The jobless rate in America hovers at 9.1 percent. The national debt ticks upwards of $14.3 trillion and small businesses collapse daily due to costly bureaucratic regulations. The President has failed to offer a viable plan that will put America’s economy back on a path to prosperity. It is in this context that President Obama invites questions about jobs and the economy via Twitter tomorrow afternoon for the nation’s first presidential Twitter town hall. If you ever wanted to put President Obama on the spot for these things and more, the …
In this month’s Libertad Radio Show on WBER in Fairfax, Virginia, our Heritage team had a chance to sit down with experts and political leaders to discuss issues ranging from Mexico and Afghanistan, to the economy and jobs. The first half of the hour-long show is in Spanish, the second half in English. To listen to the full show, click here. We kicked off our Spanish segment with a discussion on the President’s recent decision to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Later on, we had the opportunity to sit down …
Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. A decent military takes cash – Ed Feulner The Year of School Choice – Wall Street Journal Game on, not over, for parents – Charles A. Donovan Know Your Enemy: Meet the Haqqani Network – James Carafano Leahy Stacks Deck for Hearing (and Still Loses) – Hans A. von Spakovsky The Case Against Ignoring Congress on the Debt Ceiling – Connor Simpson Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land on this Independence Day …
Today, we at The Heritage Foundation mourn the loss of Otto von Habsburg, a defender of freedom and friend of liberty in Europe and around the world. Born as the Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary and the oldest son of Austria-Hungary’s last emperor, Otto was next in line to be Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary and thus went into exile with his family following the end of World War I. Otto was well-educated, fluently speaking seven languages and earning his doctoral degree in social and political sciences from the …
It took Nixon to go to China, and now it’s taking a coalition of union members to push for right-to-work legislation in big labor’s heartland of Michigan. Our friends at The Mackinac Center’s Michigan Capitol Confidential report: “A grassroots coalition called ‘Michigan Freedom to Work’ held a news conference June 30, 2011, at several locations around the state, including Lansing. Several union members and others gathered in the Capitol building to announce their new coalition and plans to push for legislation to add Michigan to the list of states that …
A bill introduced in the Russian Duma last Tuesday would allow the Foreign Ministry to blacklist foreigners believed to have violated the rights of Russian citizens. The bill is an angry response to the Sergey Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which was introduced in Congress last month with bipartisan support. The Magnitsky legislation is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital, which in the mid-2000s was the largest Western portfolio investor in Russia. Magnitsky died a torturous death after prison authorities deliberately denied him medical care. Magnitsky …
Our future should not be determined behind closed doors. Yet that’s where the White House and Congress are holding secret talks about our debt ceiling and about taxes and spending. We deserve openness instead. We don’t need another farce when the players suddenly burst from their huddle, line up Members of Congress, and rush through their plan on a quick count. The two keys are first, frequent and detailed progress reports from the now-secret talks, and second, ample time for review of any agreement. We’ve been told that participants supposedly …
Senator Jim DeMint (R–SC) and 12 of his Senate Republican colleagues recently introduced the Retirement Freedom Act. The bill would allow senior citizens to buy a better health plan than traditional Medicare, if they wish to do so, without having to give up their Social Security benefits. Today, if a person who is retiring does not wish to enroll in traditional Medicare’s hospitalization program and instead wants to buy his or her own health care coverage, the federal bureaucracy forces that person to give up Social Security benefits as well. …
Today’s Wall Street Journal has some bad news that most Americans are already painfully aware of. President Barack Obama’s recovery is plodding along at a snail’s pace: Two years ago, officials said, the worst recession since the Great Depression ended. The stumbling recovery has also proven to be the worst since the economic disaster of the 1930s. Across a wide range of measures—employment growth, unemployment levels, bank lending, economic output, income growth, home prices and household expectations for financial well-being—the economy’s improvement since the recession’s end in June 2009 has …
Splitting the difference does not improve bad policy. The final regulations adopted this week by the Federal Reserve Board to impose price caps on “swipe fees” paid by merchants when customers use debit cards to pay for purchases will still hurt consumers. The Fed did increase the fee cap from the 12-cents-per-transaction cap contained in the draft regulation to between 21 and 24 cents in the final version. Both are far below the current average swipe fee of 44 cents. The compromise pleased no one. Fed governor Betsey Duke voted …
