The above video is of security camera footage during last month’s earthquake in Washington, DC. Details here. An apt metaphor for the current state of the United States fiscal situation!
Sam Hananel at the Associated Press reports that despite knowing about the problem since 2005: The federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years, a watchdog report says. Such payments are meant for retired or disabled federal workers, but sometimes the checks…
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The Federal Reserve announced the arrival of “Operation Twist”. The policy is just as shady as it sounds. What is “Operation Twist” you ask? NPR explains: The Fed has at its disposal one key tool: interest rates. So when Fed officials are worried about unemployment, they try to drive down interest rates, in an…
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A new poll show that Americans believe that the government wastes half of what is spends. The current estimate of 51 cents wasted on the dollar is similar to what Gallup measured in 2009, but marks the first time Americans believe more than half of federal spending is wasted. The low point in the…
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The O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom has just released the new, updated Economic Freedom of the World Index. Over the years, this study has consistently found that the nations that score higher on the index tend to be richer and grow faster, and their citizens face less poverty, live longer, get more…
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How much can typical Americans actually afford for the U.S. federal government to spend? And how does that compare with the amount of money that President Obama would really like to spend? Now that we have the median household income data for 2010, we can update our chart showing the relationship between the amount…
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In his article, “New report cites ‘regulatory tsunami’ under Obama,” Byron York reports in the Washington Examiner that a new report from the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee reveals that instead of his claim to oppose job-killing regulations, President Barack Obama has radically expanded federal regulations, producing a “regulatory tsunami that has stifled…
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John Stossel talks job creation today with Fox News: Hiring doesn’t come from new laws. It comes when government gets out of the way and leaves all of us with simple and predictable rules.Given time, an economy, unless crippled by government intervention, will regenerate itself. An economy is not a machine that needs jumpstarting. The…
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In 2009, Americans reported nearly $34.9 billion worth of donations to private charities serving the public interest on their federal tax forms, as they claimed the federal government’s tax deduction for charitable contributions on their taxes. Of all these donations, $19.14 billion, or 54.9%, were made by taxpayer households that reported $200,000 or more…
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I stumbled across an old article in our archive from 2 years ago that caught my eye. Research Fellow Randall G. Holcombe in “Transforming America: The Bush-Obama Stimulus Programs” discusses harmful policies and warns us of their implications. George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s “stimulus” programs will permanently transform the American economy. The market-based…
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