Remember back when some Democrats supported free trade? It was called the 90s. Of course, some Democrats still support free trade, but as Speaker Nancy Pelosi demonstrated yesterday, the protectionist wing of party is in full control today. The only Democrats that seem to support free trade today no longer …
With President Bush’s letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi Wednesday and John McCain’s speech in Brooklyn yesterday, now all three presidential candidates and the White House are supporting plans that would expose taxpayers to hundreds of billions of dollars in housing market risk. All three plans would set extremely bad precedents …
The early narrative of the housing market collapse featured all the usual suspects: sleazy mortgage bankers, shadowy lenders and pushy Wall Street brokers – all of them preying on unsuspecting homebuyers. But now we’re starting to get, as radio legend Paul Harvey puts it, “the rest of the story.” Turns …
Polling shows that while 61% Americans oppose bail outs for Wall Street investment companies, 56% support “the federal government taking steps to help prevent people from losing their homes.” Apparently, who is asking for government help and why is crucial to public support for federal government intervention. That is one …
The White House isn’t buying the Senate housing bill. As Benton Ives reports in Congressional Quarterly, President Bush is not too thrilled with the bailout proposal. Why? “The bill will likely do more harm than good by bailing out lenders and speculators and passing on costs to other Americans who …
Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the World Bank Group released their 2008 “Paying Taxes” publication earlier this week. The study compares tax regimes from around the world using three indicators (number of tax payments, time spent paying taxes, and total tax rate). According to the Executive Summary “corporate income taxes only account …
Despite Eliot Spitzer’s recent fall and the partial exposure of his hypocrisy in strong-arming businesses and business leaders under investigation, one of Spitzer’s chief enablers – the New York Times – apparently still has never seen a corporate prosecution it hasn’t liked. On its front page today, the NYT takes …
Any doubt that the Democratic Party is completely beholden to organized labor is now over. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) unprecedented step to strip the up-or-down vote requirement from the Colombia Free Trade Agreement undermines the spirit of fast-track trade law and deals a death blow to any administration’s ability to …
