Monday January 10, 2011
The new year heralded in a new record.The Federal Debt is now over $14 trillion. This is the kind of record you don't want. It also means the Federal Government is spending now and expecting someone else - your children and grandchildren - to pay later.
In case you think all of this debt is because of stimulus spending, let me remind you that the Federal Debt was $10 trillion before Obama even took office. Most of that was because of $500 billion a year Security spending from the War on Terror AND mandated spending for Medicare, Social Security and a host of other social programs.
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Monday January 10, 2011
The weekend shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, which killed six bystanders, shows the consequences of an economy that focuses primarily on financial gain, and ignores the human cost. As About.com Guide to Conservatives Justin Quinn asks:
The shooter was identified Saturday evening as Jared Lee Loughner, a man whose Internet ramblings (which were taken down after the shooting) further identify him as mentally ill. ...The real question for the people of Arizona should be how someone like Loughner fell between the cracks?
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Monday January 10, 2011
Consumers are cutting back debt in all but one area: student loans. That's because the Federal government is lending triple the amount it did in 2008, thanks to the Stimulus Package and the Health Care Reform Bill. In November, 2010, the government subsidized student loans were $315 billion, driving the non-revolving debt to near-record levels of $1.606 trillion. In contrast, credit card debt dropped 6.3%, continuing a 28-month downward trend. This is the longest decline since the Federal Reserve began keeping records in 1943. (Source: Federal Reserve, G.19 Release, January 7, 2011)
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Friday January 7, 2011
Although it said 103,000 jobs were added, the December Jobs Report was a mixed bag. First, the Good: businesses added 117,000 new jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped to 9.5%. The Bad - the government lost 10,000 jobs, and unemployment rate dropped only because people gave up looking for work, dropped out of the labor force, and were no longer counted as unemployed. (For a history of employment reports since March 2007, read Employment Statistics History.)
Now, for the Ugly.
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