The Congressional Budget Office has issued its Budget and Economic Outlook for Fiscal Years 2011 through 2021. Here’s the quick summary of what they anticipate in that short term: Under current law, CBO projects, budget deficits will drop markedly over the next few years—to $1.1 trillion in 2012, $704 billion in 2013, and $533…
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Terence Jeffrey reports at CNSNews.com that according to the U.S. Treasury Department, federal debt is rising at near record rates and if continued, Fiscal Year 2011 could produce a $1.708 trillion deficit, marking it second only to Fiscal Year 2009’s $1.89 trillion. The federal debt increased by $105.8 billion ($105,835,837,302.32) in January, according to…
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A wonderful graphic by Third Way is available here showing the path of Social Security towards insolvency. Jim Kessler and David Kendall advocate: “a ‘Savings-Led’ Social Security reform plan that actually increases the program’s progressivity. Our plan makes roughly two dollars in benefit reductions for every one dollar in revenue increases, and achieves solvency…
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In a new article in the Christian Science Monitor, “Pentagon cuts don’t cut it. Want to really save money? Get a new security strategy”, Independent Institute Senior Fellow Charles V. Peña shows that the proposal by Obama administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates of “cuts” in spending by the Department of Defense are not cuts…
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Ethanol consumption in the United States has been rising exponentially for more than a decade. As it happens, a great deal of the credit for that belongs to the extremely generous assistance that ethanol producers have received from the U.S. federal government over that time. That assistance has come in the following forms: The…
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In his recent article in Investor’s Business Daily, “Uncertainty Continues To Depress Jobs,” Robert Higgs (Senior Fellow, The Independent Institute) discusses how the U.S. government’s interventionist and spending policies are prolonging high unemployment by creating a climate of massive economic uncertainty: President Obama, in his State of the Union address, promised to focus on…
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The latest economic forecasts are now projecting that the federal budget deficit will reach a record of nearly $1.5 trillion in 2011. As the Wall Street Journal reports, this “grim outlook landed a day after President Barack Obama outlined plans to push for new spending that he said would help keep the U.S. globally…
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If you want to quickly see how President Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats’ federal government spending proposal for 2011 stacks up against what Congressional Republicans have in mind, shown against a background illustrating the trend in U.S. federal government spending since 1967, here you go! References 1 Obama, Barack. The State of the…
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In a characteristically informed and appropriately scathing attack on the welfare state, Walter Williams asserts a cautiously optimistic view of the recent trend in political discourse as it has become more popular to call for limits on the arbitrary powers of the state. “For the first time in my lifetime—and I’m approaching 75 years…
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Former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) officials Douglas Holtz-Eakin (Director), Joseph Antos (Assistant Director) and James Capretta (Associate Director) show in a new Wall Street Journal article, “Health Care Repeal Won’t Add to the Deficit,” that repealing Obamacare (“Affordable Care Act” or ACA) will not increase the federal deficit. In so doing, they refute the…
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