Three researchers at the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, David O. Lucca, Taylor Nadauld and Karen Shen, have just published the results of their study into whether federal government-backed or -issued student loans and other forms of government assistance are contributing to the rise in college tuition. Here’s their key finding, as…
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Today, the Independent Institute is launching a fun, five-part, satirical, YouTube web series called Love Gov! Here’s more information on what the series is about: “Love Gov is a way to help anyone, especially Millennials, understand the federal government’s ever-expanding reach into personal lives,” says David J. Theroux, Founder and President of Independent Institute….
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This year, to mark the Fourth of July holiday, we’re featuring a chart showing the growth of the U.S. federal government’s spending, tax collections and the national debt from 1940 through 2014, using patriotic colors: Probably the most amazing thing this chart reveals is how much faster the nation’s total public debt outstanding grows…
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As Loretta Kalb of the Sacramento Bee reports, Deborah Bettencourt, superintendent of the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, will receive a pay increase of $24,269 as of July 2. The increase of 7.5 percent boosts the superintendent’s pay from $221,500 to $245,769. Bettencourt’s salary is far beyond that of California’s governor ($173,000), the attorney…
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Back in December 2013, we featured a chart that showed how much debt per resident that Puerto Rico had accumulated. It also showed that Puerto Rico was second only to Detroit, Michigan, which had back then recently declared bankruptcy. Here is what we said at the time: Considering Puerto Rico’s situation, in the absence…
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Summer travelers know that the Transportation Security Administrative troops, drill sergeants decked out in Jiffy Lube blue shirts, do a bang-up job of making air travel more miserable than it should be. As they take off their shoes and belts, travelers may also know that the TSA is a miserable failure at its appointed…
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What are the consequences of a large and growing national debt? Believe it or not, the Congressional Budget Office directly addressed that question in its 2015 Long-Term Budget Outlook: How long the nation could sustain such growth in federal debt is impossible to predict with any confidence. At some point, investors would begin to…
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What if, instead of borrowing money to sustain its spending, the U.S. government instead sold equity shares of the future performance of the U.S. economy? Evan Schulman, the president and founder of Tykhe LLC, who received a patent in 2006 for his concept of sales participation certificates — a way for businesses and other…
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As we noted, Big Government has been colonizing economic activity through schemes such as the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. This New Deal act, based on the notion that central planning works, set up cooperative boards and conscripted growers into reserve set-asides. This meant that Fresno raisin growers Marvin and Laura Horne, like…
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First, the news from the Los Angeles Times: Peter Lee, the executive director of Calfornia’s Affordable Care Act exchange, after receiving a big raise this past February, is now getting a big bonus and another raise: California’s Obamacre exchange awarded its executive director a $65,000 bonus Thursday four months after giving him a 24%…
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