US goverment is already paying high interest rates

Amol Kapila — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:04:26 +0000

Joseph Lavorgna, chief U.S. economist for Deutsche Bank, was on The Kudlow Report yesterday talking about how various US corporations (including, Berkshire Hathaway, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Labs, and Lowe’s Home Improvement) are able to issue two-year debt at lower interest rates than the Federal government right now. This tends to get masked because the Federal Reserve is holding short-term rates low using accommodating monetary policy. However, this is an omen that when the Fed raises rates, much higher interest rates may be in store for Uncle Sam.

Fact from the video: Uncle Sam has issued some $2.6 trillion in debt since the beginning of 2009.

From my previous post, quoting former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin,

By 2020, the federal deficit — the amount the government must borrow to meet its expenses — is projected to be $1.2 trillion, $900 billion of which represents interest on previous debt.

Federal government poisoned citizens during Prohibition

Amol Kapila — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:06:16 +0000

Yikes! Slate published an article recently that has gotten a lot of attention regarding how the Federal government poisoned its own citizens during Prohibition:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Amol Kapila » federal government

US goverment is already paying high interest rates

Federal government poisoned citizens during Prohibition