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By now, pretty much everybody knows that President Obama’s economic stimulus program, more formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has turned out to be an extremely expensive failure. Instead of creating or saving millions of jobs, this massive economic stimulus program really represented the federal government’s wasteful spending at...
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How can changing the rules by which welfare benefits are doled out save taxpayer dollars while making sure that only the people who are eligible for welfare benefits can receive them? It’s a trick question, because the key to making it work is to make the bureaucrats who operate the federal government’s welfare dispensing...
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What if the President of the United States was the driver of a car, and the speed at which he drove was the rate at which the U.S. national debt would increase while he was at the wheel? Would that be the kind of road trip you’d like to go on? Courtesy of the...
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Just in case you missed it this past weekend, it has now been officially three years since the U.S. Senate acted to pass a budget for the United States federal government! The Daily Caller’s Caroline May reports on the momentous occasion: Thomas Jefferson is widely credited with coining an adage that makes fools of...
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We were among the first to report that President Obama’s proposed budget would break the debt deal reached in the U.S. Congress last summer. Today, although the President’s proposed budget is officially dead, the leadership of the majority Democratic party in the U.S. Senate according to Powerlineblog is taking steps to make breaking that...
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Here is an apparently common scene today from the U.S. Senate’s first session to attempt to mark up a budget for the first time in almost three years (we’re nearly a week away from the official anniversary of the last time the Democratic Party-controlled body acted to do so, as they are required to...
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What happens when the federal government’s bureaucrats, such as those of the General Services Administration, don’t have any effective oversight in the executive branch when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars? Well, rather than us tell you, let’s have the reporters of the Washington Post describe the agency’s Inspector General’s findings of fiscal malfeasance,...
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If the United States were make a real effort to run a budget surplus for the sake of cutting its national debt burden in half by the year 2050, how big would those budget surpluses have to be? The Economist answers the question for the U.S. and 25 other nations in chart form: The...
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Do you ever feel like you need a scorecard to keep track of all the various spending proposals being put forward for the U.S. federal government’s budget? If so, you’re in luck! The Mercatus Center has put together the following chart that you can use as a scorecard to see how well each of...
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Via the Associated Press, all values below are in millions of U.S. dollars (because apparently, to save ink, the AP cut them off. We’ve added the dollar signs and better punctuation): WASHINGTON (AP) – Figures on government spending and debt (last six digits are eliminated). The government’s fiscal year runs Oct. 1 through Sept....
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