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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The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are lackluster at best. One troublesome aspect of the whole “movement” concerns the poor economic logic underlying their causes. The occupiers are targeting the wrong enemy when they claim corporate greed and income inequality caused by capitalism is generating the problems in Washington. These claims have been propagated by…
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Gary Becker, University of Chicago Nobel Laureate in economics, has a must read article in today’s Wall Street Journal. The article echos much of what we here at MGC have been arguing – government failure as a cause of the recession, failure of stimulus and monetary policy to boost economic recovery, the necessity of…
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Freakonomics reports yesterday that a new poll from the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post shows more people see raising the debt limit as a bigger risk than not raising it. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner conduct their own poll. Weigh in here! As Ezra Klein reports on the development of the Capitol…
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Despite not having taken any action to pass an annual budget for the United States government of any kind for almost two and a quarter years, it appears that the current majority Democratic Party in the Senate may finally have developed a blueprint for the federal budget, one that even promises to reduce the…
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Jed Graham in Investor’s Business Daily reports that a new study of the financial condition of Social Security and Medicare indicate that with baby boomer retirements, rising health costs, and the ongoing economic malaise, these federal entitlement programs are producing massive deficits in perpetuity unless major changes are made to cut these unsustainable liabilities….
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In the following video, Independent Institute Research Fellow Jeffery Miron discusses why federal entitlement spending (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) is growing to unprecedented levels and must be cut and cut and cut some more if the U.S.’s fiscal spending and debt crisis is to be resolved. HT: Mike Munger
Dennis Cauchon in USA Today reports that: Americans depended more on government assistance in 2010 than at any other time in the nation’s history, a USA Today analysis of federal data finds. The trend shows few signs of easing, even though the economic recovery is nearly 2 years old. A record 18.3% of the…
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In “S&P Cuts U.S. Ratings Outlook to Negative,” Damian Paletta at the Wall Street Journal reports that the influential firm Standard & Poor’s has just “for the first time lowered its outlook on the U.S. government’s debt to ‘negative’ from ‘stable.’” A stark warning from a credit-rating firm about the U.S. government’s fiscal problems…
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