Sometime in the next two to three weeks, the total public debt outstanding for the U.S. government will exceed 18 trillion dollars. If you were to ask us to pin down a precise date, we would say sometime around December 9, 2014, given the rate at which the national debt has been increasing during…
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The Internet is a flywheel of innovation, changing virtually every aspect of life in the nation, from commerce through entertainment and certainly journalism. The Internet was not invented by Al Gore, vice-president of the United States under Bill Clinton. But now president Barack Obama, in the wake of a mid-term election defeat, wants to…
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How much has government spending for things like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Affordable Care Act subsidies, unemployment benefits, and other welfare programs grown since today’s Social Security recipients were born? The National Interest‘s Milton Ezrati has the numbers: These constraints are crystal clear in existing budget data. Entitlements have grown relentlessly over the decades,…
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At the end of our recent piece on the Great Crane Giveaway, we observed that “when it comes to big government and bureaucracy, things are always worse than they seem.” As it turns out, the crane giveaway wasn’t the end of it, as San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross point out….
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Tom Slear retired from the U.S. Army in 2001 after reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel in a career spanning 28 years, 23 as a reservist, where he specialized in logistics and never faced combat. He recently wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post, in which he described veterans benefits as “too generous.”…
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California’s $3 billion Stem Cell Research and Cures Act, Proposition 71, promised life-saving cures and therapies for a host of afflictions. In 2004 voters approved the measure, which created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Ten years later, David Jensen of the California Stem Cell Report shows how that is working out for…
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Since 2008, roughly $1 out of every $10 new dollars borrowed by the U.S. government through the end of its 2014 fiscal year has gone to fund the Federal Direct Student Loan program, which lends the money borrowed by Uncle Sam to college students at over double the interest rate that the U.S. government…
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As we have noted, the new eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge came in $5 billion over budget, a full ten years late, and with doubts about its safety. One UC Berkeley structural engineering professor declines to use the new span. In Sacramento hearings on the safety theme, insiders called for a…
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It’s a shame, but this Veterans Day, we have to consider how broken the fiscal stewardship of the U.S. federal government has become by the way that approximately 60,000 disabled veterans have gamed the system to triple dip into government-provided benefits. One veteran on disability collected nearly $210,000 in benefits in 2013, while another…
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As we have noted, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is a perennial loser, always billions in the red, with taxpayers on the hook. On the other hand, whatever the losses, the USPS finds a way to give postal bosses a pay hike. As a visit to any post office will confirm, the regular…
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