Since the middle of 2016, the city of Dallas has been dealing with a Texas-sized problem for one of its public employee pension funds. Specifically, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System was so at risk of becoming insolvent that the city’s retired firefighters and police officers were effectively conducting a run on the…
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Six years ago, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Louis A. Johnson Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia had a shortage of over 600 parking spaces, so federal officials began planning to put in a new parking garage at the facility. Six years later, all the VA had to show for all their planning…
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The Congressional Budget Office released its 2017 Long-Term Budget Outlook this week, several months ahead of its usual schedule, which is typically published every July. The most interesting part of the new long-term budget outlook appears in the report’s appendix, where the CBO’s analysts illustrate how their new outlook for the publicly held portion…
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On March 23, 2017, the U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding added up to more than $19.86 trillion, or if you round up by another 0.014 trillion, we’re really talking about a national debt of 20 trillion dollars. That’s a big number, which for many people, is really tough to grasp just how big…
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According to the latest estimates, it will cost Californians upwards of $64 billion to build the bullet train envisioned by Governor Jerry Brown and the state’s legislature. That’s money that they don’t have today, but if they did, that’s also a lot of money that could be put to work to do more things…
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Every year for the past four years at least 40 billion dollars has gone to waste because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has declined to audit its own expenditures to ensure that unintentional medical billing errors are caught and corrected. That is a stunning claim being advanced by Kristin Walters of…
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Since President Trump released his “skinny” budget last week, there has been a lot of political posturing, if not outright hysteria in the media, from the advocates of the various government programs targeted for reduced levels of federal spending. And perhaps more remarkably, there have been widespread accusations of spending cuts where none have…
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Before he became president, Donald Trump perhaps made his biggest impression on Americans in his role on the reality TV game show The Apprentice. Today, with the release of the president’s so-called “skinny” budget, he looks to be in the starring role for a government-version of The Biggest Loser. Reuters reports on President Trump’s…
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On Monday, March 6, 2017, a federal judge awarded $2.5 million to a military veteran who was denied timely medical care at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. The Arizona Republic‘s Jacques Billeaud reports on the results of the civil trial in federal court. A judge on Monday awarded $2.5 million…
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For the U.S. national debt, the date of March 16, 2017, marks the day when the statutory debt ceiling, which limits how much money the U.S. government can borrow, will go back into effect for the first time since it was suspended back on November 2, 2015, as part of former President Obama’s last…
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