Step Down Obama » The Foundry

Not-So-Happy New Year for the Entrepreneur in 2012

John Ligon — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:16:22 +0000

Last week, The Heritage Foundation co-hosted the launch of the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), a new tool giving insight into the effect that various drivers of entrepreneurship have on economic development in countries around the world. Two crucial findings from the 2012 GEDI emerged at the conference: The drivers of productive entrepreneurship have deteriorated globally.… In almost all countries high-growth entrepreneurship has suffered the most. Ambassador Terry Miller, director of Heritage’s Center for International Trade and Economics, also highlighted a key finding from the forthcoming 2012 Index [...]

VIDEO: Charles Krauthammer Says Liberals Have No New Ideas

Rob Bluey — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:16:59 +0000

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer is one of America’s foremost political commentators. He is among the sharpest critics of the Obama administration and liberalism. The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas spoke to Krauthammer about the state..[...]

VIDEO: The Reality of America’s National Debt

Josh Shepherd — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:24:09 +0000

America’s total debt now tops $15.2 trillion—the size of the entire economy. While this is a real concern, the greater problem is the growth of spending and debt in the future. Spending on entitlements is the real driver of future debt. In this clip from the documentary film “I Want Your Money,” Heritage expert Alison Fraser reveals why the national debt is a catastrophic crisis, stating: “We’re right on the cusp of 77 million baby boomers retiring into these entitlement programs, and that is absolutely unsustainable.” [...]

Chart of the Week: Defense Spending Throughout U.S. History

Rob Bluey — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:12:21 +0000

President Obama visited the Pentagon on Thursday to outline his plan for gutting our nation’s military. Obama’s vision makes America more vulnerable to foreign threats and leaves our armed forces less able to provide for the common defense. As we’ve previously illustrated, Obama has proposed significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget. This week’s chart shows how sharply defense spending has dropped as a percentage of the total federal budget — currently well below its historical average despite ongoing operations overseas. The chart also debunks the myth that our Founding Fathers [...]

What Liberals Don’t Understand About Business and Profit

Mike Brownfield — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:50:13 +0000

How’s this for a nicely polished gem of irony? Matthew Yglesias, a liberal blogger today authored a piece poking fun at Barnes & Noble for attempting to diversify its bookstore model by venturing into the world of digital with its “Nook” e-reader. (Stay tuned for the irony, below.) For Yglesias, the notion that a corporation wants to innovate and change in order to survive is a laughable one: Barnes & Noble the organism doesn’t want to die, so it makes a desperate effort to launch a new book-related businesses (sic) [...]

Chart of the Week: U.S. Presidents Ranked by Budget Deficits

Rob Bluey — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:56:30 +0000

Over the past 50 years, 10 U.S. presidents have made annual budget requests to Congress, projecting deficits both big and small. But no other president compares to Barack Obama when it comes to the size and scale of the current budget deficit facing the United States. The country is facing an 8.3 percent estimated average national deficit of a two-term Obama administration — the biggest of the past 50 years. By comparison, the current estimate for Obama is nearly double the percentage under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush [...]

Top 10 Worst Federal Rules of 2011

James Gattuso — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:00:07 +0000

Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but looking back on the past 12 months, it’s tough to see any sense in many of the Administration’s regulatory missteps. Of course, there are bound to be a few howlers when government churns out more than 3,500 rules in a year, including dozens unleashed by Obamacare, Dodd–Frank, and the perpetually errant Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But by any standard, 2011 brought forth a remarkable number and variety of regulatory blunders. Fair warning: Our Top 10 list may prove fatal to any bit of [...]

South Carolina and Voter ID: When Politics Drives Law Enforcement

Hans Von Spakovsky — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:51:08 +0000

Attorney General Eric Holder put a lump of coal in South Carolina’s Christmas stocking on Dec. 23 when he objected to the state’s new voter ID law. By ignoring inconvenient facts and clear legal precedent, Holder showed once again that politics and ideology—not the rule of law—drive his law enforcement decisions. Given the power of the Justice Department and its potential for abuse, this should worry all Americans, particularly when that abuse has the potential to affect the outcome of next year’s election. South Carolina passed a voter ID law [...]

North Dakota’s Job Creation Formula

Rob Bluey — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:15:39 +0000

When it comes to creating jobs, North Dakota has found the right formula. The state has the largest percentage increase in employment over the past year and was the fastest of all 50 to recover from the recession. The reason is simple: energy production. “North Dakota has been the poster child for what can happen when we unleash free enterprise and allow states to develop and commercialize their resources,” Heritage’s Nick Loris wrote recently on The Foundry. “North Dakota is drilling at record pace.” The state’s unemployment rate is 3.4 [...]

EPA’s “Sustainability” Agenda: Vast Power Grab

Romina Boccia — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:30:35 +0000

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is on a mission to further unilaterally expand its already vast regulatory powers in the name of “sustainable development.” Congress should take action to rein in the agency before it’s too late. An EPA-requested report issued in August by the National Research Council (NRC), a private nonprofit, lays out “an operational framework for integrating sustainability as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA.” The NRC and the EPA held a meeting on the report just last week. The exact meaning of [...]