January 8, 2008 | By Nathaniel Ward

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Listen to Heritage on Hannity and Ingraham

The Heritage Foundation yesterday kicked off an exciting new initiative to bring our message of conservative reform directly to the American people.

Heritage is partnering with talk radio hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to explain the conservative principles President Reagan upheld through the “What Would Reagan Do?” campaign.

» How well do you know Ronald Reagan? Answer the “What Would Reagan Do?” question of the week

“Too many people have forgotten what Ronald Reagan really stood for,” Heritage President Ed Feulner said Monday on Hannity’s program.

» Listen to Feulner on Sean Hannity’s radio show

President Reagan “didn’t invent the principles that he ran on,” Feulner argued on Laura Ingraham’s show. “He went back to the Founding Fathers” and used the principles of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence to guide his responses to modern events.

» Listen to Ed Feulner on Laura Ingraham’s radio show

Yet in this important election year, candidates and elected officials seem to have forgotten the Founders’ ideals even as they invoke Reagan’s name. So every day for the next year, Heritage will work with Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to articulate Reagan’s principles and vision and how he applied the ideas that made America great to contemporary problems.

Curing the earmark addiction

“Congress remains addicted to earmarks,” Heritage Vice President Mike Franc argues in a new Heritage video. In fact, despite pledges to curb these special-interest handouts, liberals in Congress included more than 12,000 earmarks in recent spending bills.

» Watch the video: Stop pork-barrel spending

» Take our poll: Can Congress rid itself of its earmark addiction?

There is a solution. Lawmakers and pundits alike have cited Heritage Foundation budget expert Brian Riedl’s novel proposal to cut wasteful earmarks from the 2008 budget: block them with an executive order. President Bush is reported to have considered the plan, which created quite a stir on Capitol Hill.

“Brian Reidl of the Heritage Foundation helpfully points out that the president still has ways to do more than bellyache about these spending requests,” the Chicago Tribune explains in its editorial on Riedl’s plan. “Most of the earmarks aren’t written into appropriations bills; they’re included in conference reports that accompany the bills. The president could cancel those earmarks by executive order.”

What (not) to do to help the economy

“Policymakers should be careful not to overreact” to recent indicators suggesting the economy may face a slowdown in the coming year, argue Heritage economists Rea Hederman and James Sherk.

The Left is almost certain to revert to its discredited economic policies, and even some self-described conservatives may argue that big government can and should intervene.

But Sherk and Hederman write that “the federal government should be careful about trying to fix the current market conditions.” They outline several cautions for policymakers:

• Control government spending. “Stimulus packages that increase government spending will only cause higher taxes and slower growth in the future.”

• Keep taxes low. “The government should focus on keeping tax rates on capital and investment low and trying to reassure businesses of the stability of the country and the economy. Without a doubt, Congress should not look to increase taxes on investors or businesses in this period of sluggish growth.”

• Limit government interference. “Congress should be wary of increasing the regulations on business, which could overburden some industries.”

• Keep inflation in check. “The Federal Reserve should not attempt to stimulate the economy by printing money. The Federal Reserve has already lowered interest rates rapidly in recent months. Expanding the money supply further has the potential to couple low growth with rising inflation, raising the specter of a return to the stagflation of the 1970s.”

In other news

• Voters go to the polls in New Hampshire on Tuesday to participate in the state’s important primary elections.
• Iranian boats harassed American warships in the Persian Gulf on Monday, the Pentagon reports. Meanwhile, Iran’s dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is allegedly losing the support of his nation’s top religious leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
• Environmental groups are lobbying to declare polar bears an “endangered species” because of the purported risk of global warming. “Listing polar bears as ‘threatened’ with extinction could trigger limits on development, particularly oil and gas exploration and production, that could harm the animals,” the AP reports.
• President Bush quite rightly called on Congress to make the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent. Raising tax rates and punishing investment and entrepreneurship will not help an already wobbly economy, he said.
• Compared to the first half of 2006, crime rates fell slightly in the first half of last year, according to new FBI data.
• Something else the government shouldn’t subsidize: switchgrass, which researchers have found to be useful in ethanol production.
• Federal spending grew at a nine percent rate between October and December, according to government figures. Spending on the Medicaid entitlement alone grew at an 11 percent rate. Yet news reports took a curious view: they said the deficit increase resulted from a dearth of tax revenues, not a surge in spending.

Coming up at Heritage

To attend these or any other events at Heritage please RSVP at Heritage’s website.  Or you can view these events live online.  All times are Eastern.

• On Wednesday, Jan. 9 at noon, author Jonah Goldberg discusses his new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
• On Tuesday, Jan. 15 at 10:00 a.m., a panel of experts looks at the results of Taiwan’s Jan. 12 elections.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.

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