Over at Big Goverment, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy suggests the government host a garage sale to pay down its debt: Here is an idea: Greece is getting ready to sell some of its assets to pay for its gigantic debt ( Corfu and the Parthenon are not on the auction block yet), and the US should do the same. According to the Financial Statement of the United States , there is about $2.6 trillion of stuff we could sell (See Page 49 of the report, it’s page 69 of the whole document). A few items on my list: Loans receivable and mortgage backed securities: $540 billion TARP direct loans and equity investments: $240 billion Property, plant, and equipment: $784 billion Freddie and Fannie preferred stocks: $65 billion Whole thing here
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What If The Government Gave an Estate Sale?
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Who said this in praise of Walmart’s in-house check-cashing operations? If you’re cashing, for example, a $1,000 biweekly paycheck then $6 is almost one third the price MoneyGram is asking. Nothing too earth-shattering about this, but it underscores the point that a lot of the time the best solution to abusive business practices is to find ways to get competing firms into the business
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Feel The Liberal Love For…Walmart?
I’m sure Peter Suderman will have more later, but here are a few things worth noting about the CBO’s preliminary analysis (PDF) of the Senate health care bill as modified by the reconciliation bill Democrats have put together: 1. The Medicare savings, which may not actually materialize because they depend on reimbursement changes Congress has been loath to maintain in the past, total nearly $500 billion during the first decade, compared to total deficit reduction of $130 billion. 2.
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A Few Tricks to Make Your Deficit Look Smaller
It is difficult to determine just what specific curriculum changes the Texas school board has in mind, though the ringleader of the revisionist faction, a creationist weirdo named Don McLeroy , strikes me as one who wants to impart ideology into the textbooks, not balance. Historians, it seems, are also skeptical .
Originally posted here:
Don’t Mess With the Texas Curriculum
A Boston Globe investigation finds that Massachusetts’ Economic Development Incentive Program, which during the last 16 years has dispensed hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local tax breaks to businesses that promised to create jobs, often has little or nothing to show for its efforts: Hundreds of the projects delivered fewer jobs than promised, and some companies actually slashed employment.
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Government-Subsidized Job Creation Preservation Elimination in Massachusetts
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a provocative op/ed by Yale law student Michael Seringhaus in which he advocated that the DNA profiles of every American be kept in a central forensic database. The goal of such a database is to help the police fight crime by better enabling them to find perpetrators who leave DNA traces at the scenes of their misdeeds.
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Fight Crime with a Universal DNA Database?
Timothy Carney, whose work on Obama-administration corporatism has paced the field, writes a bit more about the drug companies’ support for Obamacare, which Jacob Sullum flagged yesterday. In the heated yearlong health fight, President Obama has often accused his opponents of willful misrepresentation, even as he and his allies have endlessly repeated the biggest whopper of all — that the bill would rein in the special interests. Of all the single-industry lobbies in Washington, the largest is the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America.
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More on Big Pharma’s Bill
Last weekend’s murders of three people tied to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez grabbed headlines in the United States and provoked outrage from the Obama administration. But as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum notes, those attacks were just a small part of the bloody ordeal that our government is inflicting on Mexico by insisting that it stop drugs destined for American lungs, noses, and veins.
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New at Reason: Jacob Sullum on Mexico’s Drug War Violence
Just got an upbeat personal email from my former governor and now DNC head Tim Kaine praising my efforts to pass Obamacare. It read in part: Ronald — I just met with the President, where I was proud to fill him in on all the great work that you’re doing to pass health reform. We spoke about the calls you’ve made, the letters you’ve written, and the terrific events you’ve organized on the ground
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DNC Chair Tim Kaine Congratulates Me For Helping Pass Health Care Reform
RomneyCare is probably not a very good model for federal health care reform: [Massachusetts] Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill – a former Democrat running as an independent for governor – said the local [health care] plan enacted in 2006 has succeeded only because of huge subsidies and favorable regulatory changes from the federal government. “Who, exactly, is going to bail out the federal government if this plan goes national?” he asked
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Massachusetts Treasurer: Fiscal Catastrophe Ahead If U.S. Passes Health Care Overhaul
