The first presidential debate takes place in Denver on Wednesday with a focus on domestic issues, including President Obama’s unpopular health-care law. Obamacare imposes numerous tax increases on Americans, totaling more than $500 billion over a 10-year period. According to Heritage’s analysis, these higher tax rates on income and investment threaten to slow economic growth. […]
In August, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) failed to pay $5.5 billion due to the Treasury Department to fund health benefits for its retirees. This Sunday, USPS will miss a second payment to the Treasury, this time for $5.6 billion. This second default is no surprise; the USPS just doesn’t have the money to pay […]
The movie “Won’t Back Down” opened yesterday in more than 2,500 theaters across America. The film brings to the big screen the highly charged issue of education reform by showcasing how two committed parents take on the establishment. With a cast of stars, including Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis, the movie has already prompted protests […]
A nuclear-armed Iran was a key topic of discussion at the U.N. General Assembly this week, including speeches by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama. While both leaders agreed that “a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained,” there are key differences in approaching this issue. The following statements […]
A fire bomb explodes behind a riot police squad on September 26 in Athens, Greece, during clashes with demonstrators. (Photo: AFP) Over the past few days, new strikes and riots have convulsed Greece and Spain. Conventional wisdom (including from economist Paul Krugman) suggests that cuts in government spending—often described as “austerity”—are a primary cause of […]
Judging by President Obama’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly yesterday, U.S. public diplomacy messaging on the Middle East crisis is stuck perpetually on a setting of “apology.”It has been this way since the much-criticized September 11 statement from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which apologized to the threatening mob outside its gates for any […]
House and Senate Republicans have introduced legislation that would prevent Congress from using commemorative coins to fund pet projects as a creative workaround to the earmark ban. In April, The Heritage Foundation’s sister organization, Heritage Action, first wrote about the commemorative coin process. Currently, Congressmen can introduce commemorative coin bills depicting national icons in their […]
In an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Obama referred to the problematic relations with Middle Eastern governments as “bumps in the road.” These “bumps” (failures, in reality) are the result of a policy based on profound naiveté and shortsightedness. When he came to office, President Obama attempted to portray himself as the antithesis […]
Free checking accounts, once considered common, are becoming increasingly rare as the enormous costs of new regulations hit banks’ bottom lines. According to the just released 2012 Checking Survey by Bankrate, Inc., a publisher of financial information, only 39 percent of banks continue to offer free checking accounts, a sharp decline from the 76 percent […]
SAT scores among the nation’s test-takers are at a 40-year low. As The Washington Post reports: Reading scores on the SAT for the high school class of 2012 reached a four-decade low, putting a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, […]
