The hefty raises given to U.S. Postal Service bosses did not prevent losses of more than $15 billion last year. The postal bosses now want to reduce those massive losses by eliminating Saturday mail delivery, a congressional mandate dating from 1981. But since 2007 first-class mail volume has declined by 37 percent, giving way…
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How do you know if something is really a big deal in Washington D.C.? Quite literally, politicians will do everything they can to make a federal case out of it! So what then are we to make of the reaction of today’s politicians in the nation’s capitol of the impending spending cuts that will…
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“In June 2009, President Obama proposed to address failures of consumer protection by establishing a new financial agency to focus directly on consumers, rather than on bank safety and soundness or on monetary policy.” So explains the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), the new federal agency that emerged in the midst of a deep…
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Ripped from the pages of the Washington Post comes a very interesting story about how politicians stacked the deck against making real spending cuts at the same time they claimed they were making record spending cuts back in April 2011, as they also claimed success in averting a shutdown of the federal government. Let’s…
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Russell Files, a trapper with the Wildlife Services (WS), a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, objected to a neighbor’s dog coming into his yard. So while on duty he set traps that severely injured the canine. Similar incidents of wanton cruelty have prompted legislators to call for an investigation of the Wildlife…
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Americans are skeptical about the federal government’s ability to lead a recovery from the Great Recession, according to Diminished Lives and Futures: A Portrait of America in the Great-Recession Era, a national survey from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Those surveyed have good reason for that belief. Near…
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West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, is home to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) whose origins “are inextricably linked to the tragic events of 9/11 and West Point’s unwavering commitment to the future security and safety of our nation.” The Center has produced material on radical Islam and Al Qaeda but a recent report…
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The Congressional Budget Office has just issued its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, which attempts to project what the federal government’s revenues from taxes and spending will be from 2013 through 2023. Here’s a quick rundown of what they foresee. For 2013, the CBO projects that the deficit will be $847 billion, which rounds…
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Three headlines caught our eye recently. First, as we expected, President Obama failed to produce a budget proposal by the first Monday in February as required by law for the third year in a row, and for the fourth out of the five Februarys in which he has been President: For the third year…
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One of the federal government programs slated for cuts is Head Start, which President Lyndon Johnson first deployed in 1965 as part of his War on Poverty. President Obama wants a Head Start budget of $8.2 billion, up from the current level of $7.2 billion. Republicans want $2 billion in cuts to the federal…
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