FreedomTalks

Our friend Ramesh Ponnuru from National Review puts forward an interesting proposition in Time magazine. Republican proposals on health care policy are radical. He elaborates that Democrats are incremental in their approach to buttress a failing status quo with additional governmental support programs.
Ponnuru explains that the GOP is trying to move away from [...]

Fresh off raising over $4 million online in one day this week, Texas Congressman Ron Paul defeated former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani on his home turf in the NY GOP straw poll.
Hat tip to The Caucus.
Ron Paul Wins! That’s the headline today after the first New York State Republican Straw Poll. Clearly, after raking [...]

The Club for Growth has been running this ad about Governor Mike Huckabee’s statements on the gas tax hike in his state.

There’s a sharp column at NRO todayon how the AMT combines with pay-go rules to create a massive tax mess. Here’s the gist:
The Democratic pay-as-you-go imperative requires that tax cuts be balanced, based on static scoring from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, with tax hikes or spending cuts. Spending cuts are rarely considered [...]

Cato’s Dan Mitchell points us to this fantastic bit of news about economic growth in the former Soviet province of Georgia, which recently instituted a flat tax.
Effective January 1, 2005, Georgia (the country, not the U.S. State) adopted a flat tax of 12%, replacing its previous four-bracket system. The flat tax was augmented with a [...]

House Ways and Means Republicans are releasing a new study today by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), an analysis arm of Congress. They find that Rep. Charlie Rangel’s “Mother of All Tax Hikes” plan will raise taxes on Americans at almost every income level. The bill hits working and middle class households, [...]

Nick Gillespie at Reason points us to this great short by Stuart Browning on the perils of government-run health care.

What’s great about this is that Browning has done more than recap the basic problems with socialized medicine; he’s actually gone out and found the human side of the story, taking a (painful, I think) look [...]

As Foreign Affairs magazine’s Michael Shifter reports, Hugo Chavez is continuing his drive for more power and even more economic ruin in Venezuela.
On the national front, Chávez is resolutely consolidating his autocratic governance model. The National Assembly overwhelmingly approved the articles for a constitutional reform that will be submitted to a national referendum on December [...]

In a forward-looking commentary in today’s Washington Times, Richard Rahn explains the distorting factors in the global petroleum market; namely that there are too many inefficient governments in control of oil resources.   Rahn writes:
Most people do not realize that about 90 percent of the world’s liquid oil reserves are controlled by governments or state-owned [...]

This week the Senate will be debating the pending farm bill on the Senate floor. This latest farm policy outrage will cost taxpayers more than $280 billion over five years. It’s a combination of subsidies, tariffs and price controls, all of which are bad public policies. One of the worst giveaways from Big Government to [...]