This month, Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) sent a letter to the Chairman of the FCC and the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, asking them to investigate cell phone exclusivity agreements. Exclusivity agreements are arrangements between cell phone makers and service providers to allow one carrier the exclusive rights to sell a particular phone for a period of time. One of the major objections by Sen. Kohl and others was that these agreements disproportionately hurt rural Americans, and those who were customers of smaller carriers. Then, last week, Verizon …
With the public’s trust in his handling of health care tanking (50%-44% of Americans disapprove), the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed to pass Obamacare: all Obama, all the time. As part of that effort, Obama hosted a conference call with leftist bloggers urging them to pressure Congress to pass his health plan as soon as possible. During the call, a blogger from Maine said he kept running into an Investors Business Daily article that claimed Section 102 of the House health legislation would outlaw …
Contrary to several reports, the House Democratic health care bill (H.R. 3200) is not deficit-neutral, but would raise deficits to alarming new levels over the long term. It would do this by relying on several old warhorse budget gimmicks. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), H.R. 3200 would increase the budget deficit by $239 billion over ten years – that’s right, increase. And that’s even before these gimmicks: 1st Gimmick – Fiddle with Implementation Dates: True, the bill runs surpluses initially. Why? Because the tax hikes proposed to pay …
New York City principals and parents have resourcefully devised a way to better equip their children’s local public schools to meet their needs. For years, some public schools in Manhattan have raised money from parents to hire additional teaching assistants to aid lead teachers in the classroom. The aides, who are independently hired, serve as lunch monitors, art instructors, and after-school teachers, and cost the schools a little more than half that of a unionized assistant. But after receiving complaints from the teachers union, the Bloomberg administration has nixed the …
Under the excuse of fighting the economic crisis, the Russian government is stepping up regulation that could severely restrict business growth. Ostensibly to stem the tide of rising prices, the government has initiated a dramatic cap on grocery retail chains. The bill submitted to the State Duma bans chains with sales exceeding 1 billion rubles ($31 million) from buying or building any new stores if they control over 25 percent of the market in a city or a town. Formally, this measure is designed to stop retailers from charging monopoly …
This past Friday on MSNBC, Center for American Progress researcher Igor Volsky told MSNBC “the House bill is deficit-neutral over ten years” This is flat-out untrue. Here is the CBO letter (PDF) that Volsky was referring to. Click on it. Search for the term “deficit-neutral” … or even just “neutral.” You’ll notice that those terms do not appear anywhere in the document. This is what the CBO letter actually says: According to CBO’s and JCT’s assessment, enacting H.R. 3200 would result in a net increase in the federal budget deficit …
This weekend President Obama dedicated his weekly address to defending Congress’s plans for an overhaul of the nation’s health care system. He argued, “Once you’ve seen enough ads and heard enough people yelling on TV you might begin to wonder whether there’s a grain of truth to what they are saying.” Here’s the truth, brand-new analysis(pdf) from The Heritage Foundation — conducted by The Lewin Group— shows that the public plan component within the House Democrats’ health reform bill is in conflict with how the Congress and the President are …
President Obama just got turned down by America’s governors. Obama wanted governors to endorse his proposed overhaul of health care, but ran into opposition over the runaway costs, as reported by The New York Times. Instead he got this: Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, said he feared Congress was about to bestow “the mother of all unfunded mandates.” “Medicaid is a poor vehicle for expanding coverage,’ added Mr. Bredesen, a former health care executive. “It’s a 45-year-old system originally designed for poor women and their children. It’s not …
The White House announced this morning that it would be delaying release of updated financial and economic forecasts until the middle of August. In other words, its usual mid-July update of key forecasts for policy makers will not be published in time for expected House and Senate votes on health care reform. This delay matters enormously to the deliberations of Congress on this central issue. If it knew that the near-term budget picture is worsening and that it cannot count on a recovering economy to produce much needed revenues for …
