How Much Will Escalation Cost?

The L.A. Times has a fascinating article about the difficulties in accounting for estimated costs in a troop surge in Afghanistan. The calculations so far have produced a sweeping range. The Pentagon publicly estimates it will cost $500,000 a year for every additional service member sent to the war zone. Obama's budget experts size it up at twice that much. [...] The Office ...

National Debt Hysteria?

In a front piece story in today's NYT, Edmund Andrews warns that the bill is about to come due on the massive borrowing the federal government has engaged in. Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to ...

The Cost of Empire

Last week, Congress approved the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, with costs totalling to a whopping $680 billion. And as Christopher Preble points out, that's not all:The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security ...

Obama’s Schoolchildren Speech

President Obama is set to address the nation's schoolchildren next week, presumably to propagandize them into his evil agenda of turning the country into Communist Russia (pronounced "roo-shuh") and offing granny to save money on health care just as they do in his native Kenya. There are even instruction manuals to enlist the support of the teachers unions in brainwashing ...

Winning the Healthcare Fight

David Frum frets that conservatives might be in for a Pyrrhic victory in the health care fight if they define winning as "beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself." [W]e’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) exploding Medicaid and Medicare costs and ...

Are Americans Stupid?

Bill Maher has a piece at HuffPo arguing that Americans are a bunch of idiots who should just shut up and let people who know what they're talking about make decisions on tough issues like health care reform. [T]ake the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their ...

Washington’s Wealth Boom

Radley Balko has a new column at Fox on "Washington's Wealth Boom." The new top three [wealthiest counties in America according to per capita income] are now Loudon County, Virginia; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Howard County, Maryland. All three are suburbs or exurbs of Washington, D.C. In 2000, 14 of the 100 richest counties were in the Washington, D.C., area. In ...

McCain More Trusted on Economy, Losing

A new Rasmussen poll finds that voters trust John McCain more than Barack Obama on taxes (47%to 45%) and on "economic issues" more generally (48% to 47%).  These numbers are, of course, within the margin of error.  They do, however, represent a reversal of a trend and may indicate that the "Joe the Plumber" and "spreading the wealth around" message ...

Obama’s Acceptance Speech: The More Things CHANGE, The More They Remain the Same

I wrote a quick post before bed last night giving my off-the-cuff reaction to Barack Obama's nomination acceptance speech, arguing that, despite all the talk of "change," it was basically a speech that Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry could have given. The NYT has a six-page transcript of the speech as delivered.  Let's ...

Obama’s Spending Wish List

This just in: Politicians promise lots of things they won't be able to deliver if they get elected. Yesterday, we had the hilarity of John McCain's promise to balance the budget in four years without raising taxes or cutting anything but "wasteful" spending. Today, we've got an analysis from the Los Angeles Times showing that Barack Obama is ...

McCain to Balance Budget – Here’s How

John McCain is promising to balance the budget in his first term: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico. [...] “In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is ...

Medicare Trustees Report

The latest report issued by the Medicare Trustees is not good. The HI annual cost rate is projected to increase from 3.11 percent of taxable payroll in 2007 to 11.40 percent in 2082—8.02 percent of taxable payroll more than the projected income rate for 2082. Expressed in relation to the projected Gross Domestic Product (GDP), HI cost is estimated to rise ...

Iraq Political Progress Benchmarks

Jason Campbell, Michael O'Hanlon and Amy Unikewicz say that Brookings has come up with some metrics to measure political progress in Iraq and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there actually has been some. The most intriguing area of late is the sphere of politics. To track progress, we have established “Brookings benchmarks” — a set of goals on the political ...

Closing the Earmarks Favor Factory

Mark Tapscott provides an extensive report of a Congressional Research Service finding that President Bush could, by mere executive order, stop all earmark spending directed by committee report rather than actual legislation. It turns out that this is the vast majority of all pork barrel spending. Of course, no evidence whatsoever has been provided in the last seven ...

Free Medicare for Everyone!

Kevin Drum, taking as a given that most of us are perfectly satisfied with our current health coverage but scared of losing it, offers an interesting solution: [E]xpand Medicare (or create a similar program) to cover every person in America under the age of 21. And then let them keep it as they grow older. In ten years everyone under 31 ...