“Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted” is an old American/English idiom that the Cambridge dictionary describes as meaning “to be so late in taking action to prevent something bad happening that the bad event has already happened.” Who knew that the American and English farmers of yesteryear had such insight into…
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As this column has noted, Emily Bazar of the California Health Care Foundation’s Center for Health Reporting has been working three shifts documenting the abuses of Covered California, a wholly owned subsidiary of Obamacare. These abuses include a dysfunctional computer system that cost nearly $500 million, cancellation of health insurance without notice when people…
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What would happen if the U.S. government defaulted on making payments on any portion of the $18.1 trillion it has borrowed? That’s a question the Federal Reserve asked not so long ago, and just in case this might someday happen, the Fed created an emergency plan to deal with the situation. Reuters reports: In…
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On Friday, 15 May 2015, the U.S. Treasury identified the national origins of the major foreign holders of debt issued by the U.S. government through the end of March 2015, the halfway point of the federal government’s fiscal year. With that information, we can now update our chart showing just who has loaned the…
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As we have noted many times, the new eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge was 10 years in the making and a whopping $5 billion over budget, but all that time and money could not guarantee safety for the public. Before he moved to Congress in recent elections, state senator Mark DeSaulnier…
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When it comes to intrusive government, California is plunging to new depths, as Daniel Weintraub notes in the Sacramento Bee. “For Californians who fear big government, this might sound like the ultimate nightmare: An unelected board and its vast scientific bureaucracy is going to force us to pay more to wipe our butts.” The…
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It is something of an understatement to say that the U.S. tax code is both very big and very complex, but did you know that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service believes that to be so true that it actually prohibits its employees from providing guidance on tax code matters via social media, the preferred…
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Any effort to track government waste, fraud and abuse is bound to take ample notice of the federal Internal Revenue Service. As we have noted, the IRS targeted non-profit groups favoring smaller government and lower taxes. Then IRS bosses tried to pass this off as “horrible customer service,” even as they doled out huge…
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Big news regarding the true state of Social Security’s finances from CNBC: New studies from Harvard and Dartmouth researchers find that the SSA’s actuarial forecasts have been consistently overstating the financial health of the program’s trust funds since 2000. […] Researchers examined forecasts published in the annual trustees’ reports from 1978, when the reports…
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Every year, thousands of regular Americans are prosecuted by government prosecutors for the kinds of activities that, for government bureaucrats, would seem to be considered to be perks of being on the federal government’s payroll. For example, in 2012, the most recent year for which the FBI provides arrest statistics, there were 7,900 arrests…
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