How does your income compare to that of an employee of the U.S. federal government? Recently, Political Calculations took a unique approach to answering that question. They obtained the federal government’s public payroll data for every one of its employees named Smith and used that as a statistical sample to model their distribution of…
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Imagine the following scenario. Unemployment remains stubbornly high as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve enters the Oval Office. The President urges the Chairman to pump more money into the economy to stimulate economic growth before his reelection bid. The Chairman responds: “In my view, the monetary authority has laid the foundation for recovery. What is holding back the economy now is…
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How much more work would you be willing to do if it means you will lose much more than you make in extra income? That’s a question that anyone who benefits from any government assistance program has to answer whenever they reach a key income threshold that is tied to the value of benefits…
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Government waste occurs in schemes such as the federal stimulus, the GM bailout, Obamacare, and so forth. Government waste also occurs as a result of nepotism and sinecures, as in the case of Gil Cedillo Jr. In 2011 California’s Central Basin Municipal Water District hired Cedillo as a “business development manager,” a position the…
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As recent congressional hearings confirmed, the Internal Revenue Service can be very efficient when it comes to voter suppression. But when it tries to fight tax fraud the IRS is something of a bust, as the story of Carol Cooke confirms. Cooke has lived at her Long Island home for 37 years. In…
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The 25 craziest things the U.S. government spends money on, according to list25, who put together the following YouTube video presentation: Just imagine if the federal government’s bureaucrats ever figured out that they could combine these things! Why, we could have the FAA send 3,600 deceased federal government employees to Indonesia for a three-week…
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Last week Senate leaders struck a deal to preserve the filibuster but this was much more than a question of procedural traditions. The tradeoff called for confirmation votes on President Obama’s nominees to head various federal agencies. So the Senate proceeded to confirm Richard Cordray as the first permanent director of the Consumer Financial…
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Do you remember how U.S. politicians claimed that the federal government’s budget sequester would be extremely destructive to the U.S. economy? Well, perhaps not so much, especially considering how they work in real life. But there was one area of federal budget cutting that was expected to have a real world impact: defense spending….
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We recently noted that government employee unions call the California capitol “our house.” Evidence is mounting that government unions do indeed own the place. Their mass rally in June was for a pay raise and to the surprise of nobody the politicians they worked so hard to elect gave them exactly what they wanted…
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We recently stumbled across a 45-second video of a special guest lecturer for John Taylor’s Economics 1 class at Stanford University back on September 24, 2009. Enjoy!
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