Last week, we suggested that the U.S. government could “rather painlessly” pay down the national debt if it adopted a policy where it restrained the growth rate of government spending to be less than the growth rate of the nation’s GDP. Let’s take a closer look at how that might work in practice. Let’s…
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Politicians promoted the California high-speed rail project as a rapid route between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. But as we noted, the “bullet train” broke ground near Fresno. Now Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee finds a gap between other bullet-train claims and reality. The California High-Speed Rail Authority claims that…
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We’ve answered the following question that was recently asked at Quora: How did the USA end up with $18,000,000,000,000 of debt? More importantly, can the US government pay back the debt? The United States federal government has ended up with a total public debt outstanding of more than $18 trillion (at this writing) because…
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As we recently noted, California’s Department of Consumer Affairs was implementing a computer system pegged at $27 million. Problems with the system boosted the cost to $77 million, but that still didn’t get it done. Consumer Affairs bosses want another $17.5 million, bring the cost to $96 million, more than three times the original…
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At the end of its 2014 fiscal year, the total public debt outstanding of the U.S. government stood at $17.860 trillion. That amount, however, consists of two parts: “Debt Held by the Public” and “Intragovernmental Holdings”. The Intragovernmental Holdings portion of the debt is really made up of a number of trust funds that…
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California’s Franchise Tax Board (FTB) says inventor Gilbert Hyatt owes $55 million in taxes. Hyatt says he’s the target of a vendetta, and as Dale Kasler shows in the Sacramento Bee, Hyatt has a strong case. In 1990 Hyatt was awarded the patent for the first single-chip microprocessor and earned $350 million in royalties….
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Earlier this week, both the U.S. House of Representatives’ and the U.S. Senate’s budget committees released their own respective budget proposals for the federal government’s 2016 fiscal year, which when combined with President Obama’s spending proposal from February, means that we now have three different proposals of what the future trajectory of the federal…
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As we have noted several times, the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was $5 billion over budget and ten years late. Despite all that time and money, safety issues with the bridge seem to be getting worse, as Jaxon Van Derbeken of the San Francisco Chronicle explains. For example, the…
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Beginning yesterday, the U.S. Treasury Department began its now-routine use of “extraordinary” measures to slow down the rate at which it borrows money to keep the nation’s total public debt outstanding below the limit set by Congress. In announcing those measures, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew ruled out some common-sense suggestions that members of Congress…
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As consumers know, modern computers are incredibly reliable machines that work right out of the box, simplify many tasks, and save consumers money. In the hands of government employees, however, computers often fail to work, make life more complicated, and cost taxpayers much more money than advertised. As Jon Ortiz notes in the Sacramento…
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