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Archive for July, 2013

Sinecures Add to High Cost of Government


Wednesday July 31st, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 8:45am PDT   •   3 Comments

Government waste occurs in schemes such as the federal stimulus, the GM bailout, Obamacare, and so forth. Government waste also occurs as a result of nepotism and sinecures, as in the case of Gil Cedillo Jr. In 2011 California’s Central Basin Municipal Water District hired Cedillo as a “business development manager,” a position the…
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IRS Fails in Tax Fraud Fight


Monday July 29th, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 9:41am PDT   •   6 Comments

  As recent congressional hearings confirmed, the Internal Revenue Service can be very efficient when it comes to voter suppression. But when it tries to fight tax fraud the IRS is something of a bust, as the story of Carol Cooke confirms. Cooke has lived at her Long Island home for 37 years. In…
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Your Tax Dollars At Work – Really!


Sunday July 28th, 2013   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 9:39am PDT   •   1 Comment

The 25 craziest things the U.S. government spends money on, according to list25, who put together the following YouTube video presentation: Just imagine if the federal government’s bureaucrats ever figured out that they could combine these things! Why, we could have the FAA send 3,600 deceased federal government employees to Indonesia for a three-week…
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Permanent Protection Racket


Wednesday July 24th, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 9:14am PDT   •   2 Comments

Last week Senate leaders struck a deal to preserve the filibuster but this was much more than a question of procedural traditions. The tradeoff called for confirmation votes on President Obama’s nominees to head various federal agencies. So the Senate proceeded to confirm Richard Cordray as the first permanent director of the Consumer Financial…
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Defense Sequester: Not Such a Big Deal


Wednesday July 24th, 2013   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 6:33am PDT   •   0 Comments

Do you remember how U.S. politicians claimed that the federal government’s budget sequester would be extremely destructive to the U.S. economy? Well, perhaps not so much, especially considering how they work in real life. But there was one area of federal budget cutting that was expected to have a real world impact: defense spending….
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Not Good Government


Monday July 22nd, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 9:50am PDT   •   0 Comments

We recently noted that government employee unions call the California capitol “our house.” Evidence is mounting that government unions do indeed own the place. Their mass rally in June was for a pay raise and to the surprise of nobody the politicians they worked so hard to elect gave them exactly what they wanted…
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“Fix It”


Friday July 19th, 2013   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 7:28am PDT   •   1 Comment

We recently stumbled across a 45-second video of a special guest lecturer for John Taylor’s Economics 1 class at Stanford University back on September 24, 2009. Enjoy!

Willful Waste and Destruction at the Economic Development Administration


Wednesday July 17th, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 8:50am PDT   •   1 Comment

It’s not clear how much economic development the federal Economic Development Administration, a division of the Commerce Department, actually produces. But the Commerce Department’s inspector general has some observations about the administration’s performance after a cyber attack that turned out to be bogus. “EDA’s persistent, mistaken beliefs resulted in an excessive response and ultimately…
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Stimulus vs Spending Cuts – UK Edition


Wednesday July 17th, 2013   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 6:13am PDT   •   2 Comments

Does government spending really boost the economy? Does cutting government spending, or rather, reducing the growth of government spending, hurt the economy? Here is the answer to both questions, in one graph, from Britmouse (via Scott Sumner): Sumner then continues his observations to compare the British experience with that of the troubled nations of…
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Department of Homeland Security Fails to Make Nation Secure


Monday July 15th, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 8:45am PDT   •   5 Comments

The National Transportation Safety Board says it will be months before they fully determine why Asiana flight 214 crash landed at San Francisco on July 6. The crash also disturbed other federal security agencies, for a strange reason. Bob Clifford, an aviation attorney whose firm has handled a number of air disaster cases, told…
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