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.

On average, Uncle Sam borrows $10 billion a day, every day. If you stack $10 bills high enough to add up to $10 billion, the stack would rise 67.9 miles above the Earth’s surface. During much of the past year, Uncle Sam has been borrowing enough money to do that daily.

Most of what the political class calls policies are really aspirations with no policy content. They are feel-good statements that promote goals most people would support, with no associated policies that would move toward those goals. The following is an example.

They’re dead to me,” was the reaction of one friend when he learned of the plan, now characterized as an alleged plan, to introduce Uber-style surge pricing to Wendy’s fast food restaurants. No sooner did I begin writing this article (including the following line: “Given the initial reaction, it’s possible that the Wendy’s surge pricing plan will never see realization.”) than the company issued a statement saying that it would not implement those pricing methods. It characterized a phrase that CEO Kirk Tanner used during the 4th quarter conference call indicating that Wendy’s “w[ould] begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling” as “misconstrued.”