In 2011, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner realized the most significant achievement of his entire career in the U.S. Congress when he reached a deal with the White House to restrain the growth of U.S. government spending: the Budget Control Act of 2011. Here, using the leverage of the threat of not…
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A few weeks ago, the New York Times posted a nice info-graphic on the dispersion of government transfers over time. The report show that American’s income that comes from government transfer programs has more than doubled over the last 40 years, rising from 8 percent in 1969 to 18 percent in 2009. The info-graphic…
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Do you remember back in April 2010, when the administration was trumpeting how much better the expected budget deficit for 2010 was going to be? When, magically, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget’s projection of the expected deficit dropped by just over $300 billion U.S. dollars from its originally forecast value of…
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The Wall Street Journal notes in a new article, “The 2010 Spending Record: In two years, a 21.4% increase”: “Perhaps you missed it, but then so did the Washington press corps. Late last week the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary budget tallies for fiscal year 2010, and the news is that the U.S….
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In a new article in the Financial Times, Nicole Bullock reports that a huge pension deficit of more than half a trillion dollars for 50 U.S. cities may produce calls for a massive federal bailout: “Big US cities could be squeezed by unfunded public pensions as they and counties face a $574 billion funding…
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Through the Freedom of Information Act, Judicial Watch has obtained copies of Treasury Department documents that show that President Obama’s Compensation Czar (“Pay Czar”), Kenneth Feinberg, received an annual GS-15 salary of $120,830, contrary to the claims that he was unpaid. “Jill Farrell, a spokesman for Judicial Watch, said her organization had sought clarification…
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Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart II‘s new article, “We must cut taxes, curb spending and crimp regulations,” is being syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services to newspapers across the United States and Canada, including the Sacramento Bee, Lexington Herald-Leader, Standard Times (Bedford, MA), Bellingham Herald, Albany Times-Union, Guelph Mercury, Kitchener Record, etc. “The…
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