Add North Carolina to the list of states making monumental moves forward on school choice. In the last two weeks, legislators in the Tarheel State have advanced two policies to expand educational options for the state’s students. The first lifts the state’s cap on charter schools, currently limited to100. The second puts into place a tax credit scholarship program to give special-needs students the opportunity to attend a private school of their choice. While the first bill has made it past the governor’s desk, the second awaits final approval.
In a classic case of the “Friday afternoon news dump,” last week the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it is closing the process to apply for a waiver to Obamacare’s annual limits provision in September. Both the timing and substance of this decision confirm that HHS’s annual limit regulations and the decision to grant waivers was a public relations strategy gone bad. Friday’s announcement was little more than a move by the Obama Administration to limit further damage from a self-inflicted wound.
There’s urgency in Washington to fix a problem that’s been a long time coming: America’s fast track to fiscal implosion. In The Heritage Foundation’s just-released, expanded 2011 Budget Chart Book, you can see just how bad the country’s spending problem is and how America racked up so much debt. Congress is coming to grips with the need to enact reform, in part because there’s a new breed of Tea Party conservatives making their voices heard on Capitol Hill and also because the government has reached the legal limit on how …
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), left, visits Heritage today at 10 a.m. to talk about her plan to save Social Security, which faces $6.5 trillion in unfunded obligations over the next 75 years. She’ll sit down afterward with me to talk about why Social Security reform should be part of the debt limit debate. Then at noon today we welcome Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) to Heritage for The Bloggers Briefing. As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Upton has sway over a range of issues from health care …
Of all those whom we at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation have honored with the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom—and they include such famed defenders of freedom as Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Harry Wu—none surpasses the courage and commitment of Elena Bonner, who passed away last Saturday. Known best as the widow of Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize Peace Prize winner, Mrs. Bonner—despite serious health problems—became a tireless advocate of human rights and unflinching opponent of political oppression. When Mikhail Gorbachev, still head …
The decision to adopt a national seal was made on July 4, 1776, the same day that the Continental Congress declared America’s independence from Great Britain. As a practical matter, America needed an official emblem to affix to diplomatic and official documents in order to signify its sovereignty as a new nation. And yet our Great Seal would become so much more than a mark of sovereignty; the symbolism of the Great Seal reflects America’s universal, timeless ideas. As opposed to the state seals of European nations, the imagery of …
Treadmills for shrimp and poetry in zoos. The AARP recently decried these examples of government spending as part of a recent TV campaign against Medicare and Social Security reform proposals. AARP says that in order to balance the budget, Congress should consider cutting funding for these types of programs, instead of considering Medicare and Social Security reform. AARP’s campaign refuses to acknowledge that current Medicare and Social Security spending is on an unsustainable path. Getting the nation’s spending—and ultimately the debt—under control cannot be done solely by cutting funding for …
The Supreme Court’s 9 to 0 decision today in Wal-Mart v. Dukes stopped an abusive class action lawsuit and should bring a huge sigh of relief that the plaintiffs’ bar was stopped from further exploiting employers who create jobs. Although the administration will probably never publicly admit it given its strong allegiance to plaintiffs’ lawyers and their massive campaign contributions, they should also be relieved since a contrary decision against America’s largest retailer (a long-time Heritage Foundation donor) could have hurt our struggling economy.
Is President Barack Obama sowing the seeds of mistrust in Washington by playing “fast and loose with the truth in pursuit of political ends”? Heritage’s James Carafano writes that revelations about the President’s signature New START Treaty certainly make it look that way. Under the treaty, Russia will be permitted to build a dozen more nuclear weapons if they so choose — and Russian officials have said they plan to build more launchers. The United States, though, must cut weapons and platforms, including a quarter of its launchers. And that’s contrary to …
It’s tempting to cut off funds immediately for President Obama’s ill-conceived Libya offensive. But it’s not the right course. For the sake of our allies, Congress needs to be patient in using the power of the purse to correct Obama’s misadventure. Even if the ongoing air attacks chased Muammar Qadhafi from power, he might be replaced by a radical Islamist regime. We have no good intelligence on what the rebels would establish if they took over.
