Issues

Steve Beren had the opportunity to interview all five candidates, one on one, no holds barred, spending an average of two hours with each candidate. He has posted articles about each of the five interviews on his blog at RedCounty.com. Here are the links to all five interviews.

The average tax rate assessed to corporations worldwide has fallen 10 years in a row, but the U.S. isn't driving the trend. Policymakers in the most advanced economy continue to punish their constituents.

• Home Prices Least Affordable Where Gov't Is Most Involved
• How Little Law From '70s Brought The Financial System To Its Knees
• How Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac Sank In The Subprime Quicksand
• How Congress Ignored Warnings And Stiff-Armed Reform Of GSEs
• Support Of Fannie And Freddie: Bipartisan And Beyond Words

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's cry in unveiling the House's massive reform bill might as well have been "Viva la health care revolution!" America never voted for change like this.

Wall Street Journal editorializes about a study released by WellPoint that documents the consequences for families and small business as a result of the Democrat plan for a government takeover of health care.

People thought something small, agile and smart was coming to government, but so far it's turning out to be just big-box politics.

10,000 chant to Congress: 'Hands off our health care' and 'Kill the bill'

Americans, by and large, resist being “given” things by the state: they instinctively dislike being turned into passive supplicants. They equate the ability to make choices with power, and the conferring of state benefits (whether in the form of services or money) as a loss of personal freedom. The British are just beginning to come to the same conclusion. And that is what should have been the nub of the argument about middle-class welfare payments.

• Number one: let families and businesses buy health insurance across state lines.
• Number two: allow individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together and acquire health insurance at lower prices, the same way large corporations and labor unions do.
• Number three: give states the tools to create their own innovative reforms that lower health care costs.
• Number four: end junk lawsuits that contribute to higher health care costs by increasing the number of tests and procedures that physicians sometimes order not because they think it's good medicine, but because they are afraid of being sued.

H.R. 3962, the "Affordable Health Care for America Act" has been introduced--all 1990 pages of it. This gargantuan beast contains thirteen new tax hikes.

• They don't begin to cover everyone
• Medical costs will soar
• Taxes will also go up
• Bureaucracy will explode
• Health outcomes will worsen
• Reform as envisioned is unconstitutional

• Why Health Care Costs So Much
• How Quantity Is Influenced By Price Controls
• How Payment By Third Parties Distorts Decisions
• Costs Of Malpractice Insurance Go Beyond Doctors' Premiums
• How Cost Of Drug Development Is Lost On Public and Politicians
• How Regulation Of Drug Industry Discourages R&D And Costs Lives
• Weighing True Cost Of Delays In The Drug-Approval Process
• How Strictest Price Control Of All Restrains A Great Medical Advance
• Misconceptions That Mar Medical Care

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

Svetlana Kunin, a retired software developer, was a civil engineer in the Soviet Union until 1980 and now lives in Connecticut.

The Republican Party today...has to move from a pro-business strategy that defends the interests of existing companies to a pro-market strategy that fosters open competition and freedom of entry.

The voting data, as compiled from the 2000 and 2004 presidential votes and 2000 census data, suggests that the popular media has it pretty much wrong. The Red and Blue narrative is both true and false and we need to recognize the truth in order to dispense with the myths and fallacies.

Fear of the envy of others is one of mankind’s most deeply primal and pervasive terrors... Envy-avoidance is one of the most basic and primary motivators of human behavior... Socialism can be seen as a desperate attempt to eradicate envy: by forcing everyone to be “equal,” no one will have grounds for envying others... Liberalism is nothing more than a pose by those afraid of envy.

Vice Presidential Candidate and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on issues of the day.