Members from both the treasury and opposition benches demanded an increase in the budget allocations for the health and education sectors, as the National Assembly held its second day of debate on the federal budget for the Fiscal Year 2008-09 on Sunday. They said that subsidies on oil and electricity should continue to control price [...]

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) has been boasting his state’s health insurance reform initiative has reduced the number of uninsured by half, with nearly 300,000 more people added to the state’s health insurance rolls. What he doesn’t mention is that four out of five of them are relying heavily on taxpayer subsidies for their health [...]

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs delivered the first major makeover of the iPhone, unveiling a faster, cheaper handset that may help him convince business users to switch over from the BlackBerry.
Apple sank 2.2 percent in Nasdaq trading after saying carriers won’t have to give the company a cut of the lucrative monthly service [...]

The farm bill provides far more money for hungry people than it does for farmers. Nearly 80 percent of the cost of the farm bill is for food programs, including $10.2 billion for domestic food assistance programs and $7.8 billion for food stamps. There’s also $1 billion for a program to provide healthy snacks of [...]

But is it too good to be true? Everything in life has a cost, even if it’s not immediately obvious. KiwiSaver may be lucrative for many people but that doesn’t mean it’s good for New Zealand as a whole.
The total cost of KiwiSaver’s subsidies will soon reach $2 billion a year, and that is probably [...]

Everyone wins from this arrangement, say its supporters. Homeowners — some victims of deceptive lending practices — stay in their houses. Neighborhoods don’t suffer the potential blight of numerous foreclosures. Housing prices don’t go into a free fall, depressed by an avalanche of foreclosures. Although lenders take a loss, the losses are [...]