President Obama nominated Representative Mel Watt (D–NC) as new chief regulator to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), replacing the current acting director Edward DeMarco. Watt has strong support from liberals in both the House and the Senate as a longtime member of the House Financial Services Committee and advocate …
Senator Patty Murray’s (D–WA) budget tax plan directly calls for $975 billion in new tax increases over the next decade. Indeed, the Senate budget is only a framework document, but it clearly lays out who should pay the higher taxes. The Democratic majority wants higher taxes by “eliminating loopholes and …
Professional golfer Phil Mickelson, one of California’s many but dwindling wealthy, apparently carded a bogey when he intimated over the weekend that the near 60 percent marginal tax rate on the state’s millionaires may be enough to make him flee to a lower tax burden state. In November, the state …
What would the potential impact on the economy be if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the housing finance government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)—were eliminated? Our research indicates that winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the mortgage market would have a minimal and predictable effect on the economy. Since 2008, Fannie Mae …
The President and his advocates in Congress argue that raising taxes on all taxpayers would damage the economy but that raising taxes on only “high-income” households is supposedly not economically destructive. This line of reasoning is simply mistaken. (House Speaker John Boehner (R–OH), perhaps still cognizant of the economic ramifications …
In a new Backgrounder, “How Contagious Is Europe’s Economic Crisis?”, we discuss several channels through which a European crisis could be transmitted to the U.S. economy and note the key policy responses needed in the U.S. and in Europe. Current effects. The U.S. is already affected by lower demand for …
Last week, The Heritage Foundation co-hosted the launch of the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), a new tool giving insight into the effect that various drivers of entrepreneurship have on economic development in countries around the world. Two crucial findings from the 2012 GEDI emerged at the conference: …
Yesterday, President Obama insisted that a coalition of Senate Republican legislators is playing partisan politics yet again. He told Americans that he knows exactly what small businesses need in order to start productively hiring, and that’s the Small Jobs Act, which is currently before the Senate. The business community does …
In an attempt to solve the nation’s current economic woes, legislators remain fixated on a single solution: federal stimulus spending. This is the wrong solution, regardless of the sweet rhetoric used by some Washington lawmakers, and is no economic stimulus. Two days ago the Senate passed (62 to 36) another …
While legislators finalize yet another round of stimulus spending, they should self-impose a time-out to assess the ineffectiveness of the last two years of government-directed stimulus. After two years of repeated government stimulus programs, the economy remains either in recession or in very slow recovery and yet the federal government …
