Another fiscal year for the U.S. Government has ended. Let’s take a look at just who the biggest holders of the U.S. national debt were at the end of Fiscal Year 2012: Here’s the overall summary of the data presented in the chart: The information presented in our chart above is preliminary, as the…
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Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve Bank seem to be determined to reinflate the real estate bubble. Ben was blind-sided by the bursting of the bubble in 2006 as evidenced by his earlier CNBC interview: “Well, I guess I don’t buy your premise [that there is a real estate bubble]. It’s a pretty unlikely…
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As the Washington Post recently noted, the United States is the world’s leading consumer of products made from hemp, with sales of more than $43 million in 2011. All these products, however, come from outside the country, primarily Canada, because the United States is the only major industrialized country to ban the growing of…
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The outgoing Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Timothy Geithner has issued the Citizen’s Guide to the 2012 Financial Report of the United States Government. There are two charts in the report that fully summarize the nation’s fiscal situation, which Geithner indicates should be considered together. Here they are: In this first chart, we see…
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Thanks are due to the Wall Street Journal for running the impassioned speech of then-Sen. Barack Obama, delivered on the Senate floor, March 16, 2006: Mr. President, I rise today to talk about America’s debt problem. The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership…
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Federal authorities can continue to wiretap and conduct surveillance on non-Americans within the United States according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) recently reauthorized by the U.S. Senate and earlier by the House. Senate majority leader Harry Reid said the measure was imperfect but necessary to “protect us from evil in this world.”…
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Which of the following three entities of the U.S. government would you say is the least responsible when it comes to the U.S. federal government budget? The President of the United States The U.S. Senate The U.S. House of Representatives Here are the key responsibilities of each entity: By law, the President of the…
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The federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is proposing minimum sound requirements for electric cars, hybrids and other vehicles in order to warn pedestrians, cyclists and the sight-impaired. The rule is based on a 2009 NHTSA study of state-level accident data finding that 77 of 8,387 hybrid vehicles (.9 percent) were involved in…
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The U.S. tax code places a “significant, even unconscionable burden” on taxpayers and needs to be completely overhauled. That is the view of Nina E. Olson, national taxpayer advocate with the Internal Revenue Service, as she explained to Congress on January 9. The code is so complicated, that individuals and business have to spend…
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How much will your paycheck change as a result of the recently passed fiscal cliff deal in Washington D.C.? The answer to that question depends not just upon how quickly your employer can incorporate the required changes in federal withholding tax rates, but also upon which set of instructions they received from the IRS…
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