Shrink the State. End the Fed. Balance the budget. Make a profit. Leave an inheritance.
Gary North
Back in 1977, Lew Rockwell, who was then editor of Private Practice, assembled three teams of physicians from Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, plus some economists, and sent them on a two-week tour. I was one of them. We spoke in 12 cities in 14 days. Our target audience was physicians. Our message: to get [...]
Continue reading →Means-testing is a system that penalizes richer people’s access to federal welfare. The Social Security System is an aspect of the welfare state. So, it is subject to means-testing. Most Americans do not know that there is a means-testing provision for Social Security. It is hidden, but it is real. This is made clear by [...]
Continue reading →President Obama’s proposed budget targets seniors. It proposes a different way of calculating the consumer price index. The new way will produce lower CPI figures. Why is this important to the budget? Because Social Security and Medicare have built-in cost-of-living adjustments. By lowering the official CPI figure, which is used to calculate benefits, the government [...]
Continue reading →The president of Cyprus assured voters that he would never, ever tax their bank accounts. Now he says the government must do this. Any voter who heard this assurance should have gone to his bank immediately and withdrawn half of his money. Then he should have sent another 40% to a German bank. The other [...]
Continue reading →In this brief interview by Charlie Rose, the screenwriter of Lincoln refers to Tea Party members as psychotic. Reagan voters, too. He says that the welfare state is community. He says that climate change threatens the species. All of this is as accurate as his script, which says that Lincoln pushed hard to get Congress [...]
Continue reading →Should the U.S. government default? Wrong question. The right question: Can the U.S. government avoid defaulting? The answer is clear: no. It will default. It is $222 trillion in the hole. That’s the present value of its future obligations. Of course it’s going to default. Would that be bad? Not for taxpayers. Would it be [...]
Continue reading →Birth rates are falling around the world. Japan was first. Then Europe. Then China. The U.S.A. was the hold-out. Now it has fallen below 2.1 children per woman–replacement rate. White, college-educated American women are down to 1.6 children. Mexican birth rates are way down. So are Mexican-American rates. Latin America is down. The immigrants kept [...]
Continue reading →Barack Obama, who did not close Guantanamo, prosecute corrupt bankers, or get American troops out of Afghanistan, delivered his second inaugural yesterday. The address was a judicious combination of platitudes, deception, code words, and a large dose of bloviation at the end. To bloviate is to give long speeches with high-flying words, yet communicate little. [...]
Continue reading →Here is a video that gets the message across: the books are cooked. The boomers will cost $3 trillion a year when they are all retired. There will be a default before all boomers are fully retired.
Continue reading →The mainstream media are filled with stories about the surprise experienced by American workers this month. Social Security’s FICA tax will rise by two percentage points this year. Someone making $50,000 will pay an extra $1,000. It turns out that workers forgot to budget for this. They did not know that they would be pushed [...]
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