Last year, U.S. defense spending registered $581 billion. The next closest spender on the military was China … at $129 billion. Third on the list was Saudi Arabia at $81 million. Russia spent $70 billion on defense in 2014, one-eighth of the U.S. expenditures.   read more

The fiscal picture for state governments is looking rosier these days, thanks to state budgets having more revenues than expenditures. And the increase in state revenues is largely because state pension funds are booming in the stock market. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that total state government revenues jumped 16.3% from 2012 to 2013, when their total value rose from $1.9 trillion $2.2 trillion.   read more

Most of that money went to defeat citizen initiatives and it was well-spent—the corporations won 96% of the time Health insurance giant Anthem gave $13 million, all but a small amount of it to fight California’s Proposition 45, which would have required state approval to raise insurance rates. The measure lost. Monsanto spent $10.7 million in Oregon and Colorado to defeat measures that would have required genetically modified food to be labeled as such. Both initiatives were defeated.   read more

Former Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-North Carolina) decided to leave the House of Representatives last year after 18 years in office, but before he left he got a special retirement gift from a lobbyist: a nearly $50,000 trip to Australia for McIntyre and his wife Dee.   read more

The Department of Energy announced last week that it would cease support for the FutureGen project, a power plant that was supposed to trap and store underground the carbon dioxide it produced, which was initiated by the George W. Bush administration and revived under President Barack Obama. The Illinois plant was to have received about $1.1 billion in stimulus money, but “only” about $200 million was spent.   read more

Coal production has fallen below 1 billion tons for the first time since 1993, according to a federal report. Production in 2013 fell to 984.8 million tons, a 3.1% decline from 2012, when production was 1.02 billion tons, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The EIA report says production was down in both the Appalachian and Western regions, but up in the interior. West Virginia, the nation’s biggest coal producer, saw its production go down by about 4.5 million tons.   read more

Executives of the online real estate database Zillow say having a Starbucks within close proximity to houses can inflate their value. Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff and chief economist Stan Humphries found that homes within a quarter mile of a Starbucks have appreciated 96%, going from $137,000 to $269,000, from the late 1990s to now. Those homes not near a Starbucks appreciated only 65%, from $102,000 to $168,000.   read more

The median income of millennials is about $2,000 less than it was for their baby boomer parents in 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The agency also reported that more millennials are living in poverty and fewer are employed today than when boomers were becoming upwardly mobile yuppies. Michigan, Indiana and Ohio have the highest percentage of young people living in poverty, while highest rates of millennials living with their parents are in California, Florida and Nevada.   read more

Children of the wealthiest Americans were more than eight times more likely in 2013 to receive a bachelor’s degree than the poorest, according to the Pell Institute. Those in the upper strata saw 77% graduate from college, while only 9% accomplished the same feat at the bottom rung. The gap in college education has widened considerably since 1970, when 40% of students from high-income families earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to 6% of students from low-income families.   read more

Volpicelli, now an adult, sued the IRS over $13,000 that the agency took from him at age 10 to cover a tax liability owed by his late father. They took the funds wrongly believing they belonged to the father. Volpicelli claimed he didn’t file his lawsuit until after he had turned 18, because he didn’t learn of the wrongful levy until then. The IRS contended that the lawsuit should be thrown out because the federal statute of limitations is nine months for challenging IRS’ tax levies.   read more

Eighty percent of those in this country could live for a month or less on the money available to them from checking and savings accounts and cash at home, according to research by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Even when counting the money that’s hard to access, such as that in 401(k) retirement accounts or getting more credit, the average household could replace only four months’ worth of income.   read more

If manufacturing is what’s boosting the recovery, the economy is hanging by the thin thread of computers and electronic components. That segment of the economy was responsible for 110% of all manufacturing growth between 2000 and 2009, according to a study (pdf) from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. That means that the rest of the manufacturing sector was actually performing worse in 2009 than it had been at the start of the decade.   read more

A Reuters examination of federal budget cuts found funding reductions were highest in “red” states like Texas and Mississippi, where grant funding saw a 40% reduction. Programs that lost funding ranged from preschool to anti-drug initiatives. In purple states like North Carolina and Ohio, where Obama’s support was more evenly split with the Republican opposition, the funding cuts were smaller—a 27% drop. Meanwhile, Obama-friendly blue states like California only saw a 22.5% drop.   read more

At $889 million, a figure leaked this week at the Kochs’ annual winter donor retreat near Palm Springs, the brothers’ secretive fundraising network goal would dwarf the $657 million spent by the entire Republican Party during the 2012 election. The Koch budget might even match the total spending by both Republicans and Democrats in next year’s contests. And all the while, the Kochs will largely avoid disclosing the sources of their campaign operation.   read more

The survey revealed the number of people who said they were struggling to pay their medical bills went down from about 75 million people in 2012 to 64 million people last year. The survey also showed that due to the implementation of Obamacare, the number of uninsured working-age adults in the U.S. declined from 37 million in 2010 to 29 million by the second half of last year. The rise in people with health insurance also meant fewer people skipped going to the doctor in 2014.   read more

Candidates’ backers set up nonprofit organizations ostensibly as “social welfare organizations” that don’t have politics as their primary purpose. Instead, they run “issue ads,” that coincidentally mention either the candidate they’re backing or their opponent. Sen. Mitch McConnell used this technique to great effect in his recent defeat of Alison Lundergan Grimes.   read more