Over the last several weeks, we’ve been watching a very strange race to the bottom between two very fiscally-troubled states, Illinois and Connecticut, where the state government of each seems intent on becoming the first U.S. state to crash its credit rating all the way down to junk status. It looks like Illinois’ state…
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Puerto Rico is proving to be something of a case study for how politicians and bureaucrats, when finally faced with the consequences of their excessive spending as they run out of money to pay the debts they racked up to sustain it, will engage in even more unethical conduct to escape them. In today’s…
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The media love anniversary stories, but last month the fifth anniversary of President Obama’s stimulus package slipped by without much fanfare. Taxpayers might recall how, in 2008, spending on the order of $800 billion was urgently called for and delivered. But it failed to stimulate much economic growth. In the last three months of…
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On December 26, one day after Christmas, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner broke a blockbuster story. On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2012, the United States will reach its $16.4 trillion borrowing limit and will have to undertake “extraordinary measures” to avoid default. The debt ceiling had been troubling Steven Mufson of the Washington Post…
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In the Washington Post, Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane report that with strong public support and White House opposition, the “House rejects proposal to raise debt ceiling” by voting down a measure that would raise the national debt ceiling by 16.8% from the current $14.3 trillion to a whopping $16.7 trillion. With an August…
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In a new agreement reported by William Boston in the Wall Street Journal, “Want to Buy a Piece of a Greek Island?”, the government of Greece is taking steps to sell off and privatize a small amount of its enormous holdings of government-owned property. Will this properly begin the process of divesting to the…
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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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Now that we’re almost to the end of the year, where many look back at the previous twelve months to find lessons to learn and apply in making their New Year’s resolutions, what can we learn from history where the U.S. national debt is involved? Quite a lot actually, as Arnold Kling recently did…
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In a new editorial in the Washington Examiner, “Closing the books on the worst Congress,” the 111th U.S. Congress is described as “reckless and destructive.” This is the Congress that passed Obamacare, against the wishes of a substantial majority of the public, on Christmas Eve of last year. In the dead of night, Democratic…
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