Category: Pete du Pont

I'm Pete du Pont with the National Center for Policy Analysis. It's bad enough Congress gave Bill Clinton his one dollar minimum wage hike. Worse is the lame reasoning from …

Two pieces of good news were announced recently. First, the nation's economy grew an unprecedented 7.3 percent during the last quarter of 1999. Second, due in part to this tremendous growth, the Social Security trust fund is predicted to have an extra three years of life, pushing back the projected insolvency date to 2037.

You've heard about Roth IRAs. How about Roth MSAs?

The political trend that's pained me most over the past few years has been the inability of Congressional Republicans to stick to the promises of 1994. I've given examples before. Now, Investor's Business Daily is the latest to run the numbers.

President Clinton is wrong about Bradley Smith. Clinton nominated Smith — reluctantly — to the Federal Election Commission. Republicans and Democrats each nominate three people to the commission. Smith's a Republican who, Clinton says, hates campaign reform.

The Clinton administration may be crowing about its settlement with Smith and Wesson, but there's nothing to be proud of.

The battle to keep Internet commerce tax free won a small victory last week when a Blue Ribbon Commission voted to extend the moratorium on Internet taxes until 2006.

As the saying goes "No good deed goes unpunished."

By now, I'm used to stereotyping and name-calling in politics. What I'll never get used to is using issues like race and religion to pit one group of Americans against another for votes.

Every year the federal governments "spends" about $125 billion in tax subsidies (read: Your Money) encouraging people to buy private health insurance. But the number of uninsured is 44 million and growing. How come? Because the subsidies actually cause people to decline insurance.

Did you read about the Los Angeles teachers union's call for a strike? When you hear the facts, you'll know why school choice is inevitable.

The commission studying Internet taxation has been hearing two starkly different scenarios of our future with e-commerce. On the one hand, the word is that taxing Internet commerce will kill the goose just as it begins to lay golden eggs. On the other hand, there are predictions that state and local government revenue bases will dry up unless Internet sales are subject to the same taxes that apply to traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses.

Before you lose sleep over rising gasoline prices, a few facts.

The big news from Super Tuesday was presidential politics. More interesting to me were the fortunes of the many initiatives on the California ballot.

President Clinton wants another $8.5 billion in new federal education spending. But years of studies have showed with painful clarity that spending has gone up as student performance has gone down.

This story, reported in the New York Times, isn't exactly policy wonk stuff, but it's just too good not to pass on.

Stop the presses — Congress is about to do a very good thing. It looks like it's going to repeal the Social Security Earnings Test for those who retire at 65. Democrats have fought it for years with their class warfare rhetoric. But commonsense appears to have won the day.

Whether or not George W. Bush winds up as the republican presidential nominee, I hope one of his more sophisticated policy ideas becomes part of the republican platform.

"He hates campaign finance reform, Bradley Smith does," Mr. Clinton said. No, Mr. President. Bradley Smith favors campaign finance reform. Real reform, that is, not just writing a new bunch of regulations that Democrats and Republicans alike will immediately find ways to get around.

Well, here's a happy bit of news. According to the Washington Times, a recent survey of seniors at the nation's top 55 universities showed four out of five were ignorant of even the most basic elements of American History. Most can go through four years of college without taking one history course. The soon-to-graduate-and-be-loosed-on-the-world students demonstrated what critics called "profound historical illiteracy".

Someone once said that the most beautiful words in the English language were "Summer afternoon." I beg to differ. I think the most beautiful words in the English language are "Pitchers and catchers report to Florida in two weeks."

The press tells us Americans don't want a tax cut. So I'll tell you about Ernst and Young's Jack Anderson, and his Misery Index.

Today, the latest evidence the God of politics has a sense of humor, and he's laughing at us.

The media spin coming out of "Super Tuesday" was, of course, the performance of the presidential candidates. More interesting, though, were the fortunes of the many propositions that littered California's ballot.

Who's afraid of biotechnology? Lots of people, apparently, which is a shame.