The Biden-Harris administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) Act is a bad spending bill. But it wasn’t until Friday, December 10, 2021 that anyone fully appreciated how bad it really is. That was the day the Congressional Budget Office released its estimate of the full cost of H.R. 5376, the legislation containing the BBB Act’s...
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The U.S. government rang up another $669 billion in the national debt from January 20, 2021 through the end of its 2021 fiscal year. That’s how much extra money the federal government has had to borrow to support its excessive spending during President Joe Biden’s tenure in office. Much of that additional debt is...
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President Joe Biden is a lot like President Donald Trump. He likes to use Twitter to gaslight his critics. How else can you explain President Biden’s September 25, 2021 tweet, in which he claims his Build Back Better Agenda will not cost anything? My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars. Instead of wasting...
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The Federal Reserve is trying very hard to get ahead of a potential conflict-of-interest scandal. Several high-ranking Fed officials have investments in securities the U.S. central bank has been buying to stimulate the economy. Consequently, these officials have conflicts of interest in considering policies that might materially affect the value of their investments. Reuters...
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The U.S. Senate passed a $1.1 trillion “bipartisan” infrastructure spending bill last week. Shortly afterward, just 50 senators passed an extremely partisan $3.5 trillion budget blueprint. A good question to ask is where is the U.S. government going to come up with the money to pay for all that spending. The simple answer is...
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Visual Capitalist has created an interactive visualization of the publicly-held portion of the U.S. government’s public debt. It covers 150 years, combining historic data from 1900 through 2020 with CBO projections for the next 30 years. You’ll need to follow the link above to take advantage of the interactivity, but here’s the big picture...
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Do the U.S. national debt and the government’s budget deficits matter? If you listen to the economists shaping the Biden administration’s policy agenda, they say they do not. Their basic argument is that with interest rates so low, the government can borrow as much as politicians want to spend. They think they never have...
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The Congressional Budget Office has issued its 2021 Long-Term Budget Outlook months ahead of its usual schedule. The CBO forecasts that the publicly held portion of the national debt will grow to more than double the size of the U.S. economy during the next 30 years.

Writing in Foreign Policy, economist Dambisa Moyo paints a nightmare scenario of what is waiting for the next U.S. President:

Crisis and Leviathan is Robert Higgs’ great work of history exploring how politicians exploit crisis situations to grow their power. As their power grows, so too does the size of government. Leviathan, of course, refers to the old bible stories of a multi-headed sea serpent with an insatiable appetite—much like today’s U.S. government, which...
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