The IRS is in full crisis mode and the staff of Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) J. Russell George has been busier than a one-legged man in a butt kickin’ contest.
Wasteful Government Subsidies for Cape Wind Project
Wind energy has been touted by environmentalists as clean and cheap. While it may be clean, it is far from cheap. A maze of government subsidies, mandates and crony capitalism deeply mask the true cost of wind energy production to make it extremely wasteful of citizens’ dollars. In the free market, wind energy would never be built without the massive government intervention it receives.
Duplication Duplication
These next few weeks, I will be pointing out areas of duplication, overlap, or fragmentation in the federal government and suggestions on how it can be eliminated that will save millions of dollars for the taxpayers. Since 2011, the General Accountability Office (GAO) has been required to “identify and report annually to Congress on Federal […]
Summer Retransmission Dispute Heats Up
In the midst of the summer doldrums, a broadcaster and a multi-channel video programming distributor (MVPD) are battling over retransmission fees with consumers suffering the consequences. The parties this time are CBS and Time Warner Cable (TWC), with millions of viewers across the country losing access to shows such as “NCIS,” “The Big Bang Theory,” and “Under the Dome.”
Time for FCC Overhaul
On Thursday, July 11, 2013, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing on two draft bills, the FCC Process Reform Act and the FCC Consolidated Reporting Act, which was introduced on July 26, 2013 as H.R. 2844. On July 25, 2013, the Subcommittee voted to advance the bills to the full Committee by a unanimous voice vote. Similar bills were passed on a bi-partisan basis by the House in the last Congress, but failed to make headway in the Senate.
Payments to the Recently Deceased
A June 28, 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled, “USDA Needs to Do More to Prevent Improper Payments to Deceased Individuals” bluntly lays out a pervasive problem that can be easily resolved.
Panic in Detroit
On July 18, 2013, Detroit filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy, becoming the largest American city to do so. According to CBS News, the city is more than $18 billion in debt with a current budget deficit of $380 million.
Just Give Me More Money to Spend
Well, finally a big government politician who admits it. It’s almost refreshing. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn) said in a July 25 Round Table with Progressive Democrats of America, “The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it.” This statement is amazing as we approach a $17 […]
It’s All in the Numbers
Last week, we got the jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). They reported a job gain of 162,000 for the month of July. There wasn’t a lot of hoopla about it because the numbers were pretty pathetic. Many analysts had expected somewhere between 175,000 to 200,000 jobs. Plus, the BLS dropped the […]
Bravo Senator Coburn!
We’ve heard a lot of whining and seen a lot of hand wringing about how awful the the sequester is to the nation’s economy. (The sequestration is the automatic budget cuts imposed by Congress that is occurring in the federal government.) We hear about federal employees being furloughed, children not being able to attend school, […]