“On May 19, the United States hit its debt ceiling after adding $300 billion in more debt since lawmakers suspended the ceiling in February,” Heritage’s Romina Boccia reports.
That’s $300 billion in new debt in less than four months.
Hitting the limit, she says, is part of an ongoing pattern: Continue Reading »
Congress is currently debating the so-called “farm bill,” which Heritage Foundation experts Daren Bakst and Diane Katz call “a multi-billion-dollar tangle of agriculture subsidies, welfare payments, and environmental patronage.”
In fact, this legislation is really a food-stamp bill with farm programs tacked on. As Bakst and Rachel Sheffield explain, this approach allows urban and rural lawmakers to join forces to spend taxpayer money. Continue Reading »
Heritage Foundation experts accounted for three of the nine articles in the Journal of International Security Affairs‘ recent symposium (not yet online) on the 30th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative:
Do you think missile defense can help keep America safe?
Heritage President Jim DeMint’s expansion of The Heritage Foundation’s “‘can do’ approach offers conservatives the hope that empirical evidence and good ideas can actually win the day, so right reason can find its way into law,” columnist Quin Hillyer writes in the American Spectator.
Hilyer chatted briefly with DeMint about Heritage’s future:
“We’re not going to change the scholarly approach to research and development of policies,” he said. “That’s not going to change. But Heritage can become more of an emissary, so to speak, of those policies. We will be doing more to energize the grass roots.” Specifically, he said, Heritage would be partnering with the conservative state policy think tanks which “are really a key to our approach to turning Washington around.” He wants to help “give them the muscle… to push their initiatives.” It’s all part of what he called, during his formal speech, an emphasis on “competitive federalism,” to take policy decisions out of Washington and let states “compete for the best business environment, the best tax code, the best education system.”
In other words, yes and no. Yes, Heritage — and its sister, the more overtly political Heritage Action 501(c)(4) organization — will be more activist in terms of trying to mobilize or catalyze political action. But no, it “won’t change our core mission” of policy research.
Do you think Heritage’s approach can beat the liberals and help enact conservative solutions?
Congress is holding hearings today about the September terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya that claimed the lives of four Americans. Heritage Foundation experts have identified several questions that remain unanswered and how to anticipate and mitigate similar threats in the future.
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Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector, standing, takes questions on the cost of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants at a meeting Tuesday of Capitol Hill staff.
Politico says The Heritage Foundation is among the five players who could stop the push for amnesty for illegal immigrants:
This is the kind of policy fight for which Jim DeMint was hired.
The former South Carolina GOP senator and tea party hero took over last month as president of the 40-year-old conservative think tank, and got straight to work. He has blasted the Gang of Eight’s proposal as “amnesty,” criticized negotiators for drafting the bill in secret and is trying to highlight the bill’s potential costs if millions of undocumented immigrants are made eligible for federal benefits.
If DeMint and Heritage — with its policy analyses and feisty advocacy arm — can help keep the right unified on immigration, it could force Democrats and the White House to accept amendments they don’t like in order to get something through — or simply kill the bill.
Heritage has been here before. The group helped sink previous immigration efforts by focusing on costs. Senior research fellow Robert Rector released a study in 2007 saying that immigration legislation could cost taxpayers $2.6 trillion.
Monday, Heritage said immigration reform could cost $6.3 trillion on new spending on entitlements and social programs.
DeMint appeared on Fox News this morning to explain the costs of granting amnesty:
Do you think lawmakers will balk at the costs of this plan?
The proposed Gang of Eight immigration bill is unfair and costly, Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint said Sunday on ABC News’ This Week.
The study you’ll see from Heritage this week presents a staggering cost of another amnesty in our country and the detrimental effects long-term that will have. There’s no reason we can’t begin to fix our immigration system so that we won’t make the problem worse.
But the bill that’s being presented is unfair to those who came here legally, it will cost Americans trillions of dollars, it will our unlawful immigration system worse. …
Heritage is the only organization that has done an analysis of the cost. Unlawful immigrants make up about 2 percent of our GDP, and they consume most of that. If you consider all the factors of amnesty and unlawful immigration, the cost will be in the trillions of dollars over the lifetime of these unlawful immigrants.
And he warned that the contents of the bill aren’t as advertised: “I think if people read the bill, that it will be blocked. Because once you get into it, just like Obamacare, it is not the way it’s been advertised.”
What do you think? Is the immigration plan similar to Obamacare?
Entrepreneur Catesby Jones will join The Heritage Foundation today at 11:00 a.m. Eastern for a webcast about the dangers of the Internet sales tax.
“Catesby Jones has declared war on the Internet sales tax,” Heritage’s Rob Bluey explains. ”As president of the 28-year-old clothing company Peace Frogs, his business relies on Internet purchases to stay profitable. Compliance with the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act could put him out of business — or at least create a regulatory compliance nightmare.”
A new Heritage Foundation report, called Red Tape Rising, exposes the costs of the new rules and regulations the Obama administration has imposed:
Regulatory burdens on Americans increased by nearly $70 billion during President Obama’s first term in office, during which federal agencies imposed 131 new major regulations. In 2012 alone, the Administration issued a total of $23.5 billion in new regulatory costs from 25 major rulemakings.
A new infographic highlights these costs: Continue Reading »