Congressional passage of three free-trade agreements yesterday marked a rare victory for economic freedom in America. But the United States has a long way to go before it regains its status as a leader in economic freedom, according to a new video from the Charles Koch Institute. Government regulations and rapidly rising federal spending have curtailed economic freedom in the United States. The result is a poor economy with high unemployment. The Koch Institute bases its findings on the latest Economic Freedom of the World Report. Heritage’s annual Index of …
Google is growing up. That was the message company representatives shared at Heritage this week on the Silicon Valley behemoth’s 13th birthday. (Click here to watch video of the event.) Google is making the case for the free market — and taking its message to conservatives. The Heritage Foundation hosted representatives from Google at Tuesday’s Bloggers Briefing. The meeting came just a few days after a Senate hearing in which Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was grilled by lawmakers over the company’s search engine ranking practices. The search engine giant recently added …
As the economy continues to struggle, a new report highlights ways the government may be making things worse by imposing bigger burdens on business. Our new video breaks down the facts and highlights the impact of this creeping government red tape. While these costs are often invisible, they are nevertheless very real for taxpayers. Heritage’s James Gattuso and Diane Katz explain:
Today is the deadline for U.S. retailers to unload any unsold cribs that don’t meet the federal government’s new safety standards. An estimated 100,000 cribs could be headed to the trash — even though they’ve never been declared unsafe or a hazard to children. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) had the opportunity to spare businesses of the expense at a special meeting two weeks ago. But the Democrat-led commission voted against extending the deadline. As a result, retailers stand to lose at least $32 million, according to the commission’s …
Is the modern incandescent light bulb ready to retire from society and find its final resting place in the halls of the American History Museum? Politicians seem to think so, but consumer behavior indicates otherwise. According to an article in The New York Times, Despite a decade of campaigns by the government and utilities to persuade people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescents, incandescent bulbs still occupy an estimated 90 percent of household sockets in the United States. Aside from the aesthetic and practical objections to fluorescents, old-style incandescents have …
CNBC reported on Obama’s Pay Czar earlier this week: Under the plan, which will be announced in the next few days by the Treasury Department, the seven companies that received the most assistance will have to cut the annual salaries of their 25 best-paid executives by an average of about 90 percent from last year. As the Heritage Foundation has explained before, wage controls don’t work . Policy based on envy and disdain rather than sound economics will do nothing to aid a recovery.
