Downsizing Blog
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) runs an array of rural subsidy programs, which are aside from the farm subsidy programs that it also runs. USDA’s rural programs are grouped within three agencies: the Rural Housing Service (RHS), the Rural Utilities Service (RUS), and the Rural Business-Cooperative Service (RBS). The agencies will spend $6.5 billion in 2016.
These subsidies are the focus of a new essay at DownsizingGovernment.org.
George Will’s oped the other day argued that Congress should hurry up and fund an expansion in the Charleston, South Carolina, seaport. But his piece revealed why the federal government should reduce its intervention in the nation’s infrastructure, not increase it, as Clinton and Trump are proposing.
New data on worker pay in the government and private sector has been released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. There is good news: the pace of federal pay increases slowed during 2015, while the pace of private-sector pay increases picked up.
Export-Import Bank supporters are back at it again. According to a document from the Office of Management and Budget, the administration is reportedly asking lawmakers to include a provision restoring the agency’s full lending authority as part of the continuing resolution that needs to be passed in order to keep the government functioning after September 30th.
“There is now a consensus that the United States should substantially raise its level of infrastructure investment,” writes former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers in the Washington Post. Correction: There is now a consensus among two presidential candidates that the United States should increase infrastructure spending. That’s far from a broad consensus.
According to opinion polls, Americans think that the federal government is too large and powerful. And most people do not trust the federal government to handle problems.
With a big speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Donald Trump has tried to establish his bona fides as a “growth” candidate. There are many desirable features of his new plan, but some of the provisions should be junked, and others can’t be properly assessed given a lack of details.
Donald Trump is a competitive person. He likes to have bigger things than other people. He says that he has really big hands. His tax cut was larger than the other GOP candidates. And now he says that his infrastructure plan will be double the size of Hillary Clinton’s.
Tesla Motors recently announced that its latest model, the Tesla 3, will be released at the end of 2017. Almost 400,000 pre-orders have already been placed for the fan favorite that boasts a celebrity clientele including Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and George Clooney. For $35,000 you, too, can be the proud owner of the environmental solution of the future: a coalpowered automobile, subsidized by Uncle Sam.
The 2015 Medicaid actuarial report came out last week, and with it another entry in the series of upward revisions to how much Medicaid would spend on the adults made newly eligible by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. In 2015, per enrollee costs for the adults made newly eligible by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion were estimated to be 49 percent higher than the previous projection.
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