We recently noted that a hearing in the State Transportation and Housing Committee raised concerns about the safety of the new eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. Now it turns out some of the witnesses knew what they were talking about. As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, “a supposedly watertight steel chamber…
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President Obama told Americans that if they liked their health plan they could keep it. As millions of Americans discovered, that turned out to be wrong. And the victims may not be happy with the latest Obamacare twist: If you dislike the health plan the government wants you to have, you pretty much have…
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Depressing deficit and debt news from Washington D.C.: On the same day House Speaker John Boehner said he would bring a “clean” debt ceiling bill to the House floor — and join Democrats in voting for a 13-month extension of the debt limit — the head of the Congressional Budget Office declared that the…
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Catherine Engelbrecht used “weaponizing of government” to describe what she perceives as a federal campaign against her. Is it the latest blast of fevered rhetoric, or does she have a case? Catherine and her husband Bryan were largely apolitical people who ran a small manufacturing business in Rosenberg, Texas. Over two decades the couple…
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As we noted last year, the U.S. military has more than enough tanks and Army chiefs of staff such as Ray Odierno protest that they don’t want any more. Politicians, on the other hand, wanted the Army to have 280 more tanks, at $8 million a pop. It turns out that there is more…
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How much will the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) cost Americans over the next 10 years? It can be really difficult to specifically break out the specific cost of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), because it spans across multiple programs. The only good detail we have at this point is from the CBO, which…
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As this report notes, new Internal Revenue Service boss John Koskinen has announced that the IRS will pay out a total of $62.5 million in bonuses to IRS employees. Koskinen says the “performance award payouts are recognition of that great work done in very trying circumstances” and are needed to boost morale. Embattled taxpayers…
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The CBO reports in its new Budget and Economic Outlook, which covers the years from 2014 through 2024: Federal outlays are expected to increase by 2.6 percent this year, to $3.5 trillion, or 20.5 percent of GDP—their average percentage over the past 40 years. CBO projects that under current law, outlays will grow faster…
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Contrary to Barack Obama’s promise, Obamacare deprived millions of Americans of the health plans they liked and wanted to keep. To get the health plan the federal government wants them to have, Obamacare steered these people to HealthCare.gov, a dysfunctional, insecure website also inscrutable to Spanish speakers because it was written in Spanglish. The…
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As we noted last week, the California Senate conducted a hearing on the problems with the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which cost some $5 billion more than the original estimate. Bridge construction was delayed 10 years but doubts remain about its safety. Taxpayers should wonder why politicians took so long to…
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