The question is answered by the reporting of the Daily Caller News Foundation‘s Kathryn Watson: Uncle Sam’s financial statements are so bad the Government Accountability Office (GAO) flunked him for the 19th year in a row. The Department of Defense, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Department of Agriculture have books in such…
Read More »
Lance Roberts is an investment advisor who also hosts a radio show in Houston, Texas. Recently, he had a Twitter exchange with Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, in which Steve asked the following question: Does rising debt cause slow growth or does slow growth cause debt to rise? Roberts’ response to the question makes…
Read More »
How much does your state or local government’s debt add to your personal share of government debt? With so many different jurisdictions and debt-issuing governments, getting a precise answer to that can be extraordinarily difficult to determine, but thanks to the following map produced by the Tax Foundation, we can get you a somewhat…
Read More »
How does life change when a government doesn’t have the money to pay the people who loaned it money? The answer to the question is that life gets a lot harder, as the Associated Press’ Danica Coto reports in “Puerto Rico is cracking down on people who steal power, cheat on their taxes or…
Read More »
It’s not often that we’re surprised by a government spending statistic, but what Breitbart News‘ Mike Flynn reported over the past weekend about one particular line item within the U.S. Treasury Department’s annual financial report for the U.S. government floored us. Tucked away in the report, however, was a surprising fact. Student loans now…
Read More »
Do you remember Fannie Mae? Or rather, the Federal National Mortgage Association, the government-supported enterprise which was bailed out and taken over by the U.S. Treasury Department back on September 7, 2008? If not, ProPublica summarizes what happened to the government-backed corporation at that time: On Sep. 7, 2008, the government took over Fannie…
Read More »
According to estimates by the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. government spent over $892 million for public relations advertising through private firms in 2014. And that doesn’t include the spending that various federal departments and agencies do to advance their own reputations in the public through their own PR resources! Government spending watchdog Open…
Read More »
President Barack Obama released his final budget proposal for the U.S. government yesterday. We thought it might be fun to visualize the proposed spending in all his previous budget proposals, from his first to this last one, adjusting each for inflation so that they’re expressed in terms of constant 2009 U.S. dollars — the…
Read More »
Watching U.S. territory Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is a lot like watching a train derail from its tracks in slow motion. Except with one important difference—it’s a train wreck where the locomotive operators’ best idea for dealing with it involves making it worse by setting the crashing train on fire. With that image in…
Read More »
When we last looked at the ongoing ethical saga of Kimberly Graves and Diana Rubens, the two executives at the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs’ Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) who abused their power to displace lower ranking employees from their jobs so they could take them for themselves, complete with big relocation bonuses and…
Read More »
 |
 |
 |