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Archive for May, 2015

Shutting the Barn Door after the Horse Has Bolted


Thursday May 28th, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 6:51am PDT   •   1 Comment

“Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted” is an old American/English idiom that the Cambridge dictionary describes as meaning “to be so late in taking action to prevent something bad happening that the bad event has already happened.” Who knew that the American and English farmers of yesteryear had such insight into…
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Obamacare Expands Misery Beyond Death


Tuesday May 26th, 2015   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 11:10am PDT   •   2 Comments

As this column has noted, Emily Bazar of the California Health Care Foundation’s Center for Health Reporting has been working three shifts documenting the abuses of Covered California, a wholly owned subsidiary of Obamacare. These abuses include a dysfunctional computer system that cost nearly $500 million, cancellation of health insurance without notice when people…
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What if the United States Defaulted on the National Debt?


Saturday May 23rd, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 3:30pm PDT   •   0 Comments

What would happen if the U.S. government defaulted on making payments on any portion of the $18.1 trillion it has borrowed? That’s a question the Federal Reserve asked not so long ago, and just in case this might someday happen, the Fed created an emergency plan to deal with the situation. Reuters reports: In…
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Spring 2015: To Whom Does the U.S. Government Owe Money?


Tuesday May 19th, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 6:29am PDT   •   3 Comments

On Friday, 15 May 2015, the U.S. Treasury identified the national origins of the major foreign holders of debt issued by the U.S. government through the end of March 2015, the halfway point of the federal government’s fiscal year. With that information, we can now update our chart showing just who has loaned the…
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Bay Bridge Not Over Water, Corrosion Troubles


Monday May 18th, 2015   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 6:18am PDT   •   0 Comments

As we have noted many times, the new eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge was 10 years in the making and a whopping $5 billion over budget, but all that time and money could not guarantee safety for the public. Before he moved to Congress in recent elections, state senator Mark DeSaulnier…
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Big Brother Barges Into the Bathroom


Wednesday May 13th, 2015   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 10:49am PDT   •   1 Comment

When it comes to intrusive government, California is plunging to new depths, as Daniel Weintraub notes in the Sacramento Bee. “For Californians who fear big government, this might sound like the ultimate nightmare: An unelected board and its vast scientific bureaucracy is going to force us to pay more to wipe our butts.” The…
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Tax Rules Too Complicated for IRS to Explain


Wednesday May 13th, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 7:19am PDT   •   2 Comments

It is something of an understatement to say that the U.S. tax code is both very big and very complex, but did you know that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service believes that to be so true that it actually prohibits its employees from providing guidance on tax code matters via social media, the preferred…
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IRS Marijuana Rip-Off


Monday May 11th, 2015   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 11:30am PDT   •   1 Comment

Any effort to track government waste, fraud and abuse is bound to take ample notice of the federal Internal Revenue Service. As we have noted, the IRS targeted non-profit groups favoring smaller government and lower taxes. Then IRS bosses tried to pass this off as “horrible customer service,” even as they doled out huge…
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Social Security Going Broke Faster


Sunday May 10th, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 6:33am PDT   •   0 Comments

Big news regarding the true state of Social Security’s finances from CNBC: New studies from Harvard and Dartmouth researchers find that the SSA’s actuarial forecasts have been consistently overstating the financial health of the program’s trust funds since 2000. […] Researchers examined forecasts published in the annual trustees’ reports from 1978, when the reports…
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Unexpected Perks of Being a Government Bureaucrat


Friday May 8th, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 7:31am PDT   •   1 Comment

Every year, thousands of regular Americans are prosecuted by government prosecutors for the kinds of activities that, for government bureaucrats, would seem to be considered to be perks of being on the federal government’s payroll. For example, in 2012, the most recent year for which the FBI provides arrest statistics, there were 7,900 arrests…
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