Say what you will about government bureaucrats, but when the full power of their incompetence is released, it is a sight to behold. We mean that in a good way this time, because for once, that incompetence might work to the advantage and benefit of regular Americans! Let’s start at the beginning. Earlier this…
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People who work for the federal, state, or local governments in the United States are really well compensated compared to their peers in the private sector. That’s not so much because of the take-home pay, which is often in the same ballpark as what people with similar education and training earn in similar occupations…
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Back in April 2014, we described the newly unfolding tragedy of fraudulent waiting lists at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ medical facilities as a rationing scheme – one that was operated by knowing individuals within the VA for the purpose of enriching themselves: The VA has been wracked in recent weeks by reports of…
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We have good news and bad news on the U.S. government’s budget deficit for 2015. First, the good news from Reuters: The U.S. budget deficit is likely to fall by $60 billion in 2015 due to strong revenue gains, the Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday, enabling the government to stave off default without…
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In this latest episode of our occasional series Bureaucrats Behaving Badly, we’ll focus on “the case of the federal worker who hardly ever worked,” to borrow the Washington Post‘s own headline! Lisa Rein reports: A federal patent examiner racked up more than 18 weeks of pay last year for work he didn’t do, but…
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A century ago, Americans going to the recently invented movie theater would often be entertained by short comedy films, such as Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops series. Aside from the visual gags, many of these early films drew their humor from depicting people employed in a government profession as being something other than competent in…
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Bloomberg‘s Lisa Abramowicz is asking the question, “What happens when the Federal Reserve loses its stranglehold over debt markets?” Which after having order break down in the U.S. stock market yesterday, after having held for the previous four years, is a pretty good question to ask. More specifically, she’s looking at the nation’s corporate…
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One of the biggest news items in the past week was the Chinese government’s surprise devaluation of the nation’s currency, the yuan. This week, Bloomberg‘s Mark Whitehouse reports on the fallout, and the potential disruption it will have on the ability of the businesses and governments of other nations to pay their debts: The…
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Jeff Desjardins of Visual Capitalist has created a unique visualization of how the world’s nearly $60 trillion of money borrowed by various governments, at all levels, is distributed among the world’s nations: Desjardins describes some of the bigger numbers and where they came from: Today’s visualization breaks down $59.7 trillion of world debt by…
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China is, by far, the largest foreign lender to the U.S. federal government. But now, with its primarily export-driven economy under stress, it has been shedding its holdings of debt securities issued by the U.S. Treasury. Bloomberg reports on the surprisingly small impact of China’s significant change in its international lending policies: To get…
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