Think-Tanking

404 days ago - From December 2006 to March, Heritage Foundation scholars conducted a computer simulation and gaming exercise that examined the likely economic and policy consequences of a major oil disruption in the Persian Gulf. The exercise utilized a realistic scenario, state-of-the-art macroeconomic modeling, and a knowledgeable team of subject matter experts from government, business, academia and research institutes from around Washington. ...

404 days ago - Given the low educational attainment of a large number of immigrants, it is not surprising that average immigrant wages are low and falling relative to those of non-immigrants ...

411 days ago - This summer, three Democratic senators have called for a return of the Fairness Doctrine, a misguided concept that required broadcasters to provide a forum for different viewpoints when discussing controversial public issues.

411 days ago - The White House released data last week indicating that the federal deficit for the 2007 fiscal year, which will end on Sept. 30, will be $205 billion rather than the $244 billion that the White House predicted back in February.

411 days ago - It’s now too late to stop the civil war in Iraq, but we may yet succeed in preventing it from becoming a regional meltdown. President Bush’s decision to send 21,500 more troops into Iraq is an act of desperation, as they, like the rest, will end up trying vainly to referee a multisided civil war. Washington should focus on a more achievable — and more vital — objective: working with Iraq’s neighbors to quarantine the violence there. If the war spills over beyond Iraq’s borders, it could easily escalate into a Sunni-Shiite conflagration, undermining U.S. policy throughout the Middle East.

418 days ago - Whatever else it is supposed to do, a federal system of government should offer policy-makers a division of labor. Perhaps the first to fully appreciate that benefit was Alexis de Tocqueville. He admired the federated regime of the United States because, among other virtues, it enabled its central government to focus on primary public obligations (“a small number of objects,” he stressed, “sufficiently prominent to attract its attention”), leaving what he called society’s countless “secondary affairs” to lower levels of administration. Such a system, in other words, could help officials in Washington keep their priorities straight.

418 days ago - These days, more action on health reform appears to be happening in the states than at the federal level, and we heartily approve this for at least two reasons. First, because none of us knows exactly what the “right” answer is for health reform, it makes sense to allow each state to experiment with policies it thinks will work. Reforms that work will jump across state lines, as appropriate, and reforms that do not will cause limited harm.

425 days ago - As a general, [Pakistani President Pervez ] Musharraf got mixed reviews from his peers. As a politician, he has shown little talent. His one strength, until Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry defied him, was that his opponents were even less inspiring.

425 days ago - With the fourth anniversary of the 2003 capital gains and dividend tax cuts just past and the Office of Management and Budget’s Mid-Session Review just ahead, supporters of making these tax cuts permanent are reiterating their claim that the tax cuts boosted the economy and increased federal revenues.

425 days ago - The first commandment in the bible of racial theories is the view that “diversity equals excellence.” Until recently, this theory has been described in the elementary and secondary education settings as “racial integration.” For more than 50 years, public school districts throughout the nation have been engaged in efforts to racially integrate their schools. They have been subjected to mandatory court desegregation orders and they have implemented “voluntary desegregation plans.” The overall impetus for these activities has been the premise that a racially integrated America is socially desirable and that the process of racial integration should begin in the earliest years of education.

432 days ago - Several conflicts of various intensities are raging in the Middle East. But a bigger war involving more states — Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the United States and others — is growing more likely every day, beckoned by the sense that America and Israel are in retreat and that radical Islam is ascending.

432 days ago - High occupancy vehicle lanes spread throughout most of America’s largest metro areas in the 1980s and 1990s as an effort to encourage commuting by car pool and bus. But years later, the common spectacle of little-used and often abused HOV lanes adjoining jammed “regular” lanes is creating a backlash, with lane restrictions being loosened or eliminated in five states.

432 days ago - Some members of this committee have suggested that the solution would be to repeal the [alternative minimum tax] and not worry about the $800 billion in revenues that would be forgone. Those members argue that the AMT would tax people who were never its intended target and thus AMT revenues should never have been counted on. The real baseline, they assert, should assume no AMT.