The New START Treaty that Presidents Obama and Medvedev are going to sign tomorrow in Prague sets the stage for the big show, the April 12-13 non-proliferation summit in Washington. Both events are deeply flawed. Both are theater productions for Obama to push through his unrealistic agenda of “getting to zero”, i.e. attempting to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. The New START is a déjà vu: in the 1980s, the Soviets threatened to withdraw from existing arms control treaties if US deployed missile defense. Now they are doing it …
It’s been nearly a year since the Obama administration took the reins of General Motors, and if today’s headlines are any indication, things aren’t looking good for the troubled Detroit auto maker. First off, GM just isn’t making money. It posted a $4.3 billion loss for the second half 2009 – far from profitability, far from a government-led turnaround. The company claims it has a chance of “achieving profitability” in 2010, but keep in mind that GM is $50 billion in the hole to the American taxpayers, who paid for …
In a welcome decision, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday announced that it will not act on the Department of Energy’s motion to withdraw its application to construct the nuclear materials repository at Yucca Mountain until the court system rules on related lawsuits. Not only will it not consider the motion but it will continue its work on the application review and expects to have a significant portion completed by November. In other words, Yucca is far from dead. The announcement from the NRC was a pleasantly unexpected one. Just days …
In NRO’s symposium today, Clifford May notes that Iran’s leaders will view the Nuclear Posture Review “as one more sign of a weakening America,” and Jamie Fly argues that our self-imposed nuclear limitations will not convince Iran or North Korea to change their behavior. As if on cue, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused U.S. leaders of resorting to weapons “like cowboys” when “beaten by logic.” The NPR is full of problems. For example, while the strategy outlines many current threats accurately, its solutions are based on the misguided belief that …
In the days and weeks following the signing of Obamacare into law, Administration officials have attempted to promote all of the legislation’s immediate impacts. Owners of tanning salons across the country are already seeing one of those immediate impacts—a whopping 10% tax. One salon owner in Western Oregon laments in an interview with a local TV station, “10% of everything you make to the federal government. That is tough on top of all of the taxes we are paying today.” Another salon employee at a Michigan-based business echoed those concerns in a separate …
In 2008, on average only 26 percent of all non-consensus votes in the U.N. General Assembly coincided with the United States’ votes. However, when the nations are categorized in terms of economic freedom, as measured by the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, a trend appears – those nations with better freedom scores cast votes that coincide with the U.S. at a higher rate. This should not be surprising. Economic freedom refers to the ability of individuals to control their own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free …
Obamacare was sold as a way to improve benefits and expand coverage. But it doesn’t seem to be panning out that way. Almost immediately, major companies offering excellent health coverage to both active workers and retirees said the new law would cost them a bundle. AT&T alone said they’d have to set aside an extra $1 billion in the first quarter due to an Obamacare tax on their retiree drug coverage. Now, both retirees and current employees of AT&T and other affected companies are “wondering whether the new law could …
The taxpayer-funded auto bailout was largely the result of a number of poor decisions made by General Motors and Chrysler. Along with the excessively high labor and legacy costs, Detroit’s dependence on big, non-fuel-efficient vehicles was its own doing and at one time, was a very profitable strategy. Detroit struggled to make competitive fuel-efficient vehicles that rivaled its Japanese counterparts. The government stepped in and took a controlling stake in General Motors and, more recently, attempted to provide more regulatory stability by mandating stricter fuel efficiency standards. The Environmental Protection …
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), over half of President Barack Obama’s new $940 billion health care entitlement is paid for by price-fixing Medicare cuts. Never mind that the President’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says that these cuts would cause “roughly 20 percent” of Medicare providers to go bankrupt in Obamacare’s first ten years. The CBO has to believe these cuts will happen because they are required, by law, to believe everything Congress tells them. The American people are not. So the American people ought to …
In a huge win for the free market and limited government, a federal appeals court today put a halt to the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to exert its authority over the Internet and its power play to regulate the companies who provide access to it. The decision, issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, centers around the FCC’s efforts to enact “net neutrality,” a policy that would prevent ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from managing the flow of traffic on the Internet by …
