A conservative student in Florida says he has the evidence that implicates a public college administrator who last week ordered members of Young Americans for Freedom to leave a campus event after they displayed Heritage Foundation research papers. Palm Beach State College activities director Olivia Morris-Ford, a Facebook fan of President Barack Obama and filmmaker Michael Moore, booted the conservative students from a rush event. Morris-Ford claimed they didn’t have permission to be on campus. Her assertion stands in conflict with evidence YAF state chairman Daniel Diaz shared with Heritage. …
Lawmakers shoved through Obamacare on the promise that it would decrease the number of uninsured Americans. The new law does this by expanding Medicaid’s eligibility to cover an additional 16 million Americans by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). However, recent analysis from former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and American Action Forum analyst Michael Ramlet shows this strategy exacerbates existing problems within the health care system—making Obamacare’s biggest “benefit” questionable. Medicaid, the destination for many of those projected to be uninsured under prior law, is a federal health …
The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal brings some unsurprising yet alarming news about the nation’s fiscal situation. Simply put, the federal government is spending an increasing amount on benefits in the form of entitlements while simultaneously trimming the number of taxpayers paying the bill: Efforts to tame America’s ballooning budget deficit could soon confront a daunting reality: Nearly half of all Americans live in a household in which someone receives government benefits, more than at any time in history. At the same time, the fraction of American households …
In the wake of Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision last month in Perry v. Schwarzenegger striking down the California constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, legal scholars and analysts continue to weigh in on the ruling. The decision has now been stayed by a panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A briefing schedule has been set up, and the appeal, including arguments over issues of legal standing for Prop 8’s proponents, is scheduled for hearing this December. Meanwhile, authorities on various …
Tax-hike advocates have erected yet another straw man to protect their high-tax policy, now arguing that little economic harm would be done if Congress and the president were to raise taxes on higher earners because these high-tax sufferers would have saved the money anyway. Yet the issue is not saving vs. consumption; the issue is incentives, as Robert Barro points out in today’s Wall Street Journal. Of course, the tax hikers prefer to talk in terms of whether tax cuts for the wealthy would help the economy. But we’re not …
In the midst of election primaries, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a day-long conference yesterday in Washington at the National Press Club titled “A New Era – Defining Civil Rights in the 21st Century.” There was a remarkably wide breadth of speakers, including columnist William Raspberry, Clarence B. Jones (former counsel and speechwriter for Martin Luther King), Roger Clegg (Center for Equal Opportunity), and Heather MacDonald (Manhattan Institute). Considering the conference topic — discrimination and racial disparities — the civility and intelligence of the discussions and debates was …
Violent and property crime fell in America last year, the second full year of the current recession, according to new data from the FBI. Recently, the Associated Press ran a story on how criminologists are puzzled by declining crime rates during times of high unemployment. Criminologists should not be surprised, because the social science literature on the relationship between unemployment and crime rates is mixed. Studies tend to find either a positive relationship or no relationship at all between unemployment and crime. Policymakers and journalists need to understand that the …
Fifty years ago in Sharon, Connecticut, a group of crack conservative leaders developed The Sharon Statement and formed Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The succinct statement of these teens and twenty-somethings encapsulated the chief truths of America: freedom of the individual, limited government, the free enterprise system, strong national defense, and the genius of the Constitution. Armed with the Sharon Statement, the Young Americans for Freedom forayed into new territory. Besides launching their new publication, The New Guard and successfully fighting liberals in academia, they took the communists head on. …
No demographic was more opposed to Obamacare’s passage and no group wants to see the law repealed more than America’s seniors. They know that Obamacare used Medicare as a piggy bank to transfer half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, not to shore up Medicare’s solvency, but to spend on a new government program. As if that were not enough, now President Barack Obama wants to raise taxes on the dividend payments that millions of seniors depend on for their livelihood. American seniors are beginning to wonder when they’ll stop …
For the past year, the phrase “cap and trade” was as taboo as using Lord Voldemort’s name in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Wizards scared of the Dark Lord referred to Voldemort as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” For those hoping to pass cap and trade, it became “The-Energy-Policy-That-Will-Create-Jobs.” But opponents correctly labeled cap and trade a significant tax, and the bill died in the Senate. In fact, congressional votes on cap and trade are a major talking point on campaign ads—ads that vilify Members who voted for the Waxman–Markey cap-and trade-bill last …
