the White House involved in discussions in March,” Ryan told reporters gathered at the pricey Kingsmill resort in Williamsburg, where the House GOP is holding its annual retreat.

If you’ve been in Washington, DC since the end of last year, you may have seen the ads sponsored by Bankrupting America posted all over the Union Station and Capitol South Metro stations. The ads, an example of which can be viewed here, feature quotes with promises from presidents and members of Congress to tackle the nation’s ever-growing national debt.

Even though the “fiscal cliff” debate may be over, the fight over the debt ceiling is right around the corner. Armed with a new web ad, Bankrupting America is continuing to call out Washington over how they are spending our money.

It’s official. Mark Sanford, former Governor of South Carolina who received glowing marks on fiscal policy from the Cato Institute, announced yesterday that he will run in the special election for South Carolina’s First Congressional District:

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) announced he’s running for his old House seat on Tuesday, ending more than a month of speculation that he’d run.

“Officially we’re going to announce tomorrow, and then it’s off to the races,” Sanford told the conservative National Review. “What I’d like to do is take all that I’ve learned in my time in Congress and my governorship, on my way up and on my way down, and apply it to what is probably the most important debate that we will have in regard to the future of our country. I’m running because I care deeply about spending, and the mathematical impossibility of us continuing down the path we’re on.”
[…]
Sanford argued that he’d be the strongest candidate to take on deficit spending.

“I think if you look at the almost 20 years in the larger federal or state debate, what you see is an amazingly consistent record on looking out for the taxpayer and trying to impact that which I think worries a lot of people right now, that spending locomotive that we have going in Washington right now,” he said.

Buried in yesterday’s news of President Obama’s press conference, where he brow beat Republicans over the debt ceiling and called for even more tax revenue, was word that the White House would break the law by not submitting a budget for FY 2014 to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) by the required date:

The White House has informed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that it will miss the legal deadline for sending a budget to Congress.

Acting Budget Director Jeff Zients told Ryan (R-Wis.) in a letter late Friday that the budget will not be delivered by Feb. 4, as required by law.

In the letter, Zients says the administration is “working diligently on our budget request.”

The letter blames the late passage of the “fiscal cliff” deal for the delay, saying that because tax and spending issues were not resolved until Jan. 2, “the administration was forced to delay some of its FY 2014 budget preparations, which in turn will delay the budget’s submission to Congress.”

“We will submit it to Congress as soon as possible,” Zients writes.

The Hill notes that, since taking office, the White House has met the deadline only one time. The last time Congress passed a budget was April 29, 2009, which was also the first year of Obama’s administration. And while the White House likes to blame Republicans for the impasse, Obama couldn’t even get a budget through in 2010 when Democrats had complete control of Congress.