During the last two presidential administrations, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) bureaucrats seeking to increase their regulatory power would often engage in secret collusion with political activists to either deliberately throw court cases where the EPA was being sued or to settle them without contest to achieve that end. Michael Bastasch of the Daily Caller…
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Political Calculations tallies up the most recent accounting of the amount of money that the U.S. government owes to its major creditors: The U.S. government’s 2017 fiscal year officially ended on 30 September 2017. From the end of its 2016 fiscal year (FY2016) a year earlier, the total public debt outstanding of the U.S….
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In 2015, the nonpartisan government spending transparency advocate OpenTheBooks began tracking the U.S. government’s purchases of firearms and ammunition down to the department and agency level, where one of the most surprising things they uncovered back then was that civilian government agencies that you would never think would have a legitimate need for semiautomatic…
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It may come as a surprise to many Americans, but the U.S. government operates at least two fully socialized health care systems, for which it both pays the cost of health care and also directly provides it: the Veterans Health Administration for military veterans and the Indian Health Service for Native Americans. Both can…
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On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico and knocked out the entire power grid of the U.S. territory. Nearly three weeks later, about 90% of the island’s electrical grid was still without power. In Puerto Rico, electrical power is solely provided to some 1.5 million households and businesses by the Puerto…
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Earlier this week, we mentioned that if a fiscally strapped local government cannot tax or cut its way out of its debt burden, and won’t take action to directly reduce its most costly liabilities, then bankruptcy is a viable third option to preserve the interests of those who reside within the government’s jurisdiction. But…
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What is your local government’s debt burden? Or in other words, how much of your local government’s annual revenue would be fully consumed by its liabilities? That’s a question that J.P. Morgan took on in its recent analyst report The ARC and the Covenants 3.0, in which it considered the total debt burdens of…
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Government bureaucrats like to set up special rules to benefit themselves, and nowhere has that been more evident in the past week than in the reaction to the reports of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s use of taxpayer funding to charter private jets for highly questionable “business” travel. Dan Diamond…
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On Friday, September 29, 2017, after months of dysfunctional delay, the U.S. Senate finally got around to passing its own version of a budget blueprint for the U.S. government’s 2018 fiscal year, which officially got underway on Sunday, October 1, 2017. Politico‘s Sarah Ferris describes some of the politics that are built into the…
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Several years ago, MyGovCost explored the concept of the national debt as kind of an emergency reservoir, which is an idea that we’re going to revisit today to apply to the unique situation in which the hurricane-devastated U.S. territory of Puerto Rico finds itself. What if, instead of being some seemingly intangible thing involving…
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