Somebody has observed that nations tend to base their strategy for national defense on winning the war already past. Thus France built the Maginot Line after World War I. The same might be said of America's health care policy – managed care is America's Maginot Line.
Has the American justice system spun out of control? With the agitation over au pair Louise Woodward, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, the Menendez brothers and other well-publicized decisions, it seems like the system "gets it wrong" all too often. But are things really more woeful than ever? History suggests not. At most times dissatisfaction with our criminal justice procedures has been widespread.
Free trade is a proven winner. More than 12 million Americans have jobs supported by exports – jobs that pay about 14 percent more than jobs in nonexport industries. Exports have more than doubled as a share of the nation's total output in the last 25 years. Since 1993, American trade with other countries has increased by 33 percent – and trade with Canada and Mexico, our partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has grown by 44 percent.
If our computer industry operated like our public schools, IBM would be the only computer manufacturer, computers would be as big as a house and they would cost $200,000.
There is a growing debate in Washington over private contracting in Medicare. What the debate boils down to is this: should seniors be allowed to go to any physician and pay for that service out of their own pockets? Or must bureaucrats protect these seniors from themselves and their doctors?
In keeping with the Halloween spirit, the Clinton Administration recently unveiled the latest monster to lumber from the capital to terrorize the nation: a global climate change treaty intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The tragic flaw in this monster, like Dr. Frankenstein's creation, is its reliance on faulty and overreaching science. And like the Frankenstein monster, the treaty will not produce the benefits touted by its creators.
One of the principle arguments against the flat tax, as proposed by House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) and publisher Steve Forbes, is that it would be too good for the rich. That is because the top income tax rate would fall from the current 39.6 percent to just 17 percent under the Armey-Forbes plan. Better we should keep oppressing and penalizing all taxpayers with ungodly complexity and punitive tax rates than allow wealthy taxpayers to keep more of their money, the liberal Washington establishment says.
A headline in a recent Sunday New York Times read "Crime keeps on falling, but prisons keep on filling." The fact is crime keeps on falling because prisons keep on filling.
Moscow – In 1991 Warsaw newspaper editor Adam Michnik defined the challenge of reforming Poland's economy from Marxism to the marketplace: "All of us know how to switch from a market economy to a planned totalitarian economy. Nobody knows how to switch from a totalitarian economy to a market economy."
Speaking of the Red Terror, Josef Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
The recent balanced budget agreement included a revision to the Medicare program that would make the average person wonder which is worse: trusting federal bureaucrats to run a health care system, or the way the federal government goes about passing the laws that guide those bureaucrats?
Republican Congressman John Doolittle of California and 54 of his House colleagues (52 Republicans and two Democrats) have the ideal answer to reforming campaign finance, but their approach is so straightforward that hardly anyone seems to be paying attention.
There is an old saying: be careful what you wish for, you might get it. I have a feeling that many conservatives are going to be saying this about the balanced budget that now seems likely to finally be achieved in 2002. Rather than having found the Holy Grail, conservatives may quickly come to miss the very deficit they railed against for so many years.
What kind of characteristics do you look for in a city if you want a good place to live? I'll tell you what I look for – a place where families and businesses and jobs are welcome, but criminals aren't.
Each Labor Day we celebrate the material progress of the American worker, and impressive it has been. Most jobs previously done by muscle and sweat are now done by machine. The work week averages 35 hours instead of 65. Four-week vacations are commonplace. Retirement in good health at age 62 has replaced death in harness at age 52. Since 1900, hourly pay has gone up sevenfold in real, inflation-adjusted terms. It's gone up threefold since 1947 alone.
You would think that an organization that thrives on providing consumers with information to help them make good choices would apply that same thinking to health care.
If you have the impression that fewer people these days are being murdered, raped, robbed and assaulted, and that not as many homes are being burglarized, you're right. There has been a documented decrease since 1993 in every category of violent crime plus burglary.
Several states have figured out a way to increase the number of people without health insurance – and they are effectively putting that strategy into action, although that's not what they intended. Its called "community rating," and it always results in driving up the price of health insurance and pricing people out of the health insurance market.
Once again a bureaucrat determined to do something and a president who thinks he has found a heartstring to tug are proposing to do all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.
We've all seen the "Peanuts" cartoon where Lucy holds the football and asks Charlie Brown to kick it. At the last minute, Lucy always pulls the football away and Charlie falls flat on his back. But no matter how many times this happens, Lucy is always able to convince Charlie that this time will be different and he will finally be able to kick the ball.
Speaking at the United Nations on June 26th, President Clinton said "…we have to first convince the American people and the Congress that the climate change problem is real and imminent." Failure to do so, he suggested, could produce "50 million or more cases of malaria," cause "the seas to rise two feet or more," cause urban heat waves, and cause the Maldive Islands to disappear.
The approach of Independence Day affords us a time to marvel at the genius of what the Founding Fathers created for us in the new nation that grew out of the Declaration of Independence and ensuing events: a nation based not on allegiance to a ruler but on individual rights.
Republicans almost lost their majority on Capitol Hill in the '96 elections and have since resembled Clark Kent more often than Superman. Their mild mannered Resist-and-Retreat routine is no expressway to smaller government and more freedom. They've forgotten what General Douglas MacArthur told them at their 1952 National Convention: "It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it."
Across the country state and local governments have been privatizing welfare services.
As part of the Contract With America, Congress passed the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995. The legislation restricts the ability of Congress to pass laws that would impose costly burdens on state, local and tribal governments. Under the legislation, any proposed bill that would impose a cost of more than $50 million on a state or local government would be subject to a "point of order" – a procedural move that would permit congressmen to stop the legislation unless a majority voted to override the point of order. In addition, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has to estimate the cost of mandates imposed on private-sector businesses if the mandates exceed $100 million.