Long-term interest rates are rising rapidly, with the 10-year Treasury pushing against 4 percent for the first time since the summer of 2008 – before the financial markets collapse. The many influences on U.S. interest rates at the moment are all moving in the same direction – up. One influence is the growing concern that inflation could become a major problem in the near future, and this is building into the inflation expectation components of interest rates. Another is simply the unwinding of the flight to safety following the initial …
President Obama has appointed yet another czar. This time it’s a pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, to monitor the compensation paid to seven companies currently under the opiate influence of federal bailout money. We’re long past czar fatigue. The political usefulness of a czar is that it allows the President to underscore the importance of an issue. The czar does not acquire any powers not already resident in the office of the Executive, but does have more than the usual influence accorded a federal bureaucrat by virtue of his presumed access …
Defending the Obama administration’s government-run health insurance option, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday: I think if you listen to the debate on Capitol Hill about health care you’re likely to hear two very important words: choice and competition. A public option that you’re referring to is nothing more than the ability to provide more choice through competition. Those, I think, are values that you’ll hear throughout this debate as being held near and dear to the hearts of not just people on Capitol Hill, but throughout the …
From the creators of Obama’s Bogus Budget Cuts and The National Debt Road Trip, we now have The Obama Stimulus: Predictions vs. Reality: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJu0DgpiK8c[/youtube]
Did you ever know anyone that would repeatedly go out to the bar, drink themselves unconscious, and then wake up the next morning and promise never to drink again? That is President Barack Obama when it comes to spending. This February, after signing the largest single-year increase in domestic federal spending since World War II, President Obama held a “fiscal responsibility” summit designed to “send a signal that we are serious” at putting the nation on sounder financial footing. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank quipped at the time: “Holding a ‘fiscal responsibility …
Considering how Big Labor has been forcing our government to treat them, the only surprise is that this didn’t happen sooner: WHISTLER, B.C. — Canadian mayors have ended their annual conference with a renewed call to shut out U.S. bidders from municipal stimulus spending. Mayors narrowly passed a resolution saying as much at their annual conference in Whistler, B.C., on Saturday in retaliation for a “Buy American” policy south of the border that some say is costing jobs in this country. Jean Perrault, outgoing president of the Federation of Canadian …
Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly job report showing that the economy lost 345,000 jobs in May. This brings the total number of jobs lost in the first full three months since the economic stimulus package was passed to 1.5 million jobs. Countering these inconvenient truths, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a new “accelerated” “roadmap to recovery”, which the AP dryly notes “is neither new nor accelerated.” Officially, the Obama administration claims their stimulus plan has already “saved or created” 150,000 jobs, …
Not even D-Day, June 6th, went by without an international apology from President Obama, despite it being one of the most heroic days in American history and ultimately one of the most successful. If Mr. Obama cannot celebrate the sacrifices of American G.I. in the hellish environment of the Normandy Invasion 65 years without diminishing it, there is little hope he will ever find anything American to be 100 percent in favor of. After visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp and Dresden (presumably for a so-called balanced perspective), Mr. Obama arrived …
See Heritage research here, here and here for what should be done in the Middle East. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3eXFkYvDwM&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
We have long warned about the dangers of a public health care plan, but now, the fight is heating up in Washington. Obama took part in a conference call rallying supporters for a June 6th campaign kickoff. In a dream world, Obama would want a single payer health care plan, where the government is the only option for health care coverage. President Obama, though, keeps going back to the rhetoric that we can keep our health care plan if we like it. However, as we have pointed out, a public …
