Last week, the Congressional Budget Office issued its first estimate of how the U.S. national debt would change over the next 10 years as a result of the tax cut legislation now making its way through Congress. That estimate came in the form of a November 8, 2017 letter from CBO Director Keith Hall…
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It’s no surprise that the U.S. federal government does lots of stupid things. Sometimes, those things are meant to save money but, surprise surprise, those things really do the opposite and drive up costs instead. A good example of this unintended effect can be found in Medicare’s Direct and Indirect Remuneration (DIR) fees on…
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During the heyday of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Emily Bazar of the Center for Health Reporting kept track of how Covered California, the ACA’s wholly owned subsidiary, actually performed. As she noted, Covered California wasted millions on promotion, handed out lucrative deals to cronies, and its $454 million computer system…
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If someone wanted to stop the U.S. government from wasting so much money, a very good place to begin would be to end the power that bureaucrats have to award multi-million dollar contracts without seeking any form of competition among the businesses they will rely upon to deliver results for U.S. taxpayers. Writing in…
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Have you ever wondered what it is like to work for a failing enterprise, when that enterprise is a government? Diana Sroka Rickert recently had that experience after she accepted a high-level position with Illinois’ state governor’s office. She would go on to leave that job after just a matter of weeks of growing…
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From the White House on down, the National Football League is getting a bad rap over anthem antics by some players. That is a shame, because the league, the game, and the players can teach valuable lessons, particularly for those in government. If your daddy was governor of California, like Jerry Brown’s, or President…
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Back in 2012, Americans who sought smaller government, and believed that they were taxed enough already, geared up for the election. Trouble was, the Internal Revenue Service targeted them for harassment on the basis of their political beliefs. Last week, the Trump administration agreed to pay $3.5 million to the so-called tea party groups,…
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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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Corey Lewandowski, an outside advisor to Donald Trump, wants the president to fire federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau boss Richard Cordray. Lewandowski doesn’t like CFBP rules that make it easier to sue finance companies, but firing Cordray will not be easy. He can only be fired for cause, and that entails a burden of…
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