Today's inside look focuses on the wins coming from the Truth in Accounting partnership with the University of Denver, which has opened up new opportunities and introduced our name and work to a wider audience. But these wins aren't for us. They are for you! And we can only rack up more wins with financial support. DU doesn't fund us. We fund the project. 
 

"The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was not a surprise to regulators or investors who took the time to check the bank’s financial statements and footnotes. By March of 2021, unrealized debt securities losses for the bank had already begun to climb, reaching ($1,343) million by year-end December 2021, and leaping to ($15,160) million a year later, all the while the bank’s stockholders’ equity remained flat."

"Sobering Statistics 

The study, called Financial State of the Cities 2023, was done by Truth in Accounting. It has some difficult truths: 50 out of 75 cities could not pay their bills; the combined debt for all 75 cities is $267 billion. Moreover, elected officials didn’t include the cost of government in this figure, instead pushing it onto future taxpayers."

"WASHINGTON, May 18 (Reuters) - The Pentagon overestimated the value of the ammunition, missiles and other equipment it sent to Ukraine by around $3 billion, a Senate aide and a defense official said on Thursday, an error that may lead the way for more weapons being sent to Kyiv for its defense against Russian forces."

"A Fifth Circuit panel ruled Wednesday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s unusual funding structure is unconstitutional, in a lawsuit brought by a small-dollar (payday) lending group. CEI legal and policy experts have long objected to the bureau’s unaccountability, starting with its unchecked, direct funding from the Federal Reserve. CEI previously filed a lawsuit on this subject in the D.C. Circuit in National Bank of Big Spring v. Mnuchin."

"U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis saw states as “laboratories of democracy” conducting “experiments” in public policy. Today, more than eight decades after Brandeis coined the phrase, state experimentation with tax policy makes it abundantly clear that tax policy has a direct impact on economic growth. As shown on page 27, each of the eleven states that enacted an income tax since 1960 now has a smaller share of state GDP relative to the other 39 states and each one also has a smaller share of state and local tax revenue. That is a remarkable statistic; those eleven states enacted a new source of tax revenue and lost revenue share to other states! On the contrary, states with low tax burdens and states without an income tax consistently outshine their higher-burden peers on the key, tangible economic measures like growth in private-sector jobs, GDP, and wages. What’s more, citizens are taking notice and “voting with their feet” by flock- ing to low-burden states from higher-burden counterparts. Skeptics try to dismiss this definitive migratory trend by cherry-picking success stories like Texas and Florida and characterizing them as ‘’happy accidents” of favorable geography, climate, and/or resource abundance."

"The Biden administration’s decision to recruit nearly 90,000 new IRS auditors could have a chilling effect on small businesses and economic growth, permanently impeding our nation’s ability to recover from its current economic malaise.

As part of the misleadingly titled “Inflation Reduction Act,” President Biden and his allies secured roughly $80 billion in new IRS funding to hire 87,000 auditors. This is bad news for the American economy."

"The student loans owed to the Federal government – over $1.6 trillion dollars and growing – are shown as assets on the government’s books.

The Government Accounting Office (GAO) did a deep dive into the recent actual Direct Loan repayment history at the request of Congress persons.

The purpose of the report,  released last month, is stated here:

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-105365

 “This report examines how and why Education’s Direct Loan cost estimates have changed over time. A forthcoming report will examine government and private sector estimation methods and Education’s approach to estimating Direct Loan costs.” 

Guess what? – the government has consistently over-estimated how much student loan debt would be repaid."

"The recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will reduce budget deficits by roughly $275 billion while pushing fiscal policy in the right direction to assist the Federal Reserve in its fight against inflation. However, a possible announcement from the White House to offer across-the-board student debt cancellation could undermine the bill’s disinflationary gains and deficit reduction."

"Social Security and Medicare are two of the government’s mandatory spending programs — and popular ones at that — but one senator has suggested changing that label, making them vulnerable to annual budget cuts every year."