In 2013, the American Farm Bureau Federation reports that a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people will cost $49.04 on average. But did you know that the U.S. federal government is subsidizing a portion of that meal? It’s true! In 2012, the most recent year for which we have data, the U.S. federal government…
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Six years ago Congress imposed a mandate on how much ethanol and other biofuels must be mixed into gasoline. Now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing the first-ever cut in that amount. That has politicians perturbed, but for the wrong reasons. The mandate was for 15 percent ethanol — standard stocks contain 10 percent…
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In Washington, D.C., an investigation by James Rosen and Marisa Taylor of the McClatchy news service has found that the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), which the Pentagon set up over twenty years ago to strengthen the accountability of its spending, has broken down. Worse, it appears that Defense Department officials are currently…
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California deploys some of the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, but the Golden State’s pillage people are worried that they might not be high enough. They now want to more than double registration fees on motor vehicles, more accurately known as the car tax. The car tax is based on .65…
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As everybody knows, so far Obamacare succeeds only at taking away the insurance people already have and leaving them with higher premiums and weaker coverage. Now another government plan is jolting Americans with sticker shock. As this report notes, changes in federal flood insurance are beginning to quadruple premiums in some areas, harming homeowners…
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Back on October 27, 2013, we shared John Taylor’s graph showing the difference between the amount of spending outlays involved in the House and Senate Budget proposals for the U.S. government’s 2014 fiscal year: At the time, we noted that the question before U.S. lawmakers was where they would really draw the line for…
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Procurement scandals are common in the U.S. military and seldom the sort of thing anyone could make up. In the latest, as reported by the Washington Post, the U.S. Navy paid $1.6 million for firearm silencers valued at $8,000 – more than 200 times the manufacturing cost – and that most likely never should…
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Today, we’re going to tie together a number of threads that we’ve been following with respect to the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”), because they just all intersected each other. First, let’s begin by filling in more of the map showing the number of individual health insurance policies…
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President Barack Obama’s announced intention is to bring “quality, affordable,” health insurance to the uninsured. That is not likely to happen for some time, if at all, given the debacle of the rollout. But Obamacare has already succeeded in taking away health insurance from some 19 million people in the individual market. Those people…
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Elon Musk of Tesla got a U.S. federal government loan of $465 million to produce the upscale Tesla Model S electric car. At more than $70,000 the car is too expensive for most consumers and as Britain’s “Top Gear” found, the car ran far less between charges than Elon Musk claimed. Now other problems…
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