Parents don’t lay awake at night trying to figure out how to repay the money they loaned themselves. The government, however, thinks that it makes perfect sense to collect $100 of tax revenue, spend the $100, and then declare that it now owes itself $100. This scheme is not limited to Social Security. Currently, federal intragovernmental debt for all programs totals $4.3 trillion. FULL ARTICLE

BusinessWeek has done us a favor by pointing out that most economists continue to accept the very theories that prevented them from anticipating the financial collapse. However, the magazine errs in concluding that we should now listen to those same economists. It would make more sense to ignore those economists that not only failed to predict but also had a hand in creating the crisis. FULL ARTICLE

There is general agreement that Bush, and the Republican Party in general, is in favor of tax cuts. Let’s consider the validity of this assumption. Do Bush’s policies demonstrate that he’s in favor of reducing taxes? He has engaged in tax shifting and in hiding the burdens of his expansions of the welfare and warfare state, and he has demonstrated that he’s opposed to lowering our tax burdens. Deep into his second term, we have plenty of evidence to show that Bush should be blamed for increasing our tax burdens at a phenomenal pace. Let’s look at the numbers. FULL ARTICLE

What might prices be if the money supply had been fixed since 1959?

According to the CPI, the 2005 price level was 6.7 times higher than it was in 1959. However, in the absence of an expanding money supply, the price level would have been one–fifth as high as it was in 1959. Due to economic growth, the price level in this period would have fallen by 80 percent. Therefore, the expanding money supply over the last 46 years has resulted in a current price level over 34 times higher than it otherwise would have been.

Let’s put this in everyday terms. Suppose these estimates represent the changes in the prices of goods such as hamburgers, cars, and housing. According to these numbers, a hamburger that cost 60¢ in 1959 would have cost $4 in 2005. If the money supply had been fixed, however, that hamburger would only cost 12¢ today. Similarly, a $20,000 car in 2005 would have cost slightly less than $3,000 in 1959. Again, without the monetary effect on prices, that car would only cost $600 today. The price of a $45,000 house in 1959 would have increased to $300,000 in 2005. With a fixed money supply, that house would cost $9,000 today.

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As always, government officials are attempting to underreport the inflation estimates. Although the CPI shows that inflation increased from a monthly rate of .2 percent in June to .3 percent in July, government officials have reported that inflation declined from June to July. They get this result by estimating a “core inflation rate.” FULL ARTICLE

In the 2000 election, Bush II promised to shovel money into all sorts of programs — and he’s kept that promise, writes Mark Brandly. In the first five years of the Bush regime, federal spending increased 45%. Federal government debt increased $553 billion in fiscal year 2005 alone. That’s more than $1.5 billion of additional debt per day and over $1 million of borrowing per minute for every minute of the year. FULL ARTICLE

With gas prices exceeding $2 per gallon, an alarmed American public is prone to believe scary predictions about a future without gas. And so into this hyper-charge environment will step a number of commentators who claim to marshall all the data to show that we must dramatically change our lives. [FULL ARTICLE]