As Joel Kotkin detailed in the Washington Post this weekend, the Wall Street Bailout and Trillion Dollar Deficit Plan being pushed through Congress this month mark the transfer of power from commercial cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, to Washington DC. In the business world, campaign contributions and lobbying efforts have replaced cost cutting as the way to maximize profit. Going to Washington with hands outstretched can prevent bankruptcy, and can provide a stimulus to the bottom line. Competing without such government aid is becoming more and more …
In the mid-1960s, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson created a blue-ribbon commission of civic leaders who recommended chartering a center for independent nonpartisan analysis. The Urban Institute became that center. Urban Institute senior fellow Rudolph Penner told the New York Times yesterday: Many say we risk providing too little rather than too much stimulus. Don’t bet on it. The amount of public debt created will not only break post World War II records, but shatter them. The increase this year relative to G.D.P. will be more than twice the previous record …
Sen. Reid has said he wants the Senate to vote on the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) this summer. The bill, Big Labor’s highest legislative priority, effectively eliminates secret ballot organizing elections. Instead of letting workers decide whether or not they want union representation in the privacy of the voting booth, EFCA requires workers to publicly announce their choice in front of union organizers. How does the AFL-CIO justify getting rid of secret ballots? They claim the “system for forming unions is broken” because “employers routinely harass, intimidate, coerce …
In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama insisted that “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” To this end, the president pledged to make the passage of an economic stimulus package as bipartisan as possible. Well, the House vote on his stimulus bill was bipartisan — against Obama. Not a single Republican voted for the bill; they were joined by 11 Democrats in opposition. So what happened? Why did Obama’s stimulus plan not only fail to attract any Republicans but also drive away …
On Wednesday, January 28, the House passed the single largest spending bill in United States history by a 244-188 vote. It remains to be seen where the stimulus is in this bill. Conservative alternatives exist that promise twice the jobs at half the cost, yet the Left continues to support a plan that does little more than advance an ideological agenda of nationalized health care and education. Small victories have been won. First, we applaud conservatives for sticking together against a plan that offers no bipartisan solution to America’s economic …
An economic recovery plan that creates jobs, lowers gas and electricity prices, and won’t cost taxpayers $825 billion? Generally, when something is too good to be true, it usually is. And it’s probably the case here, but if I had a wish list of energy items to include in the stimulus package, it would look a lot like the Institute for Energy Research’s plan. • Defend jobs and investments against expensive, job-killing climate regulations; • Halt EPA’s attempt to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide; • Renounce …
Tucked inside the Appropriations Committee report on the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Trillion Dollar Debt Plan are quite a few sentences like this one: However, the Committee has had extensive consultations with the Corps concerning how the funds provided under this heading could be used in broad program categories. – Pg. 27 …and this one: However, the Committee has had extensive consultations with the Bureau of Reclamation how the funds provided under this heading could be used in broad program categories. – Pg. 30 These sound an awful lot like phone-marking (a practice …
As President Barack Obama and his leftist allies in Congress spend trillions in taxpayer dollars in the span of just a few months, it is important to remember that the left is no enemy of big business. The left LOVES big business. Who else could possibly pay huge corporate taxes and make payroll on exorbitant big labor contracts? So as the Obama administration both makes it harder for Detroit to turn a profit by mandating fuel efficient cars, and then turns around gives them more bailouts, remember, this is …
The economy is not the only policy area where the left has slapped some lines of code together and are attempting to pass it off as reality. As Al Gore’s testimony today on Capitol Hill reminds us, global warming would not exist as an issue without the left’s blind devotion to computer modeling. But as Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John Theon tells the Senate’s Environment and Public Works minority subcommittee, climate modeling is not all that it claims to be: My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is …
Heritage senior tax policy analyst Curtis Dubay and macroeconomics policy analyst Karen Campbell have a new paper out analyzing The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan put out by Council of Economic Advisers president and vice president Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. Dubay and Campbell write: Romer and Bernstein estimate how much government spending and tax cuts will increase production, or gross domestic product (GDP). … Romer and Bernstein, however, rely on a model based on historical data that is not comparable to current economic conditions, because …
