Raymond Keating The latest news on the United States economy managed to get even worse than what we’ve experienced recently. Real growth in gross domestic product the fourth quarter of 2012 was expected to be pretty poor. But a negative 0.1 percent was even worse than those poor expectations. This was the first quarter of […]
A majority of elected officials in Washington, D.C. once again have proven how disconnected they are from economic reality by passing their so-called remedy to the “fiscal cliff.” The politicians argue their deal averted the catastrophe of massive tax increases and arbitrary spending cuts in federal programs. The reality, of course, is that compared […]
A major election is behind us. Yet, little has really changed, and that includes the state of our economy. We’ve been stuck in a grossly underperforming economic recovery after a long, deep recession. Unfortunately, there’s little in the data to tell us that things are changing in any substantive way for the positive. In fact, […]
The federal government closed its books on the 2012 budget year at the end of September. The bottom line results provided another powerful reminder of just how out of control the federal budget remains — more specifically, how out of control spending is. In its latest monthly budget review, the Congressional Budget Office reported that […]
It’s a presidential election season, so there’s a great deal of debate going on over taxes. Of late, the chatter has focused on who pays federal taxes — especially income taxes — and who doesn’t. So, let’s just simply go to the numbers and sort this out. First, we consider total federal tax liabilities by […]
Economics and politics obviously overlap. Specifically, they should converge when policy is made. But economics and politics definitely are not the same. Economics is rooted in substance — trying to understand and explain how the economy works, including how policy affects the economy. Meanwhile, politics can be rooted in substance, but it just as easily […]
If you’re concerned about how high federal government spending and debt have reached in recent years, the latest numbers on the current fiscal year offer little hope for positive change. To review, federal outlays jumped from $2.73 trillion in 2007 to $2.98 trillion in 2008, and $3.52 trillion in 2009. This vast increase in spending […]
Politicians on a bipartisan basis love to talk glowingly about entrepreneurs and the businesses they build and work to grow. Unfortunately, that rhetoric too often hides a fundamental misunderstanding about the process of entrepreneurship or economic risk takers themselves. Those misunderstandings or hostilities usually become evident through policymaking. That is, while saying nice things about […]
There’s a great deal of talk about a “fiscal cliff” in political, policy and media circles these days. It references a combination of tax increases and federal spending “cuts” scheduled to kick in at the start of 2013, resulting in a big hit to the economy. But let’s be clear about the real threat here. […]
Chief Justice John Roberts surprised the planet by effectively siding with the Supreme Court’s four liberal activists in upholding most of ObamaCare as constitutional. In a stunningly convoluted and contradictory majority opinion, Roberts said the ObamaCare individual mandate — that everyone must have or purchase health insurance coverage, or if not, face penalties — was […]