Members of Congress and President Obama are squaring off for a showdown. The US will hit the debt limit by the end of February, and with Obama insisting that he will not negotiate, “dooms day” scenarios are being predicted. Discussions of alternative solutions have yielded little in the way of progress. The idea to mint … Continue reading
Late last week a seldom heard voice echoed throughout the regulatory reform debate forum when the U.S. Department of State openly stood behind the controversial Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ‘Resource Extraction Rule.’ This rule, developed as part of the continuing cavalcade of Dodd-Frank initiatives, went into effect last August with the goal of requiring … Continue reading
On July 6, President Obama signed a bill that will hold student loan interest rates at 3.4% for the next year. Students all over the country greeted the bill with relief. With college tuition rates increasing faster than the inflation rate, students are relying more and more on loans to pay for their education. Tuition … Continue reading
By Will Portman The U.S. needs deficit reduction, but there’s such thing as too much of a good thing — or, in the case of the end-of-year “fiscal cliff” the country is approaching, implementing too much of a good thing much too quickly. In the absence of congressional action, a slew of tax increases and spending … Continue reading
By Will Portman The Occupy movement has brought income inequality to the forefront of the national political discussion over the past year, even if both the movement and the issue have faded in recent months. Occupy protestors are concerned about the growing wealth gap in the U.S., pointing to studies like the recent Congressional Budget Office … Continue reading
By Will Portman Due to vicious circle effects, it becomes more and more expensive to pay off the national debt the more and more debt we accumulate, beyond the obvious fact that it’s a greater burden to pay back a greater sum of money. With each new dollar of deficit spending, we’re not merely digging … Continue reading
By Will Portman Winston Churchill once said, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) cited the late British Prime Minister’s famous quote this week as he unveiled The Path to Prosperity, his budget for fiscal year 2013, arguing … Continue reading
By Will Portman On Monday, I went to a talk at the Brookings Institution entitled “America’s Dysfunctional Politics: Is the Constitution to Blame?” Professor Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas School of Law discussed his new book, Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Government, which argues that the 225-year-old U.S. Constitution is … Continue reading
By Will Portman According to a recent Gallup poll, 76% of Americans think that most members of Congress don’t deserve to be re-elected. The same poll, however, showed that a majority of Americans, 53%, think that their representative does deserve to be re-elected. The mentality seems to be something along the lines of, “Throw the bums out! Just not … Continue reading
By Will Portman Yesterday I attended a panel entitled “A Millionaire’s Tax and the Economy” at the Center for American Progress. One of the panelists, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), discussed his bill, the Paying a Fair Share Act, which would mandate that individuals earning above $2 million a year pay at least 30 percent federal … Continue reading
