This Computer Only Costs $9

This Computer Only Costs $9

Flickr/Mark Ramsay
By Christina Medici Scolaro, CNBC

It's smaller than a credit card yet powerful enough to act like a super cheap PC. How cheap? It costs less than $10.

C.H.I.P. is a micro-computer that allows you to surf the Web, check email over Wi-Fi and play games with a Bluetooth controller. The minicomputer—basically a chip that hooks up to an external monitor—has a 1 GHz processor, 4GBs of storage and 512MB of RAM, according to its Kickstarter page.

The Next Thing Co., a company based in Oakland, Calif., began a Kickstarter campaign for the C.H.I.P. computer in May with a funding goal of $50,000.

Related: 10 Biggest Tech Flops of the Century

It has since blown past that goal, and by a large factor. The campaign has brought in just under $690,000 and counting as of Monday morning. The fundraising campaign ends June 6.

The small computer is designed for a mass audience, including students, teachers, grandparents, children, artists, makers, hackers and inventors, according to its Kickstarter page.

Raspberry Pi is another full-functioning, no-frills computer. Like C.H.I.P., the Raspberry Pi is basically a computer chip that plugs into a computer monitor or TV. It costs $35 and uses a standard keyboard and mouse.

Raspberry Pi teaches users how to program in languages like Scratch and Python.

This article originally appeared on CNBC.
Read more from CNBC: 

Reward checking accounts offer savers up to 5% APY
Has Krugman been proved wrong on austerity? 
How the 2014 CNBC Disruptors cashed in 

Chart of the Day: Boosting Corporate Tax Revenues

GraphicStock
By The Fiscal Times Staff

The leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have all proposed increasing taxes on corporations, including raising income tax rates to levels ranging from 25% to 35%, up from the current 21% imposed by the Republican tax cuts in 2017. With Bernie Sanders leading the way at $3.9 trillion, here’s how much revenue the higher proposed corporate taxes, along with additional proposed surtaxes and reduced tax breaks, would generate over a decade, according to calculations by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, highlighted Wednesday by Bloomberg News.

Chart of the Day: Discretionary Spending Droops

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The federal government’s total non-defense discretionary spending – which covers everything from education and national parks to veterans’ medical care and low-income housing assistance – equals 3.2% of GDP in 2020, near historic lows going back to 1962, according to an analysis this week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Chart of the Week: Trump Adds $4.7 Trillion in Debt

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated this week that President Trump has now signed legislation that will add a total of $4.7 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2029. Tax cuts and spending increases account for similar portions of the projected increase, though if the individual tax cuts in the 2017 Republican overhaul are extended beyond their current expiration date at the end of 2025, they would add another $1 trillion in debt through 2029.

Chart of the Day: The Long Decline in Interest Rates

Wall Street slips, Dow posts biggest weekly loss of 2013
Reuters
By The Fiscal Times Staff

Are interest rates destined to move higher, increasing the cost of private and public debt? While many experts believe that higher rates are all but inevitable, historian Paul Schmelzing argues that today’s low-interest environment is consistent with a long-term trend stretching back 600 years.

The chart “shows a clear historical downtrend, with rates falling about 1% every 60 years to near zero today,” says Bloomberg’s Aaron Brown. “Rates do tend to revert to a mean, but that mean seems to be declining.”

Chart of the Day: Drug Price Plans Compared

By The Fiscal Times Staff

Lawmakers are considering three separate bills that are intended to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Here’s an overview of the proposals, from a series of charts produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation this week. An interesting detail highlighted in another chart: 88% of voters – including 92% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans – want to give the government the power to negotiate prices with drug companies.