President-elect Donald Trump has selected South Carolina Representative Mick Mulvaney to be the next director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Mulvaney is an interesting choice for the job, which given many of the public positions that he has taken over the years with respect to wasteful spending in Washington…
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Sometime shortly before January 17, 2016, after the Obama administration had withdrawn roughly $400 billion of U.S. taxpayer money from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Settlement Fund account at the U.S. Treasury, it transferred the withdrawn funds electronically overseas to U.S. accounts at the Swiss National Bank in Geneva, Switzerland. On January 17, 2016,…
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According to the U.S. Government’s Office of Personnel Management, more than 2.7 million people work as civilian employees of the U.S. federal government. For all practical purposes, they are entirely compensated by taxes imposed on the 140 million Americans who are employed in occupations outside of the federal government. Chris Edwards of Downsizing the…
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For many Americans, the days following Christmas are often filled with trips to the mall, where they exchange the gifts they got for those they would rather have received. It’s no different for U.S. politicians. For example, President-elect Donald Trump has big plans to boost the U.S. government’s spending on the nation’s infrastructure, which…
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“Is it the ‘how’ or the ‘when’ that matters in fiscal adjustments?” That’s the title of a new paper by a team of five economists that really answers a different question: What is the best way for a government to reduce its budgetary red ink, when the alternatives are to raise taxes, cut spending,…
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In one month, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. Shortly after he assumes office, it is widely expected that he will pursue a massive fiscal stimulus for government spending, similar in many respects to what President Obama did in his first month after being…
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Last week, USA Today‘s Donovan Slack broke the story of the secret internal ranking system that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been using to monitor the performance of the hospitals and medical facilities that it operates across the United States. WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs has for years assigned…
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A lot of Americans would probably be very surprised to find out that the U.S. federal government was on the verge of shutting down for the second time during the last four years this past weekend, coming within an hour of doing so. Instead, the near-“crisis”, which arose because the U.S. Congress needed to…
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This week, we’ve been focusing on how lavish pension benefits promised by the officials of local and state governments across the U.S. have combined with the extremely poor returns that those officials have realized on the pension funds they have been investing on the behalf of public employees to produce an insolvency crisis for…
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The Kersten Institute for Governance and Public Policy at Stanford University has a project that tracks the liabilities of pension funds for state government workers across the nation, where the liabilities represent the gap between the money that the pension funds hold and how much they would need in order to pay 100 percent…
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