Millions of Americans probably received this week’s email from President Obama, inviting them to send money and be registered to win a free dinner with the President. Heritage’s Ernest Istook took it as a personal invitation to be one of four people to be chosen. And upon reading the fine print, he found he doesn’t have to send a donation in order to win this lottery. “After all,” Istook says, if I contribute to the President I might be forced to accept an ambassadorship or some other federal job.”
126 years ago today, on June 17, 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor. A gift from the French people, the statue recalls our alliance with France during the Revolutionary War. Historian Edouard de Laboulaye conceived the idea of the statue as a visible symbol of America’s guiding principle: the universal liberty and equality of men. Sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi designed the statue, modeling her after the Roman goddess Libertas, the personification of freedom. Officially titled “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the statue’s name, along with the torch born …
Retailers have 11 days to sell any cribs that don’t meet the government’s new safety standard. Anything that’s left in stores on June 28 must be trashed. At least 100,000 cribs — a figure significantly larger than first anticipated — could be destined for the garbage dump, according to new estimates released yesterday by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Despite the large inventory, the Democrat-controlled CPSC voted 3-to-2 against extending the June 28 deadline. Previous figures, reported yesterday on The Foundry, put the number at 20,000 affected cribs. But due …
Today marks the 81st anniversary of the passage of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. Actor and economist Ben Stein famously explained this legislation in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the classic John Hughes movie that was released 25 years ago this month: In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the…Anyone? Anyone? The Great Depression, passed the—Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley–Smoot Tariff Act, which—Anyone? Raised or lowered? Raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? …
For many Americans, poverty is hidden from view, and its reality is conveniently tucked out of sight and out of mind in places like inner cities or across rural landscapes. The effects of poverty, though, are all too real for those suffering in the shadows. Consider one startling fact: Children from single-parent families (most of which are headed by a single mother) are over five times as likely to live in poverty than are those from married families. The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector points to the root cause of the …
The announcement that Osama bin Laden’s longtime second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri, will lead the fractured terrorist group came as no surprise to pundits and observers. Since joining forces with bin Laden in 1998, al Zawahiri had jointly pursued a series of dramatic assaults on the United States and Western interests abroad, including the tragic attacks of 9/11 and the bombing of the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in 2000. While the ascendance of al Zawahiri to lead al Qaeda Central is largely anticlimactic, his appointment nonetheless …
RALEIGH, NC — There’s a lot of talk in Washington these days about debt — and for good reason. The federal government reached the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling one month ago today. And the Obama administration has set a date of Aug. 2 for Congress to raise that limit. Why does this matter? There are economic implications for all Americans, but the generation under the age of 40 faces some of the biggest challenges from the country’s massive debt. That’s why Heritage has launched an education tour called Slay the …
Just how many jobs does President Barack Obama want to destroy in the name of going green? According to a new report by The Center for Automotive Research, the number could be as high as 264,500 jobs lost just from new automobile fuel efficiency standards being considered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, the cost of a new vehicle could go up by nearly $10,000 and sales could be reduced by 5.5 million vehicles annually. DBusiness pulls apart the report and finds that under the highest proposed mandate — which …
As more Americans delay or forego the benefits of marriage, one social scientist is suggesting that young adults’ reluctance to tie the knot may stem from faulty market mechanisms in the “sexual economy.” At a recent presentation at The Heritage Foundation, Mark Regnerus discussed the concept of sexual economics and his recent book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying, also mentioned this week in The Washington Times. The dynamics of sexual economics, Regnerus explains, include tradeoffs in the exchange of sexual relationships, in …
Ever since the raid last month that killed Osama Bin Laden, the question of whether the US violated Pakistani sovereignty keeps on coming up. Heritage asked renowned international law scholar Jeremy Rabkin to address the matter. Did the United States violate Pakistan’s sovereignty when it raided Osama bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad? At first blush, that might seem hard to deny: if a sovereign state can’t exclude outside military intervention, what’s left of sovereignty? But, in fact, the claim to sovereignty involves responsibilities as well as rights. The political thinkers who …
