Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal is not a panacea for the nation’s debt and deficit woes. The Ryan proposal is, however, a bold, brave, and, we think, an extraordinary step forward by the House Budget Committee, which Mr. Ryan chairs,
History books are filled with examples of unplanned and unexpected events. U.S. presidents like any head of state anywhere in the world must be capable of responding to sudden, serious and totally unexpected turns of events. As renowned historian Arnold
Few seem to be. At least not in the Administration they aren’t, nor among the spenders in Congress or the government-employee unionists who are manning the barricades (in some cases, quite literally) in state capitals throughout the country. Herb Stein
The upheaval in the Mideast has brought gasoline prices front and center once again. Traders are building a risk factor into forward purchase contracts and gasoline prices per gallon now hover around $4 a gallon with no end in sight.
The mind-numbing, esoteric mumbo jumbo that dominates so much of the reporting and commentary on public-sector pension funds seems designed to cause the tax-paying public to surrender and acquiesce to letting their civil servants or elected officials iron it out.
For weeks the discussion among talking heads and columnists has been about a “looming” government shutdown. Then, last week, our elected officials gave us, through yet another Continuing Resolution (CR), another two weeks to debate a budget for the year
It was like a root canal without the benefit of Novocain, watching and listening to the harangue on RT (Russia Today) about how the protests in Madison Wisconsin, Cairo, Libya, Bahrain, and Tunis are all one in the same, that
The stunning speed of events in the Middle East that brought about the fall of Tunisia’s strong-arm dictator, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, followed by the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak might suggest that our intelligence services were
That’s the way Winston Churchill, whose 1939 words we borrowed for our headline this week, were he asked about America, might answer that question today. In foreign affairs we have spent much of the past two years trying to reset
Last week we expressed disappointment in the President’s State of the Union address. While it contained the tone of a leader seeking common ground, and talking the talk of deficit and debt reduction, it was bereft of specifics. Now having
We, like many others, hoped for more from the State of the Union Address. We thought that, just maybe, President Obama might lead for a change, and signal a Clintonian tack to the center, with a strong pro-growth message and
Finally; it seems we may have a Congress that takes seriously the urgent need to rein in the unsustainable deficits and the accumulation of public debt that so threaten the future well being of the nation. Thank goodness for the
The 112th Congress of The United States should have one mission above all others as it begins its walk through the pages of history…to protect the full faith and credit of The United States of America. These are perilous times
Fashioning good legislative policy (so that laws that we enact garner maximum respect from the public) requires, as we have seen from its absence in the prior Congress, patience and compromise. A party with electoral control over both chambers of
We are headed for major trouble in these United States. Realistically speaking, the knight on the proverbial white horse who will ride to our rescue is apt to speak Spanish or Vietnamese or, perhaps, Polish. An infusion of young, Immigrant
Obscured by the daily scramble of news stories about WikiLeaks, its pompous and self-aggrandizing spokesperson, Julian Assange, and the classified information that was revealed, is a phenomenon which profoundly affects the way each of us as individuals conduct our daily
The President proposed a national conversation about the proper role of government during last week’s hastily arranged press conference designed to smooth the ruffled feathers of his party’s bantam roosters who have been cackling their dissatisfaction over the common-sense compromise
The 111th Congress will soon pass into history and perhaps will best be remembered for having set the all time record for Congressional irresponsibility … even surpassing the machinations of the 107th Congress, which enacted the so-called Bush tax cuts
That’s the new phrase commonly heard (with a nod and a wink) in banking circles when real estate loans are due but everyone knows they will be rolled over for renewal. It simply means the loan will be extended while
Blessedly, the cacophony of political attack ads on every television station is over. Democrats and Republicans will all agree that the peace and quiet is welcome. As to the result, we all know the numbers: The GOP takes over the
House of Cards: – “a speculative scheme that depends on unstable factors that the planner cannot control,” (WordNet – Princeton University). While we don’t believe America has, by any stretch of the imagination, yet become a house of cards, we
The new buzzword in these difficult times for the United States and world economies is “unsustainable.” Again and again economists and politicians have said that the path on which the U.S. is headed is “unsustainable,” a description with which Federal
Fixing Washington, or more correctly, fixing the government for which about half of us pay and for which all of us are heavily in debt, does not require a political messiah, nor does it require a revolution. What it requires
The latest efforts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians are hanging by a thread, which should be no surprise. Perhaps, based on the 2000 Camp David peace talks, sponsored by President Clinton, when the Palestinians walked away, essentially,
The latest efforts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians are hanging by a thread, which should be no surprise. Perhaps, based on the 2000 Camp David peace talks, sponsored by President Clinton, when the Palestinians walked away, essentially,
Let us stipulate that it has been a long, slow process, this erosion of American exceptionalism and those uniquely American qualities that made this country and its citizens the envy of the world. Some say we are “crying over spilled
In mid August under the heading “The Perversion of American Democracy: Death by a Thousand Cuts” we opined that in a series of continual steps the current Administration was subverting the underpinnings of our form of government by usurping and
While chaos theory has had a place in science since mathematician and physicist Jules Henri Poincare first coined the term in the 1880s, it made its way into pop culture with the introduction of the so-called butterfly effect by fiction
It is less than two months to the midterm Congressional elections and for the Republicans all current signs point to something between significant successes at worst, and taking control of Congress if everything breaks their way. To be sure, the
Consider the outrage from the left at such a notion. “That’s the thinking that got us into this mess in the first place,” the President and his lock-step liberal legions will rush to remind us. Well, no, it isn’t. The
Our nation is in trouble and it goes far deeper than the current economic crisis of the past few years. Nor, despite all the rancor and the loud shouting back and forth, is the problem attributable to any single controversial
Sound familiar? Most everyone has heard it time and time again. It’s the way many TV sales pitches end after seeming to give the viewing audience something for nothing. It’s a sucker’s pitch. It usually works like this: you are
Last week the North Korean government (officially, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, a misuse of the word “democratic” if ever there was one), threatened a massive nuclear strike if the United States and South Korea carried out their annual
Last week the North Korean government (officially, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, a misuse of the word “democratic” if ever there was one), threatened a massive nuclear strike if the United States and South Korea carried out their annual
Those of us who had to square dance in grade school may remember the old Virginia Reel; the caller commanding us to do the dos-a-do which was a spin move in one direction and then another. That spin, however, doesn’t
The near collapse of our financial institutions and the overall economy and the misguided notion that a few trillion dollars of additional federal spending would return us to prosperity moved us in early 2009 to suggest an alternate approach. We
Far-left ideologues and self-styled intellectual illuminati have, for years, labored overtime to highjack the notion of American Exceptionalism by equating it with their own notion of American arrogance. Let us put an end to this calumny. Let us recall and,
Once again, this weekend, Americans will gather with their families to “celebrate” the 4th of July. What are we celebrating? What stirs us on this day? How much time will be spent reflecting upon its relevance to our way of
The president’s recent disappointing oval office speech elicited a chorus of criticism from across the political spectrum. For some reason the speech seems to have put a spotlight on the president as a leader, whereas other misjudgments in which he
Like a relentlessly advancing cancer, the news about the US fiscal deficit and the accumulated debt, which is its result, keeps getting worse. Every week the press discloses some supposedly “new” information about either the federal budget, economic failure, projections