In “Is the U.S. Becoming a Welfare State?”, Daniel Indiviglio reports in The Atlantic that U.S. government entitlement programs now account for a whopping 35% of wages, up from 26% in 2008. Uncle Sam has been aggressively increasing Americans’ allowance recently. Government entitlement programs have grown to account for 35% of wages, according to…
Read More »
Back in January, we featured a post where we looked at who are the largest holders of the U.S. national debt. Since that time, the U.S. Treasury has revised their data, specifically to identify who the real foreign owners of the U.S. national debt are. Here are how things really stood at the end…
Read More »
Rasmussen Reports has released a new poll indicating that 58% of likely American voters prefer a partial shutdown of the U.S. government “until Democrats and Republicans can agree on what spending to cut” and 61% want less spending. As Republicans and Democrats in Congress haggle over the budget, most voters would rather have a…
Read More »
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…
Read More »
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…
Read More »
In a January 19th article in the Wall Street Journal, “What Congress Should Cut,” former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe propose abolishing “the Departments of Commerce and Housing and Urban Development, end farm subsidies, and end urban mass transit grants, for starters.” The primary economic challenge today is…
Read More »
According to CBS News, on the last day of 2010 the U.S. National Debt hit a record level of more than $14 trillion or $14,025,215,218,708.52, up from $9 trillion just over three years ago and a whopping 55% increase since just before 2008. As the report states: It took just 7 months for the…
Read More »
In an article from Reuters, David Lawder reports that a new U.S. Treasury report of cash holdings, “The Financial Report of the United States,” shows that the U.S. government went into greater debt in fiscal year 2010 to the tune of additional $2 trillion. Unfortunately, the report does not include the massive land, minerals,…
Read More »
The Washington Post reports that the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has come up with a plan to address the nation’s fiscal house of cards. The major points of the plan include: Deficit reductions by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade Large reductions in discretionary spending Tax code reform He hits…
Read More »
The New York Times has a wonderful tool for understanding how the recommendations of the presidential deficit commission could work to close the estimated annual budget shortfalls in the future. You simply go through and select spending cuts and tax increases until the budget shortfall is corrected for both in the present and future….
Read More »
 |
 |
 |