When the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico filed for bankruptcy last week, we took the opportunity to identify the most likely candidates among U.S. states to follow the new legal precedents that are now being set by its example. The editorial board of a leading newspaper in one of those states, Illinois, argues that…
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One of the little known perks of being appointed to head one of the major departments of the U.S. government is that you can have your official portrait painted to become an immortal part of the government’s growing collection of artwork. James Varney of RealClearInvestigations reports on the downside for U.S. taxpayers of that…
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The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world. Part of the United States since 1898, the Caribbean island with a predominantly Spanish-speaking population of over 3.7 million has often been promoted as a candidate to become the nation’s 51st state. But May 3, 2017 marked the beginning of a…
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In case you missed it over the weekend, there’s big news from Washington D.C. regarding the U.S. government’s budget for the rest of its 2017 fiscal year – no federal government shutdown! Reuters reports: Negotiators in the U.S. Congress reached a deal late on Sunday on around $1 trillion in federal funding that would…
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University of California President Janet Napolitano, the former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and also the former governor of the state of Arizona, appears to have been caught by California state auditors with her hand in the proverbial public tax dollar cookie jar. Writing at Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer, who runs…
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One of the great difficulties of trying to describe the sheer amount of money that the U.S. government processes each year is that the numbers are so large that they lose all sense of human proportions. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl took on the challenge for the amount of money that the U.S. government…
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The new White House director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Mick Mulvaney, is looking for help to create a list of federal government agencies that can be either eliminated or have their budgets greatly reduced because they do things that have become unnecessary. Whether it’s because the agencies have obsolete missions…
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Tomorrow, April 18, 2017, is Tax Day in the United States, the date by which all Americans who earned income in 2016 must either file their income tax returns and send a payment to the IRS or file for an extension to file their income tax returns for 2016 later this year. It’s no…
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Nearly one year ago, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico officially defaulted on its debts. In response to that default, and the looming threat even larger defaults the U.S. Congress passed an emergency debt relief bill to rescue the territorial government of Puerto Rico, which President Obama signed into law on June 30, 2016….
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The Mercatus Center’s RegData project has created a database of federal regulations and used it in some pretty interesting ways to describe their cost to both American businesses and regular Americans. One of those ways involved estimating how much time it would take to read through the entire Code of Federal Regulations at the…
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