The bottom line

The cost of Washington's budget brawls

Last summer’s fight over the debt ceiling cost taxpayers at least $1.3 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office. The delay in increasing the debt limit forced the Treasury Department to pay extra borrowing costs, including hundreds of overtime hours for federal employees tasked with avoiding default.

The Washington Post

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Weekly Reader comes to an end

Weekly Reader, a staple of American classrooms for generations, will soon disappear. Scholastic, which bought the 110-year-old school newspaper in February, is ending its run. Read by two thirds of U.S. grade-school students at its peak, Weekly Reader now has fewer than 1 million subscribers.

New York Post

Comparing city and country economies

Metropolitan New York’s economy is roughly the size of Spain’s. Greater Los Angeles has a larger economy than Switzerland, while the economy of greater Boston is bigger than that of Greece.

The Wall Street Journal

A flood of business books

Publishers release as many as 11,000 new business books a year, a strategy aimed at flooding the market rather than identifying what consumers want. “I usually tell people not to read business books at all,” says Bob MacDonald, author of books like Cheat to Win and Beat the System. “You’re not going to learn anything.”

Bloomberg Businessweek

One in ten employers to drop health insurance

Nearly 1 in 10 employers say they anticipate dropping health coverage for employees at some point in the next three years, according to a poll by consulting firm Deloitte. Companies cited rising health-care costs as the primary reason, as well as the possibility that penalties associated with the health-care law will be cheaper than paying for coverage.

Los Angeles Times