We have been tracking the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which came in 10 years late and $5 billion over budget but still bristled with safety concerns. Those worries were serious enough to prompt state senator Mark DeSaulnier to hold hearings and threaten a criminal investigation. Calls for a criminal investigation…
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Can governments simply use inflation to make their national debts disappear? That’s the subject of a new working paper by Jens Hilscher, Alon Raviv, and Ricardo Reis, who used real-world data to see how effective that inflation might be in reducing the real value of a government’s outstanding liabilities. Here’s the abstract of the…
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In December 2007, the U.S. government launched a new website that it promised would make the spending by federal government agencies transparent to all, the Washington Post recalls: USASpending.gov was launched to great fanfare in 2007, the product of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. “Technology makes it possible for every American to…
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As Robert Higgs demonstrated in Crisis and Leviathan, the state exploits crises to expand its power. The current situation on the U.S.-Mexico border represents an escalation in that government manufactured the crisis. Young Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans are coming because they believe they will get in the country and receive amnesty, based on clear…
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The new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has already rung up $5 billion in cost overruns. The span also came in 10 years late and could well pose a danger to the public. As we recently noted, UC Berkeley structural engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asi believes the structure is unsafe and declines…
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What’s the latest perk enjoyed by federal government bureaucrats while on the job? It would appear to involve surfing for porn on the Internet. Jim McElhatton of the Washington Times reports: For one Federal Communications Commission worker, his porn habit at work was easy to explain: Things were slow, he told investigators, so he…
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What is the best way to reduce a government’s budget deficit? A new working paper by European Central Bank economist Maria Grazia Attinasi and International Monetary Fund economist Alexander Klemm once again confirms what we’ve long argued: when it comes to preserving the prospects for economic growth, cutting government spending is a much more…
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With all the excitement in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Central America, a key domestic development has failed to draw the attention it deserves. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has joined the IRS in a cover-up of illegal activity. As the Daily Caller notes, when former IRS official Lois Lerner worked at the FEC’s…
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Did you know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has paid over $34 million to grow soybeans in Afghanistan since 2009? The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) just delivered a report of their review of the program, finding evidence that the entire initiative is a multi-million dollar waste of time, money, and…
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Rep. Jared Polis recently went on record stating that DEA boss Michele Leonhard “is a terrible agency head.” The liberal Colorado Democrat has a strong case, but there’s more to it than that. Sen. Mitch McConnell, a conservative Kentucky Republican, blasted the DEA for wasting limited resources by impounding hemp seeds destined for research…
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