Donald Trump Trump--the billionaire real estate tycoon and reality TV figure who is flirting with a 2012 presidential run -- sat down with Meredith Vieira in an exclusive interview that aired this morning, Thursday, April 7 on “Today.”

Trump, who is tied for second place among likely Republican candidates and first among Tea Party members, talks pointedly about Obama’s presidency, his thoughts on Obama’s birth certificate, foreign affairs, and the possibility of running for President. He tells Vieira, “I love this country, but this country is going to hell.”

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The ongoing standoff in Washington over the federal budget is now less than three days away from its deadline, with Republicans and Democrats still locked in disagreement in the House of Representatives.

If the parties can't pass a spending plan by the end of Friday, money will stop flowing from federal coffers, and the government will start to shut down on Saturday. Insert the doom and gloom scenarios of death and starvation here.

But as a potential shutdown looms, perhaps there are larger questions we need to ask:

If government shuts down, who will spend our hard earned taxpayer dollars on sculptures of fairy riding toad's?

If the government shuts down, who will spend money on important studies that teach us how “monkeys react under the influence of cocaine"?

If the government shuts down, who will make sure that we spend $89,298 of taxpayer funds to replace new sidewalks with newer sidewalks that lead to ditch?

The reality is that our federal government borrows nearly forty cents of each dollar it spends and we have allowed our taxpayer dollars to be abused and misused by both political parties for too long. We are on an unsustainable path and it's time to change course. As the Heritage Foundation notes:

Perhaps if President Obama were more willing to lead in 2010, when his party first abdicated its responsibility to pass a budget, Congress and the American people would not be where we are today – staring a partial government shutdown straight in the eye, all while trillions of dollars in debt await future generations. Majority Leader Reid and President Obama now must put politics aside, agree to modestly cut spending, move the process forward and avoid a shutdown.

Jon Stewart is taking on the Obama Administration yet again.... proving that the bloom is now completely off the rose.

Judicial Watch Inc is reporting that Census Bureau data reveals that most U.S. families headed by illegal immigrants use taxpayer-funded welfare programs on behalf of their American-born anchor babies.

Even before the recession, immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, according to the extensive census data collected and analyzed by a nonpartisan Washington D.C. group dedicated to researching legal and illegal immigration in the U.S. The results, published this month in a lengthy report, are hardly surprising.

Basically, the majority of households across the country benefitting from publicly-funded welfare programs are headed by immigrants, both legal and illegal. States where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62%), Texas, California and New York with 61% each and Pennsylvania (59%).

Read the full article HERE.

Rep. Paul Ryan released details on the Republican’s adult plan to reduce spending by $6.2 trillion in the next 10 years. Ryan says in the first year there are about $600 billion in cuts alone. The budget also calls for pro-growth tax rates of 25% for individuals and businesses.

Obama may have punted but Republicans did not. This is a bold and responsible fiscal plan - the likes of which the American public has desperately awaited. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Our budget cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years and puts the nation on track to pay off our national debt. …This morning the new House Republican majority will introduce a budget that moves the debate from billions in spending cuts to trillions. America is facing a defining moment. The threat posed by our monumental debt will damage our country in profound ways, unless we act.

No one person or party is responsible for the looming crisis. Yet the facts are clear: Since President Obama took office, our problems have gotten worse. Major spending increases have failed to deliver promised jobs. The safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams. Government health and retirement programs are growing at unsustainable rates. The new health-care law is a fiscal train wreck. And a complex, inefficient tax code is holding back American families and businesses.

The president’s recent budget proposal would accelerate America’s descent into a debt crisis. It doubles debt held by the public by the end of his first term and triples it by 2021. It imposes $1.5 trillion in new taxes, with spending that never falls below 23% of the economy. His budget permanently enlarges the size of government. It offers no reforms to save government health and retirement programs, and no leadership.

Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade.

It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

There is no doubt that auto technology is changing at a dramatic pace. But when it comes to electric vehicles, one thing remains true, they all about hype, hope, and government largesse. But what has really changed in more of a century of trial and toil?

Consider this exchange in 1896 between Thomas Edison and Henry Ford where the elder told the aspirant to forget batteries and stick with the internal combustion engine (gasoline) for his horseless carriage.

Here is the conversation as recounted by Samuel Insull in his 1934 autobiography:

Thomas Edison with an electric car in 1913, “He asked me no end of details,” to use Mr. Ford’s own language, “and I sketched everything for him; for I have always found that I could convey an idea quicker by sketching than by just describing it.” When the conversation ended, Mr. Edison brought his fist down on the table with a bang, and said: Young man, that’s the thing; you have it. Keep at it. Electric cars must keep near to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do, either, for they require a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.

Later on Mr. Ford wrote:

That bang on the table was worth worlds to me. No man up to then had given me any encouragement. I had hoped that I was headed right, sometimes I knew that I was, sometimes I only wondered if I was, but here all at once and out of a clear sky the greatest inventive genius in the world had given me a complete approval. The man who knew most about electricity in the world had said that for the purpose my gas motor was better than any electric motor could be—it could go long distances, he said, and there would be stations to supply the cars with hydro-carbon. That was the first time I ever heard this term for liquid fuel. And this at a time when all the electrical engineers took it as an established fact that there could be nothing new and worthwhile that did not run by electricity. It was to be the universal power.

As the Heritage Foundation notes in this post, no matter how hard the government tries, it just won’t ever be as effective as the free market is in satisfying consumer demand:

Since little demand currently exists in the market for electric cars, the government offers a tax credit of $7,500 to those who purchase vehicles like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf. And even with the tax credit, electric cars aren’t flying off the lots. So while the government continues to waste taxpayer dollars in its attempt to commercialize an industry, the free market is meeting consumers’ needs by improving existing technology and doing so without government-funded incentives.

Read the full article here.

Bottom line, when the government chooses winners and losers in the market, the winners are usually pet projects, and the losers are the taxpayers as well as the market.

So very very good...

President Barack Obama is proud of his record of accomplishment - a record that's highlighted incredibly well in this new ad from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Perhaps a sneak peak of things to come for 2012...