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Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass) brushed off fears that a runaway national debt could pose a threat to America. "Look, a debt of whatever amount merely records resources that have already been acquired by the government," Markey argued. "The government has already gotten and spent that money for the benefit of America. Whether it ever pays this money back is basically irrelevant." "Let's imagine that, 'horror of horrors,' the government defaults on this debt," Markey continued. "Who's hurt? The people who lent the money to the government by buying bonds can obviously afford to lose this money. People who need their...

If you thought Obamacare was terrifying, just wait until you read about what President Obama's regulatory agencies are planning to do with your retirement savings. According to an alarming report in the Wall Street Journal, government regulators at the Labor Department will be implementing new rules at the end of the year that will eventually force private retirement investments into government accounts. How? By making private investment options, specifically IRAs, too burdensome, a liability and expensive. Bolding is mine.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday couldn't agree that federal debt is a national security problem, in a hearing aimed at assessing the long-term strategic implications of the government's $19 trillion debt. "A realistic discussion about it, and accepting expert opinion that this debt that we have is not actually right now a threat to our country, is I think a more realistic and honorable way of talking to the American people about it," Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday. That surprised committee chairman Bob Corker, who concluded the hearing by describing such views...

There is no magical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, nor another bubble that would bring in enough revenue to offset the very large budget and reduce the unpayable national debt I have taught basic principles of economics for thirty years to group after group of college students who were often cross-eyed, bored, running late, playing with their phones, angry that I gave them too many notes, “hard tests,” and too many assignments which interfered with their busy social lives. Many students were there just to get a grade and to complete their useless social studies degrees...

President Obama’s first budget as president declared that he was ushering in a “new era of responsibility.” His last budget as president shows that he’s presided over an era of unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility. That at least, is what the Congressional Budget Office’s independent analysis of Obama’s budget makes plain.

Janet Yellen signaled that the Fed is grappling with the problem I have been warning about: the dollar has become the de facto currency and the Fed is indeed becoming the world’s central bank. Yellen has admitted that everyone is lobbying the Fed to surrender its domestic policy objectives for international ones. This is precisely what took place in 1927. Yellen stated that the Fed should worry less about inflation domestically than about global growth risks. She pointed to the slowdown in China and depressed commodity prices, but Europe is a real basket case. She used the words that “caution...

President Barack Obama responded to reports of slow job growth Friday by blaming Republicans who have opposed parts of his economic agenda. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report found the economy added 242,000 new jobs in February. The latest number highlights a long-running trend of slow, yet positive, economic growth. Obama credits the growth to his agenda but its slowness to Republicans for their opposition to his plan. “The plans that we have put in place to grow the economy have worked,” the president declared in the Oval Office. “They would work even faster if we did not have...

According to the latest White House budget projections, the government's interest costs are expected to more than triple to $787 billion by 2026, as interest rates rise, from $223 billion in 2015. By 2025 and 2026, the government will spend more on interest costs than all non-defense discretionary outlays. Under the White House budget, the national debt will increase from $19 trillion to more than $27 trillion over the next decade.

"This is the real reason Washington can’t create a long-term deficit reduction plan. The boomers love their safety nets." Wow, so it looks like we have a budget deal in Washington. A debt ceiling and spending crisis has been averted. It’s good news. But let’s all calm down. It’s only temporary. The agreement does not address the long-term fiscal problems we have. Problems that were mostly created by none other than the “baby boomer” generation. Yeah, you know who you are. You’re tanned and healthy and living way past average life expectancy. You’ve got a defined benefit pension plan from...

On Monday the U.S. national debt hit a new record: $19,012,827,698,418. This is the first time the national debt has ever exceeded $19 trillion. That's more than $58,000 for each person who lives in the U.S. today (including children). The main culprit behind the rising deficits and debt is growing federal spending--especially among Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. Traditionally, Congress has set a limit for how much debt the U.S. may take on, known simply as the debt limit. But rather than put a higher limit on the debt, lawmakers and the president have repeatedly suspended the debt limit,...

The national debt hit $19 trillion for the first time ever on Friday, and came in at $19.012 trillion. It took a little more than 13 months for the debt to climb by $1 trillion. The national debt hit $18 trillion on Dec. 15, 2014. That's a slightly stepped-up pace compared to the last few $1 trillion mileposts. It took about 14 months for the debt to climb from $17 trillion to $18 trillion, and about the same amount of time to go from $16 trillion to $17 trillion. The federal government has been free to borrow as much as...

The Budget: When President Obama released his first budget plan in 2009, he called it a “New Era of Responsibility.” What he produced was irresponsibility on a historic scale.

Does anyone remember the national debt? Judging from the presidential campaign so far, perhaps we should put the debt's image on a milk carton somewhere. In the last Republican debate, there was precisely one question on the debt -- and the candidates answered it by talking about their tax plans. That was far too typical. According to the FiveThirtyEight website, "the deficit" was mentioned an average of two times in the first five televised Republican debates (including the "undercard" debates) by all the candidates -- and the moderators -- combined. And "the national debt" was brought up an average of...

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”—Aldous Huxley There’s a man who contacts me several times a week to disagree with my assessments of the...

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, delivered on Feb. 24, 2009--a little more than a month after his inauguration--President Barack Obama warned that we have a "responsibility" not to pass on to our children a federal debt they cannot pay. "There is, of course, another responsibility we have to our children," Obama said in that speech. "And that's the responsibility to ensure that we do not pass on to them a debt they cannot pay. That is critical." At this point, a chuckling Obama paused to accept a standing ovation from the chamber. Then-House Speaker Nancy...

Barack Obama is preparing for his final State of the Union Address, which he'll deliver January 12. And the president is not looking to slow down as the end of his presidency nears. "I've got 12 months left to squeeze every ounce of change I can while I'm still in office. And that's what I intend to do," Obama writes in an email to supporters. We've done a lot of remarkable things together this year, and it's because of committed citizens like you that this country keeps moving forward. You keep proving the cynics wrong. On January 12, I'll be...

The federal government continued to collect taxes at an unprecedented pace in the beginning of fiscal 2016, raking in a record of approximately $416,014,000,000 in revenues through the first two months of the fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2015 through the end of November), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today. In the entirety of fiscal 2015, which ended on Sept. 30, the federal government collected a record $3,248,723,000,000, which worked out to about $21,833 for every person who held a job in the country as of September. The record-setting $416,014,000,000 in taxes that the federal government collected in just...

June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put the U.S. government's debt at a staggering $18 trillion. But according to a former U.S. comptroller general, the actual debt is $65 trillion -- more than triple the official figure -- and it isn't going to improve as long as politicians continue to put their personal and partisan interests ahead of the nation's. David Walker, who served as the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from 1998 to 2008, told John Catsimatidis, host of "The Cats Roundtable" on New York radio station WNYM, that there's much more to the debt than just...

Last week, when reviewing the next steps in the 2015 version of the debt ceiling "drama" we said that "that the only certain outcome from the melodramatic debt ceiling fight over the next several days, is the following: the US is about to have a brand spanking new debt ceiling, one that should last it until March of 2017: $19,600,000,000,000." Sure enough, with just days left until the November 3rd D-Day when the Treasury runs out of emergency cash and is forced to prioritize debt repayments over government spending, moments ago Politico reported that "congressional leaders and the White House...

We cannot continue to cripple future generations WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today issued the following statement praising the passage of Rep. Tom McClintock’s (R-Calif.) Default Prevention Act in the House of Representatives:“First and foremost, Congress must enact critical reforms to restore fiscal sanity for our nation and reverse the continued upward trajectory of our spending. We cannot continue to cripple future generations. The House took a significant step today in that regard and passed the Default Prevention Act, which ensures that our nation’s debt will be paid in full and on time. “This legislation allows the United...