Six months of railing against business rather than finding ways to encourage entrepreneurs to expand and hire has left the Obama administration with egg on its face. "Pass my $800 billion Stimulus Plan and unemployment will not exceed 8%" was the Obama administration mantra. Well we passed it, and unemployment will soon exceed 10%. President Obama said his Stimulus Plan would save or create 3.5 million jobs in the next two years. This cornucopia of 1960's "Great Society" style social programs misbranded, as a Stimulus Plan has not produced jobs and worse still is unlikely to produce any permanent private sector jobs. Maybe a few hundred thousand temporary infrastructure jobs will be created over the next year or two but that is the best we can hope for from the…
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In the United States we spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the world. We spent $7,421 per capita as compared to about $3,500 countries with universal
national health care systems such as France and Germany. In fact, according to the latest data, we spent $2.2 trillion in 2007 on
health care, or 16.2% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even more worrisome is that expenditures continue to rise at an alarming rate of 6% annually.
There is however, another side of the American health care story, one that is rarely discussed but one that has added dramatically to health care costs. In the past 25 years we have turned deadly diseases such as AIDS and many cancers into chronic illnesses. Death is cheap…
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Embodied in our founding documents is the promise of unparalleled "Opportunity For All". This is what makes America unique. In no other country can children of poor immigrants rise to the pinnacle of wealth and power. Talent, education and hard work are building blocks of the American success story, not birthright or ethnicity.
Have we done enough to preserve our special heritage - Have we been good custodians of our patrimony? As the son of bootblack I know firsthand the opportunities that can arise when you mix education and hard work. The American system has certainly worked well for this boy from the Bronx as well as for a half African-American lawyer who recently became President of the United States and countless tens of millions of others who have risen from…
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