Echoing the findings of The Heritage Foundation’s 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, the latest edition of The Economist sums up well the current status of America’s business environment: The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation.… The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones […]
A bipartisan group of lawmakers today promised to defend the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program for low-income families following President Obama’s decision to eliminate funding in his budget. “The bipartisan, grassroots coalition responsible for keeping the Opportunity Scholarship Program alive will continue speaking out, and I’ll be standing alongside them every step of the way,” Speaker […]
Obamacare increases unaffordable government spending, which ultimately comes out of taxpayers’ pockets. Here, we summarize three of the most costly provisions of Obamacare: 1. Medicaid Expansion: Beginning in 2014, Obamacare expands Medicaid to include all non-elderly individuals with income below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. The expansion of Medicaid accounts for more than […]
Few lawmakers have expressed as much outrage over President Obama’s unconstitutional “recess” appointments as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). He was among the first to warn about the consequences of the president’s unilateral action on Jan. 4. More than a month later, a new director is running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three members of […]
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) introduced legislation to protect religious organizations from Obamacare’s overreach last summer. Now, as President Obama presses forward with his anti-conscience mandate, Blunt is prepared to keep the pressure on the White House. “This is a genuine assault on First Amendment freedoms,” Blunt said in an exclusive interview with Heritage following a […]
Yet again, the Russians are working to strengthen their position prior to NATO’s Chicago summit coming up in May. Mikhail Ulyanov, director of the Security and Disarmament Department at the Foreign Ministry, stated that Russia’s withdrawal from the New Strategic Reductions Treaty (New START) “cannot be excluded.” Moscow primarily objects to the expansion of U.S. […]
The number of Americans dependent on the federal government has exploded over the past five years, reaching a record 67.3 million people, according to Heritage’s annual Index of Dependence on Government. That means 1 in 5 Americans (21.8 percent) today receive some level of assistance from the federal government. This week’s chart — one of […]
Gov. Scott Walker delivered a passionate defense of Wisconsin’s reforms at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday night. The embattled Republican governor used his keynote speech at CPAC to outline what’s at stake in Wisconsin and other states if his budget reforms are rolled back. “Our most powerful tool is the truth,” Walker told […]
“Simply unacceptable.” That’s the near-unanimous response to President Obama’s supposed “accommodation” offered to those who objected to Obamacare’s mandate that religious institutions pay for contraceptive products and services—including abortion-inducing drugs. That mandate — which tramples heavily on religious liberties — drew tremendous fire across the board, from Christians and Jews alike, drowning the President in a political maelstrom of […]
The chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee blasted the president’s self-styled “accommodation” of religious employers required under the Obamacare law to provide contraceptive services to employees in apparent violation of the Constititoin’s protection of religious liberty. “Under the President’s proposal,” explained Heritage’s Jennifer Marshall, “employers and employees will still bear the cost of paying for […]
