Is America getting soft? President Obama seems to think so: The way I think about it is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. We need to get back on track. Obama says he wants to remedy our softness and restore our competitive edge, yet the regulatory state that he constantly expands is actually the source of the problem. Our growingly intrusive government is …
At the Heritage Blogger’s Briefing today, Senator Rand Paul urged Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin to delay the mark-up of his 860 page proposal to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as No Child Left Behind: “It’s time to put an end to the status quo, slow down, read the bills, and truly work for the American people, not against them. I urge the chairman and ranking member to cancel tomorrow’s mark-up and allow everyone concerned the time necessary to read and evaluate …
The latest iteration of No Child Left Behind comes before a Senate committee tomorrow with bipartisan support. But if Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has anything to say about it, the bill won’t go anywhere fast. Paul, the Tea Party favorite who won election last November, has promised to introduce 100 amendments, including a complete repeal of No Child Left Behind. That could significantly slow down the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. His approach seeks to reduce the federal government’s role in education and return control to local communities. …
If you’re concerned that the Solyndra scandal is hampering other energy initiatives, worry not. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is moving right along with its review of urinal efficiency. Not urologically speaking, of course, but in terms of the ceramic catch of nature’s call. The federal plumbing police last codified water efficiency standards for urinals back in 1998. According to statute, the DOE must allow states to toughen such requirements if the feds don’t do so within five years. Having thus waived pre-emption, the agency is now seeking information …
The “National Popular Vote” plan (NPV) is a scheme that would effectively abolish the Electoral College without going through the formal (and politically difficult) process of amending the Constitution. The NPV proposes an interstate compact in which participating states agree in advance to automatically allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote (the highest vote getter, even if only a plurality), disregarding the popular vote results in their states. The NPV supposedly would go into effect as soon as “states cumulatively possessing a majority of the …
Promising solutions to child poverty and social breakdown are on the agenda in Atlanta tomorrow morning, when The Heritage Foundation joins Georgia Family Council for a symposium called “Breakthrough Georgia: Fighting Poverty and Restoring Society.” Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector will present findings on the state of child poverty in Georgia and the profound role that marriage can play in decreasing the state’s poverty rate.As across the rest of the country, the marital status of a mom and dad in Georgia can have a tremendous impact on the probability …
China has the dubious distinction of being one of the most controlled information environments in the world. Yet even China’s army of censors can at times have trouble staying on top of the vast sea of communication that flows through the Internet. The most recent challenge to government control is microblogging sites like Twitter, which produce a prodigious volume of output. Twitter itself is, of course, outlawed by the Chinese government, which created a number of internal Internet services, like the popular Weibo microblogging service. Ironically, that has now proven difficult …
Lawmakers have recently paid lip service to cutting the corporate tax rate to help boost economic growth. Doing so would be good policy, but it’s important to know why. Information disseminated by both political parties, think tanks, government organizations, media outlets, and political pundits has confused the issue, leading many to believe that reducing the corporate tax rate would have little effect on the economy. This is because most discussion surrounding the utility of tax cuts is filtered primarily through the “demand-side” lens—that is, it views tax cuts as effective …
The “Occupy Wall Street” crowd may be dramatically out of step with the American electorate, but Big Labor likes what it sees. The AFL-CIO union has bought two prominently-placed Google ads for a pair of initiatives supporting the protests. The search term “occupy wall street” turns up two sidebar ads that link to AFL-CIO websites, as seen in the screenshot below (click to enlarge). Google Adwords, the site’s advertising service, charges 10 cents per click for a prominently-placed ad on that search results page. The first ad points to aflcio.org/iam99percent, …
Democratic pollster Doug Schoen has conducted what he calls “the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.” The survey’s findings suggest that the protest movement that has “occupied” New York City’s Zucotti Park for a month and spread across the country is not only unrepresentative of “the 99%”, but is actually far outside of the mainstream of American public opinion. Scribe noted a pair of polls yesterday showing that Americans, by and large, consider the federal government more to blame for the state of the economy than Wall …
