Credit: triple pundit

American businesses are still trying to figure out how President Donald Trump’s proposed budget could affect their operations. And while it seems increasingly unlikely that Congress will pass Trump’s budget ‘wish list’ as is, the administration’s $1.1 trillion package — which would beef up defense programs, slash funding for other agencies and demand “significant reorganization” of key governmental services — could have dramatic impact on American small businesses.

The Labor Department, which enforces occupational safety and fair employment laws (as well as provides federal funding for unemployment benefits), would lose just over 20 percent of its staff and operational funding. Services like the Senior Community Service Employment Program and the Office of Disability Employment Policy, which facilitate employment opportunities and protections for workers, would be eliminated.

And the Department of Agriculture, whose programs play an indispensable role in ensuring that the towns and rural counties that make up America’s fertile breadbasket have adequate funding infrastructure, would see almost a third of its budget stripped. Key programs that connect mortgage lenders and potential homebuyers would also be cut. […]

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Credit: The Gallup Organization

Gallup routinely asks Americans about the importance of religion in their everyday lives, and how often they attend religious services. We have not yet had an opportunity to ask these questions directly to President Donald Trump himself. And we have not asked Americans directly about Trump’s religion. But I suspect that most Americans don’t associate Trump with personal religiousness in the way that they did, for example, President Jimmy Carter.

Trump himself seems quite willing to talk about his religious background. In his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last month, Trump said, “I was blessed to be raised in a churched home. My mother and father taught me that to whom much is given, much is expected. I was sworn in on the very Bible from which my mother would teach us as young children, and that faith lives on in my heart every single day.”

Trump was raised a Presbyterian in Jamaica, Queens. While growing up, he and his family gravitated toward the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, with its famous […]

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The federal government collects taxes to finance various public services. As policymakers and citizens weigh key decisions about revenues and expenditures, it is instructive to examine what the government does with the money it collects.

In fiscal year 2015, the federal government spent $3.7 trillion, amounting to 21 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Of that $3.7 trillion, over $3.2 trillion was financed by federal revenues. The remaining amount ($438 billion) was financed by borrowing.  As the chart below shows, three major areas of spending each make up about one-fifth of the budget:

• Social Security: Last year, 24 percent of the budget, or $888 billion, paid for Social Security, which provided monthly retirement benefits averaging $1,342 to 40 million retired workers in December 2015. Social Security also provided benefits to 2.3 million spouses and children of retired workers, 6.1 million surviving children and spouses of deceased workers, and 10.8 million disabled workers and their eligible dependents in December 2015.
• Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and marketplace subsidies: Four health insurance programs — Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable […]
  
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A West Virginia coal mine
Credit: West Virginia Public Broadcasting

The notion of “externalities” has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.

While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I’ve always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics — it makes them sound Serious — but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.

To […]

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