Free Republic

Over the years, I’ve shared many charts, graphs, and tables to help people understand that the welfare state is fundamentally unsustainable. And, assuming there’s not genuine entitlement reform, many of these fiscal estimates show that the United States has a very perilous future. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the United States is in worse shape than every nation other than Japan and the United Kingdom. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a bigger long-run fiscal problem than all countries other than New Zealand and Japan. And according to International Monetary Fund...

“We know the statistics,” said President Barack Obama, “that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves.” The Journal of Research on Adolescence found that even after controlling for varying levels of household income, kids in father-absent homes are more likely to end up in jail. And kids that never had a...

As Rick Perry's record is beginning to be scrutinized, the budget mess in Texas has started to receive national attention. Apparently, there is a $31 billion deficit in the current fiscal year that will necessitate drastic cuts. It has also come to light that Perry, rather than making the necessary cuts in 2009, took Obama stimulus funds and used over $6 billion of the stimulus to plug his deficit. The deficit has now exploded, as they tend to do when not addressed early, and the stimulus money has dried up and blown away like a tumbleweed, leaving the state awash...

I know, I should link more. I tend to forget that my readers don't know everything I know--that they haven't written a couple dozen stories about European disability and pension systems, growth rates, unemployment, immigration, and so forth... So sorry that I didn't provide links on my Sweden post about disability, unemployment, and so forth. I just sort of assumed that Sweden's amazing rates of disability, "true" unemployment rate that may top 20%, and so forth were common knowledge. They certainly aren't particularly controversial. But if there is anything less common than common sense, it's probably "common knowledge". Let me...