Celebrating the company’s Wednesday initial public offering, President Barack Obama last night called his government takeover of General Motors a “success story.” “American taxpayers are now positioned to recover more than my administration invested in GM,” he said. Left unsaid is the fact that if the Obama Administration keeps selling their GM stock at the IPO price, the U.S. taxpayer will lose $10 billion on the deal, and that does not include the loans GM still owes, cash for clunkers, the Chevy Volt subsidies, or the millions of unseen costs …
For two years now, President Barack Obama’s administration has been on a concentrated mission to expand the size and scope of the federal government. Of course, this passionate mission is derailed when the inefficiencies of certain government services are highlighted in the American conscience. And every time the general public decries a specific example of government ineffectiveness, the Obama team’s reaction is incredulous shock. How could anyone not blindly trust the federal bureaucracy? Once again this is the case as a tidal wave of criticism befalls the Transportation Security Administration …
With the nuclear New START Treaty causing waves in Congress, President Obama’s recent overseas trips drawing criticism from both supporters and opponents, and the upcoming NATO heads-of-state summit in Lisbon this month, a fundamental question arises: What is America’s role in the world? In the newest installment in the Understanding America series, Marion Smith looks to the words and intent of the Founders themselves in order to understand their view of American foreign policy. Liberty, he argues, is the defining principle of American policy, both domestic and foreign. As an …
Join us Friday at Noon ET right here on The Foundry for a live chat on New START that is up for ratification in the Senate. Joining us will be Homeland Security expert James Carafano. Dr. Carafano is the Director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy here at Heritage. He has written extensively on the treaty and what it means for national security. There are a lot of flaws with the treaty and Dr. Carafano will answer questions you have for it. <a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=1dceb63e11″ mce_href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=1dceb63e11″ >Lunch with Heritage Feat. …
Government employees owe $3.3 billion in back taxes, CNBC reports. According to Heritage Foundation fellow James Sherk, the typical federal worker “receives 22 percent more in wages than an equally skilled private sector worker … .” And, says Sherk, when both wages and benefits are toted up, federal workers are overpayed by $40 billion to $50 billion per year. You’d think they would be able to pay their taxes.
Congressional Quarterly is reporting that the United States Senate is going to enact a one-month reprieve for Medicare physicians, saving them once again from a draconian reduction in Medicare payment. This entire system is a mess. Under the existing Medicare payment formula (the Sustainable Growth Rate, or SGR) for doctors that the Senate and their House colleagues enacted in 1997, physician reimbursement is tied to the performance of the general economy. If in any given year Medicare physician payment outpaces the growth in the general economy, there is an automatic …
When a news outlet heralds the message that “4 in 10 say marriage becoming obsolete,” one can be sure that no one has surveyed the kids. Today the Pew Research Center, in conjunction with Time Magazine, formally released the results of a poll that, in the words of one Associated Press writer, underscores the existence of “rapidly changing notions of the American family.” It’s an ideological spin on what is in fact a slowly evolving situation that culture shapers and policymakers could and should be doing much more to address. …
Both liberals and conservatives agree that Social Security’s coming fiscal problems need to be addressed soon or they will only grow worse. A recent analysis for the Pew Charitable Trusts by Charles Blahous, one of the two public trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, shows that Social Security’s problems cannot be wished away: According to the trustees’ analysis, there is an 80 percent likelihood that the trust fund will be exhausted between 2032 …
While they were busy wasting time on Obamacare, energy taxes, and amnesty, the 111th Congress let many of their primary obligations slide. That is why the next two months is about to witness the busiest lame duck session in the history of Congress. Here are seven most do items this lame duck must address before the 112th Congress is sworn in: 1. Appropriations – Congress has yet to complete work on one of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to keep the discretionary budget of the government funded into next year. …
The report today from the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission is chilling but not terribly surprising. According to the commission (pages 243–44): For about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, China Telecom advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese servers. Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, routing all traffic to about 15 percent of the Internet’s destinations through servers located in China. This incident affected traffic to and from U.S. government (“.gov”) and military (“.mil”) sites, …
