In the new Wall Street Journal article, “Fed Fires $600 Billion Stimulus Shot,” Jon Hilsenrath reports that the day after the stunning mid-term elections that clearly were a referendum against the Keynesian spending binge of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Federal Reserve has launched another gigantic “stimulus” measure exactly like what…
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We’ve been digging through the White House’s budget projections for Fiscal Year 2009, which was produced under President Bush’s tenure, and Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011, which were both produced under President Obama’s direction, to compare how much of the U.S. taxpayers’ money each would have planned to spend in the years from 2010…
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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 $300 billion U.S. dollars from its originally forecast value of…
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In the new article on runaway spending from the Pentagon, “How Many More Trillion$ for Defense?”, Independent Institute Research Fellow Winslow Wheeler explains the dire need for effective budgetary controls over the Pentagon.� As it stands the Pentagon “is literally ‘unauditable.’” �Since Sept. 11, 2001, Congress and the Defense Department have added more than…
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Dr. Emily Skarbek, Director of the Government Cost Calculator was interviewed on the nationally syndicated radio program, “The Jason Lewis Show” (Premiere Radio Networks).� Using MyGovCost.org, Dr. Skarbek explains the effects of rampant government spending for any individual in America. Listen to the interview here. Download the mp3 file here.
Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs examines the serious problem of “regime uncertainty” being created by the feasting of federal spending programs starving (crowding out) the private investment needed for recovery from the recession: “Private saving and investment are the heart and soul of the dynamic market process. Together they provide and allocate the…
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It must be a condition of employment that a journalist who writes about the current recession include in his article the statement, �consumption makes up more than two-thirds of the economy� or �consumption spending accounts for 70 percent of GDP.� This seemingly simple, factual statement, however, is nearly always intended to carry some explanatory…
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In an incisive, recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Sara Murray reports that: “Efforts to tame America’s ballooning budget deficit could soon confront a daunting reality: Nearly half of all Americans live in a household in which someone receives government benefits, more than at any time in history. “At the same time, the…
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Private saving and investment are the heart and soul of the dynamic market process. Together they provide and allocate the resources used to augment the economy�s productive capacity, generate sustained long-run economic growth, and thereby make possible a rising level of living. Economic crises interrupt this process by discouraging investors and causing them to…
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Kevin Williamson at National Review has further discussed his June 2010 projections of total long-term, U.S. national debt being $130 trillion. In a 2008 Forbes article, economist Laurence Kotlikoff had more conservatively estimated the debt to be $70 trillion. What Williamson points out now though is that both the total, money supply of the…
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