At the Pentagon yesterday, President Obama released a press statement concerning his new military strategy. The document was clear with regard to Iran, stating “U.S. policy will emphasize Gulf security, in collaboration with the Gulf Co-operation Council countries when appropriate, to prevent Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon capability and counter its destabilizing policies.”…
Read More »
In “Problems possible with nearly 65,000 Arlington graves, report says” in the Washington Post, Christian Davenport reports that the newly released year-long study, after earlier reports of misidentified remains, shows that the 150-year-old, Army-run, Arlington National Cemetery has problems with 25% of the graves! Errors include “mismarked or unmarked graves, urns that had been…
Read More »
The St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve has come out with the findings of their groundbreaking research into the primary cause of the rise in the U.S. national debt. Is it too little revenue (i.e. tax collections?) Is it too much spending? The report’s authors Daniel L. Thornton and Kevin L. Kliesen summarize…
Read More »
Edward P. Lazear (former Chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisors; Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics, Stanford University; Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution) proposes significant spending cuts, no tax increases, and most importantly�adoption of rule-based constraints on future government spending. What do you think�is limiting growth in government…
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 »
In an article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Right Way to Balance the Budget,” Andrew Biggs, Kevin Hassett and Matt Jensen report that new research of 21 countries over the past 37 years shows that to reduce government debt, a major reduction of spending must be adopted instead of higher taxes. On average,…
Read More »
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…
Read More »
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…
Read More »
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…
Read More »