In its ceaseless quest to protect us from ourselves, Congress in 2009 compelled credit card companies to confirm an applicant’s “ability to pay” before approving an account. Lawmakers evidently believe that Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and the like somehow lack incentive to manage their own credit risk. (As opposed to, say, …
A few weeks ago, around Tax Day, Heritage started warning of Taxmageddon—a one-year, $494 billion tax hike that slams the economy on January 1, 2013, unless Congress and President Obama act to stop it. At that time, Taxmageddon was merely a blip on Washington’s radar, because the conventional wisdom was …
This is the third of our four-part series on Occupy Wall Street, transcribed from a recent Heritage Foundation event on the movement. In part three, Ben Domenech, research fellow at the Heartland Institute and editor of The Transom, reflects on his own interaction with Occupiers and explains why he’s not …
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Buried deep in the President’s hyperbolic assault on the House-passed budget last week—with all that “radical vision” and “social Darwinism” rhetoric—was one kernel of truth: “This isn’t a budget supported by some small rump group in the Republican Party,” the President said. “This is now the party’s governing platform. This …
Adding to a long list of energy-efficiency legislation, two Members of Congress—David B. McKinley (R–WV) and Peter Welch (D–VT)—recently proposed a federal energy-efficiency bill that gives tax rebates to homeowners who make energy-saving improvements to their homes. This bill and its predecessors reward consumers for saving money. Let’s propose a …
Ezra Klein, Mark Thoma, and Paul Krugman take issue with David Brooks for suggesting that the failure in recent years to keep budget deficits under control represents a moral issue. “Every generation has an incentive to spend on itself,” Brooks writes, “but none ran up huge deficits until the current …
In a recent article titled “Hill Weighs Tax Trade-offs,” Politico reports that Congress is considering lowering the corporate tax rate and replacing the lost revenue with higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends. But the article cites no “Hill sources” considering such an ill-conceived swap. There are only vague …
