A sampling of recent remarks from John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism: “What I want to do today is to talk about the new thinking and the new approach that President Obama brings to the task of safeguarding the American people from violent extremism and terrorism.” “The president understands that…
Category: U.S. Politics
Global Deceit
The fallout from Climategate continues to shake the foundations of the theory that global warming is manmade. My employer, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recently held a debate on the issue at our 8th Annual Policy Orientation for the Texas Legislature. I think the results show even more clearly that the global warming machine may…
National Review and the Contract
Why in the world would National Review say that, “Republicans ought to promote new energy technologies in order to reduce the risks of global warming?” I can’t think of a good reason. Yet that is exactly what it does in an article by Ramesh Ponnuru, “Contractual Obligations,” that discusses the need for a new “Contract…
Subsidies Anyone?
According to the Cato Institute, federal subsidy programs topped the 2,000 mark for the first time last week. Almost half of those have been created in the last 20 years: the number of federal subsidy programs soared 21 percent during the 1990s and 40 percent during the 2000s. As Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of tax…
The $2.6 Trillion Health Care Plan
Don’t buy the claims that the ObamaCare bill will be deficit neutral. Don’t even trust the claim that it will result in increased spending of only $343 billion. And you can completely ignore the fiction that this bill will only cost $848 billion over the next ten years. The truth is that new spending in the…
When the Going Gets Tough, Let the Government Handle it
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
There are a lot of ways to measure how the economy is doing. But employment, or jobs, is probably the measure that means the most to us. On a macro level, we understand that it means something good when we read that two million new jobs were created and unemployment fell to 4.2%. On the…
Facts–and People–Are Stubborn
Ronald Reagan once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” And he is right. Sometimes, the truth becomes almost impossible to ignore. I think we are seeing that now in the national debates over climate change and health care. Yet, even more stubborn than facts are people. I tell the interns at my office when I meet…
Consumer Protection Usually Doesn’t Live Up to its Name
It seems as if the folks in Washington don’t have enough to do with taking over the American financial, automobile, and health care industries. The talk now is about creating a new consumer protection agency to “protect … the financial well-being of American consumers.” While this may sound like a good cause, a review of…
Tax Cuts Work
In his recent National Review Online article on the federal government’s deficit spending, Rich Lowry wrote, “The same way overzealous Republicans once argued that tax cuts paid for themselves, Obama Democrats argue that deficit spending pays for itself.” Lowry’s statement is problematic on several levels. For one, it essentially equates tax cutting and deficit spending,…