Yesterday we highlighted two recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports (October 14, 2010 and February 10, 2011) that detail how Obamacare bypassed the traditional yearly budgeting process and created a $105 billion slush fund for implementation. As we explained yesterday, if conservatives are serious about stopping Obamacare, they must proactively defund this money program by program. Today former Congressmen and Heritage Foundation Distinguished Fellow Ernest Istook will testify on this subject before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. The hearing started at 10 AM and is titled Setting …
In 1999, the Clinton Environmental Protection Agency released a report required by the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act which estimated the economic benefits of the legislation to be $170 billion in 2010. Sounds believable. Fast forward to last week, the Obama EPA released their own report on the economic benefits of the Clean Air Act in 2020. Total CAA benefits according to the Obama the EPA: $2 trillion. A more than 1000% increase. Did the Clean Air Act get 1000% better in just 10 years? Or did the …
While Obamacare is rightly notorious as a fiscal nightmare, less well known is just how massively it transferred power from Congress to the executive branch. In fact, the full scope of Congress’s abdication is still unknown. What is now known, however, is that deeply buried within Obamacare was a $105 billion slush fund that assures its implementation into the future, no matter what future voters think or want. This makes then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment to the Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties about Obamacare, “We have to pass the …
Last week, when the National Center for Health Statistics released the latest results from the National Survey of Family Growth, The Washington Post reported that one finding “may surprise those bewailing a permissive and eros-soaked popular culture: More than one-quarter of people interviewed in their late teens and early 20s had never had sex.” Many conservatives do rightly criticize our current “eros-soaked popular culture.” But those conservatives who follow The Heritage Foundation also know that abstinence has been on the rise for some time now and that stable family relationships …
Mark your calendars for July 1st. That is the day that Obamacare’s failed health care model will crash head on to the fiscal reality of strained states budgets. For all the headlines that Obamacare’s individual and business mandates get, perhaps the dirtiest little secret about Obamacare is that over half of the health insurance coverage gained through the law is accomplished through Medicaid. Medicaid already covers one of every six Americans, eats up 22 percent of the typical state budget, and total federal and state Medicaid spending has quintupled over …
Yesterday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar testified before the House Natural Resources Committee on the Department of the Interior’s Fiscal Year 2012 Budget proposal. When pressed by Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) about the de facto offshore drilling moratorium the Obama Administration has inflicted on his district, Sec. Salazar responded: “When you look at the production within the Gulf of Mexico, even in the midst of the national crisis of the Deepwater Horizon, the production has remained at an all-time high.” This is an audaciously out of touch statement. According to the …
Yesterday, for the first time since September 2008, the price of a barrel of crude oil topped $100 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. But while the recent unrest in the Middle East has had some marginal effect on rising prices, the most significant factor has been increased oil demand worldwide. That is why, long before the recent protests even began, analysts were predicting $4 a gallon by this summer and $5 a gallon by 2012. Anyone could have predicted that the recovering world economy, coupled with the continued growth …
Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a 345-page report detailing 34 major areas of wasteful government spending that Sen. Tom Coburn (R–OK) says could save the federal government $100 billion or more every year. Conservatives jumped on the news, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R–VA) office releasing a statement:“That is why House Republicans are hard at work cutting spending and getting our fiscal house in order – we need to prevent taxpayer dollars from being wasted and put Washington on a budget so we begin to live within …
The New York Times has a story out today purporting to show that “Majority in Poll Back Employees in Public Sector Unions.” But this poll is completely worthless. To understand why just look at the question they used to justify their headline: Collective bargaining refers to negotiations between an employer and a labor union’s members to determine the conditions of employment. Some states are trying to take away some collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. Do you favor or oppose taking away some collective bargaining rights of the unions? …
Obamacare remains tremendously unpopular with the American people. According to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll, only 14 percent of Americans believe they have benefited from the law, compared to 17 percent who say the law has already harmed them. Only 28 percent of Americans believe Obamacare will help the nation’s economy, compared to 45 percent who believe it will make it worse. Overall, 48 percent of Americans oppose Obamacare while only 43 percent favor it. Some provisions, like the individual mandate, are particularly unpopular, with a full 67 percent …
