Former White House Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag may have left the Obama administration this past July, but The New York Times has made sure his opinions won’t fall into obscurity. He is now a Contributing Columnist for the NYT op-ed page and his first effort is a tax-and-spend classic. We have paired some of Orszag’s op-ed statement “myths” with “facts” from JD Foster’s new paper: Obama Tax Hikes Defended by Myths and Straw Man Arguments Orszag: “In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is …
When most people think about the Founders and economics, two common myths arise. The first is that the Founders vehemently disagreed about economics and, therefore, reached no consensus on the subject. This contention is evident in Alexander Hamilton’s and Thomas Jefferson’s famous exchange about whether the American economy should consist of self-sufficient farming or a commercial empire of manufacturing. The second myth is that the Founders saw little or no role for government in the economy—that they embraced a purely laissez faire economic theory. Thomas G. West puts an end …
In the continuing (over)reaction to the failures of Hurricane Katrina five years ago, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) once again “leaned forward” in anticipation of a hurricane. For all of its activities in response to Hurricane Dean in 2009, FEMA spent north of $50 million for what amounted to a cloudy day in Houston, as Dean never got close to hitting Texas. Despite the fact that few expected Earl to actually hit the United States, FEMA issued disaster declarations to North Carolina and Massachusetts. Other than some larger waves, …
A recent comment by actress Jennifer Aniston that “women are more and more realizing that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child” might seem to indicate that deviancy has irrevocably been “defined down” and that a culture of permissiveness has been permanently entrenched in our nation’s society. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the percentage of teens who believe that it’s okay for an unmarried female to have a child has increased to nearly 64 percent (among males) and to more …
One in six Americans now receives some form of government assistance, reported last week’s U.S.A Today. Fifty million are on Medicaid, a record high and a whopping 17 percent increase since December 2007. Food stamp enrollment has climbed nearly 50 percent since 2008 and now stands at 40 million, or one in seven people. Ten million Americans receive unemployment benefits, and 4.4 million get direct cash assistance, an 18 percent increase from two years ago. And these are the numbers from only four of the more than 70 welfare programs …
Iran’s bombastic President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, again has called into question the military strength and staying power of the United States. Asked last month if he anticipated a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Ahmadinejad dismissively said: Do you really think that an army that has been defeated by a small army and now wants to withdraw would want to enter a war against the large and well-trained Iranian army? I don’t think so. The U.S. cannot start a war against Iran. More importantly, why would it? There are no …
According to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released today, only 26% of voters think the economy is going to be better in the next year, and 61% think the country is on the wrong track. Desperate to show Americans he’s fighting “every single day, every single hour, every single minute” to turn the economy around, President Barack Obama unveiled yet another economic stimulus spending plan yesterday. This time the President is promising to spend $50 billion over six-years on a “Race to the Top”-style transportation pork plan that will …
This Labor Day marks a milestone in the history of the U.S. union movement. It is the first Labor Day on which a majority of union members in United States work for the government. In January the Department of Labor reported that union membership in government has overtaken that in the private sector. Three times as many union members work in the Post Office as in the entire domestic auto industry. The face of the union movement is not a worker on the assembly line but a clerk at the …
There is an important column on immigration today in The Washington Times Commentary section by Mark Metcalf, a former Justice Department colleague and good friend of mine. I previously reported for The Foundry on his testimony in June about our broken immigration court system before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. Metcalf is a former immigration judge who writes about the disdain the Obama administration has shown toward the rule of law with its wholesale dismissal of thousands of cases against illegal …
Like all good socialists Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez believes private property is theft, so he wants to steal it back in the people’s name. Chavez remains on an expropriation roll, having gobbled up huge sections of the Venezuelan economy, reportedly $22 billion in transactions in the past four years. For the powerful and prominent he has offered compensation, drawing on Venezuela’s oil wealth, but for many promises and litigation lead only to misery and despair. Franklin Brito was a 49-year agronomist and modest property owner with a grievance against the Venezuelan …
