Today is Thanksgiving Day, 2015. Today also marks a grim milestone for the growth of the U.S. national debt under President Obama, as it is now over $8 trillion higher than it was on the day he was sworn into office on Tuesday, January 20, 2009. Back then, the total public debt outstanding stood…
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Everyone knows that monopolies in business are bad. Writing at CBS News, economist Mark Thoma explained why they’re so bad for consumers: When firms have such power, they charge prices that are higher than can be justified based upon the costs of production, prices that are higher than they would be if the market…
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In 2011, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: People think of debt’s role in the economy as if it were the same as what debt means for an individual: there’s a lot of money you have to pay to someone else. But that’s all wrong; the debt we create is basically money we…
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It really is a toss up these days as to which is the most criminally corrupt federal government agency. Is it the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Veterans Affairs? In the horse race of malfeasance, the VA edged into a slight lead last week, as two of its…
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At $18.61 trillion, most people think the size of the U.S. national debt is just 103% of the nation’s GDP. But according to Dave Walker, the former comptroller general of the U.S. government’s General Accounting Office, the total liabilities of the U.S. federal government add up to $65 trillion, which works out to be…
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Now that former House Speaker John Boehner’s deal with President Obama to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling until March 2017 is law, the U.S. Treasury Department is ending the shell game that it was playing with the nation’s accounts and trust funds to keep the government running as if it were business as usual….
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Following the headlong rush by a bipartisan coalition of House and Senate members to jetison the only effective restraint on the growth of U.S. government spending in modern history before House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation became effective, it occurred to us that one way that we could quantify the badness of the deal is…
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In 2011, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner realized the most significant achievement of his entire career in the U.S. Congress when he reached a deal with the White House to restrain the growth of U.S. government spending: the Budget Control Act of 2011. Here, using the leverage of the threat of not…
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Puerto Rico is proving to be something of a case study for how politicians and bureaucrats, when finally faced with the consequences of their excessive spending as they run out of money to pay the debts they racked up to sustain it, will engage in even more unethical conduct to escape them. In today’s…
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In mid-August 2015, the state government of Illinois began to “technically default” on payments it owes on its outstanding debt, joining the fiscally troubled U.S. territory of Puerto Rico in the hall of debt shame. Writing at Business Insider, Certified Financial Advisors Michael Comes and John Mousseau describe how that happened and what that…
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