The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is losing billions of dollars a year. The government company that delivers “snail mail” is losing out to email and other types of electronic communication. First-class mail volume fell from a peak of 104 billion pieces in 2000 to just 64 billion pieces by 2014.

Quite a number of media fact-checkers tripped over Ted Cruz’s claim in last night’s debate that Barack Obama had “dramatically degraded our military,” and Marco Rubio’s related pledge to rebuild a U.S. military that is “being diminished.”

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released new projections showing the debt disaster being manufactured in Washington. Federal borrowing from global capital markets is expected to soar from an outstanding $14 trillion this year to $24 trillion by 2026 under the baseline.

With the rise of electronic communications, the volume of snail mail has fallen precipitously, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been losing billions of dollars. The 600,000-worker USPS is an unjustified legal monopoly that is heavily subsidized. It is a bureaucratic dinosaur that Congress should put on the way to extinction.

The recent “occupation” of government-owned lands in Eastern Oregon by disgruntled ranchers’ motivated Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times (NYT) to produce an edifying essay on January 6th. It was aptly titled “Why the Government Owns So Much Land in the West.” Curiously, the NYT essay fails to mention one of the most significant, recent, and contentious attempts to “dispose” of federal public lands.

If you ask just about anyone at Cato what is the biggest problem we face, they will say big government, particularly the vastly overgrown federal government. Gallup finds that many Americans agree with us.

Presidential candidate Ben Carson released a three-page tax plan yesterday. Based on the limited information the plan includes, it looks like the best GOP plan so far.

The $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill passed by both the House and the Senate earlier today caps off a year of dreadful budgeting by Republicans in Congress.

The bill includes a few reforms, but generally fails to block President Obama’s various power grabs. So while the bill lifts the ban on oil exports, it does not block the administration’s dangerous effort to extend environmental regulations over small pools of water on private property.

The federal government owns more than one quarter of the land in the nation, about 640 million acres. The holdings are concentrated in the West, where it owns about half of the 11 westernmost states.

The federal government owns more than one quarter of the land in the nation, about 640 million acres. The holdings are concentrated in the West, where it owns about half of the 11 westernmost states.