Betsy

When is a deal not a deal? When it’s with Barack Obama. On Monday, President Obama announced his fiscal 2016 budget with a whopping 7 percent increase in federal spending. That breaks a deal he signed with Congress back in 2011. In exchange for permission to hike federal borrowing by a whopping $2.1 trillion —

President Obama says he’s had enough of “mindless austerity”; he wants to undo “the arbitrary across-the-board cuts known as ‘the sequester’ ” that he agreed to back in 2011. Releasing his fiscal 2016 budget on Monday, Obama proposed a whopping 7 percent increase in federal spending. No matter that this means breaking his agreement three-plus

President Obama’s self-congratulatory State of the Union message last week made it sound like our nation’s problems are behind us. But on Tuesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office set the record straight with a blistering warning. The CBO cautioned that America’s unaffordable public programs and crushing debt will condemn us to anemic economic growth. Total

here’s one part of ObamaCare that even many Democrats hate – the so-called Cadillac tax on generous health plans. It doesn’t go into effect until 2018, but employers know it’s coming and are already cutting health benefits to stay under the Cadillac line. It’s clobbering workers and roiling union negotiations across the country. The growing

With flu raging through 46 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is taking center stage, advising the public and physicians. But the agency increasingly isn’t up to its task. Until last year, polls showed the CDC to be the most respected federal agency. But then it bungled its response to Ebola. That was

Next time you’re a patient, ask whether your “health-care provider” is a doctor. On Jan. 1, New York changed the standard for who can practice medicine, putting patients at risk. It became the 19th state to capitulate to aggressive lobbying by nursing groups to let some nurses play doctor without going to medical school. In

The US Census Bureau announced last week that New York slipped to fourth place in population among the 50 states. Though babies are still born here every day, and immigrants still flock in, overall population growth lags because New Yorkers are abandoning the state. Don’t blame the weather. Blustery Montana and North Dakota aren’t having this problem. New

AN ABC-Washington Post poll shows 61 percent of Democrats support Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, far more than other contenders. If she wins the White House, health reform could become even more painful than ObamaCare. Clinton ducks questions about her views on health reform. But the plan she proposed in 1993, as first lady,

If you want to know how your tax dollars will get spent next year, the answers are in Cromnibus—the 1,695 page bill that Congress hurriedly passed last weekend to fund the federal government through September 2015. Republicans won big with Cromnibus, along with farmers, political parties, incandescent bulb users, Blue Cross insurers, kids who like