FreedomTalks

Our friends at the Heritage Foundation have a great new study out about the economic harms that a cap and trade system on carbon would cause. Both presidential candidates with a shot at the office support “cap and trade.” In fact, Senator McCain will be pushing the bill mentioned below quite hard this summer. Conservatives […]

I’m in the American Spectator this morning with a piece speculating on the motivations behind Bush’s global warming speech yesterday. One thing I didn’t note was that McCain’s people are probably frustrated by this. While Bush didn’t go all the way in endorsing cap and trade, as McCain has, he did substantially […]

Read enough national op-ed columns and you’ll very quickly start to recognize a pretty common strain of thought which argues that bipartisanship is a good thing.  That sounds plenty nice, and maybe there’s something to be said for getting along with your political enemies. But bipartisanship isn’t in and of itself something to applaud, because […]

The chief of staff for Rep. Dan Lipinski brags about bringing home the bacon for purely political purposes. This man is gloating about his corrupt practices. It’s time to put an end to the wasteful, and often corrupt, practice of earmarking.
The Chicago Sun-Times has the story about the braggart chief of staff, Jerry Hurckes.
What has […]

To read the financial pages these days, you might believe that’s so. James Pethokoukis thinks not, and reminds us that we’ve heard similar sorts of gloomy forecasting before before.

FW Chairman Dick Armey recently took on the issue of earmarks over at Townhall:
There are three groups of people who regularly spend other people’s money: children, thieves, and politicians. All three of these groups need supervision—a watchful, responsible eye who keeps them in line. For children, that means parents. For thieves, that means police […]

Over at the Atlantic, Megan McArdle predicts that more regulation is certainly in store for the financial sector — but isn’t sure it’ll do much good:
[T]he broad demands for “stricter scrutiny” and “more transparency” are meaningless…
The problem is not transparency but complexity: The value of the securities was as opaque to those who held them […]

Oh boy.
The government on Wednesday relaxed capital requirements at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as part of a plan to inject an additional $200 billion of financing for home loans.
…It was the third step the government has taken in recent weeks to allow Washington-based Fannie and McLean, Va.-based Freddie to shoulder larger burdens in the […]

Matt Yglesias writes:
The “world in numbers” for our current print issue is a nifty map of the overtaxed highway infrastructure in our major urban areas. Under the circumstances, the case for more transportation infrastructure is compelling, but it’s worth underscoring the fact that you’re never going to have anything more than a very temporary solution […]

Yesterday, I taped an episode of Bloggingheads with American Prospect staff writer Ezra Klein. The whole thing is here, but FT readers might be interested in the following bit in which I talk about how John McCain might smooth out his sometimes rocky relationship with the conservative movement:
There’s more about McCain and economics, William F. […]