With the official unemployment rate having now risen to 9.2%, Patrick Buchanan notes in his new column, “An Establishment in Panic,” that another 7% are underemployed and economic growth is a very weak 1.8%. Obama’s predictable answer is higher taxes and to raise the federal debt ceiling so that even more spending and debt…
Read More »
Ron Paul has gone public with proposals for the Fed to destroy $1.6 trillion in government bonds that it is currently holding. As The New Republic’s Dean Baker reports, such a plan might be a way around the impass that has mounted on the Hill. Aside from the practicalities of politics, Paul’s plan is…
Read More »
The White House is now reporting that the debt day is approaching faster than expected. August 2nd was the cut-off date for negotiating a deal, but now Congress must agree to a deficit-reduction deal by July 22 to avoid hitting the limit. Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats are deadlocked in opposing positions. Included in one…
Read More »
Discussions of a Treasury default all share one common feature—no one is certain as to what a default would actually entail. A recent article in The Economist highlights a study by Terry Zivney (Ball State University) and Richard Marcus (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) that looked at the last instance of U.S. default in 1979. The…
Read More »
Bernanke urges for an increase in the debt ceiling, demonstrating the wisdom of James Buchanan and Richard Wagner. In Democracy in Deficit, Chapter 8, the authors set out to model Keynesian-oriented fiscal policy with the “the plausible hypothesis that monetary authorities are, like elected politicians, subjected to both direct and indirect political pressures, and…
Read More »
Last year, Americans believed Federal government debt to be just as dangerous as terrorism. According to the a June 2010 Gallup poll, 4 in 10 Americans ranked both Terrorism and Federal Debt as an “extremely serious” threat to the future well-being of the United States. One year later, Osama bin Laden is dead. The…
Read More »
Charles Rowley summarizes two options facing bond holders as sketched out by Stanley Druckenmiller, the legendary investor and onetime fund manager for George Soros. “First, suppose that one owns a 10-year Treasury. In return, one receives an income stream over that period. As a result of default that income stream will be delayed for…
Read More »
Over at Economix, Casey Mulligan has a nice illustration of Austan Goolsbee’s approach to economic planning. In essence, targeted means of stimulating investment (say, with New Homebuyer tax credits) don’t work to increase investment, and thereby employment, in the short-run. Rather these types of subsidies have drive up prices for current asset owners—constituting windfall…
Read More »
Michael Snyder reports on seventeen statistics on the unsustainable nature of reckless U.S. government spending and debt. 1. As of December 28th, 2010, the U.S. national debt was $13,877,230,355,933.00. 2. If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it…
Read More »
 |
 |
 |