By Bill Wilson — It is disheartening and sad to see the House Rules Committee block many amendments that would have trimmed billions of pork from the hurricane disaster relief bill that had nothing to do with Hurricane Sandy. That said, two amendments that did manage to get through the rules process offered by Representatives Mick Mulvaney and Rob Bishop merit passage. The Mulvaney amendment include $17 […]

By Bill Wilson — “There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default.” That was how White House Press Secretary Jay Carney put it on Jan. 12 , urging House Republicans to give the Obama Administration another blank check — increasing the […]

By Bill Wilson — Gross Domestic Product (GDP) forecasts are coming in for the fourth quarter, and they are not good news for the economy — and foretell another hard year for the 22.4 million people struggling to find full-time work, and the 5 million who have […]

NRD Editor’s Note: This column was first published at Investors.com . By Bill Wilson — For much of its 236-year history, the federal government has accumulated new power by whittling away at the essential protections afforded to American citizens under the U.S. Constitution. In recent years this wholesale […]

By Bill Wilson — Will state and local governments add 220,000 jobs in 2013? That’s what chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi is suggesting in a recent report by Bloomberg News . “Their payrolls in the fourth quarter will be 220,000 larger than in the same period for 2012, he projects,” states […]

By Bill Wilson — Soon, the Obama Administration will be able to borrow money to refinance and expand the $16.4 trillion national debt without any permission from Congress. That is, if House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gets her way. On CBS’ Face the Nation on Jan. 6 , Pelosi said that if the debt ceiling […]

By Bill Wilson — From 1989 through 1992, I had the good fortune of visiting Poland to see firsthand the rapid economic transformation the country was going through in the post-Soviet era. Just a few hundred yards away from the Parliament, near the corner of Wiejska and […]

By Bill Wilson — If housing tends to lead economic recoveries, then we’re in trouble. This marks the worst post-recession home buying market since the Great Depression. Nobel laureate Professor Vernon L. Smith, who delivered the keynote address at the Cato Institute’s 30th Annual Monetary Conference on Nov. 15 , noted how housing leads both recession and recoveries. “In 11 of […]

By Bill Wilson — On Dec. 12, the Federal Reserve announced yet another open-ended round of quantitative easing — a promised $540 billion of purchases of U.S. debt every single year. Call it QE4Ever. The announcement comes atop the Fed’s $2 trillion balance sheet expansion since Aug. 2007 when the financial crisis began, plus its pledge to buy […]

By Bill Wilson — In 2013, $2.2 trillion of the $3.65 trillion budget will be on so-called “mandatory” spending — a Washingtonian euphemism for automatic spending. This is money that will be spent regardless if Congress ever votes on anything ever again — with the notable exception […]