Regardless of your political party or ideological leanings, the notion of the federal government spending $2 trillion, adding to the national debt of nearly $11 trillion already, should make you stop and consider the staggering size of our national tab.

If the irony of using debt-based spending to solve a problem caused by debt-based spending has escaped you, perhaps these fun facts will put things into perspective:

If you spent $1 every second, you’d have to keep spending for 412,000 years to get…

Read the full story

I have an expansion of my original “deregulatory bailout” plan for Detroit in The Detroit News today. I’m also quoted in their editorial on how energy policy needs to catch up with the auto industry’s - and, it seems, consumers’ (if polls are to be believed) - enthusiasm for electric cars. The Detroit News, by the way, remains the best place to get news on the industry’s design plans - see the box to the right of the editorial, for instance.

…

Read the full story

Here’s some insightful comments from Thomas Haynes, a friend of CEI’s:

There’s a very interesting debate that could be conducted on who’s the madam, who’s the john and who’s the pimp in the relationships between the executive branch, the legislative branch and the financial services industry, but only so much of that debate can take place on Internet.

I did, however, want to note to those involved in the debate over TARP that my experience as a borrrower, plus some candid…

Read the full story

ACORN is speaking against it—maybe it will actually help! This past summer Congress passed “Hope for Homeowners” which took effect Monday. Distressed borrowers can now refinance into 30-year fixed mortgages with the backing of FHA. According to the Boston Globe,

To be eligible, the borrower’s home must be the primary residence; the mortgage must have originated on or before Jan. 1, 2008; and as of March 2008, an applicant’s mortgage payment must account for more than 31 percent of gross monthly income….The…

Read the full story

There are all sorts of people today who normally talk about free markets but who have got themselves into a tizzy over the failed bailout. We need to get one thing straight - the bailout was the wrong answer to the wrong question. To begin with, the plan was merely postponing the inevitable, as a letter in the Wall Street Journal pointed out this morning:

The lesson of past financial inflection points is that we must let the markets reallocate capital from…

Read the full story