By Kevin Mooney — Here on the one-year anniversary of the British Petroleum oil well explosion, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have pulled together a few key statistics that call out for a major overhaul of U.S. energy […]

By Robert Romano – By now, it is common knowledge that the 2011 continuing resolution negotiated by House Speaker John Boehner, which cut $38.5 billion in budget authority, will only reduce 2011 outlays by about $352 million . That is mostly because the resolution did not address about $240 billion of budgeting authorities enacted by previous Congresses that have yet to be fully spent. Only when they are will outlays begin reducing in […]

By Bill Wilson – Now that Iceland has told international banks and the European Union (EU) to pound sand, by refusing to bail out the UK and Netherlands who covered the losses of British and Dutch investors who lost $5.8 billion in Icesave when the bank failed in 2008 , a funny thing has happened. Or has not. The Earth did not open up, sucking the North Atlantic island nation into the deep reaches. The sky […]

By Bill Wilson – The U.S. cannot say it was not warned. For years now, sovereign credit rating agencies have repeatedly told Congress to get its torrent of deficit spending under control, or else face a downgrade of its gold-plated Triple-A credit rating. Alas, we did not […]

Standard & Poor’s downgraded the outlook of the United States to negative today : “Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative […]

By Robert Romano – When he addressed students at George Washington University on the dire fiscal emergency facing the nation, Barack Obama attempted to lay blame for the $1.645 trillion budget deficit at the feet of tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. Obama said , “we made the […]

By Kevin Mooney – State officials should act now to deny ObamaCare the regulatory edifice it needs to take root, instead of waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the federal law, according to policy analysts who favor free market reforms. Already, Gov. Bobby […]

By Robert Romano – In February, when he presented his budget for the 2012 fiscal year, Barack Obama called for an “adult conversation” on the nation’s finances . Everyone laughed. His was a budget that would add on average $1.08 trillion to the national debt every single year until 2021, when it would […]

By Kevin Mooney – What began as a benign effort to allow financially strapped property owners to receive tax benefits in exchange for specified development rights, has morphed into a government land grab. The chief culprit here is The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a well-funded 501(c) […]

By Bill Wilson – Barack Obama is threatening that if Congress does not increase the $14.294 trillion national debt ceiling, the nation will default. In a letter to Congress, Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner wrote , “Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States.” It is a rather curious formulation. Note that the […]