Archive for April, 2011

Building a Prosperous Future

By Tim Munsell.   Our National Debt is over $14 Trillion dollars, and growing by $1.5 trillion dollars a year.  That’s $47,500 per second! And the Congressional Budget Office says that unfunded liabilities for future payments of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid add tens of trillions more.  This gigantic debt will have enormous consequences...
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Battling Against the Truth

By John Lumbard.   Spending more than you have feels pretty good, so the resistance to balanced budgets---or anything close to balanced budgets---is not surprising.  Still, it's always a bit of a shock to read carefully-thought-out opinions, written by smart people, that are nonsensical efforts to bend reality to justify the status quo. Today...
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The Cost of Promises

By James Schaefer. CalPERS, California's massive state employee retirement fund, has $227 billion invested in the stock and bond markets to guarantee the future promises that have been made to the state's workers. Those investments generate earnings, and CalPERS has to guess at the rate of return they'll produce to know whether...
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Term Limits!

By Ralph Lockhart.   Amid all the hoopla about budget cuts, from both sides of the political fence, the media really doesn't do much to explain the entire Federal budget issue.  Consider the recent talk about $38 billion in budget cuts.  That's a huge number . . . . $38,000,000,000, or 38 thousand millions! But...
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Speech On Boston Common

By John Lumbard.   "In the last 75 years there's been a dramatic change in our nation's Congress.  Our legislators used to say and believe that they represented the interests of all Americans, and were working to do what what’s best for the nation as a whole.  Now they say that...
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The Antidote

By Alan Parks.  Business World writer Holman Jenkins, Jr. lays out the case very well in a Wall Street Journal article on April 6, 2011  that the United States is almost certainly going to deal with its massive deficits and unfunded entitlement liabilities by printing fiat money---which could lead to significant, painful...
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This Week In Fiscal Irresponsibility

By John Lumbard.   This is shaping up to be a big week for debt and deficits.  The U.S. Senate is deep in discussions and negotiations regarding Senate Joint Resolutions 3,4,5, and 10.  The President is going to deliver a speech Wednesday afternoon at George Washington University (apparently without TV coverage) that...
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The Farmer and the Lottery

By James Schaefer.   The farmer wins the lottery and is being interviewed by a news reporter.  "What are you planning to do, now that you've got all this money?"  Replies the farmer,"Well, I guess I'll just keep farming 'til the money's gone." Today farmers enjoy so much taxpayer support that it's fair...
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