Freakonomics reports yesterday that a new poll from the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post shows more people see raising the debt limit as a bigger risk than not raising it. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner conduct their own poll. Weigh in here! As Ezra Klein reports on the development of the Capitol…
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Yesterday, President Obama threatened that if the debt limit is not raised by the August 2 deadline, he can’t guarantee that Social Security checks will go out. However, for years Democrats have argued that Social Security is on strong fiscal footing, and reform is unnecessary. The argument is that over the years the government…
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HT: Tyler Watts
The St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve has come out with the findings of their groundbreaking research into the primary cause of the rise in the U.S. national debt. Is it too little revenue (i.e. tax collections?) Is it too much spending? The report’s authors Daniel L. Thornton and Kevin L. Kliesen summarize…
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Despite not having taken any action to pass an annual budget for the United States government of any kind for almost two and a quarter years, it appears that the current majority Democratic Party in the Senate may finally have developed a blueprint for the federal budget, one that even promises to reduce the…
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With the official unemployment rate having now risen to 9.2%, Patrick Buchanan notes in his new column, “An Establishment in Panic,” that another 7% are underemployed and economic growth is a very weak 1.8%. Obama’s predictable answer is higher taxes and to raise the federal debt ceiling so that even more spending and debt…
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Ron Paul has gone public with proposals for the Fed to destroy $1.6 trillion in government bonds that it is currently holding. As The New Republic’s Dean Baker reports, such a plan might be a way around the impass that has mounted on the Hill. Aside from the practicalities of politics, Paul’s plan is…
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The Daily Mail in London reports that the “U.S. military spends a cool $20 billion on air conditioning annually in Iraq and Afghanistan”. The U.S. military forks out a whopping $20.2billion a year on keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cool, it has emerged. The alarming figure is more than NASA’s entire annual budget…
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For a Fourth of July challenge, how many pages does it take for the CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter to fully document the U.S. tax code as it stands in 2011? If you answered 72,536, you’re right. Note that we didn’t say “you win”!… If you’d like to get a jump on next year,…
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Here is an excellent new video on the relationship between economic freedom and economic and social well-being. The freer a country is, the higher the quality of life and more happiness, including less poverty, more prosperity, longer life spans, cleaner environment, less corruption, lower child mortality, more civil liberties, and less unemployment. Freer countries…
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