Last week (and again yesterday in a follow-up article) The New York Times featured the poverty-fighting work of the Family Independence Initiative (FII). Founded by Maurice Lim Miller in 2001, FII is a nonprofit, community-based organization that helps working poor families escape poverty by encouraging and rewarding personal initiative and mutual support. On its Web site, FII displays a heading that reads, “Recreating the conditions under which generation after generation of Americans secured a future for their children and communities.” What are those historic conditions? According to Miller, they include …
Recently in The New York Times, Robert Pear highlighted the major problems with the Medicaid program. His findings reveal that having a Medicaid card in one’s wallet is of little use if it doesn’t give beneficiaries access to the care they need. A woman with several herniated discs and pain in her neck and arms told Pear that her Medicaid card is “a useless piece of plastic. I can’t find an orthopedic surgeon or a pain management doctor who will accept Medicaid.” Pear interviewed doctors and Medicaid enrollees in Louisiana …
Pyongyang revealed a covert facility for enriching uranium to a visiting U.S. scientist last week. Dr. Siegfried Hecker, former head of the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, stated he was shown a vast plant containing “hundreds and hundreds” of centrifuges—North Korea claimed 2,000—controlled by an “ultra modern control room.” The discovery affirms a U.N. report released earlier this month that North Korea continues to “use a number of masking techniques in order to circumvent the Security Council measures” to curtail Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. Although the United States has long …
Earlier this week, we reported on The New York Times’s “deficit puzzle,” which allows you to close both the short-term and long-term budget gaps for the years 2015 and 2030 using cuts to domestic and defense spending, Medicare and Social Security reform, or tax increases. We used the puzzle to close the long-term budget gap completely while also extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts—using only the available spending cuts. Though deficit reduction must occur immediately, long-term deficits are the real crux of the matter. In 2030, the federal deficit …
In a recent editorial somewhat misleadingly entitled “A Real Debate on Taxes,” The New York Times argues in favor of allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire for Americans of all income levels. Their argument presents a few fatal flaws. First, a real debate on taxes is also a real debate on the current and projected skyrocketing levels of federal spending. Instead, the Times asserts that “more Americans—and not just the rich—are going to have to pay more taxes” in order to address looming deficits. The Times may …
In today’s editorial titled “The K.S.M. Files,” the New York Times laments the good ‘ole days of 2009, when, in their words, “the United States was making progress toward cleaning up the mess President George W. Bush made with his detention policies. The Pentagon was working on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The flawed military tribunals were improved, at least a bit. And the Justice Department announced that the accused mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh (sic) Mohammed, would be tried in federal court.” Setting nostalgia aside, and the fact …
Yesterday, The New York Times ran an editorial titled “Fixing Missile Defense.” Given the editors’ clear track record of opposing missile defense, they must mean “fix” it in the sense of neutering it. Ostensibly, the editors are pointing to recent public complaints by the Director of the Missile Defense Agency about poor quality-control practices by several unidentified defense contractors. Predictably, the editorial calls for punishing the contractors. What is important here, however, is that the criticism does not stop there. The editorial also warns against adopting a missile defense testing …
The Pentagon’s major strategy known as the Quadrennial Defense Review was released this week. It immediately drew praise from the New York Times’ editorial titled “The Defense Budget” for cutting weapons programs—although not nearly enough—and for acknowledging a decline by choice regarding the role of the United States in the world. The editorial singles out the cancellation of the C-17 transport plane, the Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine, and the F-22 fifth-generation fighter for applause, and dismisses them as “anachronistic and unnecessary.” The article’s stock-in-trade is a litany of recycled sound …
Organized labor has demonstrated why workers should spend some time this Thanksgiving giving thanks for the secret ballot. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) “have been sparring for the right to represent 10,000 home health-care workers” in California. The SEIU has not exactly been using kid gloves. One SEIU organizer admitted that “he was encouraged ‘to pressure voters to change the ballot’ and that on one occasion he himself changed a vote to SEIU’s favor.” Other workers reported that SEIU organizers made …
According to exit polls, Americans who voted last November 4th described themselves as 34% conservative, 44% moderate and only 22% liberal. One third of new voters were independents — and about two-thirds of them voted for President Barack Obama. How did President Obama win over so many moderates and independents? By explicitly renouncing his party’s tax and spend past. Specifically, Obama promised to “cut taxes for 95% of workers and their families” and enact “a net spending cut” for the federal government. Not only has President Obama failed to keep …
