Average student loan debt in New Hampshire is more than $33,000, and the national total is now $1.5 trillion.   But it’s those same young college graduates who will bear the burden of our national debt, now $21 trillion, up from just $2.5 trillion in 1988.  The debt doubled to $5 … [read more]

A few weeks ago the debt passed 21 TRILLION DOLLARS, but I was out to lunch with the rest of America.  Pollsters say that hardly anybody cares about the debt any more.  Deficits stimulate the economy, right?  Doesn’t that mean jobs? Ummm, that sort of “stimulus” is a dubious way to try … [read more]

The United States spends as much government money on health care as do the socialized health care systems of Europe.  States and our federal government now spend nearly two trillion dollars a year on health care.  That’s more, as a % of GDP, than Canada and the U.K. spend on … [read more]

The rising cost of health care is driving more and more citizens into Medicaid, the program for the poor. Medicaid, in turn, drives up the cost of health care by under-paying doctors. HealthAffairs.org says that it doesn’t even pay half of the discount price that your insurance company would pay. A survey of thousands of physicians, by CNN, reveals that Medicaid only covers 50% – 70% of their costs of providing care. … [read more]

The federal debt is now larger than Twenty Trillion Dollars.  That’s $124,000 per American, if you’re counting just the younger half of the population. The older half of the population has benefited from the growth of the debt—we paid lower taxes and got more services, for decades—and we won’t have to pay it back.  So it’s younger Americans who will bear the brunt, and they’re beginning to notice. … [read more]

The debt-clock number you see in the upper-right-hand corner of this page is the federal debt, according to conventional accounting.  You can make it look smaller by counting only the debt that the government owes to the public, and not the debt (held by the Federal Reserve and the “trust funds”) that it is effectively cancelled because the government owes the money to itself. … [read more]

“The U.S. program that pays elderly Americans’ hospital bills will exhaust reserves in 2028, two years sooner than last year’s estimate, trustees of the program said on Wednesday.”
— Reuters. … [read more]

“The official poverty rate in the United States, defined as lacking resources for life’s basic needs, was 19% in 1964. It had fallen to 12.1% by 1969, the year Johnson left office. Last year, it stood at 15%.”
— USA Today. … [read more]

“Switzerland will decide on June 5 whether to pay its citizens a basic income to replace welfare benefits … Economists like it because unlike welfare benefits, basic income does not phase out if people work. As a result, there is no abrupt disincentive at various income levels the way there is with so many government assistance programs.”
— Chris Low, Chief Economist, FTN Financial. … [read more]

We’ve just been reading comments by Establishment journalists—the LA Times, Slate, Paul Krugman of the NY Times—who raged against Time Magazine’s excellent and well-researched cover story about the federal debt.  The truth is that the dangers described … [read more]