During his Twitter Townhall on Wednesday, President Obama admitted that government welfare has created dependency. He noted: I think we should acknowledge that some welfare programs in the past were not well designed and in some cases did encourage dependency.… As somebody who worked in low-income neighborhoods, I’ve seen it where people weren’t encouraged to work, weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and over time their motivation started to diminish. And I think even if you’re progressive you’ve got to acknowledge that some of these …
In a Thursday interview with Scribe, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC, claimed that President Obama has no real intention of striking a deal with Republicans on the debt ceiling. Rather, he said, the talks between congressional leaders and the White House have been efforts to “run out the clock up against his so-called deadline of August the second” in order to paint Republicans as “irresponsible.” The president fully intends to wait it out until then, DeMint said, “so that he can have a crisis” – which of course smacks of former …
During his Twitter Town Hall yesterday, President Obama vastly underestimated the size of the bloated Department of Education budget. The nice thing about the defense budget is it’s so big, it’s so huge, that, you know, a 1 percent reduction is the equivalent of the education budget. I’m exaggerating. But it’s so big that you can make relatively modest changes to defense that end up giving you a lot of headroom to fund things like basic research or student loans or things like that. That’s a pretty gross exaggeration. A …
President Obama offered few concrete proposals for promoting fiscal responsibility during his “Twitter town hall” on Wednesday. One that he did mention was his drive to freeze federal employee salaries, though he offered the measure as an example of an effort to “make these adjustments that are necessary during these difficult fiscal times…in a way that preserves collective bargaining rights.” “We froze federal pay for federal workers for two years,” Obama claimed. “Now that wasn’t real popular, as you might imagine, among federal workers,” the president added. But even federal …
Moments ago in his Twitter Town Hall chat, President Barack Obama said he “wouldn’t be president if someone hadn’t helped provide some scholarships for my school.” At age ten, President Obama received a scholarship to attend the prestigious Punahou School in Hawaii. President Obama’s remarks today underscore the life-changing significance of school choice—an opportunity most students trapped in failing and often violent public schools never get. (To hear the stories of a few who have had their horizons expanded by the school choice, watch our documentary Let Me Rise.) Sadly, the President …
The chief economic culprit of President Obama’s Wednesday press conference was undoubtedly “corporate jets.” He mentioned them on at least six occasions, each time offering their owners as an example of a group that should be paying more in taxes. “I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well,” the president stated at one point, “to give up that tax break that no other business enjoys.” But the corporate jet tax break to which Obama was referring – called …
For all of candidate Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric promising to respect Congress’s authority to draft the nation’s laws, President Obama has demonstrated a persistent pattern of circumventing the legislative branch via administrative fiat whenever his agenda stalls. And though one of the Obama campaign’s legal advisers cautioned against a President who would “take the law into his own hands and shred it when it’s convenient,” Obama has done just that time and time again. The Obama Administration generally employs one of two strategies to legislate without—and often in spite of—congressional …
In the face of an unpopular war and an upcoming re-election campaign, President Barack Obama addressed the American people last night from the East Room of the White House to inform them of his plans to rapidly withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The President’s decision, though politically expedient, jeopardizes the successes made in Afghanistan over the last 10 months and will signal to allies and enemies alike that the United States is more committed to extricating itself from the fight than it is to ensuring that stability in the region is achieved. The …
President Obama’s plan for a hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan risks squandering the hard-won gains made on the battlefield in southern Afghanistan over the last ten months. U.S. military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan had reportedly requested a slower pace of withdrawal to afford them the opportunity to consolidate recent gains against Taliban insurgents. President Obama has denied his military commanders flexibility to determine the pace and scope of withdrawal based on conditions on the ground, and instead appears to have based his decision largely around the …
It’s a big day in Washington for domestic and foreign news. This morning the Congressional Budget Office releases its annual Long-Term Budget Outlook. Then in the evening President Obama outlines his Afghanistan withdrawal plan in a primetime address beginning at 8. There are two noteworthy events happening at Heritage today: Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) visits at 9 a.m. to talk about making REAL ID a reality. Then at 10:30 a.m. we’ll host Arun Jaitley, leader of the Indian opposition in the Rajya Sabha. Jaitley (center in photo) will discuss how …
