Posts belonging to Category Politics

Social Security Bloviate-fest

By Jagadeesh Gokhale

The annual bloviate-fest on Social Security has begun, even before the Social Security Trustees’ report has been released this year.  Apparently the report is to be released next week — after a three-month delay from its statutory release deadline of April 1. 
There’s concern from groups interested in preserving Social Security that President Obama’s National Commission on [...]

Even Keynesian Accounting Can’t Find All That ‘Stimulus’

By Alan Reynolds

From January 2009 to the present, President Obama and his team have repeatedly made grandiose claims about the economic benefits of shoveling money at shovel-ready projects or green jobs.  “It is largely thanks to the Recovery Act that a second Depression is no longer a possibility,” said the President.   He also claimed that lavish spending [...]

Peter Ferrara’s Too-Nice Attack on Phony Washington Budget Deals

By Daniel J. Mitchell

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Ferrara of the Institute for Policy Innovation explains that Washington budget deals don’t work because politicians never follow through on promised spending cuts. This is a very relevant argument, since President Obama’s so-called Deficit Reduction Commission supposedly is considering a deal featuring $3 of spending cuts for every [...]

Imports Viewed Skeptically at the Washington Post

By Daniel Ikenson

What explains the chronically misleading depictions and interpretations of international trade in the Washington Post?  Is it economic illiteracy? Intellectual indifference? Institutional bias? What?
The opening paragraph in Neil Irwin’s story (online, July 30, 2010, 9:13 am) reads:
The pace of economic growth slowed this spring, according to new government data, as Americans remained reluctant to consume and [...]

Education Standards at Work — the NY Debacle

By Andrew J. Coulson

President Obama today touted his Race to the Top program, which pressures states to, among other things, adopt national education standards. Also today, the New York Board of Regents revealed that it had been misleading its citizens for years, giving them an inflated notion of how well their children were performing academically. Last year 77 percent of students [...]

The Letter Is Different, but the Spirit Still Lives

By Sallie James

An update from my post yesterday about the bill to establish a Commission to End the Trade Deficit (now called the “Emergency Trade Deficit Commission”): apparently the bill that passed the House was different from the bill initially considered, and to which I linked (and commented). My apologies.
The bill that was passed had many of [...]

Are These Examples of Washington Corruption?

By Daniel J. Mitchell

The “appearance of impropriety” is often considered the Washington standard for corruption and misbehavior. With that in mind, alarm bells began ringing in my head when I read this Washington Times report about Jacob Lew, Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget. A snippet:
President Obama’s choice to be the government’s chief budget officer [...]

ADA and the ‘Chipotle Experience’

By Walter Olson

The Chipotle Mexican Grill heralds its “Chipotle Experience,” in which customers can watch their food being made behind a glass partition. Now a Ninth Circuit panel (including famously liberal judges Stephen Reinhardt and Dorothy Nelson) has ruled that the “experience” violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, to quote the AP, “because the restaurants’ 45-inch counters [...]