President Obama will reveal his latest jobs plan Thursday night in a high-stakes speech to a joint session of Congress, facing Republicans opposed to more deficit spending and voters who increasingly don't trust him to fix the economy.
Rick Perry has pole-vaulted over Willard "Mitt" Romney to become the top Republican to face President Obama on Election Day 2012. Texas' governor beat Massachusetts' former governor 29 percent to 17 percent among Republicans, Gallup reported Wednesday. Mr. Perry deserves this distinction. While he lacks the pro-market purity of the late Milton Friedman, Mr. Perry's record should satisfy limited-government conservatives far more than Mr. Romney's.
Washington is famous for budget trickery, and the practice of base-line budgeting is one of its most cynical traditions. Base-line budgeting makes an increase in funding appear as a cut. For example, according to Dan Mitchell at the Cato Institute, "The 'cuts' in the [debt ceiling] deal are only cuts from the [Congressional Budget Office's] 'baseline,' which is a Washington construct of ever-rising spending. And even these 'cuts' from the baseline include $156 billion of interest savings, which are imaginary because the underlying cuts are imaginary." An egregious example of such base-line budgeting is the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Universal Service Fund (USF).
The debt deal between Congress and the president sets up what will likely be a painful fight for funding between the Pentagon and other national agencies, according to analysts and officials.
Political observers could not help but notice that many provisions of the compromise debt deal, such as postponing nearly all spending cuts until 2013 and boosting student aid next year, are tailor-made for President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
If you are an unemployed American, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas has a job waiting for you. We only need to find and deport the 7 million unauthorized immigrants who are now mowing lawns, scrubbing toilets, frying hamburgers, plucking chickens, slaughtering cattle and picking onions and lettuce across America.
In a state that has long suffered from one of the nation's highest jobless rates, new GOP Gov. Rick Snyder wants Michigan to import — literally — fresh competition for some of the best job openings the state has to offer.
As predictable as a full moon, the monthly release of Commerce Department figures on U.S. trade invariably provokes a uniform response from economic commentators.
In choosing John Bryson as his nominee to be the next U.S. secretary of commerce, President Obama has chosen a perfect representative of our new ruling class. He is the founder of a lobby group, the powerful Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who became a regulator with California's Public Utility Commission, then a rent-seeker with Edison International and Boeing. His experience is not in commerce at all, but in getting government to direct monies to favored companies. To be fair, that is the role of the Commerce Department these days, which is exactly why Congress needs to abolish the Commerce Department.
