Tag: Boomergeddon
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Boomergeddon Countdown: Ten Years… Nine…
by James A. Bacon The last time the United States had a serious conversation about deficit spending and the accumulating national debt was in 2010 with the publication of the Simpson-Bowles study. (That’s about the same time I wrote Boomergeddon, predicting that the United States had 20 to 30 years before the fiscal wheels fell…
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Latest Debt and Deficit Projections Warrant a Full-Scale Freakout
by James A. Bacon The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) indicate that, given continuation of current levels of taxation and programmatic spending, the U.S. budget deficit will be running at $2.3 trillion a year by 2033, driven in large part by a $1 trillion-a-year increase in interest payments on the national debt…
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Love that Budget Surplus! Use It to Bullet-Proof State Finances.
by James A. Bacon There’s good news for Virginia on the fiscal front. We need to make the most of it. The Old Dominion closed fiscal 2022 with a $1.94 billion General Fund revenue surplus, Governor Glenn Youngkin announced yesterday. Total revenue rose 16.3% from the previous fiscal year. “Fiscal 2022 was an extraordinary year…
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The Monetary Rape of Middle-Class Retirees
by James A. Bacon This past year saw one of the greatest redistributions of wealth in U.S. history. People are upset by the 8.5% increase in inflation, but they’re not nearly as upset as they should be. Wage earners, especially lower-income wage earners, have every right to be irate. Their hourly pay has increased, but…
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Boomergeddon Watch: We’re Right on Track
by James A. Bacon The U.S. national debt has passed a symbolically important milestone of $30 trillion. That’s up from the $13-$14 trillion when I wrote my book, “Boomergeddon,” in 2010 warning that the U.S. government was heading to functional insolvency by the late 2020’s or early 2030’s. I argued that higher deficits and debt…
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Don’t Let “Scarring” Hinder Economic Recovery
by James A. Bacon Tom Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, is optimistic overall about the nation’s economic recovery. The housing market is strong. Job creation has resumed. Disposable incomes are up. And families are saving more and paying down their credit cards. But he worries about “scarring” — a term that…
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Signs of the Bubble Economy…
From Virginia Business magazine: Charlottesville-based Blue Ridge Bank has made it possible for customers to purchase and redeem bitcoin at its ATMs — the first commercial bank in the country to do so. Blue Ridge Bank cardholders can purchase and redeem the virtual currency at 19 locations across the state. A year ago, bitcoins were worth…
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Welcome to the New Year, Same as the Old Year
by James A. Bacon Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, my wife and friends and I tossed confetti, tooted our noisemakers and welcomed in a new year. Twenty twenty, we all agreed, couldn’t possibly be worse than 2019. It didn’t take long to disabuse us of that notion. First came the coronavirus. Then the George…
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Bad Student Loan Debt: $435 Billion and Counting
by James A. Bacon “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen said many years ago. With the passage of time and inflation, we might need to update the quote to “a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there…” But even by the debased standards of…
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Boomergeddon vs Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
by DJ Rippert Saving America’s bacon. In 2010 Jim Bacon, blogrunner of this site, wrote a book titled Boomergeddon. The sub-title of the book is, “How Runaway Deficits and the Age Wave Will Bankrupt the Federal Government and Devastate Retirement for Baby Boomers Unless We Act Now.” The book is well written and contains considerable…
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(Almost) Free Money
By James C. Sherlock Steve Haner’s superb column on the state budget turned attention to federal aid to state and local governments. It is worthwhile to review where the feds get that money. James T. Agresti, CEO of Just Facts (chart above), has written recently hat U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is four times the historical average…
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Boomergeddon Update: Back on Track to Self-Destruction!
by James A. Bacon It’s been ten years since I published my book, “Boomergeddon,” in which I advanced the argument that the fiscal/monetary system of the United States would collapse into chaos by the late 2020s or so. The nation has continued down the path to perdition, but not at the rate I had expected.…
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Layne Cautions Again about Excess Debt and Risk
The good news in Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne’s presentation to the House Appropriations Committee this morning is that General Fund revenues, after a below-forecast start to the fiscal year, surged 27.4% in April. On a year-to-date basis, total revenues are 6.2% ahead of last year, beating the 5.9% forecast for Fiscal 2019. The bad…
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Spending Increases, Road Quality Decreases
A new study by Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense documents the magnitude of the “Growth Ponzi scheme” in the U.S. road transportation system. Between 2009 and 2017, the 50 states collectively added more than 223,000 lane miles to their road networks. At an average cost of $24,000 per lane mile to keep…
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Virginia, Antifragility, and the Next Recession
In the previous post I argued that there are large pockets of hidden risk in the U.S. and global economies that could trigger a devastating economic downturn. I’m not predicting that a recession is imminent — I do not profess to see the future — but I would suggest that only fools would pretend that…