Author: Veronique De Rugy

Wouldn’t it be nice if your boss were forced to pay you more because the government said so? Not if — as the result of the government’s intervention — you lost your job, saw your salary reduced or couldn’t work from home anymore. Yet that’s what the Obama administration is trying to do by requiring […]

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is one of a kind. He is the only self-proclaimed socialist in Congress, and he is also the only Democratic candidate in the presidential race to oppose crony programs such as the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Hillary Clinton, a big supporter of the bank, and Sanders clashed quite […]

If you are tired of reading columns about Affordable Care Act failures, don’t read any further. If you’re not, please meet yet another example of how the shockingly incompetent government has wasted so much of our money in developing and administering services that are taken for granted in the private market — namely, the ACA […]

Of the seven main candidates running for president, only one wants to keep the Affordable Care Act in place: the Democratic kind-of-front-runner Hillary Clinton. Everyone else wants to get rid of it. Most Republicans would replace it by returning health insurance regulation to the states, although they would also lock in much of the ACA’s […]

President Obama recently released his last budget, laying out his priorities and proposals for FY2017 and the years to come. Not surprisingly, it’s a tax-and-spend budget that not only does nothing to get us off the unsustainable financial path we’re on, but also it claims that more taxes and spending will grow the economy. According […]

If you have ever found yourself at the gas pump thinking, “I really wish it cost more to fill up,” then President Obama has just the idea for you. In his final budget request, he will include a call for an additional $10 in taxes per barrel of oil. This terrible idea would roll back […]

The statutory limit on how much debt the federal government can accumulate is back in the news, but this time it’s not because Washington is close to breaching it. That’s not a present concern thanks to the year-end bipartisan spending spree that included a suspension of the debt limit until March 2017. The news is […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A government, run by a succession of politicians, spent frivolously for decades and repeatedly ignored all the warning signs of looming fiscal disaster, and now that it has arrived, is begging for a bailout. No, I’m not talking about Greece. This time, it’s Puerto Rico. And the […]

During the Democratic presidential debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned that as president she would build on President Obama’s signature health care plan. The Affordable Care Act “is one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country,” she added. I beg to differ. First, the ACA […]

Those who pay just casual attention to the annual federal budget process can see that it’s a mess. It’s rarely completed on time, and it always seems to get bogged down by partisan bickering and political scheming. When the dust finally does settle, the result is usually a bloated conglomeration of goodies for countless special […]

Benjamin Franklin said there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I’d like to add a third: cronies coming back for more after Washington gives them a handout. Case in point, the merchants and retailers who got a juicy morsel from Dodd-Frank are now clamoring for more. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., […]

A tumultuous year for the Republican-led Congress has come to an end. If you were a supporter of the GOP establishment’s shallow goal to show the country that it could “govern” by passing bloated spending bills, congratulations. If you’re a special interest, congratulations are probably in order, as well. If, however, you held out hope […]

In honor of the release of the new “Star Wars” movie, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., subtitled this year’s “Wastebook” as “The Farce Awakens.” The latest edition of this annual report details 100 spending programs, totaling $108.5 million, that are a complete waste of your money. On the list, we find $1 million that went to […]

The Islamic State continues to perpetrate its barbaric terror right before our eyes, referencing Islamic texts and teachings as it commits its evil acts. The Obama administration and the U.S. media, meanwhile, continue their leftist mantra after each Islamic terror attack: “This is not Islam.” In response to this mass denial in our government and […]

After allowing the Export-Import Bank of the United States’ charter to lapse June 30, Congress voted to revive it this month on the back of an expensive highway bill. The agency is the modern iteration of a New Deal-era program that mostly extends loans and loan guarantees to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods and […]

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a plan to jump-start the economy. It would require an additional $250 billion in federal infrastructure spending over five years — on top of the $250 billion over the next five years that Congress already wants to spend — along with the creation of a $25 billion federal infrastructure […]

An office manager in Louisiana who billed Medicare for services that weren’t needed or even provided was recently sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $14.1 million in restitution. Twelve other defendants are awaiting sentencing for their roles in the $50 million scheme to defraud Medicare. The next day, a Detroit-area physician […]

There’s no choosing between guns and butter in Washington. With virtually no limit on what the federal government can spend other people’s money on, policymakers have been loading up on both for decades, and they aren’t about to let limits that they themselves created get in the way. The pesky budget caps that were accidentally […]

One need not be intricately familiar with the tale of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to appreciate that the federal budget process has similarly become an alternate reality replete with sketchy characters, peril and the absurd. In the latest trip down the Beltway rabbit hole, a Republican-led Congress relied on Democratic votes to produce a two-year […]

Little common ground exists between the left wing and right wing these days. One exception found in the emergence of the tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements is a healthy distrust in the motives of politicians and government regulators. These concerns are vindicated when officials are caught teaming up with the super rich to […]

When both liberals and conservatives like a government program, it usually means that it is expensive and expands the scope of government without delivering on its promises. The bipartisan support of the earned income tax credit is no exception. The EITC is best described as an anti-poverty program that encourages people to work. In a […]

Combating bad ideas would be much easier if they were all backed by ill intent. More often than not, however, the opposite is true, and the worst government policies are enacted with the intention to help. Such is apparently the case with the aggressive campaign by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to eliminate the payday […]

Those who take a principled stand in our nation’s capital often find themselves alone with the crickets. Unless you’re the latest cause celebre of the left (see Sen. Elizabeth Warren), taking a stand against business-as-usual big government on Capitol Hill typically means being labeled a radical extremist who is out of touch with the rest […]

The House of Representatives is looking for a new speaker. Such times of change present a perfect opportunity for Congress to reflect on what it should aspire to achieve. On top of the list is getting control of our fiscal situation by restraining government spending in ways that are consistent with a healthy and vibrant […]

Donald Trump is the most recent Republican presidential candidate to release a plan to reform our burdensome tax code. Though all the proposals are different, they share common characteristics. They would cut income tax rates on households, lower the tax code’s bias against savings and investment, close some loopholes, and reform America’s anti-competitive corporate income […]

Merriam-Webster’s definition of a bully is: “a blustering browbeating person; especially one habitually cruel to others who are weaker.” Sound familiar, Congress? That’s because this is what General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt has been doing to you for months, first by threatening to leave the country and withhold contributions and now by threatening to move jobs […]

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker just proposed a plan to overhaul the country’s labor laws, called “My Plan to Give Power to the People, Not the Union Bosses.” It would do that by expanding employee choice and holding unions accountable to their members. One of the main underlying themes of the Republican presidential hopeful’s private-sector reforms […]

If you want to know how serious Republican presidential candidates are about fiscal responsibility, just look at their positions on the spending caps put into place by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The caps, which largely cover domestic discretionary programs and the defense budget, brought a modicum of restraint to the federal spending train […]

Have you ever wondered why your television screen is often filled with advertisements from law firms touting their ability to land money for the disabled? It’s because helping people obtain federal Social Security disability benefits has become a lucrative industry in the past decade. But it would be a mistake to only blame the legal […]

Death focuses the mind. The recent passing of my dear friend Whitney Ball, who devoted her professional life to making it easier for people to support civil society, inspired this column. Whitney founded Donors Trust, an organization that, as its mission details, “encourages philanthropy and individual giving and responsibility, as opposed to governmental involvement, as […]