Video: Heritage Foundation Ad In Times Square: Obamacare Is Hazardous To Your Health
Photo Credit: The Gateway Pundit
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Heritage Foundation: WH ‘Flouting the Law’ with Obamacare Subsidies for Congress
Photo Credit: BreitbartPolitico reported that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will issue a ruling next week that will allow the federal government to subsidize the insurance plans Congressmen and their aides will be forced to buy on government healthcare exchanges due to Obamacare.
The news came just hours after the Heritage Foundation released an embargoed study to reporters that found there was no legal way for the administration to offer subsidies for Members of Congress and their aides without passing a legislative “fix.”
The Obama administration may have tried to preempt the release of that study; one of the study’s co-authors insisted to Breitbart News on Friday that no matter how creative the Obama administration gets, there does not seem to be a legal manner in which the federal government can grant the Obamacare subsidies.
Ed Haislmaier and Robert E. Moffitt, both of whom are Senior Research Fellows in the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney in private practice who served as General Counsel of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985, co-authored the study, titled, “Congress in the Obamacare Trap: No Easy Escape.”
Haislmaier emphasized to Breitbart News that “we don’t see a legal avenue, no matter how creative, for them.”
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Here’s that Dynamic Scoring You Asked for, Senator Rubio
Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe Heritage Foundation recently issued a comprehensive report showing that Sen. Marco Rubio’s plan to instantly legalize 11.5 million illegal immigrants would add $6.3 trillion to the nation’s budget deficits over the next 50 years. Heritage assumed there are 11.5 million illegals, but other estimates put the number at 33 million, which would mean adding another $18 trillion to the deficit. To put that in perspective, the largest U.S. budget deficit in history was $1.4 trillion in 2009.
Currently, the average illegal alien gets about $24,721 in taxpayer-funded benefits and pays about $10,334 in taxes. After full legalization, they will be eligible for a whole new panoply of government benefits such as direct welfare payments, Obamacare, Social Security and Medicare. Heritage concludes that the total government benefits to these former illegal aliens will then rise to about $43,900 per household, while the taxes paid by them will increase only modestly to around $16,000.
Rubio says Heritage’s report is all wrong because it fails to use “dynamic scoring.”
The sentence ends there. It’s like when Obama responds to questions about Benghazi by saying it’s a “political circus,” or liberals say their position on abortion is that “it’s a complex issue.” What isn’t political? What isn’t complex? Those aren’t answers; they’re deflections.
How about Rubio explain the hidden rays of sunshine that will appear by applying “dynamic scoring” to his amnesty bill.
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DeMint to GOP Elders: Game Over, Conservatives Must Drive Agenda
Sporting his new hat as the head of the Heritage Foundation, former Sen. Jim DeMint said Saturday said that conservatives should not rely on the GOP establishment to deliver the movement’s message. He said it is time to take matters into their own hands.
Addressing the National Review Institute’s “Future of Conservatism” summit, Mr. DeMint said that conservatives must take charge of the way the movement is perceived.
“Conservatives have given the sole distribution rights of our ideas, our beliefs and our values – at least in the political sphere – to the Republican party,” the South Carolina Republican said. “We are on the outside looking in hoping they will take some of our ideas and adopt them. It is time to flip that around.”
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DeMint Takes Parting Shot at Boehner (+video)
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who shocked Washington on Thursday with the announcement that he would resign his Senate seat in January to become president of the the Heritage Foundation, sent a parting shot at Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) over the “fiscal cliff” negotiations.
“I’m not with Boehner,” DeMint said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “This government doesn’t need any more money, this country needs less government.”
House Republican leaders on Monday proposed a counteroffer to President Obama in the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. The proposal would reduce spending by $2.2 trillion through a combination of spending cuts and entitlement reforms, and would produce $800 billion in new revenue without raising tax rates, although the plan doesn’t specify how.
Two high-profile conservative groups lashed out at the GOP offer, one of which was the Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation.
“Republicans were reelected in the House to stop Pres. Obama’s agenda, not figure out creative ways to fund it,” Heritage Action for America communications director Dan Holler told The Hill in an email.
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Sen. Jim DeMint To Resign From US Senate, Become Head of Heritage Foundation
South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint will replace Ed Feulner as president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. DeMint will leave his post as South Carolina’s junior senator in early January to take control of the Washington think tank, which has an annual budget of about $80 million.
Sen. DeMint’s departure means that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, will name a successor, who will have to run in a special election in 2014. In that year, both Mr. DeMint’s replacement and Sen. Lindsey Graham will be running for reelection in South Carolina.
Mr. DeMint was reelected to a second term in 2010. The 61-year-old senator had announced earlier that he would not seek a third term.
Mr. Feulner, who is 71 and planned to step down, is to be named chancellor of Heritage, a new position, and will continue in a part-time capacity as chairman of the foundation’s Asian Studies Center.
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Heritage Releases Top 10 Examples of Wasteful Government Spending in 2012
The Heritage Foundation along with Senator Tom Coburn, who just slammed his Senate colleagues for being part of the waste problem, created the following list of the top ten examples of government waste in 2012:
• A reality TV show in India. The Department of Agriculture’s Market Access Program spends $200 million a year to help U.S. agricultural trade associations and cooperatives advertise their products in foreign markets. In 2011, it funded a reality TV show in India that advertised U.S. cotton.
• Studying pig poop. The Environmental Protection Agency awarded a $141,450 grant under the Clean Air Act to fund a Chinese study on swine manure and a $1.2 million grant to the United Nations for clean fuel promotion.
• Amtrak snacks. Federally subsidized Amtrak lost $84.5 million on its food and beverage services in 2011 and $833.8 million over the past 10 years. It has never broken even on these services.
• Using military exercises to boost biofuels. The U.S. Navy bought 450,000 gallons of biofuels for $12 million—or almost $27 per gallon—to conduct exercises to showcase the fuel and bring it closer toward commercialization. It is the largest biofuel purchase ever made by the government.
• Conferences for government employees. In 2008 and 2009 alone, the Department of Justice spent $121 million to host or participate in 1,832 conferences.
• “RoboSquirrel.” $325,000 was spent on a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel.” This National Science Foundation grant was used to create a realistic-looking robotic squirrel for the purpose of studying how a rattlesnake would react to it.
• Cupcakes. In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the country, cupcake shops are trending. The 10 cupcake shop owners who received $2 million in Small Business Administration loan guarantees, however, can only boast so much of their entrepreneurial ingenuity, since taxpayers are backing them up.
• Food stamps for alcohol and junk food. Though they were intended to ensure hungry children received healthy meals, taxpayer-funded food stamps were instead spent on fast food at Taco Bell and Burger King; on non-nutritious foods such as candy, ice cream, and soft drinks; and on some 2,000 deceased persons in New York and Massachusetts. Food stamp recipients spent $2 billion on sugary drinks alone. Improper SNAP payments accounted for $2.5 billion in waste, including to one exotic dancer who was making $85,000 per year.
• Beer brewing in New Hampshire. Despite Smuttynose brewery’s financial success and popularity, it is still getting a $750,970 Community Development Block Grant to build a new brewery and restaurant facilities.
• A covered bridge to nowhere. What list of government waste would be complete without a notorious “bridge to nowhere”? In this case, it’s $520,000 to fix the Stevenson Road Covered Bridge in Green County, Ohio, which was last used in 2003.
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Tea Party Republicans sketch out Internet policy
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the son of libertarian Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, visited the conservative Heritage Foundation on Thursday to sketch out his agenda for preserving Internet freedom. In Paul’s view, this means opposing warrantless government snooping of private networks—and also opposing regulations intended to protect privacy and network neutrality.
The event follows last month’s announcement of a new “Internet freedom” initiative by the Campaign for Liberty, an activist group founded by the elder Paul. It appears that father and son see eye to eye on Internet issues, and the younger Paul used the Heritage event as an opportunity to explain his views.
Sen. Paul began by referencing Gordon Crovitz’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal, questioning whether the government launched the Internet. We’ve pointed out that Crovitz’s column was factually challenged; Paul offered a more nuanced version of the argument.
“It may not be completely simple but it’s definitely not as simple as that the government invented it,” he said. “When you say stuff like, ‘Oh, the government invented the Internet,’ it sort of demeans the process of the individuals who were involved.”
For example, “There was Vinton Cerf. There was Tim Berners-Lee. There were individuals. But it wasn’t the faceless government that invented the Internet. It was individuals. Even if some of them did work for government, the mind of the individual is what should be extolled, not some faceless bureaucracy.”
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