Right now, the world has too little capital, too few jobs, and too little growth. So what do Europe’s leaders want to do? Press for yet more job-killing regulation and more investment-stifling oversight, with a heaping helping of “global governance” on top. If this wasn’t so dangerous, it would be laughably irrelevant. The European plans, unveiled on Sunday in the run-up to the G20 summit in April, are breathtaking in their intrusiveness. All financial market activities around the world should be regulated to ensure that they foster “sustainable economic activity,” …
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States … No Person shall be a Representative who shall not … when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen. – Article I of the United States Constitution The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, …
(Commentary by Heritage’s Brian Walsh) The Supreme Court yesterday decided not to consider an important case, Sorich v. U.S., on the meaning and scope of an exceedingly broad federal statute that has been used to prosecute a breathtaking range of conduct. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia again broke with the strict law-and-order stereotype often applied to conservative jurists by penning a trenchant dissent to the Court’s decision not to review the case. Scalia’s dissent also helps illustrate the dire need for federal criminal-law reform. Two decades ago, the Court overturned judicial …
Heritage Foundation vice president for domestic and economic policy studies Stuart Butler attended President Barack Obama’s “Fiscal Responsibility” Summit today. He reports: The President said he wanted the sessions to be the first step in a national conversation about how to deal with the long-term fiscal problem. If he truly intends that, this could be a good first step. Lawmakers from both parties shared their views in a respectful and courteous way, as did everyone else, and that’s progress. He can and should build on this by undertaking what I …
Liberal author Robert Kuttner doesn’t believe in the entitlement crisis. His argument – reflecting conventional far left thinking on the issue – goes something like this: Conservatives exaggerate the entitlement problem by using shady figures. Social Security is just fine, so don’t worry about it. Medicare is a problem, but only because of rising health care costs. Once the country embraces socialized medicine the costs will fall, thus solving the problem. History proves this correct because the government ran up heaps of debt during World War II setting the country …
Apparently people forgot to mention to the central planners in Europe that prices fall during a recession. That includes carbon prices: Set up to price pollution out of existence, carbon trading is pricing it back in. Europe’s carbon markets are in collapse. A year ago European governments allocated a limited number of carbon emission permits to their big [emitters]. Businesses that reduce pollution are allowed to sell spare permits to ones that need more. As demand outstrips this capped supply, and the price of permits rises, an incentive grows to …
On February 10th of this year a U.S. satellite that was part of the Iridium global communications network suddenly went silent. A dead Russian satellite had smashed into the U.S. satellite sending space debris everywhere. While the media treated the incident like a road accident, the story should serve as a cautionary tale about how incredibly dependent modern life is on space. Heritage fellow James Carafarano writes in the DC Examiner: For Americans, a day without space would look an awful lot like life in the 19th century. For starters, …
The Senate is currently considering legislation that would give the District of Columbia a voting member in the House of Representatives. The legislation is patently unconstitutional, which should end the debate at the outset. But it is important to note that it is unconstitutional not simply because it was written that way in a musty old 18th Century document. In this instance, the Constitution’s text is not an anachronism, something well suited for the late 18th Century but no longer applicable in contemporary times. The Founders certainly knew that the Constitution would not allow D.C. to have …
The news of another auto bailout was met with a whimper last week. Surely, the little noticed request for an additional $22 billion was partly overlooked because $22 billion just doesn’t seem like a large amount of money after President Obama spent $787 billion of your borrowed dollars the week before. But the fact remains that many questions remain unanswered by Detroit, and unasked by Capitol Hill. For example: How much money is the Federal Government committing to GM and Chrysler? With the $39.4 billion in loans to GM and …
The Heritage Foundation has long argued that the Department of Defense’s detention of combatants picked up on the battlefield was consistent with both the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. The ACLU and other activists strongly disagreed with this position ad hoped the Obama Administration would reverse this policy. Instead, the Obama Administration has chosen to continue the DoD’s prudent detainee policies. The New York Times reports: The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a …
