Guess who lampooned Soviet economics this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost [the Soviet Union] dearly. Newt Gingrich? Rush Limbaugh? Try …
Politicians and consumers learned valuable lessons this summer when national gasoline prices peaked at over four dollars per gallon. Simply put, energy supply must be expanded in the United States. Last October Congress took the right first steps by allowing the restrictions on energy leasing in 85 percent of America’s territorial waters …
The “cash for clunkers” plan recently proposed in Congress would provide a subsidy for a new car purchase to anyone willing to have their current car destroyed. But the economic rationale is eerily similar to the New Deal program most widely agreed to be a catastrophic failure: FDR’s agriculture plan …
While the Obama Administration waffles on openness and transparency (see here and here), private citizens are stepping in to fill the void. The Heritage Foundation and other groups launched ReadtheStimulus.org to give citizens a chance to work their way through the massive spending proposal, flag suspicious language, and make suggestions. …
Strike Two: Not only did President Obama fail to open the Ledbetter Act for public comment before he signed it, a violation of his pledge to boost transparency, but now his administration is refusing to release information on billion-dollar loan guarantees made to some of America’s largest banks. Bloomberg News, …
Jay Van Andel Senior Trade Policy Analyst at Heritage Daniella Markheim comments on why the recently discovered “Buy American” provisions in the ‘stimulus’ bill will only hurt the American economy in the long run. Advocates of Buy American rules claim that limiting competition for U.S. government contracts to domestic firms will protect U.S. jobs and …
Vincent de Rivaz, CEO of the UK arm EDF energy, made an interesting but frightening comparison when talking about trading carbon credits under the European Union’s cap-and-trade program: We like certainty about a carbon price. [But] the carbon price has to become simple and not become a new type of …