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 …
The keys to stimulating our economy are private capital, small business innovation, reducing the burden big government imposes on the economy, and job creation. Several months ago, before the Democrats’ cap and trade bill was railroaded though Congress and before we faced their newly announced health care bill, we, along with 46 of our colleagues, introduced H.R. 1431, the No Cost Stimulus Act of 2009. The No Cost Stimulus Act would significantly increase the production of more American-made energy, which, in turn will create close to two million jobs and …
Breaking news: President Obama is a strong believer in free markets. Yesterday, in an address to the Business Roundtable, Obama mounted a vigorous defense of the free market and private enterprise, explaining his basic approach to economics and regulation. In his own words, Obama has “always been a strong believer in the power of the free market. It has been and will remain the very engine of America’s progress – the source of a prosperity that has gone unmatched in human history. I believe that jobs are best created not by government, but …
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 …
Washington – Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana, Chairman of the House Republican Conference, railed against government spending and lack of transparency at the Conservative Bloggers’ Briefing today at the Heritage Foundation. “We think it’s time the Democrats put our money where their mouth is,” he said. We’re advocating that congress freeze all federal spending immediately.” The Congressman spent the last week at townhall meetings throughout Indiana, drawing hundreds more people than he usually gets wherever he went. “The American people get it,” he said. “House Republicans get it. Enough is …
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 …
