Heritage Fondation

By Bethany Murphy

As Election Day fast approaches, political prognosticators say a big conservative wave is about to wash over the nation, sending new lawmakers with fresh ideas to Washington. Whether they win or lose next week, conservatives must be armed and ready to win upcoming policy battles. And The Heritage Foundation has just the tools they need.

Heritage experts have identified 23 policy areas of concern for candidates and Americans, Solutions for America. This guide offers clear policy recommendations on today’s most important issues. These recommendations include:

• Federal Spending. Government spending is out of control—so much so that a new political movement, the tea party, has sprung up to rein it in. America has a spending problem, and Heritage has a solution. The majority of our spending growth is on entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—to say nothing of Obamacare—and Heritage has created a series of recommendations that the new Congress should enact in order to correct the out of control spending that will tack on an additional trillion dollars to our national debt in the next decade.
• Health Care. Heritage urges a total and immediate repeal of Obamacare, and this needs to be a top priority for the new Congress. But Congress shouldn’t stop there:  Heritage supports free market solutions (link in PDF) as opposed to a big government takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy.
• Government Regulations. The amount of government regulation in the past year has been unprecedented, costing taxpayers an additional $26.5 billion in 2010 alone. These costs will affect Americans in many ways. It will raise the price of the cars they buy and the food they eat, for example, while destroying an untold number of jobs. Worse, the amount of red tape is set to rise in the coming year. Congress must keep in mind that the more regulations placed on Americans, the more they are restricting their freedoms.

All of these recommendations have one thing in common – reducing the federal government’s involvement in our everyday lives. Despite what Vice President Biden might believe, this country was built because of the ingenuity, hard work, and risk-taking of enterprising Americans. This country did not become the greatest in the world through government handouts and wealth redistribution. The laws of free market capitalism created the world’s only superpower. We can only remain so if we continue to honor the founding principles that make our nation exceptional among all others.

> Other Heritage Work of Note 

• Based on a 1997 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Congress has recently tried to enact various “green” bills that would supposedly help reduce carbon dioxide emissions and halt climate change.  But Heritage’s Nicolas Loris reports that “recent flaws discovered in the scientific assessment of climate change have shown that the scientific consensus is not as settled as the public had been led to believe.”
• Planned Parenthood has declared that permissive sex education results in a lower teen birthrate.  Writing on National Review Online, Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield disagree with this faulty causal analysis. “A state’s teen birthrate can be strongly influenced by the teen abortion rate,” write the Heritage domestic policy experts. “States with permissive sex-ed policies tend to have substantially higher rates of teen abortion.”
• Liberals have vociferously argued that since coalition forces did not discover stockpiles of weapons in Iraq, the 2003 invasion of that country was not justified. Heritage's James Phillips clears the record, stating “buried in the WikiLeaks avalanche of documents related to the war in Iraq are various reports about the discovery of chemical weapons caches inside Iraq.”
• Many European nations have drastically reduced spending in order to erase their budget deficits.   Heritage experts J.D. Foster laments that the United States is not following suit.  Instead, the Heritage economist reports that President Obama’s policy continues to be to “borrow extensively and continually, well beyond what is safe or prudent, to create an artificial sense of prosperity for as long as it can last.”
• Legislators are pushing for a vote on the New START treaty—an updated nuclear treaty with Russia—during the lame-duck session in Congress after the elections. Heritage President Ed Feulner writes in the Washington Times  that at least six senators fear that this treaty will cripple American defense. “They're concerned about a side agreement that the administration is on the verge of completing with Russia,” writes Feulner, “an agreement that very well could compromise our ability to deploy an effective missile defense, regardless of what the treaty itself says.”

> In Other News

• Authorities are on alert after suspicious packages were found in Dubai and London.
• The FBI has determined that a recent shooting at a Marine Corps recruiting office is linked to two attacks on military buildings in Northern Virginia.
• Unemployment levels continue to rise to over 10 percent in countries using the Euro. Spain’s unemployment rate is nearing 20 percent.
• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is cutting government spending, to the ire of many on the left, in order to get his state’s books in order. He recently scrapped plans to build a costly rail tunnel to New York as unaffordable.
• Approximately $8 billion spent by the Defense Department on Afghan reconstruction efforts remains unaccounted-for.
• North and South Korea recently exchanged fire in the Demilitarized Zone.