Fiscal hawks have been sounding the alarm about rising debt levels for decades, but their nightmare scenario of runaway inflation hasn’t come to pass. How do we know if this time is different? In 2010, when former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson (R–Wyo.) were appointed to co-chair President […]
President Joe Biden’s wide-reaching, $2.25 trillion proposal includes investments in roads, bridges and green energy. A top Republican in the United States Senate has urged President Joe Biden to scale down his ambitious, $2.25 trillion infrastructure bill, which includes investments in roads, bridges, elderly care and green energy. In an interview with ABC News programme […]
Unless we start getting our fiscal house in order now, we will soon be at the mercy of our creditors. Somebody needs to remind President Biden about the Golden Rule — the real Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules, and we are clean out of ducats. Jim Rogers, the famous investor, offered a version […]
The long love affair between investors and U.S. Treasury securities isn’t coming to an end anytime soon. It has been an astonishing decade for the U.S. federal-debt load. From the budget deficits of the Great Recession, to President Trump’s tax cuts, to the spate of large pandemic-relief packages, the federal debt has grown from about $5 […]
When I was growing up an ice cream cone was a nickel a scoop. Now, a single scoop cone at my local Baskin Robbins is three dollars. That’s sixty nickels. So far as I am aware, there is no shortage of cows or sugar. A British economist, John Maynard Keynes, promoted the idea that government […]
In ancient Greece, the saying went that a democracy dies as soon as the public realizes it can vote itself the keys to the treasury. After three rounds of stimulus—and with a fourth round under consideration—let’s hope for the sake of our democracy that the public doesn’t catch on. Government deficit spending during a recession […]
In the last four years, the federal government has both cut government revenue and dramatically increased spending. It’s an unsettling combination, the precise long-term results of which will be debated by economists like myself until the cows come home. But at least one thing is already certain: The fiscal impact of all the federal COVID-19 […]
While some economic pundits go gaga about the $1.9 trillion stimulus package (which is, by the way, a mere .6 trillion more than the fortunes of the world’s billionaires increased over a year’s worth of pandemic-fired profit taking), let’s remember that all this largesse comes with a large price tag for our children, their children, […]
There are times when Americans are concerned with the national debt. Now is not one of them. US President Joe Biden has unveiled another significant spending proposal and there is the predictable blowback from Republicans on how it will be paid for. Biden announced on Wednesday that his $2 trillion-plus infrastructure plan, if passed as proposed, will be […]
McConnell cites tax increases and national debt Surprise, surprise, Republicans are worried about the national debt again. Their strategy going into the mid-terms is going to be to rail against tax hikes and debt. It worked to swing the House in Obama’s first mid-term, we’ll have to wait and see if it works again. Wed […]
