Canada in the summer and Mexico in the spring offer good weather for planning international policies. Nervousness about the political weather, however, is putting the third Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit on August 20-21 at a site where the uninvited can be easily excluded: the Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello resort about 50 miles outside of Quebec.
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Canada in the summer and Mexico in the spring offer good weather for planning international policies. Nervousness about the political weather, however, is putting the third Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit on August 20-21 at a site where the uninvited can be easily excluded: the Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello resort about 50 miles outside of Quebec.
Continue reading →A new grab for power over education now lurking in the corridors of Congress reminds me of a song popular in the Harry James/Frank Sinatra era: “I’ve Heard That Song Before.” Section 3401, inserted by the Senate (but not the House) in the pending America COMPETES Act (S.761), would give us another costly and harmful expansion of the federal education bureaucracy.
Continue reading →The goal of our post-World War II trade agreements, such as the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), was to lower tariffs mutually in pursuit of worldwide free trade.
Continue reading →The bipartisan Border Tax Equity Act (H.R. 2600) has just been introduced by Congressmen Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Mike Michaud (D-ME), and Walter Jones (R-NC). The purpose is to correct border-tax inequities that currently disadvantage U.S. producers and service providers to the tune of $379 billion a year.
Continue reading →How can we re-motivate and reactivate the coalition of fiscal, national defense, social, and economic conservatives who gave Ronald Reagan his tremendous victories in 1980 and 1984?
Continue reading →“The dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students approaches 50 percent. . . . Every year nearly a million kids fail to graduate high school. . . . The United States has the most severe income gap between high school graduates and dropouts in the world.”
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The Kennedy-Kyl (K-K) Amnesty bill should be titled An Act to Destroy the Republican Party because it pits President Bush against the majority of the Party that elected him. When Senator Ted Kennedy appeared as the centerpiece of the photo-op announcing it, that told the grassroots all they needed to know about the politics of the deal trumpeted as bipartisan.
Continue reading →Borrowing the famous words of General Douglas MacArthur that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away,” we can now see that old treaties never die, they can be resurrected years or even decades after taking what we thought was a knockout punch.
Continue reading →American workers are not impressed with talk that “globalism” is inevitable, that educated foreigners have better skills than Americans, or that uneducated foreigners do “jobs Americans won’t do” – because that forces us to compete with foreigners working for 30 cents an hour.
Continue reading →Why do U.S. companies relocate their plants overseas, thereby abolishing U.S. jobs? (a) they can hire workers at very low wages (such as 30 cents an hour in China), (b) the companies don’t have to pay any employee benefits, (c) they don’t have to comply with safety and environmental regulations, (d) they don’t have to pay foreign taxes when they export their products back to us.
Continue reading →U.S. financial generosity to our allies after World War II included giving them special trade advantages to help them speed up their post-war recovery. We agreed that they could rebate to their producers any indirect taxes they paid on goods they exported to us, and they could also impose an equal charge on any U.S. products they imported.
Continue reading →On the first day that H-1B visas became available, the corporations snapped up all that are allowed. Our government received 150,000 applications for the 85,000 slots set aside to bring in foreign skilled workers.
Continue reading →Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says that the Federal Government needs some accountability for the billions of dollars the taxpayers pour into university education.
Continue reading →Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says that the Federal Government needs some accountability for the billions of dollars the taxpayers pour into university education. That’s right, we do; but her plan, to set up a national database to track students, plus a system of testing like No Child Left Behind, is not the solution.
Continue reading →Our federal and state highways and bridges are among America’s great assets; they enable us to drive freely and safely all over our country, and they belong to all of us, paid for by our taxes. But they are expensive assets; they require maintenance, repair, and expansion due to rising population and traffic.
Continue reading →The majority of countries in the world (e.g., Mexico) have two classes: the rulers who are very, very rich and the rest of the people who are very, very poor.
Continue reading →Marc Tucker’s New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has just received national publicity for a verbose report called “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” It’s larded with criticisms about our “expensive elementary and secondary education system” that produces “only mediocre results.”
Continue reading →President Bush’s secret plan for Social Security has just been released to the public in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by TREA Senior Citizens League, a million-member seniors advocacy group.
Continue reading →The technology industry has dispatched its wallet-filled lobbyists to demand that the new Congress vastly increase the number of foreign computer software techies and engineers who can be imported on H-1B visas.
Continue reading →Economists, academicians and financial consultants for years have been preaching that globalism is the wave of the future and that anyone who wants to survive in business must ride its surfboard or drown. All of a sudden, Business Week is having second thoughts.
Continue reading →Did the 2006 election teach Republicans that it is smart to be friends of the middle class? Have Republicans realized that jobs were second only to the unpopular war as the issue of 2006, and will surely be the number-one issue in 2008?
Continue reading →Rep. Virgil Goode (VA), Rep. Ron Paul (TX), Rep. Walter Jones (NC), and Rep. Tom Tancredo (CO) introduced House Concurrent Resolution 487 — Expressing the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in the construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway System or enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada.
Continue reading →Paraphrasing Shakespeare, To build, or not to build; that is the question. Will the Bush Administration build a fence to secure our southern border, or are we being bamboozled with sound and fury, signifying nothing?
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