Paying its contractors’ pension costs means a big bill at the Pentagon Contributing to its contractors’ pension plans is costing the Department...

Cheers! Alcohol in America is big business. We spent $162 billion buying beer, wine and liquor in 2011. That's in line with a generally steady incline...

Older Americans are better off. The median inflation-adjusted income for senior Americans has more than doubled since 1962. Fifty years ago the med...

With gas prices spiking, energy policy is a big election-year talking point. It might surprise you that renewable energy alternatives generate interes...

Penalties start in 2014 for those failing to purchase health insurance under the new Affordable Care Act. The fines will start as low as $95 per year ...

More than half of all federal spending occurs automatically, without any congressional debate or vote. 55.5% of the federal budget, about $2 trillion,...

Slow recovery or not, here's one type of tax many jurisdictions have no fear of raising. State and local cigarette taxes brought in $17.1 billion in 2...

Health care costs for the Department of Defense have nearly tripled in the last decade, from $19 billion in 2001 to $53 billion in 2011. The cost of D...

One reason for our sluggish recovery from the recession is what Americans are doing with their money: paying off old debt. Total American household de...

US children attending charter schools – publicly funded alternative schools run under contract – have more than quadrupled in 10 years. Their numb...

There are more Medicare doctors, but more of them are limiting their access to Medicare patients. The number of doctors billing Medicare rose 32 perce...

The federal government has spent more than $293 billion in the past decade to improve student academic performance, on top of a combined $5.5 trillion...

US-based multinational companies eliminated 1 million jobs from the US workforce between 1999 and 2010 while adding 3.1 million in other countries. I...

One of every three Americans over 65 depends on Social Security checks to stay above the poverty line. Without these benefits, the poverty rate among ...

The Pentagon, whose budget has nearly doubled in the past decade to $645.7 billion, may soon face new sequestration-related budget cuts of nearly $50 ...

Food stamp costs are mushrooming. More than 46 million Americans - about one in seven - rely on food stamps, the equivalent of the entire populations ...

The United States spends $98 billion annually on hospitalization for pregnancy and childbirth, but the US maternal mortality rate has doubled in the p...

US manufacturing output has risen significantly since it hit rock bottom in 2009, with a 20 percent growth over the past three years. But manufacturin...

A worker with a high school diploma is twice as likely to be unemployed as a worker with a college degree. A worker holding a bachelor’s degree earn...

Up to 1.2 million tax preparers make a living navigating the labyrinth US tax code for taxpayers. We have more professional tax preparers in the Unite...

More than one in ten of America's 605,000 bridges were classified as "structurally deficient" in 2011. 67,000 spans were restricted to light vehicles,...

Health care spending per capita in the US increased 36 percent between 2000 and 2010, from $6,177 to $8,402 for every person in the country. During th...

For people who have been out of work for an extended period of time during this economic crisis, the cost has been especially high. In 2011, the perce...

American asphalt keeps getting more crowded. Americans drive nearly twice as many miles as they did in 1980, but miles of public roads have barely inc...

Wednesday's "Fact of the Day" demonstrates how the U.S. is still struggling to make the grade when it comes to getting a return on investment in educa...