Free Republic

Tucked into Republicans’ tax overhaul bill is a technical tweak to how inflation is measured. The change is designed to hold down the deficit, but over time it becomes a significant tax increase that hits many of the same middle-class households who start out as the plan’s beneficiaries.

In its global report released on Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated that inflation within crisis-laden Venezuela could skyrocket to more than 2,300% by 2018.

I wanted to post this just in case people missed it, a while back the U.S National Debt clock began publishing the real ratio for U.S dollars to gold. At this point it's up over 6,000 per ounce. Keep stacking!

I recently had the opportunity to read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin, a prodigious tome dealing with the circumstances surrounding the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. I was taken aback by some of its provocative assertions. America joined World War I largely to help a few bankers profit off the war (despite a long-standing Monroe doctrine that prohibited our involvement in European affairs) The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was supported by international financial interests in order to destabilize Russia and steal the wealth of the Russian people; and So-called "foreign aid" is merely a...

Rate Up in 53 Percent of Local Markets Led by Metros in Louisiana, New York, Alabama;Dollar Volume of Flipper Financing Rises to Nearly 10-Year High of $4.4 BillionIRVINE, Calif. – Sept. 14, 2017 — ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation’s largest multi-sourced property database, today released its Q2 2017 U.S. Home Flipping Report, which shows that 53,638 single family homes and condos were flipped nationwide in the second quarter of 2017, a home flipping rate of 5.6 percent of all home sales during the quarter. The home flipping rate of 5.6 percent in Q2 2017 was down from 6.9...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday said Congress will not have to vote to raise the nation's borrowing limit until some time in 2018 thanks to the Treasury Department's flexibility in handling the debt ceiling once it is reinstated in December. "We will not be revisiting the debt ceiling until next year," said McConnell, R-Ky. The move undercuts Democrats who hoped to trade their votes this year for a debt ceiling increase in return for a vote to secure passage of so-called Dreamer legislation that would protect illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children. The debt...

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says federal borrowing limit must increase by Sept. 29, giving lawmakers little time after recess to act Republicans are leaving town for an August recess after a failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When they return in September, they’ll have just 12 working days to avert another big problem. In a letter to lawmakers Friday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the federal borrowing limit, or debt ceiling, needed to be raised by Sept. 29 or the government risked running out of money to pay its bills.

In the first decade of the 21st century Western economic growth entered the doldrums. The question was why. Former Harvard president Larry Summers noticed that something changed after the 2008 financial meltdown. The economic spring which had always bounced back had lost its elasticity. He diagnosed it as secular stagnation. .... Most observers expected the unusually deep recession to be followed by an unusually rapid recovery .... Had the American economy performed as the Congressional Budget Office fore­cast in August 2009—after the stimulus had been passed and the recovery had started—U.S. GDP today would be about $1.3 trillion higher than...

The amount of money the government spends on programs and the amount it collects in taxes could change from the budget office projections, so the office warns that the Treasury could run out of funds even earlier. Currently, the federal deficit stands at $693 billion, which is an increase of $134 billion than what it projected in January. The federal government has an outstanding debt of $19.8 trillion, which includes $14.3 trillion in public debt and $5.5 trillion held by government accounts. Spending on major government programs such as Social Security and Medicare causes the amount of borrowing to increase....

Advocates of abolishing the $1 Federal Reserve note are at it again, this time hoping that President Donald Trump and conservative Republicans will finally side with their three-pronged approach to revamping the nation’s currency system. Under S. 759, introduced March 29 by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., the government would end production of the $1 Federal Reserve note, revise the composition of the 5-cent coin, and suspend production of 1-cent coins. While the draft legislation calls for an end to paper dollar notes and the cent, it is silent on dollar coin production. Backers of the legislation...

The Federal Reserve gives us the freedom to buy things now that we would otherwise have to wait for.In looking at the Federal Reserve, it is important to note that this is a money system, not just a group of people sitting in a conference room controlling everything having to do with the US dollar. The Fed is a system just like the government of the US is a system. What that means is that no one controls it, and that it is much bigger than any one person or group of people could ever control. They can guide it,...

<p>MADISON -- A new audit shows huge cost overruns at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, with dozens of projects costing double or triple their original estimates.</p> <p>The Legislative Audit Bureau report finds that estimated costs for 19 major projects completed between 2006 and 2016 were $1.5 billion, double the initial projection. The audit also finds that the estimated costs of 16 ongoing major highway projects have increased by $3.1 billion.</p>

US wholesale inflation continued its upward trend in January, recording its largest monthly gain in more than four years, according to data released Tuesday by the Labor Department. The Producer Price Index, which measures prices from the seller's perspective, rose 0.6 percent in seasonally adjusted figures, which was the largest such gain since September 2012 and well above an analyst consensus forecast of 0.3 percent.

"It seems to me like a lot of people think we're in a new inflationary boom," but, warns Gluskin-Sheffs David Rosenberg, "the answer is no... that's just not gonna happen. It's not like Ronald Reagan at all in that regard." Submitted by Patrick Ceresna via Macrovoices.com*This time around, not only are valuations at 15-year highs but we're entering it into the eighth year of the expansion of the bull market. You have to respect where were you are in the market cycle in the business expansion and we're much more mature now than we were in that early stage of...

There’s a predictable checklist for meltdowns in socialist countries, and it’s playing out with tragic regularity in Venezuela. Nationalize agriculture? Check. Start government-enforced rationing when the food supply dries up? Check. Seal the border when people try to flee to buy food elsewhere? Check. The next step, and usually one of the last before total collapse, is runaway inflation. That’s what we’re starting to see in Venezuela. Rapid inflation, called hyperinflation by economists when it gets really bad, is one of the deadliest poisons for any economy. The spiral is usually triggered when a government prints too much money to...

An essential element of the “unorthodox” doctrines, advanced both by all socialists and by all interventionists, is that the recurrence of depressions is a phenomenon inherent in the very operation, of the market economy. But while the socialists contend that only the substitution of socialism for capitalism can eradicate the evil, the interventionists ascribe to the government the power to correct the operation of the market economy in such a way as to bring about what they call “economic stability.” These interventionists would be right if their antidepression plans were to aim at a radical abandonment of credit expansion policies....

Argentina could have been the United States. Like the U.S., it was one of the world's 10 richest countries at the turn of the last century. And also like the U.S., that made it a New World magnet for Old World immigrants. But unlike the U.S., that was as good as it ever got. There was no Argentinian Dream. Just a nearly never-ending nightmare of either falling behind gradually or falling behind suddenly. All of which was self-inflicted. ..... The point is that nothing is inevitable. The arc of the political universe is long, and it doesn't have to bend...

When we see our grandchildren crying because they think someone might have looked at them crossways we wonder about the fate of the Republic. I think one of the hardest things about growing old is that you can remember what a pound of hamburger cost fifty years ago ($.45), so when the government assures us over and over there is no inflation we sort of get a disconnect going that seeps into many different areas of our lives. Wise men say that History repeats itself. Those who have studied the facts and lived long enough to get a seasoned perspective...

Venezuela, mired in an economic crisis and facing the world's highest inflation, will pull its largest bill, worth two U.S. cents on the black market, from circulation this week ahead of introducing new higher-value notes, President Nicolas Maduro said on Sunday. The surprise move, announced by Maduro during an hours-long speech, is likely to worsen a cash crunch in Venezuela. Maduro said the 100-bolivar bill will be taken out of circulation on Wednesday and Venezuelans will have 10 days after that to exchange those notes at the central bank. Critics slammed the move, which Maduro said was needed to combat...

Venezuela will introduce six new bills ranging from 500 to 20,000 bolivars, the OPEC nation's central bank said in a statement on Sunday. Currently, the largest-denominated Venezuelan note is 100 bolivars (9.4 euros), which is worth just around two US cents on the black market. A two-liter soft drink bottle can cost 25 times that amount.