The United States isn’t the only country in North America grappling with the fiscal problems caused by an aging population and mounting federal deficits—Canada faces a similar fate. The difference is that, while the United States just passed a $1 trillion-plus government overhaul of health care, incorrectly justified by claims that it will reduce health care spending, Canada’s provinces are trying to figure out how to pay for their nationalized health care system, a major source of out-of-control growth in government spending. Reuters reports that each province is scavenging for …
Within a span of just a few hours this week, three seemingly unrelated events all, by happenstance, made headlines in America: the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, a historically earthshaking election in Massachusetts, and the release of The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. But perhaps there are no coincidences in life. What narrative arc ties these headlines together? Our Index revealed today that the United States is no longer as economically free as it once was (and, in fact, dropped out of the “free” category altogether); President Obama …
Under the government-proposed public health plan, “people will involuntarily lose their coverage and will be bled into the new plan,” said Heritage’s senior policy analyst for health care Nina Owcharenko at yesterday’s Blogger Briefing. “They expect they would have their private insurance plans competing with the public plan but at the end of the day the public plan will be the last one standing,” she said. Owcharenko explained that the legislative process isn’t moving at the rapid pace once anticipated. So far, the Kennedy-Dodd bill is still incomplete. The House has introduced …
With General Motors slated for nationalization, and the government holding major stakes in Chrysler and several major banks, many concerned observers have been asking when it will all end. President Obama, however, has not even ventured a guess. The omission is an odd, and dangerous, one: the president who campaigned on the need to set a deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Baghdad has failed to establish one for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Detroit. Now comes Senator John Thune of South Dakota, joined by John Cornyn of Texas, with …
U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn issued a warning to her Senate counterparts who are introducing massive health reform bills this week: Learn from Tennessee’s experiment into “nationalized” health care. “All approaches for a nationalized health care system simply don’t work, and we saw this with TennCare,” Blackburn said this week during a discussion on the future of employer-based health coverage at The Heritage Foundation. In 1995, the state implemented TennCare, a health program modeled after Medicaid. While it covered more uninsured adults, the budget-busting program grew at a 1.5-percent annual rate, …
Here we go again. Barely two months after President Obama sacked the CEO of General Motors — and less than a week after the outright nationalization of that firm was announced — the head of yet another U.S. corporation is in Washington’s sights. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is pushing for a “purge” of Citigroup’s top management, and already has contacted a potential candidate to replace CEO Vikram Pandit in the top job. The move comes only weeks after the Federal Reserve concluded — …
The Administration’s plan to take over General Motors certainly startled a lot of people, both in the U.S. and internationally. Now comes word that even Hugo Chavez — an acknowledged expert in the theory and practice of nationalization — found the move remarkable, publicly musing as to whether President Obama has now outflanked Fidel Castro and himself. On a live television broadcast Tuesday, the Venezuelan president remarked: “Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end …
Will the new majority owner of General Motors — the United States Government — take an active role in managing the firm as it struggles for viability? In a statement earlier today, President Obama insisted that the government wouldn’t impose it’s own political agenda on GM. “What we are not doing, what I have no interest in doing, is running GM,” he declared. Calling the government a “reluctant shareholder”, he declared that “GM will be run by a private board of directors and management team with a track record in …
Right now, the world has too little capital, too few jobs, and too little growth. So what do Europe’s leaders want to do? Press for yet more job-killing regulation and more investment-stifling oversight, with a heaping helping of “global governance” on top. If this wasn’t so dangerous, it would be laughably irrelevant. The European plans, unveiled on Sunday in the run-up to the G20 summit in April, are breathtaking in their intrusiveness. All financial market activities around the world should be regulated to ensure that they foster “sustainable economic activity,” …
