In his September 25 speech at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Obama praised the agreement among world leaders to end government subsidies for fossil fuels: Third, we agreed to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels so that we can transition to a 21st century energy economy — an historic effort that would ultimately phase out nearly $300 billion in global subsidies. This reform will increase our energy security. It will help transform our economy, so that we’re creating the clean energy jobs of the future. And it will help …
When gas prices surpassed $4 per gallon last summer, it forced families to cancel their vacations. Not only was the day-to-day driving eating up families’ budgets, but it made the cost of traveling somewhere for vacation all that more expensive. Purchasing airline tickets was out of the question for many. If cap and trade becomes law, news could only get worse for the air travelers and the airline industry. From CQ Politics: “The most recent draft of the Senate bill by John Kerry, D-Mass., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., includes aircraft …
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvHPTq3L4Y4[/youtube] David Goldhill is President and CEO of the Game Show Network and has run numerous businesses during his career. When his father died of a hospital-borne infection two years ago he began researching the entire U.S. health care system, analyzing it with the keen eye of a businessman. What he learned is that intermediaries like insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid distort a system that is supposed to provide health care to individuals into one that serves faceless and, largely, uncaring bureaucracies. Case in point: 100,000 people die every year in America …
Now that the President has abandoned the third missile defense site which was slated to be built in Poland, the question remains: what will be done with the money which was allocated in the FY 2009 defense budget for the system? Surely the funds should be used to boost the Ground-based interceptors which are already under-funded. To be voted on as early as today, the bi-partisan Lieberman-Sessions amendment moves to allocate between $50 million and $151 million to be used for research, development and testing of the 2-stage ground based …
The Obama Administration’s policy refuses to recognize the way out of the Honduran crisis. The door is open and a solution beckons: national elections on November 29. Yet, the Administration remains fixated on restoring former president Manuel Zelaya to power. In fine bureaucratic fashion, it has lost sight of the solution in order to support an uncertain process of negotiations. Instead of allowing the Honduran people to speak through elections on November 29 and end the crisis, the Administration makes Zelaya’s restoration to presidential office its primary objective and the …
According to AMA’s National Health Insurance Report Card, Medicare denies 6.85 percent of its claims, higher than any private insurer (Aetna was second, denying 6.80 percent of its claims), and more than double any private insurer’s average. What’s fascinating is that The American Medical Association (AMA) has endorsed a public option, despite the fact that “some member physicians at the group’s annual meeting [in June] likened the notion to communism.” The Obama administration repeats ad nauseum that we need a government option to “keep insurance companies honest” and to make sure they …
An important part of a magician’s trick is to keep the audience’s focus away from what he is actually doing. In the case of health care reform, the discussion of affordability has focused on how much the individual or family will still have to pay after our health insurance system has been “reformed.” Little attention has been paid to the how much those individuals will receive from their neighbors in order to entice them to join the rest of the insured. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has provided a table …
The rumblings of the dollar’s decline are louder than usual at the moment, tied to speculation that oil producing countries are seeking to move to a basket of currencies in oil pricing, rather than using the dollar alone. There are genuine developments behind such rumblings, mostly concerning American economic policy. But there are also reasons to believe the dollar has staying power, especially if U.S. errors can be fixed. If Arab and other oil producers are indeed looking to move away from the dollar, they have cause. The Federal Reserve …
President Clinton famously adopted a scheme by political adviser Dick Morris, where he would find something the government was doing anyway and then spin it as a presidential initiative to create illusion that the presidency really was like Josh Bartlett’s White House where the Oval Office made all the tough calls everyday. Now is appears as if Obama is playing Morris method with homeland security, trumpeting the White House role in foiling the Zazi terrorist plot. It was “test” of the presidency crowed a senior administration official. “It demonstrated that …
Last week the American Enterprise Institute hosted Jay W. Richards, visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of the new book Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem. The conversation focused on why capitalism and Christianity are compatible. Highlighting three of the eight myths surrounding capitalism he makes in his book, Richards explained the “Piety Myth”, which he defines as well-intended people ignoring unintended consequences when searching for a quick fix solution to an economic or social problem. An example of this is …
