President Obama’s economic stimulus was supposed to revive America’s economy and put people back to work. But nearly three years after Democrats rammed the bill through Congress, it’s a clear-cut failure. The nation’s 8.6 percent unemployment rate stands out as one of consequences. Then there is the high-profile Solyndra scandal and countless other government schemes gone awry. In a new video from Reason.tv, Jim Epstein takes a closer look at other examples — in a setting just a few miles from Capitol Hill. In Silver Spring, MD, government contractors pocketed …
Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. Inmates collect unemployment – Part of growing fraud problem – M.D. Kittle, Watchdog.org UTT: Infrastructure ‘bank’ doomed to fail – Ronald D. Utt, The Washington Times Census Numbers: The Trend Toward Government Coverage Continues – Nina Owcharenko, Health Affairs Iran’s ayatollahs soon to be atomic – Peter Brookes, Boston Herald Obama: “If you love me, pass this bill!” – Erick Erickson, RedState.com Solyndra employee to Mark Levin: “Everyone knew that …
What’s wrong with this picture? Last night, President Obama told Congress that the nation desperately needs to spend more on infrastructure in order to create jobs and to get the economy moving again. But only last month, his regulators aggressively moved to thwart private-sector plans to invest tens of billions on new infrastructure and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The issue is AT&T and its plan to acquire T-Mobile (now a subsidiary of the German telephone company Deutsche Telekom). The wireless industry has been one the most dazzling …
The latest unemployment numbers, released Friday, showed that the economy created a net 18,000 jobs in June, far below the roughly 150,000 needed to keep pace with new job market entrants. The unemployment rate ticked up to 9.2 percent. Since President Obama had not yet been asked directly about June’s unemployment numbers, it was inevitable that the topic be raised in his Monday press conference on the stalled debt limit negotiations with congressional Republicans. But if the president has learned anything from the apparent failure of his policies to spur …
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO do not agree on much. But they have joined forces to persuade Congress to spend more on infrastructure. On the surface it looks like a story of right and left uniting for the common good. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the Chamber’s board of directors: “We’re pretty strange bedfellows. There have been many times we haven’t agreed, and I’m sure there will be many more. But in the end, I think we all want the same thing: productive and profitable businesses, prosperous families …
Materials obtained in the U.S. SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden confirm what Heritage suspected all along: Al-Qaeda considered attacking tanker ships and other maritime energy infrastructure. Bin Laden expected to drive up the price of oil and intended to cause considerable damage to the U.S. and other oil-dependent economies. As The Heritage Foundation’s 2008 and 2010 energy simulations showed, organized terrorist attacks would cause a massive disruption and long-term decline in oil production and have a significant global geo-economic impact. Both of Heritage’s simulations of terrorism-caused energy crises …
Some in Washington seem to believe that the way our nation currently funds infrastructure projects is the only way. For example, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) told Politico: Let’s look at transportation. How do you handle that without earmarks, since that’s a heavily earmarked bill? How do you handle a Corps of Engineers project? I think, right now, we go through a period where we have gone one step further than we meant to go, and there are some unintended consequences. But as the chart to the right demonstrates, the federal …
Would you like a $14-billion taxpayer-funded tunnel in your town? How about a $500 million light rail train to nowhere? As state and local governments are under crushing budget constraints, mega-sized infrastructure boondoggles are cropping up all over the country. With the promise of “free money” from the federal government, these projects are proving too tempting for state governments to turn down. In the City of Detroit, a $500 million light rail train is being built to connect the downtown area with outlying suburbs. Critics say that the train is …
Today’s New York Times editorial on President Obama’s Cleveland political diatribe-cum-economic speech got one point right — Obama “took too long to engage this debate.” The rest of the editorial was little more than an epilogue to Obama’s political speech. One can see why the Times would avoid talking about the economic substance of the speech, the debate to which the president is so tardy: because there was precious little in the speech to talk about, despite an economy showing “widespread signs of a deceleration,” according to the Federal Reserve’s authoritative Beige Book. …
Faced with predictions of staggering losses for his party in November’s midterm elections, President Barack Obama today appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and said, “If the election is a referendum on ‘are people satisfied about the economy as it currently is,’ then we’re not going to do well, because I think everybody feels like this economy needs to do better than it’s been doing.” The prospect of that referendum is casting a long shadow over Washington as the President and candidates alike wrestle with America’s frustration over a still-stagnant …
