USA Today reports that the difference between what the federal government under President Obama will have spent in 2012 and how much it will collect in taxes and other revenue sources will be $1.33 trillion: The budget, an outline of which was released by the White House Friday night, will show a higher deficit…
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My colleague Jeff Hummel pointed out an interesting blog post by Ted Levy where he asks the question: what’s the point of the debt ceiling? Levy shows that since the debt ceiling was created in 1917, it has been raised over 100 times, 8 times in just the last ten years. In fact, Congress…
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I could not resist posting this beautiful graph of the current state of the momentousness US debt. The graph is particularly useful for eyeballing the historical path of U.S. debt to GDP. Often pundits will say that our current debt-to-GDP ratio is not unreasonable because it is not too high relative to the period…
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Below is an excellent Bloomberg interview with James Rickards, senior managing director of Tangent Capital Partners and author of “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis.” He talks with James Grant, publisher of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, on recent Federal Reserve monetary policy, the gold standard and the impact of Fed policy…
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The Independent Institute’s Senior Fellow Robert Higgs has been taking on the so-called conventional wisdom that the U.S. economy continues to be in recessionary or near-recessionary conditions because “consumers are not spending”. On Friday, Dr. Higgs issued a challenge to readers of the Independent Institute’s blog The Beacon, as well as commentators and pundits,…
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One in seven Americans now receive food stamps. As yet another indicator of the utter absurdity of Keynesian economics, Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack is claiming that food stamps (“Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”) “mean more jobs” and provide “the most direct economic stimulus”. In the process, he somehow fails to mention that food…
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Here is a great new video from Gold Resource Corporation, “Gold: Independent Money,” on the governmental abandonment of gold-backed money and the resulting runaway spending, wars, and debt we face today.
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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Bernanke urges for an increase in the debt ceiling, demonstrating the wisdom of James Buchanan and Richard Wagner. In Democracy in Deficit, Chapter 8, the authors set out to model Keynesian-oriented fiscal policy with the “the plausible hypothesis that monetary authorities are, like elected politicians, subjected to both direct and indirect political pressures, and…
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What is the hidden cost that Americans are paying to have the U.S. federal government spend so much money? To answer that question, let’s take a closer look at when U.S. federal government spending really went out of control. Here, if we track the U.S. federal government’s spending [1] per U.S. household against median…
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