Economic freedom raises incomes and improves living standards. It requires strong institutions and encourages their further development. Over time, poor developing countries that have adopted policies consistent with economic freedom have pulled ahead of their former peers.
Though the pace of U.S. job creation has quickened recently, some "Benedict Arnold" companies are still being criticized for outsourcing work from the United States to other countries. U.S. manufacturers have outsourced operations to countries such as China to lower wage costs and escape from high taxes, burdensome government regulations and intransigent unions at home. For similar reasons, service jobs in information technology (IT) are outsourced to India. Less well known, though, is that increased economic globalization has caused jobs to move to the United States as well as away from it. And because of the higher, increasing productivity of American workers, the jobs that move here pay more than the ones that leave.
The benefits of outsourcing to the U.S. economy far outweigh the costs.
House Ways and Means Committee member Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) has introduced legislation to create a tax credit to purchase health insurance, a plan that is modeled after President Bush’s tax credit proposal.
Last year, as Congress debated what would become the Medicare Modernization Act (P.L. 108-173), the media and most policymakers focused on the elephant in the room – major changes being made to the Medicare program affecting over 40 million senior citizens. But a "mighty mouse" occupied the same room, and went largely unnoticed. The law also created "Health Savings Accounts" (HSAs), allowing individuals who purchase high-deductible insurance policies to establish tax-free savings accounts for health care expenses. Early data has surprised critics by showing that HSAs are encouraging many Americans to obtain health insurance and save for their futures. Most importantly, many of the new HSA owners were formerly uninsured, defying initial prophecies that the accounts would only be utilized by the "young, healthy and wealthy."
A new report from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) exposes serious problems with the historical climate trends reconstruction published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Four Republican senators are determined to raise your taxes.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that human activities are responsible for nearly all earth's recorded warming during the past two centuries. A widely circulated image used by the IPCC dramatically depicting these temperature trends resembles a hockey stick with three distinct parts: a flat "shaft" extending from A.D. 1000 to 1900, a "blade" shooting up from A.D. 1900 to 2000, and a range of uncertainty in temperature estimates that envelops the shaft like a "sheath."
Raising the minimum wage is back. Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has announced his intention to increase the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7 an hour by 2007. This latest proposal follows an earlier plan by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., to boost the minimum wage as part of an amendment to welfare reform reauthorization.
A YEAR ago, Carrie Howland's 4-year-old son, Bobby, who has Down syndrome and Hirschsprung's disease, which affects his colon, was taking one prescription heartburn pill a day. But when the medication, Prilosec, became available over the counter in June 2003, Bobby's insurer stopped paying for it.
The death of Ronald Reagan led many of his liberal opponents to reassess his presidency, with some concluding that it was better than they thought at the time. The publication of Bill Clinton's memoir, meanwhile, has led many conservatives to reassess his presidency — and most have concluded that it was as awful as they remembered.