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When P.A. (Palestinian Authority) leader Mahmoud Abbas met with President Obama in the White House Wednesday he received a commitment that the U.S. will be sending the P.A. $400 million to build schools, roads, and homes in Gaza, as well as the West Bank. When asked how the U.S. will assure that the money will be used for the proposed purposes, Obama said that his team will clarify the conditions of the flow of money. This Wednesday in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama defended his administration’s economic policies telling the audience at Carnegie Mellon University: “Now, I’ve never believed that government has all the answers. Government cannot and should not replace businesses as the true engine of growth and job creation.” But that is exactly what the President’s big government policies are doing. Last week, USA Today reported that in the first quarter of 2010, thanks to President Obama’s failed $862 economic stimulus, paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history while government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high. Continue reading… While Congress spent the last year debating how to provide health insurance for the uninsured, a little-known provision slipped into the heath care law that could cost some Americans upwards of $2,000 a year. The Class Act, otherwise known as the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act, is the federal government’s first long-term care insurance program. Continue reading… health care plan would reduce the deficit and put us on a path towards fiscal responsibility? Remember how Congress kept gaming the system to come up with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score that could justify those claims? Well, now that Obamacare has become (hopefully only temporarily) the law of the land, the CBO is singing a slightly different tune. Last Friday CBO Director Doug Elmendorf wrote on his blog: Continue reading… America’s financial situation is unsustainable. In 2009, the federal government spent $3.5 trillion but collected only $2.1 trillion in revenue, resulting in a $1.4 trillion deficit, up from $458 billion in 2008. What’s more, with the impending entitlement crisis requiring more future borrowing, the national debt could grow faster than the economy. In 2020, if current trends continue, the country will owe more than $20 trillion, or 85 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), says Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Why do deficits matter, asks de Rugy? Continue reading… America Becomes a Two-Class Society Income tax day, April 15, 2010, now divides Americans into two almost equal classes: those who pay for the services provided by government and those who don’t. The percentage of Americans who will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009 has risen to 47%. That isn’t the worst of it. The bottom 40% not only pay no income tax, but the government sends them cash or benefits financed by the taxes dutifully paid by those who do pay income tax. The outright cash handouts include the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which can amount to as much as $5,657 a year to low-income families. Other financial benefits can include child tax credits, welfare, food stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, Children), housing subsidies, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, S-CHIP, and other programs. This is both a massive transfer of wealth and a soak-the-rich racket. The top 10% pay 73% of the income taxes collected by the federal government. The cost of Obamacare will skyrocket our income tax rate within 30 years. American education needs to be fixed, but national standards and testing are not the way to do it. The problems that need fixing are too deeply ingrained in the power and incentive structure of the public education system, and the renewed focus on national standards threatens to distract from the fundamental issues. Besides, federal control over education has been growing since the 1960s as both standards and achievement have deteriorated. Heritage Foundation education policy experts Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall explain why centralized standard-setting will likely result in the standardization of mediocrity, not excellence. Continue reading… Millions of American workers could discover that they no longer have employer provided health insurance as ObamaCare is phased in. That’s because employers are quickly discovering that it may be cheaper to pay fines to the government than to insure workers, says John C. Goodman, President, CEO and the Kellye Wright Fellow of the National Center for Policy Analysis. AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere and Verizon have all made internal calculations, according the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to determine how much could be saved by a) dropping their employer-provided insurance, b) paying a fine of $2,000 per employee, and c) leaving their employees with the option of buying highly-subsidized insurance in the newly created health insurance exchange. Continue reading… By declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to it by Congress. It has done this in a proceeding known as the “endangerment finding,” say George Allen, a former U.S. senator and governor from Virginia, and Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The EPA’s endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade, burdening America with a regulatory regime more costly than any climate bill Congress has rejected or declined to pass, say Allen and Lewis: Continue reading… |
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