Is Birthright Citizenship a Good Policy?

Recently, we’ve been seeing a lot of republican presidential candidates come out against birthright citizenship. Trump, Walker, Jindal, Graham, Christie, Santorum, Paul, Carson, and Cruz are against it. Rubio, Fiorina, Bush, Huckabee, Kasich, Pataki, Perry, and Gilmore support it. Who has it right? Let’s investigate.

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The Obama Austerity Package

Even I failed to anticipate that the end of February would approach and the president would make no serious effort at preventing the March 1 budget sequestration from taking effect. At the end of January, we noticed that, with sequester included, the United States was prepared to see an austerity package 1.9% the size of GDP in 2013, more austerity as a share of the economy than was seen in Britain in 2011 or 2012 (though not both combined). What’s important to note is that, despite Obama’s recent token effort to get congress to repeal or further delay sequestration, which accounts for $78 billion of the $304 billion in spending cuts and tax increases planned for this year, all of this is his fault and his fault alone. Continue reading “The Obama Austerity Package”

The Fiscal Cliff: Stepping Back From the Abyss

A couple days later than perhaps would have made a decent show, Congress managed to slap together a stop-gap and avert the economic catastrophe that the CBO projected would have resulted from the fiscal cliff. So let’s get to business–what does the cliff deal do, and where does this leave us going forward?

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