Posts Tagged ‘economy’
Dependence on Government Highest In History
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation When John F. Kennedy was President, just over a quarter of federal spending went to fund programs paying for some 21.7 million Americans to be dependent on Uncle Sam. But as high as that spending and dependence on the federal government was then, it has exploded today, with one in five Americans — more [...]
Unprecedented $25 Billion Agreement With Mortgage Servicers
ECONOMIC INTERVENTIONISM, PETER FOWLER (Newsroom America) -- The federal government and 49 state attorneys general have reached a landmark $25 billion agreement with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers to address mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure abuses. The agreement, announced by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, [...]
Obama’s “Healthcare” Mandate: What Would Reagan Say?
PAUL G. KENGOR, CENTER FOR VISION AND VALUES February 6 was the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. It comes at an appropriate time. February is also the month of Presidents Day and the birthday of Lincoln, the other Republican standard-bearer. Every Republican presidential candidate tries to claim the mantle of Reagan: “I believe as [...]
Romney’s “Slip”?
BY CHRIS CLANCY When I was a kid I remember a teacher telling us that whilst democracy was far from perfect it usually produced the “right” result. How did this happen? He explained as follows: For a two-party system, the democratic process only needed an “informed” minority of electors in order to get the “right” result. [...]
On Reagan’s Birthday, His Legacy Lives On
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation Today marks President Ronald Reagan’s 101st birthday. Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan made his journey west to Iowa as a radio broadcaster, then on to California to take Hollywood by storm. He crossed America as a spokesman for General Electric, and then — after discovering the import of conservative [...]
A Matter of Priorities?—Obama Gives Jobs to Foreigners
ECONOMY, EAGLE FORUM In this video, Barack Obama is asked why we are importing foreign labor while Americans are out of work: Jennifer Wedel of Fort Worth asked why the government continues "to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?" She was persistent and at one point broke in on the [...]
Trends in Household Income Inequality
CARL L. BANKSTON III Inequality is in the news these days. I think most of the evidence suggests that incomes in the United States are indeed more unequally distributed than in the past. However, I also think that it is a mistake to attribute the trend toward greater disparities in income to deregulation or, indeed, to any of the policies of [...]
Are the British Practicing “Austerity”?
DAVID WEINBERGER, HERITAGE.ORG Some prominent left-wing commentators have devoted weekly columns and blogs to the notion that Great Britain has misguidedly pursued harsh spending “austerity” and that doing so has left the country lingering in unnecessary anguish. In the opinion pages of The New York Times, Paul Krugman inveighs [...]
Republicans: Three Is A Trend’ in Another Green Bankruptcy
FRED LUCAS, CNSNEWS.COM The third federally subsidized green energy company to declare bankruptcy seems to indicate a pattern, said Rep. Cliff Stearns, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations. “One bankruptcy may be a fluke, two could be coincidence, but three is a trend,” Stearns said in a [...]
The State of the Union: An Inside Report
MARK W. HENDRICKSON, CENTER FOR VISION & VALUES On Tuesday evening, I had the honor of attending the State of the Union address as the guest of Congressman Mike Kelly (PA-03). Here are my impressions in abbreviated form: The address seemed more like a rewrite of previous speeches than an original work. Sure, there were new anecdotes and [...]
Two Kinds of Government Failure
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sandy Ikeda We use the term “government failure” to refer to interventions that systematically make things worse than they were before; where the cure is somehow worse than the disease. To those of us who study interventionism, however, there are actually two meanings of government failure. Two [...]
Taxing Investment
ROY CORDATO, THE FREEMAN In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was an economist at the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, my boss and tax policy mentor, the late Norman Ture, had a favorite saying: “People aren’t taxed. Activities are.” It is this proposition, that taxation of any kind always has the effect of [...]
How Well Off is the Average American Today?
ECONOMY, CARL L. BANKSTON III We are currently in a time of economic troubles and many Americans are indeed out of work or experiencing financial difficulties. The relative extent of these difficulties can be overestimated, though. If we look, for example, at the report (1) Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: [...]
We Need Pro-Family Tax Policies
By Phyllis Schlafly Why did Senator Rick Santorum suddenly surge to the status of a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President after having been treated like a not-to-be-taken-seriously contender in the many television debates? It's not only because a significant segment of conservatives voted by a super majority to back him [...]
On the Road for America’s Future
Ed Feulner and Tony Perkins, Heritage Foundation The United States is at a crossroads. Over the course of the next 10 months, Americans will watch as the future of our country is debated — state by state, county by county, and town by town. In the 2012 presidential election, voters will make a fundamental decision that will have vast [...]
So You Think You’re Free?
MIKE BROWNFIELD, HERITAGE FOUNDATION So you think you’re free? Thanks to big government spending and exploding debt, the United States — and indeed the world — is less economically free today than it was a year ago, according to the 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, released yesterday by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street [...]
Business, Manufacturing Groups Send Letter to Obama
MATT COVER, CNSNEWS.COM A group of 100 business and manufacturing groups has sent a letter to President Obama urging him to quickly approve the Keystone XL pipeline, saying it would be “irresponsible” for the president to halt the job-creating project. “With your approval, this shovel-ready project will provide 20,000 jobs in [...]
So, You Think You’re Free?
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation So you think you’re free? Thanks to big government spending and exploding debt, the United States — and indeed the world — is less economically free today than it was a year ago, according to the 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, released yesterday by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street [...]
$1.8 Mil To Treat STDs In Guatemala
LIBERTY ALERTS, CORRUPTION CHRONICLES As the U.S. economy continues on a downward spiral, the Obama Administration keeps pouring money into questionable causes like this week’s $1.8 million allocation to treat and prevent sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala. While this may seem like a noble cause, the timing is less than ideal. [...]
Bailing out the European Union
By Phyllis Schlafly It was bad enough when President Obama bamboozled Congress into passing a Stimulus bill that didn't produce any jobs, then increased the federal deficit in the 2012 omnibus spending bill, then raised the debt ceiling, then bailed out the big U.S. banks, then tried to bail out his pal Solyndra to try to save it from [...]
Government Is No Friend of the Poor
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Gary Chartier You’ve heard it all too many times to count, I suspect. Apologists for big government—the New York Times’s Paul Krugman and Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson being good recent examples—are convinced there’s just no good alternative to government social services. Without the [...]
Romney: Compare $5 Million We Put in Staples to $530 Million Obama Put in Solyndra
MELANIE HUNTER, CNSNEWS.COM Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, invited voters on Sunday to compare the $5 million his venture capitalist firm invested in Staples to $530 million in tax dollars President Barack Obama invested in Solyndra, which went bankrupt. Speaking at a rally in Rochester, [...]
Taxi Regulation and the Failures of Progressivism
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sam Staley As the American people head into another election year some will be puzzled by the rise and the staying power of Progressive ideals—according to which government manages the private economy supposedly for the social welfare. But in truth they’ve been operating at the local level for more than [...]
The Forbes List of Top 10 Employers
CARL L. BANKSTON III Forbes has just published the top 10 employers of people aged 18 to 29 (referred to in this article as "Generation Y"). It probably does suggest that the big period of structural upward mobility (people getting better jobs than their parents because better jobs become more common) is over for the foreseeable future. [...]
Publicly Funded Training and Private Enterprise
CARL L. BANKSTON III Should states foot the bill for training potential employees for private corporations? An article in today’s New York Times raises this question. The article looks at the example of a North Carolina state program to pay for the training of workers for a Caterpillar factory, but it cites similar programs in Louisiana and [...]
Democrats Have Selective Memory
By Henry Lamb Democrats like to say: "The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place." They are absolutely correct; we do not ever want to see again the policies that created the current economic mess. But we will, if Obama is re-elected. Democrats want their audiences to believe [...]
Feds Create Jobs For “Low-Income, Disconnected Youth”
LIBERTY ALERTS, CORRUPTION CHRONICLES Keeping with the big government mentality, various federal agencies are creating thousands of positions to meet the goals set by a new Obama initiative to find jobs for “low-income and disconnected youth.” Announced by the president this week, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Summer Jobs 2012 is [...]
Beneath Growth, a Sea of Poison
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation Today’s jobs report from the Department of Labor was encouraging news for the U.S. economy. It shows that 200,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate ticked down from 8.7 percent to 8.5 percent. Jobs were created in every sector of the economy save one — government! This report is consistent with [...]
The Mobility Gap: What Does It Mean?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman “Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe.” That’s how the New York Times began a page-one news story yesterday. It is a thoughtful story that offer a variety of explanations — some of them mitigating — for the so-called [...]
Vivien Kellems: Giving the Taxman Hell
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Wendy McElroy If principles are expressed through people, then Vivien Kellems’s life (1896-1975) shouts out that business is not the handmaiden of government. For over 25 years the Westport, Connecticut industrialist battled the federal withholding tax, which she refused to collect from employees’ [...]
What Will America Decide in 2012?
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation Voters in Iowa will caucus today to select their choice for the 2012 presidential nominees. As the rest of the nation watches, Iowa’s choice could help frame the debate for this election year. And as the voters speak, others are weighing in on what they believe is the best direction for America’s [...]
Debt Burden Threatens American Families
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul Last week, as most Americans were celebrating the holidays with family and friends, the Obama Administration announced plans to seek yet another debt ceiling increase in the New Year. While some fiscal conservatives will try to block this increase, their efforts are designed to fail thanks to the procedure [...]
A Bad Year for Obama’s Green Dream
MIKE BROWNFIELD, MORNING BELL For President Barack Obama, 2011 began with a bang -- a bold pronouncement that his green dream for America would bring forth a jobs explosion and a new economy fueled by alternative energy, a vision he likened to President John F. Kennedy's "moon shot" in the 1960s. Much to Obama's chagrin, the year has ended in a [...]
The New Knowledge Economy?
By Carl L. Bankston III Josef Joffe’s review (1) of Thomas Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum’s new book, That Used to Be Us, contains the following bizarre but common claim about how America’s current economic difficulties differ from those of the past: “Back in the Eisenhower days, Little Johnny couldn’t read so well, but so what? He [...]
Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, George Leef Since the housing bubble burst in 2007, America’s social and economic troubles have mounted rapidly. Unemployment remains high, saving and investment low. The federal government is desperate to suck in enough money to pay its enormous tab for welfare and warfare a bit longer. Our politics have [...]
Keynesianism Doesn’t Mean Big Government?
STEVEN HORWITZ, THE FREEMAN The debate over what John Maynard Keynes “really” meant by the theories he put forward in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money has been going on almost since it was published in 1936. The release of the second Hayek-Keynes hip-hop video brought this debate back to a boil. For example, in a May 2 [...]
Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, George A. Selgin Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm’s book on the great subprime crisis gets off to a good start by dismissing as a red herring the “tired” argument attributing the boom to “greed” and focusing instead on “changes in the structure of incentives . . . that channeled greed in new and [...]
Occupy Paranoia
By Carl L. Bankston III In 1963, Richard Hofstadter published an essay entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” “I call it the paranoid style,” he wrote, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” Hofstadter [...]
Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Jim Powell Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Click to Buy For decades the prevailing view among historians has been that because the American people were too stubborn and stupid to concern themselves with foreign wars, President Franklin Roosevelt had to lie for a noble cause—namely, [...]
Lawrence O’Donnell and Government Job Creation
SHELDON RICHMAN, THE FREEMAN The commercial seems like a parody, but that sure looks like Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC’s “Last Word.” In the spot O’Donnell mocks politicians who say that “government can’t create jobs.” “The government created your job!” O’Donnell fires back, smiling triumphantly. Imagine: In a [...]
Population Control Nonsense
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Walter Williams According to an American Dream article, “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing [...]
UN Elitists Hold Delegates Hostage at Climate Change Conference
Eagle Forum Exclusive Report, United Nations/Global Warming by Pat Carlson The 17th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 17) held in Durban, South Africa ended at 5 a.m. on December 11th, running two days pass the scheduled conclusion, making it the longest climate conference in UN history (16 days). COP 17 [...]
Economic Independence: Bedrock of Freedom
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Wendy McElroy In 1929 the English writer Virginia Woolf inserted a famous phrase into feminist history: “a room of one’s own.” The main theme of her extended essay by this name is that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” or, more generally, to live according [...]
Beware the Coming Bailouts of Europe
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul The economic establishment in this country has come to the conclusion that it is not a matter of "if" the United States must intervene in the bailout of the euro, but simply a question of "when" and "how". Newspaper articles and editorials are full of assertions that the breakup of the euro would result in a [...]
The First Government Bailouts: The Story of the RFC
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Burton Folsom, Jr. The idea of using federal money to bail out large failing corporations did not begin with the Bush administration. In the beginning was the RFC, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which President Herbert Hoover pretentiously named and bountifully funded during the Great Depression [...]
McConnell Urges President to Join Republicans in Support of Keystone XL Pipeline Jobs
LIBERTY ALERTS, MCCONNELL.SENATE.GOV ‘And since I still haven’t heard a good reason from the White House as to why they would block it, I’m hopeful the President will do the right thing—and get this crucial project underway. The only thing standing between thousands of American workers, and the good jobs this project will provide, is [...]
Wanted: A Healthy Dose of Humility
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Lawrence Reed An awful lot of people in this world are really puffed up about themselves. One of the character traits I wish were much more widely practiced these days is good old-fashioned humility. T. S. Eliot said, “Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than [...]
American Energy Can Jump-Start U.S. Recovery
Tapping abundant US energy deposits would create jobs and restore prosperity By Paul Driessen Our nation’s economic growth may finish an anemic 2% on the year. Faced with looming taxes and regulations, few companies are expanding, hiring or buying equipment. More than 14 million Americans are unemployed, excluding the nearly 9 million who [...]
The Obama/ Energy Strangle-Hold On America
By Chris Adamo While the Obama Administration has worked tirelessly at minimizing the negative political fallout of its “green jobs” debacle (Solyndra being among the few that gained attention), the nation has yet to fully grasp just how devastating the Obama agenda has been to the overall condition of America’s energy resources and [...]
Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, made quite a splash on the Internet with remarks to supporters in which she said: There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: [...]
