In April, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced that the House Republican Policy Committee had created the “Fiscal Integrity Task Force (FIT).” Taxpayer groups in Washington were elated. Finally, Republicans in Congress were rediscovering their fiscal soul. The goal of the FIT, according to Rep. Boehner, is “to put fiscal integrity into government budgeting, taxing, and spending, and to demand that Congress run the federal government like a family budget.”
Department of Defense and Lavish Expenditures
What do earmarks for $10 million for the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, $18 million for a chapel in Fort Hood, and $5 million for a fence near San Diego have in common? The House of Representatives deemed them to be important enough to include as earmarks in the committee report on H.R. 5658, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2009.
Coconut Road Outrage
An update on the ongoing drama associated with what CAGW has dubbed “the immaculate earmark.”
Three Coins in a Fountain
When one tosses a coin into a fountain it is customary to make a wish. The wish could be as substantial as, “I wish for the winning numbers to the lottery,” or it could be as elusive as “I wish for cancer to be cured.” Until the budget for the fiscal year of 2009 was drafted, never before has a wish dictated the potential use of the discarded currency.
IRS Still Plagued By Security Vulnerability
The Government Accountability Project (GAO) released a report on January 8, 2008 documenting the mediocre progress made by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) toward tightening its information security systems. The GAO said: “The IRS is at increased risk of unauthorized access to and disclosure, modification, and destruction of financial and taxpayer information, as well as inadvertent or deliberate disruption of system operations and services.”
Big Time ARM Wrestling
The country continues to experience uncertainty and volatility in the financial markets as a result of the crisis in the mortgage industry. Financial services companies have been hit hard. For example, Merrill Lynch announced an $8.4 billion writedown in October, and Citigroup received a $7.5 billion infusion of cash from investors in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
For its part, Congress has been trying to help homeowners who face foreclosure or need help refinancing homes they can no longer afford. Developments in the mortgage market are fluid and the industry began taking corrective action to mitigate problems for some subprime borrowers. One housing advocate told The Wall Street Journal that some loan-service providers are “already freezing rates for five to seven years.”
European Taxpayers Speak Out
When many Americans think of Europe, they conjure up images of slow-moving socialist bureaucracies. While this type of government may exist in some countries, there is a growing free market and taxpayer movement spreading throughout the continent.
Read Our Lips: No New Internet Taxes
In the fall of 1998, the Internet Tax Freedom Act put a moratorium on discriminatory and multiple Internet taxes on electronic commerce and access taxes at the federal, state, and local levels. With large bipartisan support, the ban was extended in 2001 and 2004. It expires on November 1, 2007. Congress is considering a four-year extension.
Catastrophic Insurance is a Disaster
Congress is considering changes to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) as well as increasing the availability of state-sponsored insurance funds. Both initiatives would expose taxpayers to massive costs. The Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act of 2007, H.R. 3121, reauthorizes the NFIP for five years, increases NFIP borrowing authority, and makes updates to maximum […]
“Nutty” Earmark Rejected By Florida County
Some times you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. In the case of Coconut Road in Florida, even though a member of Congress felt like wasting taxpayer dollars on a highway interchange project at Coconut Road and I-75, taxpayers in Lee County, Florida did not want and the Lee County Metropolitan Planning Commission eventually voted against.