Fiscal Policy
Not because Andrew’s post is deficient (on the contrary) but because sometimes I’m thick, I hunted out two more definitions of “moral obligation bonds”. tax-exempt bond issued by a municipality or a state financial intermediary and backed by the moral obligation pledge of a state government. (State financial intermediaries are organized by states to pool…
Via this piece against the implementation of a Value-Added Tax (ie; “A VAT is a terrible idea if it triggers bigger government, and a VAT is a bad idea if it merely finances bigger government.”), I came across the below from a decade-old interview with Milton Friedman. It was 2000 and we had a budget…
If you see the words “moral obligation” being repeated in statements and news reports related to the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation’s loan guarantee program with 38 Studios (like this one from Jim Baron of the Pawtucket Times, or this one from Ted Nesi of WPRI-TV (CBS 12)), there is a specific reason why: there…
Randell Hoven (h/t) uses CBO figures and a simple chart to put the lie to the now familiar claims that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and Bush tax cuts caused a $3 Trillion budget deficit. The CBO breaks that cost down over the eight calendar years of 2003-2010. Below is a picture of federal deficits…
I missed this when it was published in May, but this Washington Post article detailing the fiscal differences between the economically and demographically similar D.C. ‘burbs of Fairfax County, VA and Montgomery County, MD is worth a read. Take a snapshot of one year, 2006, when times were flush. In Fairfax, the county executive, an…
The final graph in this series shows the recent history of Rhode Island’s combined state and local spending. Rhode Island’s Municipal Affairs Office provides annual data on total municipal spending with state aid broken out in a separate column, allowing the state-aid contribution to local budgets to be subtracted out, avoiding the double-counting of intra-governmental…
The graphs below show the recent histories of two important subcategories of spending by Rhode Island state government, spending from general revenues… …and spending from Federal Funds (both adjusted for inflation)…
This is the first of several sets of posts intended to be rolled out over the next few weeks (the traditional summer slow season for political writing, though that will hardly be the case in RI this year!), related to issue discussions that will hopefully occur during the 2010 campaign. For starters, here is a…
In response to recent GOP leadership pronouncements, Kevin Williamson asks why anyone would trust the GOP any more than the Democrats in making budget cuts. Now, the 2009 balloon isn’t shown in this chart (and it may go off the chart if it was), but this shows that no matter who is in control, spending…
To rigorously show that reamortizing a pension system costs almost all taxpayers more money, you would begin with the risk-free rate of return on money and the expected return from the pension fund (which are two separate quantities) and then apply an appropriate discounting formula to the appropriate combination of the two. However, going strictly…
