In an era when legislation routinely exceeds 1,000 pages, the bill introduced by Sen. John Thune yesterday — at seven lines — doesn’t look like much. But looks can be deceptive. If adopted, those seven lines would guarantee the end of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a critical first step toward putting federal finances, and the economy, back on the right track. Under current law, TARP, which provided up to $700 billion to support troubled financial institutions, is scheduled to expire on December 31 of this year, but can …
The AFL-CIO, in concert with some Congressional leaders, has proposed yet another tax hike to fund Washington’s ongoing explosion of spending. This latest collaboration between Big Labor and Big Government would be a 0.25 percent tax on all stock trades. Given the budding deficit pressures another tax hike proposal is hardly surprising, but, curiously enough, this new tax would target the pensions of the AFL-CIO’s own members. Congressional leaders have decided to divide their attention for the rest of the year between a hostile (to patients) takeover of the health …
European leaders will meet for dinner tomorrow for a special summit to decide who will become the first permanent EU president and the new EU foreign minister. With the ink barely dry on the illegitimate Lisbon Treaty, EU elites are rushing with indecent haste to anoint the next leaders of Europe. And in typical EU fashion, negotiations over who will become the formal ‘faces of Europe’ will be conducted behind closed doors with zero public input. Although there is a small chance that the 27 European heads of state and …
The New York Times reports today: In 2002 Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights. But last month Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more. “The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free …
Dr. Jeffrey Flier writes in today’s Wall Street Journal: As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade. Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama’s agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, …
Yesterday at 3:00 p.m. ET, the Treasury Department updated its calculation of the U.S. National Debt to: $12,031,299,186,290.07. That $12 trillion record high comes just eight months after it hit $11 trillion and is only expected to rise faster considering the federal deficit for 2009 was over $1.4 trillion. And what is the leftist majority of Congress going to do tomorrow about these skyrocketing deficits? They are going to pile on the spending faster. The issue at hand is the congressionally created formula for annually updating the payments doctors receive …
How would private insurers fare when a government-run public option was playing against them? The non-partisan Center for Medicine in the Public Interest demonstrates that it wouldn’t be pretty. Watch: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfLXjsvmjZo[/youtube]
Late for a party? Miss a meeting? Forget to pay your rent? Blame climate change; everyone else is doing it. From an increase in severe acne to all societal collapses since the beginning of time, just about everything gone wrong in the world today can be attributed to climate change. Here’s a list of 100 storylines blaming climate change as the problem.
It’s official: U.S. taxpayers did not get a good deal when they bailed out AIG last year. That was the conclusion of a report released yesterday by Neil Barofsky, the federal government’s special inspector general for TARP. The conclusion is no surprise: no one holds up the $170 billion bailout of the insurance giant as an example of government at its best. But, the Inspector General’s report puts new teeth on the charge, and pins much of the blame on Timothy Geithner, then president of the New York Fed. The …
The government’s Web site that is supposed to tell taxpayers how their stimulus dollars are being spent, and which spends $84 million per year to do so, shows that $6.4 billion of the stimulus has been spent in 440 congressional districts that don’t exist, according to a report by the Franklin Center, as reported by Watchdog.org. The site, Recovery.gov, reports, for instance, that North Dakota’s 99th Congressional District has received $2 million in stimulus funding. But North Dakota has only one congressional district. The nation’s capital now contains 35 congressional …
