Read More »"/> Read More »"/>
Back in December 2013, we featured a chart that showed how much debt per resident that Puerto Rico had accumulated. It also showed that Puerto Rico was second only to Detroit, Michigan, which had back then recently declared bankruptcy. Here is what we said at the time: Considering Puerto Rico’s situation, in the absence…
Read More »
Summer travelers know that the Transportation Security Administrative troops, drill sergeants decked out in Jiffy Lube blue shirts, do a bang-up job of making air travel more miserable than it should be. As they take off their shoes and belts, travelers may also know that the TSA is a miserable failure at its appointed…
Read More »
What are the consequences of a large and growing national debt? Believe it or not, the Congressional Budget Office directly addressed that question in its 2015 Long-Term Budget Outlook: How long the nation could sustain such growth in federal debt is impossible to predict with any confidence. At some point, investors would begin to…
Read More »
What if, instead of borrowing money to sustain its spending, the U.S. government instead sold equity shares of the future performance of the U.S. economy? Evan Schulman, the president and founder of Tykhe LLC, who received a patent in 2006 for his concept of sales participation certificates — a way for businesses and other…
Read More »
As we noted, Big Government has been colonizing economic activity through schemes such as the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. This New Deal act, based on the notion that central planning works, set up cooperative boards and conscripted growers into reserve set-asides. This meant that Fresno raisin growers Marvin and Laura Horne, like…
Read More »
First, the news from the Los Angeles Times: Peter Lee, the executive director of Calfornia’s Affordable Care Act exchange, after receiving a big raise this past February, is now getting a big bonus and another raise: California’s Obamacre exchange awarded its executive director a $65,000 bonus Thursday four months after giving him a 24%…
Read More »
We have been keeping track, so to speak, of California’s vaunted “Bullet Train,” officially the state’s High-Speed Rail project. But as it turns out, “high speed” is something of a misnomer, as William Bigelow notes on Breitbart. The first actual construction on the project is a viaduct over the Fresno River, nowhere near the…
Read More »
According to the latest projections issued by the Congressional Budget Office, the publicly-held portion of the U.S. national debt will rise from 74% of GDP at present to surpass 107% of GDP in 25 years. Bloomberg‘s Kasia Klimasinska describes the CBO’s findings: U.S. government debt held by the public is expected to rise to…
Read More »
After a government gets into trouble for racking up unsustainable levels of debt, how fast should it go about restoring its fiscal credibility? Should it seek to lessen its fiscal “pain” by spreading out spending cuts over a long period of time, or should it, in effect, rip the bandages off as quickly as…
Read More »
The question came up of which is bigger — the U.S. national debt or all other debt owed by Americans? The answer, as best as we can determine with data through the end of 2014, is graphically presented below: At the end of 2014, the total public debt outstanding for the U.S. government stood…
Read More »