What happens when public employee unions begin calling too many of the shots in government? Reuters reports on the backstory of the city of San Bernandino, California’s bankruptcy, which features a lot of politicians blaming everyone else for their dilemma: Yet on close examination, the city’s decades-long journey from prosperous, middle-class community to bankrupt,…
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It’s not exactly news that the United States harbors an enormous number of people on welfare. By one account, more than 100 million Americans are on at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And despite the 1996 welfare reforms, the number of adults on foods stamp skyrocketed from an already high…
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In the mid-1800s, Sutter Creek and Amador City were centers of the California gold rush. Now for the first time in 50 years the Mother Lode is again the scene of mechanized mining. The Sutter Gold Mining Co. operates a modern $20 million complex, complete with ventilated tunnels, laboratories and a mill. The operation…
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He won’t be the Vice President of the United States anytime soon, but he will still be chairman of the House Budget Committee and a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, so the following excerpts from The Onion’s parody “Paul Ryan Releases 90-Minute High-Endurance Budget Slashing Video” still work – enjoy! WASHINGTON—Republican…
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Among her many devastations, Hurricane Sandy swamped the port of Newark and managed to submerge 16 Fisker Karma electric hybrid automobiles, which then caught fire and exploded. Fisker could not explain the sudden combustion, not the first problem for the company touted by President Obama, and which received federal loan guarantees of $529 million…
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How much gold would the U.S. Treasury have to pay out from the nation’s bullion depository at Fort Knox to fully pay off the national debt of $16.222 trillion (as of 1 November 2012)? Quick side note: That figure is some $5.595 trillion higher than the $10.627 trillion it was back on 20 January…
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As this column shows, government waste, fraud and abuse is rampant at all levels. Seldom, however, has any politician attempted to give divine sanction to government greed in the style of California Governor Jerry Brown, who once wanted a California space program and recently signed off on a $68 billion railroad train. The former…
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How bad has the growth of debt become among the world’s major nations? So bad that Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, a lender of last resort for distressed nations, has become extremely concerned about the level of debt overhang: Ms Lagrde had earlier said that public debt in developed…
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In 2007, energy researchers at Colorado State University created AVA Solar, which became Abound Solar of Loveland, Colorado, with manufacturing facilities in Tipton, Indiana. The President of the United States, Barack Obama, touted Abound Solar as an example of the clean-energy future, claiming it would create 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs. Members of…
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We came across a really cool web application over at the Economist: The Global Debt Clock, which visualizes the level of publicly-held debt for nations around the world. The map below shows how much all the governments of the world collectively owe entities other than themselves, according to each government’s public-held debt per capita….
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