News
FOX Business | 5 Avoidable Student Loan Mistakes
Here are five expensive mistakes parents and students make that lead them into too much student loan debt... and how to steer away from the more expensive path.
Daily Signal | This State Overpaid on Food Stamps, Costing Taxpayers Millions.
Overall,Kansas incorrectly paid out 3.99 percent of the roughly $474 million distributed during fiscal 2013. The state overpaid on 3.24 percent ($15.4 million) and underpaid on .75 percent ($3.5 million) of all SNAP disbursements.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Washington Times | How Congress lost control of government spending
The so-called “entitlements,” such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and Obamacare, take a larger and larger portion of the total federal budget each year. Former U.S. Treasury economist Eugene Steuerle, now at the Urban Institute, has created a Fiscal Democracy Index, which measures “the extent to which past and future projected revenues are already claimed by the permanent programs that are now in place.” In 1965, these programs claimed about 35 percent of the federal budget; now they claim about 85 percent of the budget, and they will soon claim more than 100 percent of total tax revenue.
CBO | The 2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook
Between 2009 and 2012, the federal government recorded the largest budget deficits relative to the size of the economy since 1946, causing its debt to soar. The total amount of federal debt held by the public is now equivalent to about 74 percent of the economy’s annual output, or gross domestic product (GDP)—a higher percentage than at any point in U.S. history except a brief period around World War II and almost twice the percentage at the end of 2008.
