According to a poll earlier this year, voters have a higher opinion of cockroaches than Congressmen. President Obama’s personal popularity remains solid, but his job approval rating is going down. Why are our elected officials unpopular? It might just be because they are not listening. In poll after poll, the …
In discussing comprehensive immigration reform in recent days, some commentators have discussed The Heritage Foundation’s previous and anticipated work looking at the costs of unlawful immigration and amnesty. Heritage’s Robert Rector, who helped spearhead welfare reform in the 1990s and is one of the nation’s top experts on government assistance …
Since taking office as Mexico’s newest president, Enrique Pena Nieto has quickly made it a point to anger one of the most influential interest groups responsible for blocking Mexican progress: teachers unions. Predictably (and not unlike in our own country), the teachers unions are upset over a number of ambitious …
Reuters’s environment correspondent Alister Doyle provides even more fodder for why a carbon (energy) tax or the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is economically and environmentally foolish. Doyle writes: Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding …
When the President’s budget comes out Wednesday, it will complete the last piece of the budget puzzle, as the House and Senate have each duly passed a budget according to law. Never mind that the President’s budget is supposed to lead Washington budget discussions, rather than follow. The key question …
Scott Winship’s recent piece in National Affairs, “Overstating the Costs of Inequality,” elevates the national debate over the role that income inequality plays in economic mobility and growth. Winship, an economist at the Brookings Institution, finds “simply very little evidence to suggest that…income disparities between the rich, middle class, and …
In the latest issue of the journal Democracy, Michael Wahid Hanna identifies Seven Pillars of the Arab Future. First on his list: economic growth and equality. Among the troubling Middle East economic indicators highlighted by Hanna are low economic growth, inequality, and high unemployment, especially for youth. He identifies five …
The Cyprus bailout fiasco continues, elevating the four-year-old eurozone debt crisis to a new level of volatility and uncertainty. At the core of the debacle lies the tiny island’s outsized banking sector, which is over eight times the size of the economy. But the third-smallest European Union (EU) member has …
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 …
