There’s this narrative in left leaning and non-American press about Jon Huntsman’s failed candidacy where people say he failed to enthuse conservative voters because he wasn’t a populist and didn’t embrace the Tea Party. I don’t think this is right. Mitt Romney isn’t a populist and hasn’t embraced the Tea Party and he’s probably going to be the nominee. The candidates that are running as | Read More »
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has emerged as the most formidable of non-Romney candidates in the Republican Party presidential primary contest. His chances of winning the conservative Iowa caucuses and South Carolina election in January seem high now but he could struggle to convince right wing voters that he best represents an alternative vision to Barack Obama’s. Gingrich has polled at roughly 27 percent in | Read More »
Dr Donald Berwick is gone. The man who was appointed by President Barack Obama last year to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not be confirmed by Republicans in the Senate so the administration is nominating his deputy instead. The White House deemed it “unfortunate that a small group of senators obstructed his nomination, putting political interests above the best interests of | Read More »
With all President Barack Obama’s lambasting of Republicans for supposedly “putting party before country,” I honestly hadn’t expected a Democrat to criticize conservative lawmakers more vehemently for their “intransigence” before the election but Senator John Kerry did on NBC’s Meet the Press today. Republicans, said Kerry, had made “the calculation politically” to block a comprehensive deficit reduction effort “to wait until next year and just | Read More »
So this is leadership. Reuters reports that President Barack Obama plans to announce on Thursday that his administration will explore an alternative route for a Canada-Texas oil pipeline, delaying final approval until after the 2012 presidential election. The $7 billion Keystone XL project is designed to carry oil—the equivalent of more than a million barrels of oil per day—from tar fields in Alberta to refineries | Read More »
Supposedly inspired by the Arab spring, a protest movement has swept Manhattan’s Financial District in recent days in an attempt to “Occupy Wall Street.” Although the protesters don’t appear to have specific plans or demands, they are outraged by what they perceive as greed in the financial industry and economic inequality throughout the United States. In her treatise of the 1960s student uprising at the | Read More »
There’s an old myth in Russian politics that’s shielded whoever occupied the Kremlin since the days of the czars from personal criticism. It holds that the ruler himself is never to blame for the terrible policies of his administration. The czar, according to this myth, is ever the fatherly good doer but surrounded by unscrupulous advisors who are conspiring to make life as hard as | Read More »
Leftists are lining up to blame the riots that began in London last week after the fatal shooting of a man by police but quickly spread to other parts of Great Britain in the days thereafter on the austerity measures that have supposedly been implemented by the Liberal-Conservative Government. That is “supposedly” because whereas cuts have been planned, most have yet to be enacted. Writing | Read More »
President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party would have liked to increase taxes as part of a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction. Republicans, adamantly opposed to raising taxes, especially during a time of fragile economic recovery, managed to prevent immediate tax hikes although revenue enhancement could be part of a broader plan that is supposed to be worked out by a bipartisan congressional committee later | Read More »
Senate Democrats have threatened to block Speaker John Boehner’s $917 billion deficit reduction plan that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling by a similar amount this year. Just what budget cuts are they willing to accept? Republican House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan‘s budget achieved more than $6 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years. All House Republicans voted for his budget in | Read More »
In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, Congress enacted an almost $800 billion stimulus bill in the assumption that an artificial increase in consumer demand could propel the nation into recovery. The rationale was pure Keynesian economics—in times of crisis, the government should borrow, spend and boost demand to generate growth. Two years later, it’s clear that the stimulus didn’t work. Unemployment is still | Read More »
President Barack Obama urged legislators this week to “seize the moment,” saying that they had “a chance to stabilize America’s finances for a decade, for fifteen or twenty years.” He is reportedly still pushing Republicans for a “big deal” that would include $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years. But why should we believe that he is serious about cutting spending now? | Read More »
Remember when then Senator Barack Obama said in 2008 that electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket” as a result of his cap and trade system? He predicted at the time that he would also bankrupt the coal industry. So if someone wants to build a coal power plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge | Read More »
There’s a proposal out there to split the state of California in half. The fifty-first state would be named South California and encompass the city of San Diego and conservative countries whereas Los Angeles, San Francisco and the more liberal northern parts of the state would continue to be governed from Sacramento. The proposed fifty-first state would be the fifth largest by population in the | Read More »
Writing for The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne argues that the debate about government spending in America is distracting people from the question how public and private resources can best be brought to bear in an effort to enhance the nation’s competitiveness. Other countries, he believes, are way ahead of the curve. While the United States is not even sure we should have gone halfway toward | Read More »
n his latest New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman criticizes the “pain caucus” in Europe, notably the European Central Bank (ECB), for insisting that sound money and balanced budgets will somehow fix all of the continent’s fiscal woes. Austerity, he argues, is failing and American policy makers would be ill advised to repeat it in their own country. Krugman’s column is unfortunately so filled | Read More »
President Barack Obama announced earlier this year to undertake a grand review of economic regulation in the United States and get rid of rules that “are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.” Today, the first plans are in and you can review them here. There is a lot of sensible stuff among the different proposals. Red tape has been rising under | Read More »
What will it take for the government to admit that it’s utterly and inherently incapable of efficiently providing “affordable” housing? A comprehensive investigation undertaken by The Washington Post uncovered nothing but waste and fraud and suffering for the scores of neighborhoods and tens of thousands of people who were supposed to benefit from the efforts of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The | Read More »
A recent Gallup poll found that more American seniors support Paul Ryan’s reform plan for Medicare than they do the president’s. 48 percent of those over the age of 65 favor the Wisconsin congressman’s approach that would privatize the program and entitle people to “premium support” or vouchers with which to buy health insurance on the private market. 42 percent support Barack Obama who has | Read More »
“I’m rooting for everybody to get rich,” President Barack Obama said last week, speaking at a town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada. “But I believe that we can’t ask everybody to sacrifice and then tell the wealthiest among us, well, you can just relax and go count your money, and don’t worry about it. We’re not going to ask anything of you.” The president urged | Read More »
The United States, like most nations in the developed world, maintain a progressive federal income tax system, meaning people not only pay a given percentage of their income in taxes but that percentage increases for high income earners, from 10 percent for individuals making a little more than $8,000 a year to 35 percent on incomes over $370,000. As a result, in 2008, the top | Read More »
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned in the Financial Times of the hugely market distorting effects of the Dodd-Frank financial bill this week. A day later, the chairman of the Congressional Budget Office testified before the House financial oversight committee about the fiscal impact of the reform act that was hammered out by lawmakers this summer. Dodd-Frank, for starters, creates many new federal bureaucracies, | Read More »
Global warming has given rise to an eerily religious campaign in which Christians and nonbelievers join hand in hand to make the rest of humanity repent for its environmental sins. Climate change should not become another tool in the hands of anti-capitalists. Instead it is with industry and scientific progress that man can best combat his changing natural world. Writing for The Huffington Post, Reverend | Read More »
A nuclear catastrophe is potentially unfolding in Japan after the country’s eastern seaboard was devastated by its biggest earthquake on record. A tsunami with waves of up to thirty feet high swept away entire villages and damaged major industries, including oil refineries and at least two nuclear power plants. Two explosions occurred at a nuclear facility in Fukushima Prefecture over the weekend. At least one | Read More »
President Barack Obama on Friday rejected criticism from Republicans that his administration was hurting the American oil industry. Indeed, he pointed out that oil production last year rose to its highest level in seven years and added that his government was prepared to encourage new drilling in the face of rising gas prices. After imposing a de facto moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf | Read More »
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