Category: Column

CNN’s Candy Crowley seems absolutely, positively astonished that Republicans could oppose raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits. To her Republican guest, Crowley asked this “question”: “If I am an unemployed American … or if I am a minimum wage worker and I see Republicans who say, ‘You know what? It’s artificial, it messes […]

In 2014, 25 million to 30 million Americans with employer-provided health insurance are likely to lose it, thanks to Obamacare’s requirement that all plans cover what Washington deems “essential benefits.” Some employers will consider this unaffordable, so after their current lower-cost plans expire over the course of the year, they’ll drop coverage altogether. These 25 […]

One mark of a good song is that it makes Billboard’s top 10 list. An even greater indicator is its staying power; whether it is remembered decades after it was a hit. Perhaps the highest accolade is whether the artist influences other musicians. All of these standards were met by the singing duo the Everly […]

What if you woke after a night of uneasy dreams to find a strange man standing in your bathtub? Don’t be alarmed. The strange man isn’t some stark naked psycho. The strange man is fully clothed. Polite, even, efficient, neat and obviously well-educated. He has a camera pointed at you. And the camera is rolling. […]

The Common Core gold rush is on. Apple, Pearson, Google, Microsoft and Amplify are all cashing in on the federal standards/testing/textbook racket. But the EduTech boondoggle is no boon for students. It’s more squandered tax dollars down the public school drain. 08 Even more worrisome: The stampede is widening a dangerous path toward invasive data […]

President Barack Obama says income inequality is “dangerous … the defining challenge of our time.” The pope is upset that capitalism causes inequality. Progressives, facing the failures of Obamacare, are eager to change the subject to America’s “wealth gap.” It’s true that today, the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of America’s wealth. […]

There’s little debate among academic economists about the effect of minimum wages. University of California, Irvine economist David Neumark has examined more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage. He reports that 85 percent of the studies “find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers.” A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that […]

In 2014, 25 to 30 million Americans with employer-provided health insurance are likely to lose it, thanks to Obamacare’s requirement that all plans cover what Washington deems “essential benefits.” Some employers will consider this unaffordable, so after their current lower-cost plans expire over the course of the year, they’ll drop coverage altogether. These 25 to […]

It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression. It’s taken socialism half that time to come back from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In New York City, avowed socialist Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that his goal is to take “dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities” […]

“In America,” Oscar Wilde quipped, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” And they often do it in the pages of Rolling Stone. Last week, the magazine posted a mini-manifesto titled “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” After confirming it […]

At the London 2012 Olympics, various media outlets probed the notion of the Olympic athletes’ village being a giant bed-hopping venue — a phenomenon that not only disgusted my mother every time she heard it mentioned (which was often) but also puzzled me as a former international-level swimmer who spent every night before a race […]

Nice tan, Mr. Mayor! You came back from steamy and tropical Indonesia to a city frozen in ice and snow, where the side streets and alleys hadn’t been plowed and where schoolkids were almost sent into the worst of the cold. But Rahm Emanuel wasn’t worried. He held a Monday news conference about the cold, […]

New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, in his inaugural speech, denounced people “on the far right” who “continue to preach the virtue of trickle-down economics.” According to Mayor de Blasio, “They believe that the way to move forward is to give more to the most fortunate, and that somehow the benefits will work their […]

PolitiFact has crowned the promoter in chief’s sound bite for Obamacare the “Lie of the Year” for 2013: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” And let me make a prediction that among his top 10 falsehood contenders for 2014 will be a reversal of what he emphatically stated back on […]

It’s no mystery what the left intends to make its next life-or-death issue: income inequality. Liberals are all popping off about it. It’s everywhere, from Obama’s speeches to liberal think tanks to liberal reporters. It’s almost as if they were conspiring to distract us from Obamacare. Nah! On “Meet the Press,” PBS anchorwoman Judy Woodruff […]

Last week the International Business Times reported: “In their annual End of Year poll, researchers for WIN and Gallup International surveyed more than 66,000 people across 65 nations and found that 24 percent of all respondents answered that the United States ‘is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.’ Pakistan and China fell […]

It is widely accepted that Hispanics will become a larger share of the American electorate in the years to come. This is a matter of simple arithmetic. Less than one-tenth of adults counted in the 2010 Census classified themselves as “Hispanic” (a term invented by the Census Bureau for the 1970 count). But one-quarter of […]

President Obama’s mission as 2014 starts is simple: He has to distract attention from the health care debacle. Health care reform isn’t working and won’t work. So he needs to create a diversion. With his poll numbers lagging around 40 percent, he is naturally concerned to stop the erosion of his base, so he is […]

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has found what he thinks is a bright spot amid the gloomy Obamacare news. When you hear what he’s enthusiastic about, you’ll perhaps understand why I wonder if there is any common ground at all between liberals and conservatives. Klein reports that Obamacare’s “biggest success” is that 4 million new […]

French President Francois Hollande has been confronted by the glaring light of reality — sort of. On New Year’s Day, as his massive tax increases began taking effect, Hollande, a member of the Socialist Party, admitted that taxes in France have become “too heavy, much too heavy.” Indeed, as of Jan. 1, French households now […]

Most economic observers are predicting that 2014 will be the year in which the United States finally shrugs off the persistent malaise of the Great Recession. As we embark on this sunny new chapter, we may ask what wisdom the five-year trauma has delivered. Some big thinkers have declared that the episode has forever tarnished […]

Now we have the latest in the long and growing list of unpleasant “surprises” about the Affordable Care Act. It turns out that expansion of coverage of Medicaid for low income Americans increases rather than decreases visits to hospital emergency rooms. According to just released results of a new study, published in the journal Science, […]

Personal responsibility has gone the way of the Dodo. It’s dead. Apologies are no longer unequivocal, they are qualified. People aren’t “sorry,” they’re “sorry if anyone was offended.” We have become a nation of victims whose mistakes, missteps and downright lies are absolved through deflection, not penance. We’re now a nation of martyrs, misunderstood by […]

President Obama, despondent over his low poll numbers and the lack of trust many Americans have for him and his policies, did something drastic. He met with the psychic medium who once helped Hillary Clinton contact the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt. With the medium’s help, Obama summoned the only presence in America who could help […]

“Congratulations, Mr. Obama, sequestration has been your most successful federal program!” That’s what some pundits are saying in response to the President’s report that our national deficit is less than half of what it was four years ago. On the surface, this certainly would be worthy of national applause for the sequester cuts in spending. […]

Former CIA Director James Woolsey has pronounced that the proper punishment for National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden would be for him to be “hanged by his neck until he is dead.” The news media want to hand him not a rope but a pedestal. The Guardian editorialized last week that its high-profile source is […]

Because things are not going well for liberals who have driven the Democrat Party out of the American mainstream, I thought it would be helpful to come up with a list of suggestions for them to consider in 2014. So here goes: Touch a gun. Guns do not bite, nor do they kill. Instead, guns […]