Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) today unloaded on the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act recently passed by the House of Representatives. While announcing that the Senate would be voting on the legislation Friday rather than Saturday (as previously expected), Reid excoriated the bill: “If they [Senate Republicans] want to debate it tomorrow for a period of time, they can do that, but I’m going to — I think this piece of legislation is about as weak and senseless as anything that has ever come on this Senate floor … The …
A study released Wednesday, commissioned by the Marcellus Shale Coalition and conducted by three Penn State University energy policy experts, offers a striking view of the massive economic benefits produced by the Marcellus natural gas fields, which stretch from Western New York, through much of Pennsylvania, and into parts of West Virginia and Ohio. The study, titled “The Pennsylvania Marcellus Natural Gas Industry: Status, Economic Impacts, and Future Potential”, focuses, as its title suggests, on the Marcellus field’s impact on the state of Pennsylvania. The economic trends are uniformly positive, …
How confident is Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) that President Barack Obama would sign Cut, Cap and Balance legislation if it makes its way to his desk? So confident that he would wager a Porterhouse steak. He issued the high stakes wager in a press conference today, making the point that America has a major spending problem, the President needs to sign a bill that solves it, and the Cut, Cap and Balance bill which passed the House on Tuesday is the only viable option on the table. In other words, Obama …
Sometimes things don’t work out the way we expect. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg today announced a $50 million gift to the Sierra Club. His motive? “Coal is a self-inflicted public health risk…and the leading cause of climate disruption.” But what will actually come out of the Bloomberg gift? 1) The Sierra Club is likely to be more effective in attacking the U.S. coal industry; 2) U.S. coal production will therefore not reach the level it might have without the gift; 3) U.S. coal exports are then unlikely to reach …
Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. Reining in the CFPB – Diane Katz The End of the Growth Consensus – John B. Taylor Obamacare No Prescription for Hiring – James Sherk The NAT GAS Subsidy – David Kreutzer Why We’ll Have 10% Unemployment Soon – Jeff Reeves Securing the Integrity of Our Elections – Hans A. von Spakovsky Role Reversal: Latin America Taunts U.S. on Debt Woes – Brian Winter U.S. loses $1.3 billion in exiting Chrysler …
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) officially opened its doors in Washington, making it the first major new federal agency in nearly 10 years. Americans should take notice, and they ought to be concerned. Heritage’s Diane Katz explains in The Daily Caller that the sheer scope of the agency’s power–and its lack of accountability–poses concerns for every American: This is a regulatory agency with unparalleled powers, including consolidated and expanded regulatory authority over credit and debit cards, mortgages, student loans, savings and checking accounts, and most every other consumer …
Last week (and again yesterday in a follow-up article) The New York Times featured the poverty-fighting work of the Family Independence Initiative (FII). Founded by Maurice Lim Miller in 2001, FII is a nonprofit, community-based organization that helps working poor families escape poverty by encouraging and rewarding personal initiative and mutual support. On its Web site, FII displays a heading that reads, “Recreating the conditions under which generation after generation of Americans secured a future for their children and communities.” What are those historic conditions? According to Miller, they include …
According to many experts, the United States stands to be the Saudi Arabia of natural gas production. Last month, the New York Times reported otherwise, questioning the economics of shale gas extraction and overstating the amount of gas available in the vast formation in the United States. The story included links to hundreds of e-mails from some independent energy executives and state geologists calling shale gas a Ponzi scheme and inducing fears of another Enron-like scandal or a subprime mortgage crisis. Yesterday, the Energy Information Administration’s Howard Gruenspecht testified Tuesday …
This week, the House Budget Committee and Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings to examine the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a board of unelected bureaucrats tasked under Obamacare to reduce the growth in Medicare spending. During the Budget Committee hearing, Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, described the board: [T]he IPAB is unprecedented in the power given to unelected officials to direct hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending. The IPAB will give unelected, unaccountable government appointees the power to make decisions about payment policy in …
In a new interview with The Boundless Show, Bill Beach of The Heritage Foundation shocked host Lisa Anderson and her young-adult audience with his statement: “If we don’t immediately act to solve the debt crisis, what will happen is tax rates will basically double by the time the current millennial generation is in their 50’s—which isn’t that far away.“ Bill Beach on The Boundless Show Their discussion was based on Heritage’s recent report Slay the Beast: How You Can Save Us from the Massive Debt. A presentation Beach and co-author Rob Bluey have …
