Federal debt and deficit
August 15, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The New York Times sees a dark cloud in every silver lining, when we have a Republican president. Especially Donald Trump. Thus, today’s Times email headlined: “The Stock Market Is Getting Scary. What You Should Do.” The Dow and the S&P are both at or near record highs. So, what is scary about that? The Times subhed offers a clue: “Stocks Keep Climbing Past Bad News.” What is the bad
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June 30, 2025 — Bill Glahn
From the U.K. Daily Mail, More than 14 million people could die as a result of Donald Trump’s foreign aid cuts, a new study has found. The US President’s administration announced it had slashed 83 per cent of programmes run by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) shortly after he returned to the White House for a second term. And now research published in the leading medical journal, Lancet,
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June 18, 2025 — John Hinderaker
In case you are wondering, the Big Beautiful Bill is working its way through the Senate. I assume that it will pass, in some version, because if it doesn’t we will see the biggest tax increase in American history on January 1, and no Republican will vote for that. Meanwhile, how does the Senate version of the bill compare with the House version? Here are some highlights, per Stephen Moore
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June 9, 2025 — John Hinderaker
There has been a lot of confusion about the “big beautiful bill,” with many understandably having the impression that it is the whole story with regard to federal spending and, specifically, budget cuts. Happily, that is not the case. This is from Stephen Moore’s Unleash Prosperity Hotline: Here’s what House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters over the weekend: Everyone here wants to reduce spending. All of us want to return
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June 4, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The Congressional Budget Office–liberal, but always prefaced by “nonpartisan” in press accounts–released a report today on the estimated budget impacts of the “big beautiful” bill that is now being considered in the Senate. The report is actually just a spreadsheet that sets out estimated budget impacts on a title-by-title basis, from 2025 through 2034. Democratic Party newspapers have gleefully hailed the results. The New York Times headlined: “Trump’s Policy Bill
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May 26, 2025 — John Hinderaker
1971 was the year when I graduated from college and started law school, so I remember it well. But I had no idea, then, that something momentous was happening that year–something that would shape America’s history, and the world’s, for the next 50 years and more. But what was it? This site has collected a number of charts that illustrate how pivotal 1971 was. Some have to do with inflation,
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March 12, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The House has passed a continuing resolution to keep the federal government operating until September. The CR will be helpful to the Trump administration because it increases defense spending, while reducing other domestic spending: If signed into law, H.R. 1968 would allow for federal operations to continue for another 6 months, until September. Typically, a “clean” continuing resolution would just hold current government spending levels steady, providing for more time
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January 8, 2025 — John Hinderaker
As if driven by a law of nature, government spending at every level has gone up and up, for decades. We are now facing a fiscal crisis: profligate government spending cannot go on, let alone continue to increase by leaps and bounds. Pretty much everyone agrees with that proposition, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that voters are ready to start cutting. One should always bear in mind that basically, all
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December 20, 2024 — John Hinderaker
It could have been much, much worse. The “continuing resolution” that Speaker Mike Johnson initially came up with, I take it as a result of negotiation with Senate Democrats and others, was a 1,500-page monstrosity that didn’t just continue existing spending until the next Congress can meet. Rather, it added many billions in new spending along with a plethora of other offensive provisions. That Frankenstein bill likely would have gone
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September 4, 2024 — John Hinderaker
That is how much the federal government is now paying in interest on the national debt. This chart shows how interest payments have surged, essentially since the beginning of the Biden Administration. It comes from Scott Bessent of Key Square Capital, via Stephen Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity: Stephen Moore notes that evaluating debt requires consideration of the purposes for which it has been incurred. Unfortunately: In recent years, we’ve
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March 11, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Joe Biden unveiled his 2025 budget proposal earlier today. In general, presidents’ budgets are hardly worth discussing. They project revenue and spending over the next ten years, and if you go back and look at them a few years later, they usually bear no relation to reality. And, in this instance, there is zero chance that Congress will pass anything resembling Biden’s budget, which can best be seen as a
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February 12, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In 2011, I think it was, we were alarmed about the metastasizing national debt. We had a great idea: let’s sponsor a competition to induce the creation of art works–videos, songs, paintings, plays, and more–that call attention to the dangers of the national debt. Thus was born the Power Line Prize competition. I made some phone calls and raised, as I recall, $125,000 in prize money. Those were the days!
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December 6, 2023 — John Hinderaker
As government at all levels continues to grow, as our federal debt spirals out of control, and as the constitutional ideal of limited government fades into history, it is good to know that most Americans at least claim to believe in smaller government. Rasmussen reports: By a 14-point margin, most voters still prefer a limited-government agenda. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 52% of Likely
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October 6, 2023 — John Hinderaker
That Joe Biden is long gone in senility is obvious to everyone. True, not everyone will admit it: in the longer version of the CNN interview that Lloyd Billingsley wrote about earlier, Hillary Clinton fulsomely praised Biden’s extraordinary record of accomplishment. I suppose she thought the CNN audience might buy it. It is not necessary to trace Biden’s decline on a daily basis, but today’s episode is worth noting. Biden
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September 6, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I yearn for the days when people cared about the national debt, and when spending and taxes were the principal issues that divided Left from Right. Those issues haven’t receded because our fiscal situation has grown less dire; on the contrary. Currently, the federal government is forecasting $2 trillion a year deficits. With the fiscal year ending on September 30, a budget showdown is in the offing. The Epoch Times
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July 14, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Back in 2010, we sponsored the Power Line Prize competition. Its purpose was to draw attention to the peril posed by our rapidly growing national debt, by stimulating the production of artistic endeavors–videos, songs, poems, paintings, games, you name it–that would bring the issue to a wide audience. We offered a $100,000 grand prize to the winner of the contest. We recruited an all-star panel of judges to select the
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May 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
We don’t have many of the fine details of the debt ceiling deal Kevin McCarthy has struck with (P)resident Joe Biden yet, but my first proposition is that the exact details don’t matter, and my conclusion is that the outcome is a modest but potentially significant win for Republicans. I think McCarthy played a weak hand—the political equivalent of a pair of deuces—extremely well. The political outcome of this deal
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