Free Republic

While fiscal-houses-of-cards like Greece, Spain, and Portugal have frightened Euro-watchers in recent years with their shaky finances/debt, some observers even wonder-aloud whether relatively-wealthy France is next. But Italy is truly still the 'sick man of Europe' -already past the point of no return- and of course debt/socialism/big government is what's done it (same garbage 'progressives' have been ramming down our throats for 5+ years now): Italian national debt exceeds 130% of GDP (US currently = 62%, but some experts say this number is not truly representative of the dire situation we're already in) Italy's high tax rates and Kafka-esque bureaucracy have...

If you take to Twitter to express your views on a hot-button issue, does the government have an interest in deciding whether you are spreading "misinformation"? If you tweet your support for a candidate in the November elections, should taxpayer money be used to monitor your speech and evaluate your "partisanship"? My guess is that most Americans would answer those questions with a resounding no. But the federal government seems to disagree. The National Science Foundation, a federal agency whose mission is to "promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the...

American officials have spent billions of tax dollars "setting up projects or programs that the Afghans cannot or will not sustain once international forces" leave Afghanistan, according to a government watchdog. "Afghanistan is a case study in projects and programs set up without considering" whether they can be continued, said John Sopko, Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Sopko's comments came in a speech Friday to a meeting of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. The problem is the sheer magnitude of the reconstruction effort, which is bigger than any ever before undertaken by the U.S. "Last year, the...

Ever had your credit card turned down at a fancy restaurant? President Obama can commiserate. Speaking to workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington on Friday, he recalled a moment last month when, at the end of a dinner out in New York City, his plastic was declined. "I guess I don't use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on," he said. "Luckily, Michelle had hers. I was trying to explain to the waitress that I've really been paying my bills."

Here we go again. Another sovereign debt crisis on the periphery of the EU is underway and many of the same factors that led to previous debt meltdowns are present. Germany is headed for a triple dip recession. Continent-wide deflation is nearly a reality. And many EU nations are smashing the debt limits demanded by treaty, thus threatening the Euro itself. All of this is impacting the percentage of debt in relation to GDP in several countries, making government bonds more expensive and debt servicing a nightmare. The Hill: Among Europe's most recent economic tremors has been the growing evidence...

Hillary, don’t ever change. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a Las Vegas crowd Monday night that more needs to be done to assure young people can achieve their dreams and free students from onerous college debt “that can feel like an anchor tied to their feet dragging them down.”“I think our young people deserve a fair shot,” she told about 900 people gathered in a Bellagio resort ballroom for the annual UNLV Foundation dinner benefiting the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Maybe Hillary should listen to some of those students. Hillary Clinton is appearing at the...

Which will be greater: the burden of student debt on Americans who went off this fall to their first year of college, or the amount of federal debt per full-time private-sector worker when these students earn their degrees and start looking for jobs? There is no doubt: It will be the amount of federal debt per full-time private-sector worker. As of last Friday, the total debt of the federal government was $17,858,480,029,490.28, according to the U.S. Treasury. That equaled $200,258.81 for each of the 89,177,000 full-time private-sector workers that, according to the Census Bureau, were in the United States in...

'We are reaching the end game in Europe. If they don’t launch real QE soon, the consequences are too awful to contemplate,' warns RBS. A key gauge of deflation risk in Europe is flashing red, dropping to record lows on fears of fresh recession and lack of decisive action by the European Central Bank. The sudden lurch downwards came as Bank of America warned that France’s debt ratio could rocket to 120pc of GDP within five years, unless the EU authorities take radical steps to reflate the region’s economy. Italy’s debt could threaten 150pc even earlier. The 5-year/5-year forward swap...

The question, "Is that degree worth it?" is coming up a lot more often these days. There's little question how "Lisa S." would answer. Forbes.com tells the story of Lisa (her full name's not given), who's a 39-year-old Minnesota lawyer making about $20,000 a year and on public assistance. She is $350,000 in debt and realizes she'll probably die before paying it back. Lisa started out studying at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, graduating with under $25,000 in student loans that she paid off in two years. The problems began when she moved to California for a master's...

Via Morgan Stanley,Amid rising tuition costs, an increasing share of students rely on debt to fund their education. Student loan delinquent balances have been on the rise since the early 2000s and those with student loans are likely to be less credit worthy than those without (Exhibit 50 & Exhibit 51). As a result, consumption for the student debt-laden population may be depressed. To be sure, the share of consumption driven by college age consumers has been in decline since 2003.These challenges are further compounded under the Qualified Mortgage (QM) regulatory regime that became effective in January 2014. The...

WASHINGTON - The painful, underperforming Obama economy remains Topic A here in the nation's capital and across the country. Pre-midterm election polls show that the voters are just as unhappy as ever over President Obama's mismanaged handling of the economic life of our nation, and Democrats are wringing their hands over expectations that it will cost them their congressional jobs on Nov. 4. It's gotten so bad that even some members of the liberal news media have become a great deal more critical of an economy that one analyst said "simply isn't as healthy as the headline numbers suggest." Even...

...GOP Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) are co-sponsors of Sen. Mike Enzi’s “Penny Plan,” formally titled “One Percent Spending Reduction Act of 2014.” “If we just stopped spending one cent out of every dollar that we spend currently, and according to [the Congressional Budget Office], they say that would balance the budget in three years,” the Wyoming Republican Senator told The Hill.

Today’s students are being crushed with John Bunyan’s proverbial burden on their backs – student loan debt. Until relatively recently this debt could have been discharged in bankruptcy. Then all that changed when Sallie Mae, the Student Loan Marketing Association, was privatized in 2004. Albert Lord, the new CEO, and his lobbyists went to work to change the laws so that student loans could not be discharged in bankruptcy. Today the cumulative student loan debt is more than $1 trillion. While a generation ago a high school diploma was considered sufficient for a decent middle class entry level job, today...

U.S. student debt has climbed to an all-time high, despite a decrease in consumer debt for all other major lending categories such as automotive debt, credit card and home equity loans. Behind mortgages, student loans are the second largest debt class. Now at $1.2 trillion, student debt has increased 84 percent since the 2008 Great Recession, based on a study by information services firm Experian. The national average balance of loans stand at $29,400 and 40 million consumers now have at least one student loan, originally reported by NewsOK. Mississippi, Oklahoma and Louisiana had the highest amount of late payments....

The media and advocates for income redistribution are creating a continual stream of stories about the student loan crisis. We are inundated with sob stories about people suffering under a crushing debt burden. The New York Times alone has had stories on how student loan debt is now a problem for senior citizens, how young people’s lives have been ruined, and how a whole generation will be unable to buy homes because of their student loan debt. Luckily, these stories are based simply on a few scattered cases. In reality, there is no student loan debt crisis and it is...

After forgiving millions of dollars in medical debt, Occupy Wall Street is tackling a new beast: student loans. Marking the third anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the group's Strike Debt initiative announced Wednesday it has abolished $3.8 million worth of private student loan debt since January. It said it has been buying the debts for pennies on the dollar from debt collectors, and then simply forgiving that money rather than trying to collect it. In total, the group spent a little more than $100,000 to purchase the $3.8 million in debt. While the group is unable to purchase...

The idea that the Obama administration has the budget deficit under control is a complete and total lie. According to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government has officially run a deficit of 589 billion dollars for the first 11 months of fiscal year 2014. But this number is just for public consumption and it relies on accounting tricks which massively understate how much debt is actually being accumulated. If you want to know what the real budget deficit is, all you have to do is go to a U.S. Treasury website which calculates the U.S. national debt to the penny....

A credit-based financial economy (as opposed to pure cash) depends on an ever-expanding outstanding level of credit for its survival. Without additional credit, interest on previously issued liabilities cannot be paid absent the sale of existing assets, which in turn would lead to a vicious cycle of debt deflation, recession and ultimately depression. It is this expansion of private and public market credit which the Fed and the BOE have successfully engineered over the past five years, while their contemporaries (the ECB and BOJ) have until now failed, at least in terms of stimulating economic growth.

Michigan has among the most debt per taxpayers in the nation, ranking ninth overall, according to the annual “Financial State of the States.” That’s actually a significant improvement from last year. The report is released by the Chicago-based group Truth in Accounting and measures the total assets and liabilities of the 50 states. The methodology of the report is unique because it includes analyzing unreported pension and retirement health care liabilities. Michigan has a taxpayer burden of $19,300 per person, which is down from an all-time high of $25,300 per person last year which ranked the state fifth. There are...

There are few characteristics of human nature that are more immutable than the tendency to be focused on the short term. And just like a heart patient straying from his diet as time passes after his heart attack, the political class has collectively decided to tune out the federal debt as an issue. Between 2009 and 2012, the federal government ran deficits exceeding $1 trillion per year, for a total of $5.1 trillion over four years. During this time, the issue of deficits and debt became a prominent part of the national political conversation. In contrast, a Congressional Budget Office...