In an interview last year, Dr. Elinor Ostrom the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the first woman to receive prize in economics, offers some tremendous insight. She stresses adaptation over a one-size-fits-all approach and says she doesn’t “think it’s possible just to have a nice little neat optimal plan.” With the climate change conference in Copenhagen coming in December, Elinor Ostrom’s point about international agreements is especially relevant: Recognizing that this is something that must be done at multiple levels, so what I am concerned about …
New regulations passed by the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care will now require all child care providers – public or private – to follow new strict guidelines covering everything from academics to child hygiene. The Boston Herald reports that the new regulations are part of the state’s plan to place day care centers under the auspice of Massachusetts Department of Education. In a typical government-knows-best mentality, Early Education Commissioner Sherri Killins told the Boston Herald: I don’t believe there’s anything frivolous or overburdening in the new regulations. We’re …
The Washington Post reports: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held lengthy talks with [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov]Tuesday as part of an intense American effort to improve relations, but she made few gains on a top U.S. priority — increasing pressure on Iran. … Emerging from four hours of talks with Clinton, Lavrov told reporters that “threats, sanctions and threats of pressure” against Iran would be “counterproductive.” We wish we were surprised by this news. Unfortunately it fits into a very well established pattern in U.S. policy on Iran:
In his September 9th address to Congress and the American people, President Obama acknowledged that, “my health care proposal has…been attacked by some who oppose reform as a ‘government takeover’ of the entire health care system.” The President attempted to refute this claim and defended the idea of a public option as a means to enhance competition amongst private insurance companies. The President emphasized that the intention behind creating a public option was not to put insurers out of business, but to hold them accountable. But health reform, with a …
Despite one of the quietest hurricane seasons in years, the number of FEMA declarations this year is on pace to hit 139 declarations, which would be the fifth highest since 1953 and 9 declarations higher than the 8-year average of George W. Bush’s FEMA. The problem is that we have created a system that promotes the nationalization of natural disasters. His system stretches FEMA thin as it has to deal with a new declaration every 2.4 days and encourages states and localities to divert resources away from emergency management to …
Leaders in the House and Senate have a secret plan to pass President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care plan without a conference and without any participation by the American people … but that plan that has been pushed to Plan B. The primary plan is to use a secretive conference committee procedure to pass Obamacare by the end of the year. Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee passed the outline of a bill, The Vapor Bill, out of committee on a party line vote with the lone crossover Republican support of …
P.J. O’Rourke once quipped about spending in Washington: “The budget grows because, like zygotes and suburban lawns, it was designed to do nothing else.” To help pay for their addiction to more spending, the left is now calling for a value-added tax or VAT. Cato Senior Fellow Dan Mitchell, in conjunction with the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation, has produced a video conclusively showing that the VAT will do nothing to stop deficits since governments that have adopted VATs have a proven track record of only raising spending even …
In January, amidst a particularly cold winter, Russia’s quasi-governmental gas giant Gazprom turned off the gas taps to Ukraine after the two sides failed to reach agreement in a pay dispute. Downstream users including Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Czech Republic were also put in the deep freeze. Gazprom has become synonymous with energy intimidation and Moscow has leveraged energy to specifically target former Soviet states such as Ukraine as it seeks to carve out a sphere of influence in its near abroad. However, the conundrum for Moscow in playing …
On Friday, the last day before a long weekend due to Columbus Day and on the eve of the Finance Committee vote, the Congressional Budget Office revealed some new information about the affect of the Baucus plan on premiums for health insurance. Surprise! After the Senate Finance Committee worked on the bill, health insurance will now cost individuals and families even more than the Congressional Budget Office originally estimated. On September 22, 2009, the CBO estimated that the average premium for a single plan was $4,700 to purchase the Silver …
This Morning Bell is the third in a five-part week-long series on how Obamacare will affect you. The scariest part about yesterday’s Senate Finance Committee vote passing its version of Obamacare, is not what is in their bill (to the extent that it even exists), but that the Finance Committee bill promises to be the high water mark for “bipartisanship” in health care reform. Now all of the other bills will be merged together behind the closed doors. All the bills are fundamentally flawed and will only get worse as …
