President Barack Obama’s speech at yesterday’s White House Health Care Forum included a number of statements that are either false or highly misleading. Unfortunately yesterday was not the first time we heard these statements from the White House. Some fact checking is in order: 1. President Obama said: “The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds. By the end of the year, it could cause 1.5 million Americans to lose their homes.“ ABC News reports: The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study …
The recently enforced Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act created many unintended consequences for toy manufacturers and oddly enough, even for your local library, but most of which, blinded parents’ sense of caution when it comes to buying toys for their children. This regulation, which went into effect on February 10, 2009, mandates that all products targeted to children must contain safe levels of lead and phthalates (plastic softener). Who can be against that? Goodwill for starters. The legislation not only mandates that new products are safe but also that all products …
It’s not going to be as easy as Obama thought. As candidate, he received kudos for saying that “strong presidents and strong countries … talk to their adversaries,” implying that the Bush Administration did not even try. He promised he would sit down with Iran, for example, to settle our differences over its nuclear weapons program. He would talk to Russia to resolve our differences over missile defenses in Europe. All that was needed was for the U.S. to “rediscover the power of our diplomacy” and stop treating those who …
Campaigning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past summer, then-candidate Barack Obama told a 1,800 person town hall meeting: “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.” So while President Barack Obama indicated yesterday that he is open to altering his health plan, Americans should always keep in mind what President Obama’s true end goal really is. And after just six weeks in office he has already made two significant steps towards that goal. If Americans hope to retain and expand their …
NAME: Aaron Schock OCCUPATION: Member of Congress, 18th District of Illinois HOMETOWN: Peoria, Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock was elected in 2008 and is currently the youngest member of Congress. A title Schock is all too familiar with. In 2001, Schock was elected to the Peoria Public Schools District 150 school board at age 19, making him the youngest school board member in Illinois. Only three years later, he became the youngest member of the Illinois House of Representatives. Schock is a staunch conservative who has big shoes to fill, as …
Instead of a bunch of small, bad energy bills, why not have one, large bad energy bill? That seems to be the sentiment coming from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Cap-and-trade. A National Renewable Portfolio Standard. A New Smart Grid. Throw it all in there. Pelosi told reporters yesterday on Capitol Hill: I would like to see one bill, which is the energy bill, with the cap and trade and the grid piece. I think having it as one bill shows the — I don’t want to say the …
During yesterday’s press conference on government contracting reform, President Obama took aim at the defense industry, declaring that “We are spending money on things that we don’t need, and we are paying more than we need to pay, and that’s completely unacceptable.” Fair enough. We more than agree that it is time to assess the capacity of the federal acquisition workforce to do its job and to clarify where and when “outsourcing” to government contractors is necessary. But then things went astray. President Obama pointed to a GAO report last …
The Obama Administration’s recent budget has some of the most revealing text in the smallest font. Put on your green eyeshade and get out your wonk decoder ring. We’re heading down into the weeds to hunt budget big game. Footnote 5 of Table S-6 starts off “Shown here are those proceeds from auctioning emission allowances that are reserved for clean energy technology initiatives and to compensate families through the Making Work Pay tax cut.” This is in reference to “Total, climate revenues” of $645,711,000,000 which are to come from the …
Congressmen Tom Price (R-GA) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) should be commended for introducing a bill this week that will eliminate a little noted provision passed in the stimulus bill which severely undermines the success of the historic 1996 welfare reform law. H.R. 1277, the Welfare Reform Restoration Act, repeals Section 2101 of the stimulus bill which creates a new $5 billion program that encourages and rewards states for increasing the size of their caseloads. The stimulus bill reverts welfare back to the broken system it once was that trapped a …
New York University Business School professor Tunku Varadarajan writes at Forbes: The truth is that, for all his unpopularity in the U.S. (and Europe, and Latin America, and the Middle East, and practically everywhere else outside Albania and Georgia), Bush is a much-appreciated figure in India–at least in high policy circles. As many have noted, both in Washington and New Delhi, the one indisputable foreign policy success of the eight Bush years was America’s invigorating new alliance with India–an alliance that is based as much in a sense of shared …
