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In honor of his recent passing, we’re taking our cue from Dick Clark’s classic television game show of yesteryear for today’s article, in which we’ll pretend to be the ones giving five clues to a contestant on that show so they can guess the category. See if you can guess what the category is…
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The first question: “Does racking up a lot of national debt hurt a country’s economic growth prospects?” The answer, via Political Calculations: What we see is that high levels of national debt with respect to the size of a nation’s economy, would appear to have a medium-strength effect upon its real rate of economic…
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What happens when a foreign government becomes the most important customer for U.S. government-issued debt? Why, that government gets its own special, and up until now, secret bank account at the U.S. Treasury Department! Reuters blows the lid off the special privileges that China now has for buying U.S. debt direct from the source:…
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Did Washington learn anything from the GSA fiasco? Only a month after the scandal, government bureaucrats seem to be at it again: showing no financial responsibility on taxpayer dime. Destination: Maui. Aloha! Breitbart reports: Judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, federal district and bankruptcy courts in nine Western states and two Pacific island territories,…
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Presented below, in one graph looking at 25 year intervals, and amazingly from National Public Radio of all places, which falls in the “Everything Else” category…. Being NPR, the related article also offers the following tidbit of deceptive analysis: Federal spending has grown roughly as fast as the overall economy over the past 50…
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What steps might fiscally responsible politicians follow to get a grip on an out-of-control spending problem? Here’s a list of ideas from around the world: France: Cut the pay of top government officials by 30%. In the U.S., they could save a lot more by also cutting their excessively generous benefits by at least…
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The Alternative Minimum Tax was imposed in 1969 because 115 households investing in municipal bonds reportedly paid little or no federal income tax… On Jan. 1, 2013, it is set to hit 27 million more—raising an estimated $120 billion, according to the Obama 2013 budget. In 40 years, a tax on 115 households will…
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Here is Gary Becker: While slow recoveries from major financial crises are common, employment would have increased considerably more rapidly, and unemployment would have fallen much faster, were it not for several factors special to this recovery. Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis have studied changes in economic policy uncertainty since 1985, and have…
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Will Rogers claimed to have never met a man that he didn’t like. I’m consistent too. I never read anything by Robert Reich that I liked. Dr. Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and currently a named professor at UC Berkeley, is at it again. In writing for the U.K.’s The Guardian,…
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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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