When President Barack Obama was sworn into office, the U.S. economy employed 134.6 million people and the unemployment rate stood at 7.6%. In response to growing job losses, President Obama passed an $862 billion stimulus plan that his economic experts promised would help the United States employ at least 138.6 million people by 2010. Reality has not been kind to President Obama’s hope. Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report showing the U.S. economy shed another net 20,000 jobs, leaving only 129.5 million jobs, almost 10 million …
Toyota’s bad press has been for its sticky pedal incident certainly isn’t surprising, but is all the negative attention warranted? When asked about the Toyota recalls, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood responded by saying, “My advice to anyone who owns one of these vehicles is stop driving it, and take it to the Toyota dealership because they believe they have the fix for it” and that “we’re not finished with Toyota.” Hood later toned down his remarks but immediately after his “stop driving” comment, Toyota’s stocks plummeted. Even after recovering some, …
Tomorrow, Feb. 6, is the 99th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States. Although it has been 21 years since President Reagan completed his second term and left the White House, he still remains a figure of great interest to many Americans, including a large number of young people who were not even born during the time he was president. New books come out about Reagan every year. The more research that is done about him, the greater the appreciation of what he …
President Obama’s decision to skip the annual U.S.-EU summit in Europe, May 24-25, has not endeared him to some Europeans; many of whom once again feel spurned by the man they have so greatly admired, and whose election they so ardently wished for. As reported by The New York Times, “In addition to the palpable sense of insult among European officials, there is a growing concern that Europe is being taken for granted and losing importance in American eyes compared with the rise of a newly truculent China.” The problem …
A short piece in today’s Washington Post examines President Obama’s religious faith. The occasion of the article is the President’s remarks today to the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event held at this time of year in the capital. Interestingly, the article does not attempt to distinguish among the usages of prayer in the life of the Commander in Chief — whether he prays for strength or fortitude or policy guidance or just a peaceful day. In fact, the Post reports, President Obama consults religious tradition and teaching for insights into …
For the past several months, Washington has exhausted every possible method to pass a health care bill designed to increase government’s control over health care. They haven’t been successful yet, but that may not matter: even without Obamacare, government health spending is set to increase far faster than private health expenditures, surpassing the private sector as soon as 2012. Today the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its projections of national health expenditures for the next ten years. The report shows that spending by the public sector grew much …
President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, rolled out the administration’s new “National Export Initiative (NEI)” today at the National Press Club. The way Secretary Locke described it, the NEI sounds like a great vehicle to create jobs—government jobs. Secretary Locke began by saying that the “NEI represents the first time the United States will have a government-wide export-promotion strategy with focused attention from the president and his Cabinet,” ignoring the prior administration’s success in negotiating free trade agreements with more than a dozen countries between 2001 and 2009. NEI’s …
In a recent letter to Speaker Pelosi, President Obama stated that North Korea does not fit the criteria for being listed as a state sponsor of terrorism, which would automatically impose sanctions. That leaves four countries on the list: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. But given testimony this week from Director of National Intelligence Denis Blair to the U.S. Senate, we have to wonder, why not Venezuela? Blair pointed out that its authoritarian president Hugo Chavez, which called Colombia’s Defense Cooperation agreement with the U.S. “a declaration of war against …
Most Americans now believe that major health care legislation will not pass this year. But as Heritage Vice President Stuart Butler explains in The New England Journal Medicine one seemingly minor proposal in the Senate health care bill could end up having huge repercussions for our entire health care system: The Senate legislation contains strong directives to the OPM, requiring it to negotiate medical-loss ratios (the percentage of premiums that insurers actually spend on medical care for enrollees), minimum benefits, profit margins, premiums, and “such other terms and conditions of …
