The Washington Post reports: The Senate voted Wednesday to renew the government’s $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers through the first six months of next year as part of a broader bill designed to extend unemployment benefits. Heritage fellow Ronald Utt explains why this is terrible public policy: Under the expiring law, the housing tax credit is available only to first-time homebuyers with annual household incomes no higher than $150,000 (for a married couple). Although an income of this magnitude puts the household comfortably within the top 20 percent …
Nancy Pelosi has unveiled the new health care bill in the House after merging together three different versions of legislation. To appease moderate Blue Dog Democrats and to meet President Obama’s oft-stated promise that reform wouldn’t cost more than $900 billion in the first ten years, Speaker Pelosi sought to reduce the $1.5 trillion total cost of the bill. Newsflash: she failed. The Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill and the media have been reporting its cost as $894 billion. But this is the net cost …
Whenever government throws billions of dollars at the economy, one would certainly expect to find some jobs at the end of those dollars. President Obama has worked hard to convince the nation that the mega fiscal stimulus he signed into law produced some 650,000 jobs. This PR blitz is amazing in the face of an economy that has shed 3.4 million jobs since Obama was sworn in, the unemployment rate is pressing toward 10 percent, and the Obama jobs gap – the gap between where he promised we would be …
The Wall Street Journal reports: GMAC Financial Services Inc. and the Treasury Department are in advanced talks to prop up the lender with its third helping of taxpayer money, people familiar with the matter said. The U.S. government is likely to inject $2.8 billion to $5.6 billion of capital into the Detroit company, on top of the $12.5 billion that GMAC has received since December 2008, these people said. For those of you keeping score at home, this would be the third time the federal government has bailed out GMAC. …
On Monday the Senate Finance Committee unveiled the legislative text of S. 1796 — dubbed “America’s Healthy Future Act” — revealing to fans of legislative “bloatware” a new one for the record book! Not only does this latest entry in the Congress League’s 111th season “monster bill” competition outstrip all other current contenders in the Health Division, it even eclipses the previous all-time division titleholder. At a staggering 1,502 pages, the Finance Committee bill dwarfs the Senate HELP Committee’s 839 page bill (S.1679), and is nearly one-and-a-half times the size …
Obama promised that the stimulus would “create or save” 3.5 million jobs, and significantly tempter the rising unemployment rate. Now that it is clear that his plan has failed to save or create jobs, and unemployment is still rising, Democrats are reaching out to small business. “Small business is the engine of job creation and capital creation in our country,” Nancy Pelosi said yesterday. Their plan? Use more taxpayer money to increase Federal loans to small businesses—those that qualify according to government guidelines, of course. But wait—right now, the majority …
In mid-February, President Obama signed the massive $787 billion stimulus bill into law. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a net of 3.6 million jobs have been lost since Obama was sworn in. In addition, the numbers show that the unemployment rate has risen from 7.6 percent to 9.8 percent … a 26-year record high. Now, the latest news on the impact of the stimulus bill is that 49 out of 50 states have seen more job losses. That’s right. In a recent report from the House Ways & …
Last week President Barack Obama announced he wants to give every Social Security recipient a $250 payment to make up for the fact that they will not get a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). The Washington Post describes this as a one-time payment. They are wrong. George Will explains: “This is the second continent-wide shower of $250 checks. The first came from the $787 billion stimulus package enacted in February. There will not be another such shower, until the next one.” Heritage fellow David John explains why these payments are undermining the …
Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) on WMUR last night: “I know that it has created some jobs but clearly but clearly not what we were anticipating.” [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nu6TlbfME[/youtube] You don’t say:
Yesterday the Washington Post reported: Federal economic recovery aid has created or saved 250,000 education jobs, the Obama administration announced Monday, although states and school systems continue to face enormous fiscal pressures. But earlier this year Vice President Joe Biden told the Brookings Institution: Two hundred days ago, President Obama signed into law the third piece of our economic plan: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And today there’s a growing consensus: The Recovery Act is, in fact, working. Don’t just take my word for it. Analysts from Moody’s to …
