The director of the Congressional Budget Office is sounding the alarm on the U.S. government’s unsustainable fiscal path. Philip Swagel issued his warning in an interview with Claire Jones of the Financial Times.
A recent study from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) found that many states misused federal aid related to the pandemic. Instead of using funds for projects related to healthcare, education, and infrastructure, state politicians used the lion’s share of federal funding for the general fund and public pensions.
Despite much hand-wringing by California politicians and bills in the state legislature with lofty goals and rhetoric, home prices in California continue to set new records. Apartment rental prices also continue to soar in Southern California, the Central Valley, and Northern California.
It is an election year and the incumbent president currently has an approval rating that rivals certain types of flesh-eating bacteria, so naturally that means it is time to fire up the printing presses at the Federal Reserve. After last week’s State of the Union address, President Biden unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2025, a bloated monstrosity that would undoubtedly worsen the nation’s debt and deficit crisis. Read the full budget proposal here.
How did the national debt become such a huge problem? Two things primarily drive the size of the national debt. The amount of revenue the federal government takes in through its tax collections and how much it spends. Of those two things, which do you think is most responsible for running up the size of the national debt? Is it a shortfall of tax revenue?
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, formerly Missouri v. Biden, the president whose administration has been accused of strong-arming Big Tech to remove “objectionable posts.” The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, joined by doctors such as Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, argue that the administration censored dissenting speech on COVID-19 and other policies by pressuring tech platforms to remove or restrict posts.
On March 11, 2024, President Biden released his budget proposal for the U.S. government’s 2025 fiscal year. It’s a remarkable document because he seeks to permanently lock in the unsustainable spending that characterizes his administration’s fiscal policy.
February’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) showed prices up by 0.62% in the past month. If that rate of increase kept up for the rest of the year, the annual inflation rate would be 7.4%. But the CPI won’t keep rising that fast.
Amazon announced on Jan. 29 that it would scrap its plans to acquire iRobot, maker of the popular vacuum Roomba. While a negative initial ruling on the merger from the European Commission in Nov. 2023 was likely the primary cause of Amazon walking away from a deal that had been valued at $1.7 billion in Aug. 2022, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly also threatened action against the deal.
The one-year anniversary of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is upon us. And while some of the factors behind that catastrophe have been tamped down, a new crop of problems have emerged to cast a shadow over the banking system and the health of the US economy. In the year since, only the sources of difficulty have changed.