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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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