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The White House on Sunday unveiled a $4.8 trillion budget proposal that would slash spending dramatically on foreign aid and social safety nets, while including $2 billion for a southern border wall and substantially boosting funding to NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security.

Some critical thinking here, the author dissects "inflation" then concludes we need crypto currency

... For years Congress has had the Internal Revenue Service adjust tax brackets and other provisions for inflation. (Revisions for 2020 are in the accompanying tables, and now is a good time to review them.) But it’s equally important to remember key tax numbers that aren’t changing for 2020—because Congress hasn’t indexed them for inflation. And while inflation has been low recently, it hasn’t gone away. As a result, millions of Americans are paying more to Uncle Sam because there’s no indexing for a variety of tax provisions, including homeowner benefits, tax thresholds on Social Security and investment benchmarks among...

President Trump on Friday signed two spending packages totaling $1.4 trillion, averting a government shutdown at midnight. The bills included all 12 annual appropriations bills for the 2020 fiscal year that started Oct. 1. They also included a slew of tax cuts, extending expiring and expired tax breaks and eliminating other taxes that amount to an additional $426 billion in lost revenue, bringing the total cost of the bill to more than $1.8 trillion. The government spent the first quarter of the fiscal year operating on stopgap funding that was set to expire on Friday. Trump reportedly signed the bill...

In my days before I worked for the Mises Institute, I had a colleague who knew I associated with Austrian-School economists. In the wake of the bailouts and quantitative easing that followed the 2008 financial crisis, he'd sometimes crack "where's all that inflation you Austrians keep talking about?" But then, in the very same conversation, he'd remark with dismay on how much housing-price increases had outpaced household income in the region. He didn't need an answer from me. He'd found some of "that inflation" all on his own. Price Changes Are Not Homogeneous These exchanges illustrated some of the blind...

[Volcker's] obituaries were disappointing for them almost uniformly promoting the fiction of Volcker as inflation slayer. Such a view doesn’t square with simple economic history. Indeed, explicit in the accepted wisdom that Volcker was “inflation’s worst enemy” (Hoover Institution’s John Taylor) is that economic growth causes inflation. As Phillips Curve devotee Neil Irwin put it in the New York Times, Volcker allegedly beat inflation “at the cost of what would become the worst recession in the seven decades between the Great Depression and the global financial crisis.” In the analysis of seemingly everyone, job loss and greatly reduced prosperity were...

ThereÂ’s a sense that the bureaucrats who command the federal leviathan work for themselves, not for the country at large. That wasnÂ’t true of Paul Volcker. Since his death last week, Paul Volcker has been heavily eulogized. ThatÂ’s not the purpose here. In these trying times, AmericansÂ’ faith in our nationÂ’s institutions is at historic lows. Once-vaunted organizations like the FBI now struggle to command a majority of AmericansÂ’ support.The causes for this are legion. But there is a general sense that the vast federal appendages created in the last 100 years have little connection to the interests of...

Watchdog blames ‘administrative bloat’As the issue of college affordability continues to be a prominent talking point on the campaign trail ahead of the 2020 presidential election, a new study shows that the cost of a college education is still increasing at a rate that far outpaces inflation.The study, put out by the financial technology company Self, found that on average, college costs have risen $2,835 since 2015, increasing 112 percent more than the rate of inflation during the same period.“While it is somewhat understandable for universities to increase costs in line with inflation, especially when you consider the number of...

Fed Admits Failure of ‘Plan A’ to Control Money Market Rates, Shifts Back to Repos (which was ‘Plan A’ till 2008) The hullabaloo in the repo market torpedoed the function of Interest on Excess Reserves and forced the Fed to go back to the future. With its announcement this morning, the New York Fed confirmed that the Fed’s Plan A of manipulating the federal funds rate into its target range – now between 1.75% and 2.0% — has miserably failed, and that it will switch to Plan B to control short-term interest rates. But this Plan B used to...

President Donald Trump on Wednesday harshly rebuked the Federal Reserve, accusing the central bank and Fed Chair Jerome Powell of having “no guts” by not meting out a more aggressive interest rate cut as the global economy slows. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday cut interest rates again by 25 basis points to a new target range of 1.75% to 2%, and telegraphed a strong likelihood of one more rate cut by the end of the year. However, some on Wall Street anticipated a more aggressive easing of 50 basis points, particularly with financial markets conditions tightening. Indeed, markets sank to...

Median income and earnings rise in 2018, while poverty rates drop, Census data shows The median household income in the United States increased less than a percent from 2017 to 2018, while the median earnings of workers in the United States rose 3.4%.The data, released by the Census Bureau Tuesday, also shows that the official poverty rate in the United States dropped to 11.8%, a 0.5 percentage point decrease from 2017.Here’s a look at the new data:Household income The [median household income] in the United States rose, from $62,626 in 2017 to $63,179 in 2018 adjusted for inflation. The Census...

GREAT WALL OF CHINA By 220AD, the Later Eastern Han Dynasty had extended sections of the Great Wall of China along its Mongolian border. This resulted in the Northern Huns attacking west instead of east. This caused a domino effect of displaced tribes migrating west across Central Asia, and overrunning the Western Roman Empire. OPEN BORDERS Illegal immigrants poured across the Roman borders: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Alemanni, Thuringians, Rugians, Jutes, Picts, Burgundians, Lombards, Alans, Vandals, as well as African Berbers and Arab raiders. Will and Ariel Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization (Vol. 3-Caesar and Christ, Simon...

<p>The Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month released its July jobs numbers confirming that we remain in the midst of the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. The expansion is clearly paying off for Americans of all walks of life.</p> <p>Just look at the mounting evidence.</p>

So, when will we hear someone running for election or re-election start talking about our huge debit and ways to reduce it? Now that we have the Democrat debates underway it’s time to turn our attention to carefully listen to what the potential candidates have to say. Are they talking about issues that are really important to the nation? Or, are they talking about proposed plans and schemes that will get them elected? Out here in the real world much of what we hear is a bit confusing and is difficult to understand.

Much has been written about the need for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, even beyond the July cut, the first one in eleven years. Indeed, the latest escalation of trade tensions with China and its concomitant currency depreciation might make further cuts more compelling. Or not. The principal purpose of a rate cut is to provide liquidity to foster greater consumption and business investment that stimulate economic growth in the face of sustained opposition forces. But rate cuts without sufficient justification, such as those based on transitory developments, reaction to presidential jawboning, miming other central banks, or inadequate...

With the “Fight for $15 External link ” making headlines, opinions abound about whether raising the federal minimum wage will have a positive or negative effect on unemployment rates. Advocates of an increase cite the impossible task of making ends meet on today’s paltry sum of $7.25 an hour and say an increase would have little effect on the overall economy. Those against such a move predict that doing so would cause employers to lay off more and hire less—raising unemployment rates as a result. As is often the case with such emotionally charged issues, especially in an election year,...

The Dow slid more than 400 points Wednesday after the bond market, for the first time in over a decade, flashed a warning signal that has an eerily accurate track record for predicting recessions.

Morgan Stanley analysts said on Monday that they now expect the U.S. Federal Reserve to cut rates in September and then again in October. … snip … The bank joins a number of investors betting that the Fed’s first rate cut since 2008, late last month, will be the first of several moves to lower borrowing costs. Goldman Sachs said earlier this month it sees a strong chance of rate cuts in both September and October.

The wholesale cost of U.S. goods and services rose modestly in July, but inflation more broadly appeared dead in the water and showed little sign it’s about to speed up. The producer price index increased 0.2% last month, matching the forecast of economists polled by ... Yet the pace of wholesale inflation over the past year was flat 1.7%. And more closely followed measure that strips out volatile food, energy and trade-margin costs fell for the first time in almost four years. The so-called core PPI dipped 0.1%. Wholesale prices rose 0.4% for goods, largely reflecting an increase in gasoline...

Venezuela’s crisis has been marked by corruption, hyperinflation, one of the world’s highest homicide rates, food and medicine shortages and the largest exodus “in the recent history of Latin America,” according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. Its chances to recover may start with President Nicolas Maduro stepping down or being forcibly removed — either by the opposition or through foreign military intervention. But that would just be the first step to get the ruined economy on the road to recovery. A major course of economic shock therapy will be required.