All Posts Tagged With: "budget deficit"

Going Broke

Barack Obama says “no one ought to go broke when they get sick in the richest nation on Earth.” He also says “no one should go broke because they chose to go to college.”
Question: Does “no one” include the government or society as a whole? I only ask because of the  trillion-dollar deficits that stretch [...]

6Feb2010 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | Continued

The Balance-of-Payments Deficit: Not to Worry

Quick. What’s the trade deficit between California and the rest of the world? Don’t try Googling it because you won’t find an answer. No government agency—or private entity—computes the dollar value of goods that people in the rest of the world sell to or buy from Californians. Why not? Because it doesn’t matter.
Yet governments do [...]

5Jan2010 | David R. Henderson | 1 comment | Continued

Now That's Leverage!

The government is borrowing nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends. (But it will protect us from overleveraged financial companies.)

12May2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Budget Deficits and Stimuli

It’s an article of faith that running  budget deficits during the New Deal helped end the Great Depression. This myth has been demolished countless times, but it hasn’t penetrated to the pundits and pop economists who host cable news-talk shows. In fact, FDR did not run extraordinarily large budget deficits, and J.M. Keynes actually criticized [...]

28Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Our Presidents and the National Debt

Burton Folsom, Jr. is the Charles Kline Professor in History and Management at Hillsdale College. His book The Myth of the Robber Barons is in its fourth edition.
During the last 75 years the United States has failed to balance its annual budget over 90 percent of the time. What’s worse, the government has spent money so [...]

1Aug2006 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 4 comments | Continued
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