Yesterday CBS’s 60 Minutes program included a segment titled “An Imperfect Union: Europe’s debt crisis”. Correspondent Steve Kroft reported that “until recently, their monetary union had brought stability and prosperity to the continent’s social democracies, producing good wages, generous benefits, long vacations. . . .” He went on to interview London financial analyst Louise Cooper [...]
President Obama has been taking credit for what he describes as an economic revival. Writing on the American Enterprise Institute’s EnterpriseBlog, James Pethokoukis, says, largely through 13 graphs, that the picture is not nearly as bright as the President claims. Judge for yourself. Below is just one of Pethokoukis’ graphs. The red line represents actual [...]
United States leads the way in per capita national debt. Source: The Weekly Standard Blog
Originally published in The Daily Caller [here] 2/14/12 President Obama put forward his FY 2013 budget yesterday. Meanwhile, there was rioting in Greece. If you think these events are unrelated, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you. If we continue down the path proposed by the president, we will soon find ourselves in [...]
The Wall Street Journal — Political Diary carries this comment from Joseph Rago in regard to President Obama’s proposed Buffet rule. Rago explains what will be accomplished, in terms of revenue generation and deficit reduction, by imposing a rule that every individual making more than $1 million annually pay a minimum30% tax. It’s not a [...]
The Huffington Post reports [here] that the Olympic torch will be lit in Athens this May by the suns rays. The odds are very good that the sun will be shining, and presumably the message is that Greece is a great tourist destination for Northwesterners and others hungry for sunshine. But one suspects that the [...]
Having just elected Suzanne Bonamici to Congress in what can only be called a landslide, voters in Oregon’s CD#1 might be interested in taking a look at The EnterpriseBlog’s “5 scariest debt and unemployment charts from the new CBO report.” The author, James Pethokoukis, notes that CBO charts two different futures depending on whether or [...]
Take a look at this satirical short film about the national debt and how it applies to just one family. Starring Brian Stepanek & Eddie Jemison.
FAST FACTS: THE OBAMA ECONOMIC RECORD – Remember when Ronald Reagan asked voters in 1980 if they were better off than they had been four years earlier? Of course the answer was no, and Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in a landslide. The Republican nominee for President in 2012 should ask people the same question. [...]
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HOOVER’S ADVANCING A FREE SOCIETY 09/10/11 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insists that he did not say that the only problem with last month’s DC earthquake was that it was not big enough. But he did say, ad naseum, that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, combined with subsequent [...]
I just got back from a week on an Alaskan cruise, and it struck me that being on a cruise ship is sort of analogous to our federal budget situation. Imagine that the federal debt is like weight; if you’re within your ideal weight range (i.e., BMI between 18.5 and 24.9), it’s equivalent to having no [...]
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE DAILYCALLER 8/13/11 – On Friday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that the so-called individual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is unconstitutional. At the end of June, the 6th Circuit upheld the same provision as a constitutional exercise of Congress’s [...]
Anyone who doubts the essentially political nature of Standard & Poor’s decision last Friday, August 5, to downgrade the U.S. credit rating obviously hasn’t read the rating agency’s own explanation for what they did. “We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S.,” S & P explained, “because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising [...]
Originally published in the Daily Caller – Voters should be wary of congressional promises to cut spending or taxes at some future date. Even when such promises are embedded in current legislation, politics, not law, will determine whether they are kept. Although there was once ample time for Congress to devise comprehensive legislation to set [...]
The on-going debate over raising the debt ceiling has focused on many areas of disagreement between Democrats and Republicans but none bigger than the Republican determination not to raise taxes. Many pundits credit this to the political power of Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform who have spent years collecting “No Tax Increase” [...]
This Wall Street Journal article argues in favor of the McConnell plan with an important point: the debt ceiling is not the best leverage for a showdown over the entitlement state. “The tea party/talk-radio expectations for what Republicans can accomplish over the debt-limit showdown have always been unrealistic. As former Senator Phil Gramm once told us, [...]
UNEMPLOYMENT RATES BY COUNTY SINCE JANUARY 2007
