Shrink the State. End the Fed. Balance the budget. Make a profit. Leave an inheritance.
Gary North
President Obama described his 2009 stimulus law as providing jobs – shovel-ready jobs. He was right. There were some jobs. They were a tad expensive, however. The Department of Transportation awarded some of these jobs. Cost to taxpayers: $738,000 per job. The Secretary of Transportation says he thinks these were a good deal for America. [...]
Continue reading →Let’s say that the federal government employs 11,605 employees in the Natural Resource Conservation Center. In fact, it does. Let’s say these people need to get the word out on climate change. After all, the climate is changing. Temperatures over the last decade have been cooling. What’s that? Cooling? Yes. Read about this here. So, [...]
Continue reading →Grandparents are in the hole for $36 billion for student loans. Some of these debts are because of their grandchildren. They co-signed the loans. Then the grandkids defaulted. The grandchildren could have gotten their B.A. degrees for under $15,000 by avoiding the standard approaches to college. They could have funded all of it themselves by [...]
Continue reading →Consumers finally have figured out that the U.S. economy is getting ready to turn down. Confidence fell sharply and unexpectedly in May. The Conference Board’s index fell from 68.7 in April to 64.9 in May. Economists had predicted a rise. Instead, confidence fell to a five-month low. There was no warning. It caught forecasters flat-footed. [...]
Continue reading →Senator Tom Coburn had the Government Accountability Office (GAO) do a study on job training programs.The study revealed that the federal government spends $18 billion a year on job training. The study also reported that there are 47 different federal job-training programs. A total of five of these have produced data since 2004 on how [...]
Continue reading →Congress has been prohibiting Americans from buying low-cost sugar ever since 1789, the first year of the United States under the Constitution. This subsidizes the sugar growers, who have not operated in a free market in the nation’s history. But it’s not just the sugar growers who are the beneficiaries. Corn producers, whose product is [...]
Continue reading →It costs too much to buy a home in San Francisco. Families are leaving. The city is not able to keep them. Big cities with high prices are becoming demographically old cities. The future is with smaller cities. The Internet makes jobs available there. The cities were the heart of production in the pre-Internet era. [...]
Continue reading →Maybe you remember Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. They are still famous for “Who’s on First?” What if they did a routine on unemployment in America? It might go like this: COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America. ABBOTT: Good subject. Terrible times. It’s about 9%. COSTELLO: That many people [...]
Continue reading →A bill has been introduced by Congressman Lamar “SOPA” Smith of Texas. This bill, if passed, will create a national data base. By law, every employer will have to submit the applicant’s name, Social Security number into this data base. The data base will then tell the employer if it is legal to hire this [...]
Continue reading →California’s finances are a disaster. Its government is dysfunctional. Yet it cannot stop passing new laws. The legislature passed 750 bills last year, most of them set to become law on Jan. 1. … Firearms: With some exceptions, it will be illegal to openly carry an unloaded handgun. Californians will still be able to obtain [...]
Continue reading →