Economic Policies

Real Action to Reduce Unemployment: Eliminating Minimum Wages and Suspending Payroll Taxes

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

Americans’ top concerns these days are unemployment, deficits and debt. The rate of unemployment seems stuck at a level economically and ethically unacceptable, and efforts to bring it down appear ineffective and extremely expensive, especially in the context of runaway deficits and debt. It’s time to re-evaluate government policies. A good place to start is minimum-wage laws, with payroll taxes a logical second. Alone, wage floors create more problems than they solve, and all of these unintended consequences are compounded by the extra burden of payroll taxes, which raise employer costs even further while also reducing employee take-home pay.

MINIMUM WAGES In May of 2007, during the Bush ...

Politics

Democrats Gone Rogue: The Future Rise of the Center?

Written by: Stephen Erickson, Columnist

American politics are in a state of upheaval not seen for generations. While most of the energy is on the Right, centrist Democrats are not standing idly by. Whether they are quietly critical of the Democratic leadership, modeling bipartisanship or suggesting an outright rebellion, centrist Democrats are challenging the big-government ideologues who are steering their party and the country in the wrong direction.

On CBS’s Face the Nation last Sunday Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad flatly stated, “Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform.” The impossibility of using reconciliation to pass the healthcare bill must have come as news to ...

Healthcare Reform

Two Plus Two Is Four — Or Is It? Obama’s Health Summit

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

Health Care Reform was supposed to be on the operating table for all 7.5 hours of last week’s bipartisan Health Summit. But was it? And how many of the Congressional surgeons were practicing economics and how many were specializing in politics?

Some came to the table quite skeptical of any purpose beyond the PR, useful for themselves as well as for their President in this widely televised event. Obama was widely criticized for releasing the Obama-Biden “Plan To Lower Health Care Costs and Ensure Affordable, Accessible Health Coverage for All” 3 days before, not after, this big event. “How,” his detractors queried, “could we believe that he really wants ...

Politics

The 3 Strains of Conservatism Stirring in the Political Ferment

Written by: Stephen Erickson, Columnist

Unless Republican Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts – the nation’s most left-leaning state – was some freak accident resulting from an astrological convergence or Karl Rove’s tampering with Massachusetts voting machines, the Democrat Party is headed for an electoral disaster of historic proportions. Conservatives are going to regain power. Just how much power they will win back and whether or not conservatives have learned anything from their own failures during the Bush years are the essential and closely related questions. Three distinct strains of conservatism are stirring in the current climate of exception political ferment. Conservatives need to consider which is ...

Social Security

National Debt IV: Making Seniors More Secure

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

Early Record-Keeping for Social Security

On February 18, shortly after submitting a $3.8 trillion budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit for 2010, President Obama officially created the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Co-Chairs of the commission are Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson. “Everything,” President Obama said, “is on the table.” Nothing is apparently out of bounds – not even increasing taxes, tackling and taming entitlements.

Here’s what Mr. Simpson had to say about Social Security: “[Y]ou have two choices with Social Security. You either – you either raise the payroll tax or ...

Foreign Policy

President Obama’s Foreign-Policy Report Card, Part II

Written by: Stephen Erickson, Columnist

Two notable events in the news this week showcase the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. First, the Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was captured by Pakistani authorities at a madrassa near Karachi. Here the Administration’s efforts to cultivate a better relationship with Pakistan bore fruit. Second, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Saudi Arabia, ratcheting up pressure on Iran. She declared that Iran is fast becoming a military dictatorship under the boots of that country’s Revolutionary Guards. If nothing is done to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, warned Clinton, then the entire Middle East may find itself in a nuclear arms race. Here ...

Social Security

National Debt Part III: Radical Reform of Social Security

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

Radical Reform of Social Security requires starting at the root, and that root is its real purpose and goals today, in 2010. What are we really trying to accomplish with this program? What are the basic problems for which we should supply social safety nets, and how do we best supply and sustain them?

2010 is more like the 1935 of Social Security’s birth during the Great Depression than any other time in American history so far. It is a time of Great Recession, when macroeconomic events have created new poverty and exacerbated old. Unemployment has destroyed wage income, and plummeting stock markets have devastated savings from ...

Healthcare Reform

Will the Rush to EMRs Really Save Money?

Written by: C. Kozak,

Anxiety over exploding national debt has heightened and spread across the United States, particularly but not exclusively in response to President Obama’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year. One relatively painless way to reduce deficits and control the debt is to control healthcare expenditures, which account for 16% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), through the use of technology that makes the same or better outcomes available at lower cost.

One particularly attractive technological advance is the ability to replace paper patient files with electronic health records (EHRs). Over the past several years US political leaders have espoused the efficiencies and subsequent savings that could be achieved in ...

Federal Debt / Federal Deficit

The National Debt: Getting in Touch with Reality

Written by: Stephen Erickson, Columnist

How bad is the national debt really?

David Walker, the non-partisan former Comptroller of the United States declared that if we were each handed our own personal share of the national debt, we’d each owe five to six times what we earn in income each year.

As bad as that sounds, it gets much worse. When unfunded entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are added to the equation, each and every citizen owes 25 to 30 times what he or she makes each year.

Let Walker’s numbers sink in for a moment.

A family making $50,000 per year owes between $1,250,000 and $1,500,000.

Only a nuclear Armageddon could harm the United States more ...

Social Security

Addressing National Debt by Reforming Social Security

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

FDR Signing Social Security Act August 14, 1935

Government deficits and debt have reached alarming levels today, and the unfunded liabilities of tomorrow are even more staggering. The key to attaining fiscal sobriety is entitlement reform, and Social Security is as good a place to start as any.

Established in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, Social Security was FDR’s strong response to the difficulties experienced by the elderly, ...

Federal Debt

Blind Men and Elephants in the Room: How Much Should We Worry about the Public Debt?

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

President Obama is expected to announce today a $3.8 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit for FY2011. Here’s the context within which he will reveal his plan. For decades now, the federal debt acquired through years and years of deficit spending has been the “elephant in the room” – the huge presence nobody talks about but everyone knows is there. In last week’s State of the Union address, however, debt joined unemployment as the two most urgent issues facing America as Obama enters his second year as our President.

Last year, the White House and Congress went “Keynesian” in a big way as the real-estate bubble popped and ...

Economic Stimulus

Additional Economic Stimulus – Another Thought

Written by: ,

Guest Contributor Wayne Nelson

Much is being made of the unwillingness of the financial industry to lend money in this current environment of uncertainty. For those of us who were around during the S&L debacle of the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, this comes as no surprise. It became very clear that lessons not learned were destined to be repeated. The major distinctions between then and now were (1) financial institutions were not too big to fail back then, and many did; and (2) there are more financial products that nobody understands out there now than there were back then.

It is clear that lending is still being ...

Politics / President Obama

The Unyielding President and the State of our Disunion

Written by: Stephen Erickson, Columnist

In the wake of the massacre in Massachusetts, Barack Obama had essentially two choices when it came to the way he approached his State of the Union speech, and the policies that would follow from it. He could accept the verdict from the Bay State, the great former stronghold of Democrats, and change course, or he could continue to sail into the tsunami. Obama chose the tsunami.

In his speech President Obama declared, “But when I ran for President I promised I wouldn’t just do what was popular –I would do what was necessary.” Two kinds of people stand against the tide of popular will. The first is ...

Economy

Plain Dealing in Ohio: Obama Goes to Battle in Elyria

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

“Hello, Ohio!” Barack Obama began his speech in Elyria on January 22. “Everybody, please,uh, please, uh, please relax. We’re going to be here for a little bit…”

The content and tone of this speech were not, however, designed to relax. The intent was rather to go populist, go angry, and “pivot” policy attention away from Massachusetts and to the Midwest and the Main Street issue of jobs — or lack thereof. Orator Obama went into warrior mode almost immediately. And there he stayed.

Combatants included the usual villains — Big Banks, Insurance and Pharma. Nothing new here. But Obama also took some folksy ...

Economic Policies

Taxing Wall Street with Righteous Wrath: Please, Can We Be More Aware and Less Angry?

Written by: Adele Wick, Columnist

Two Thursdays ago, President Obama announced a new policy: imposing a “Fiscal Crisis Responsibility Fee” on Wall Street.  The title is both shifty and judgmental, with the judgments based more on emotion than on fact.  The fee is actually a tax. And it’s being levied on only a subset of those responsible for our recession: the ones it’s so easy to hate.

Obama says that his “Responsibility Fee” is designed in part to help the Treasury recoup its losses on its “Troubled Asset Relieve Program” (TARP), the dramatic effort started by Bush 43 and continued by Obama to unfreeze credit during our recession. The program began with loans, not gifts, to the ...