Readers of MyGovCost will likely be interested in this week’s Econtalk podcast with Don Boudreaux on the nature and significance of public debt. Roberts and Boudreaux begin by discussing debt at the household level and then work to draw out which lessons apply to the spending of a federal government. In doing so, the…
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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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The New York Times has a useful infographic outlining proposals for how to trim the defense budget. The Pentagon has committed to cutting $450 billion in spending over the next 10 years—only a small slice of the tremendous increase in war and defense spending we have seen in the previous 10 years. The graph…
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James Buchanan and Richard Wagner begin their book Democracy in Deficit by explaining that prior to the absorption of Keynesian economics, the conventional wisdom of Adam Smith prevailed. Adam Smith had observed that: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” This…
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The Wall Street Journal reports in “A New Spending Record: Washington had its best year ever in fiscal 2011″ that: Maybe it’s a sign of the tumultuous times, but the federal government recently wrapped up its biggest spending year, and its second biggest annual budget deficit, and almost nobody noticed. Is it rude to…
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The United States will officially pass the 100 percent debt-to-GDP line on Halloween. This is the first time this has ever happened since World War II. As Zero Hedge reports, We decided to dig into the actual numbers (cancelling out the per capital denominator as it is the same on both sides of the…
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Sam Hananel at the Associated Press reports that despite knowing about the problem since 2005: The federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years, a watchdog report says. Such payments are meant for retired or disabled federal workers, but sometimes the checks…
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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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The market is a yo-yo following the S&P downgrade – investors are searching for stability amid the policy flux created by the current Congress and Administration. Businesses and investors are struggling to create and sustain stable and accurate expectations as to the rules they are likely to face in the future. Steve Horowitz gives…
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In his incisive new article in the Wall Street Journal, “Three Simple Ways Medicare Can Save Money,” John Goodman notes that: The most significant reason for our out-of-control deficit spending is health care. And the biggest federal health-care program is Medicare. That’s why almost everybody�on the right and the left� agrees that Medicare must…
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