President Obama says he wants big corporations, including oil companies, to pay their “fair share” in taxes. His deficit reduction plan includes eliminating what he calls special loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas companies—despite the fact that they’re not specific to the oil and gas industry but the broader manufacturing sector. If the President wants to collect more money from the oil and gas industry, he should support increasing access to America’s energy resources. This would greatly increase the amount of revenue coming into the federal government, and it …
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on Tuesday outlined what he believes are the major problems with the congressional “Super Committee” that will devise a deal to cut the federal budget in the coming months. Gingrich, speaking at the Heritage Foundation, broke the problems down into three categories: constitutional, intellectual, and legislative issues. The committee, which was created by the debt limit deal struck by congressional leaders early this month, must submit a proposal that cuts at least $1.2 trillion from the budget by November 23. “Constitutionally,” Gingrich said, …
Last night, the House of Representatives was set to vote on House Speaker John Boehner’s (R–OH) plan to raise the debt ceiling, as the projected August 2 deadline looms. Failing to round up enough votes to secure the bill’s passage, House Republicans closed up shop for the night and are scheduled to reconvene this morning, hoping to bring a bill back to the House floor with enough support to pass, as Politico reports. Inside baseball, last-minute vote wrangling aside, a much larger problem remains: Even if the Boehner bill passed …
A new report from Cornell economist Richard Burkhauser and his colleagues has once again called into question the claims of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and White House that Obamacare would have only a minimal impact on employers’ decisions to offer their employees health care. The report warns that Obamacare could cost at least $50 billion more per year than originally thought. The controversy centers on the “firewall” provision in the health law, which applies to employer plans with premiums equaling more than 9.5 percent of a worker’s income. If a …
Senate Democrats are on the warpath against the House-passed Cut, Cap and Balance Act. They have taken to calling it the “Cut, Cap, and Kill Medicare Act.” At a press conference on Wednesday, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) aptly summed up the left’s characterizations of the legislation, calling it “cruel, dangerous, and stupid.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Thursday called it “some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.” But a CNN poll released Thursday shows that two-thirds of Americans support the system established by the …
[Klein responded in a post Wednesday afternoon. See below for our reply.] Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s liberal political blogger, has been pushing a pair of questionable assertions in his posts on congressional Republicans’ plan to, as they say, “cut, cap, and balance” the federal budget. Klein has claimed, falsely, that the plan would cap federal spending at 18 percent of GDP. In fact, the Cut, Cap and Balance Act passed by the House on Tuesday brings spending down to 22.5 percent of GDP in 2012, then gradually reduces it …
Ever since the debate over the debt limit began in earnest at the start of the year, the Obama Administration, led by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, has implied that the U.S. might default on its publicly held debt. In his press conference today, the President said that “it is not acceptable for us not to raise the debt limit and to allow the U.S. government to default. We cannot threaten the United States’ full faith and credit for the first time in our nation’s history.” The fear of default and …
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 …
Our future should not be determined behind closed doors. Yet that’s where the White House and Congress are holding secret talks about our debt ceiling and about taxes and spending. We deserve openness instead. We don’t need another farce when the players suddenly burst from their huddle, line up Members of Congress, and rush through their plan on a quick count. The two keys are first, frequent and detailed progress reports from the now-secret talks, and second, ample time for review of any agreement. We’ve been told that participants supposedly …
In a new Heritage in Focus, Heritage research assistant Emily Goff discusses our 2011 Budget Chart Book which shows in vivid detail the severity of America’s spending crisis. Listen to the full interview here. In this podcast, Goff offers solutions to prevent us from worsening our fiscal situation. In addition, she tackles other burning questions about today’s budget: What was the most surprising thing she found? Is it true, as the left argues, that taxes must be raised to fix our fiscal situation? And what is contributing most heavily to …
