Labor Secretary Hilda Solis rewarded six former staffers from her congressional office with political appointments and huge raises upon taking over at the Department of Labor. The appointees had significant pay increases averaging 50 percent upon changing jobs; one employee’s salary nearly doubled. Solis, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California, began hiring the employees shortly after she was confirmed by the Senate in February 2009. Political appointments are non-competitive government jobs that differ from career positions, which often involve a long hiring process. The information …
When it comes to spending, President Obama’s proposed budget for 2011 takes fiscal irresponsibility to Greece and beyond. Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins, both former Treasury tax officials, write in the Washington Times that “the president’s planned fiscal excesses beyond 2010 cannot plausibly be attributed to the recession, blamed on George W. Bush or justified by economic principles, Keynesian or otherwise.” Growth in spending will only aggravate the nation’s currently poor fiscal outlook. By 2020, the public debt will be 91 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and …
Despite the best efforts of America’s most expensive disaster in history, Hurricane Katrina didn’t bankrupt FEMA. Nonetheless, almost five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, FEMA teeters on bankruptcy due to its policy of federalizing virtually every natural disaster in America. As The Heritage Foundation has shown, the federalization of routine natural disasters began in 1993 and has yet to show down. Specifically, in The Solution to FEMAs Budget Woes Is Not More Money and Federalizing Disasters Weakens FEMA and Hurts Americans Hit by Catastrophes, we note: In …
In the wake of last Saturday’s attempted Times Square bombing, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) is mad because NYC’s share of federal counterterrorism dollars has fallen over the past few years. These dollars, allocated through the DHS Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) have gone from “25% of the total funding pot in 2005 to 18% in 2010.” Schumer may indeed be right, that dollars have fallen, but he fails to address the more fundamental problem of UASI funding—the fact that more and more jurisdictions are receiving the money, leaving and less …
Gordon Brown continues to cling desperately to power, in a shameless display of contempt for public opinion, but his days as prime minister are surely numbered. A poll on Sunday showed 68 percent of Britons opposed to Brown remaining in office, and calling on him to resign. The PM held desperate talks over the weekend with Nick Clegg in the vain hope of forming a coalition, but so far the Liberal leader has failed to respond to his advances, preferring to look for a deal with Conservative party leader David …
For his sake, let’s hope that Bruce Arnold at the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t get the Gabriel Calzada treatment from the American Wind Energy Association and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. To freshen your memory, Gabriel Calzada is the economist at the King Juan Carlos University who got out his calculator and analyzed the green job situation in Spain—the same Spain whose job-crushing subsidies are supposed to be a model for our green recovery. The professor found that subsidizing green energy costs more traditional jobs than are created in the …
According to multiple sources, at 10 am today President Barack Obama will announce his decision to name Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. Kagan, who served as the Dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, would be the first justice without judicial experience in almost 40 years. But this does not mean she is in any way a stranger to the Senate confirmation process. In fact, in 1995 she authored an article on judicial confirmations for the University of Chicago Law Review where she wrote: The …
House Cloakroom: May 10 – 14 House Analysis: Last week the House passed a bill to authorize $6.6 billion for its cash for caulkers program reminiscent of last years cash for clunkers program. This week they are taking the spending to a whole new level with an $82.5 billion authorization bill for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, and research programs at the Department of Energy. On top of the spending there are also other concerns including how this duplicates efforts already going on in the …
Mother’s Day is upon us and some media outlets will no doubt continue their pattern of going out of their way to find offbeat maternity stories. Much of the cynical press finds faithful, monogamous and married parenting patently boring – and prefers to focus instead on the socially irresponsible, the technologically avant-garde , or the politically cheeky. This is tragic, given the amount of very intriguing and important news about mothers and families, especially the trend that finds the United States now approaching current European levels of out-of-wedlock childbearing. In …
The economic world for good reason is focused intently on Greece and the potential for financial contagion in Europe. But there’s been another interesting development on America’s Pacific-side. One of the of most talented public servants in Indonesia, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati – by some accounts, the world’s best finance minister – has resigned her cabinet post to take a position with the World Bank. It’s always necessary to put Indonesia in some context. For the record, it is the fourth largest country in the world by population. It is …
