Posts Tagged ‘federal spending’

State Department Becomes a Wasteland


Monday November 23rd, 2015   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 9:53am PST   •   0 Comments

The World War II generation has reason to associate the U.S. Department of State with treason in the form of Stalinist spy Alger Hiss. Baby Boomers and beyond have come to associate State Department briefings with “Saturday Night Live” in the form of spokesperson Marie Harf, who shows a keen sense for the absurd….
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Inside a Bad Debt Deal


Tuesday October 27th, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 10:15pm PDT   •   0 Comments

In 2011, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner realized the most significant achievement of his entire career in the U.S. Congress when he reached a deal with the White House to restrain the growth of U.S. government spending: the Budget Control Act of 2011. Here, using the leverage of the threat of not…
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The National Debt Made Simple (Presidential Edition)


Saturday September 21st, 2013   •   Posted by Mary Theroux at 12:15pm PDT   •   0 Comments

With the national debt soon to reach $17 trillion, it’s not surprising that even the President can’t quite grasp the concepts of the debt ceiling and our national debt (see: “Raising the Debt Ceiling … Does Not Increase Our Debt“)—numbers this size are notoriously difficult for any of us to accurately conceive. That’s why…
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Fine Whine at the Federal Trough


Monday September 16th, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 8:45am PDT   •   2 Comments

As this column has noted, the federal government of the United States is a spending machine, much of it on autopilot. But the economic downturn of recent years has forced spending cuts known as “sequestration.” That has made the federal trough a noisy place, but also informative. Philip Joyce, a professor at the University…
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GovGives.Con


Monday April 1st, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 9:19am PDT   •   1 Comment

The federal government gave $17.9 million to economically struggling rural timber counties in the west for conservation projects, schools, roads, rescue operations and such. Now the federal government wants the money back. A letter of protest signed by more than 30 House members, including Democrats, said: “For the administration to announce three months after…
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Federal Government Still Spending for Civil War, Spanish-American War


Friday March 22nd, 2013   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 3:04pm PDT   •   18 Comments

The federal government won’t say who they are, but in 2013 two people still get government payments for the U.S. Civil War, which ended nearly 150 years ago. No government official made that information public. It only emerged as the result of an investigation of federal payment records by the Associated Press, which also…
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Welfare Costs More Than $60,000 per Family


Wednesday November 14th, 2012   •   Posted by K. Lloyd Billingsley at 9:08am PST   •   1 Comment

It’s not exactly news that the United States harbors an enormous number of people on welfare. By one account, more than 100 million Americans are on at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And despite the 1996 welfare reforms, the number of adults on foods stamp skyrocketed from an already high…
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Don Boudreaux on Public Debt


Tuesday March 27th, 2012   •   Posted by Emily Skarbek at 7:33am PDT   •   2 Comments

Readers of MyGovCost will likely be interested in this week’s Econtalk podcast with Don Boudreaux on the nature and significance of public debt. Roberts and Boudreaux begin by discussing debt at the household level and then work to draw out which lessons apply to the spending of a federal government. In doing so, the…
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Why the U.S. Debt Ceiling Is Dangerous


Sunday January 22nd, 2012   •   Posted by Emily Skarbek at 10:43am PST   •   3 Comments

My colleague Jeff Hummel pointed out an interesting blog post by Ted Levy where he asks the question: what’s the point of the debt ceiling? Levy shows that since the debt ceiling was created in 1917, it has been raised over 100 times, 8 times in just the last ten years. In fact, Congress…
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How Would You Cut Defense Spending?


Thursday January 5th, 2012   •   Posted by Emily Skarbek at 7:16am PST   •   4 Comments

The New York Times has a useful infographic outlining proposals for how to trim the defense budget. The Pentagon has committed to cutting $450 billion in spending over the next 10 years—only a small slice of the tremendous increase in war and defense spending we have seen in the previous 10 years. The graph…
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