The fact is that New Jersey lied and got caught, but taxpayers everywhere may benefit. Yesterday, the State of New Jersey settled with the SEC on charges that the state committed securities fraud by failing to disclose the true state of its state employees pension funds. This admission is an important step toward ending accounting policies that allow states to claim that the state teachers and employees’ pension funds are fully funded, when they really have billions of dollars of deficits. By using accounting tricks, New Jersey claimed to have …
First, McDonald’s was sued because its coffee was just too darned hot; now they’re being sued because their Happy Meal toys are just too darned good at marketing food to kids. The Washington, DC, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has served McDonald’s a letter of intent to sue in California court “if the fast-food chain continues to use toys to promote Happy Meals.” Why? They say the toys lure kids into eating unhealthy foods: “McDonald’s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children,” said …
Three years ago the U.S. finished negotiating a free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia that would have given American businesses reciprocal access to the Colombian market that Colombian companies have been receiving for years. Two years later, in an unprecedented move, Speaker Pelosi denied the FTA an up or down vote in the House, stripping the agreement’s “fast track” procedural protections under the law. Despite calls for action, the Obama Administration has followed suit by failing to push the agreement forward. Now Canada has swooped in to lock in an …
Saturday Night Live opened their show this weekend with a parody of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: Unfortunately, Treasury policy is just as rudderless as seen on SNL. What’s needed now, more than ever, are ideas based on principles; not ad hoc, “solutions” that don’t provide people enough information to make rational economic decisions for the future. If people want to lambast these principles as “ideology”, so be it. At least we’d have verified experience directing our economic policy.
Rhetorically there was much to like in President Barack Obama’s speech to Congress last night. None better than this early statement: The answers to our problems … exist in our laboratories and universities, in our fields and our factories, in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. We couldn’t agree more. America has been “the greatest force of progress and prosperity …
Buried in a January 7th Heritage WebMemo by J.D. Foster and Bill Beach is this passage explaining in careful logic via eloquent metaphor the nature of, and reasons for, economic growth: The American economy does not rise and fall with the level of aggregate demand or deficit spending. Further, government cannot simply pump up total demand through deficit spending. The deficit for 2009 is already projected to exceed $1 trillion, so if deficit spending were effective, the economy should already be poised to take off. Yet the economy is contracting …
Washington – Michigan Congressman Dave Camp raised doubts and highlighted confused realities of the Democrat Spending Bill at today’s Conservative Bloggers’ Briefing, held at the Heritage Foundation. Camp compared provisions in the Spending Bill and the recently passed SCHIP Bill, calling their contradictions ‘absurd.’ “You’re too rich to get a tax cut, but your not poor enough to get health care for free,” he said, referring to Democrat’s refusals (in Ways and Means Committee and on the House Floor) to cut taxes on unemployment benefits for those who earn $50,000 …
