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Heritage
Foundation
Morning
Bell: Remember the Economy? It’s Still
Bad
By Derrick Morgan
April 30, 2013
According
to a poll earlier this year, voters
have a higher opinion of cockroaches than Congressmen. President
Obama’s
personal popularity remains solid, but his job approval rating is going
down.
Why are our elected officials unpopular?
It
might just be because they are not
listening. In poll after poll, the American people continue to tell
Washington
that their top priority is the economy. A recent Fox News poll asked
participants what is the most important issue facing the nation. The
results:
the economy got 42 percent, deficit 17 percent, guns 5 percent, and
immigration
4 percent.
President
Obama inherited a weak economy, to be
sure, but his policies, including Obamacare with its costly expected
mandates
on businesses and the Dodd-Frank financial services regulations have
made the
situation worse. Even when we see some economic growth, the jobs growth
has
been feeble. People have been leaving the workforce. Heritage’s James
Sherk
noted recently, “Labor force participation dropped to 63.3 percent, the
lowest
rate since 1979..” America needs to get its people back to productive
work, not
recruit Americans to start taking food stamps.
Instead
of working on bills that would help the
economy, right now the politicians are working on an Internet sales tax
bill
and a comprehensive immigration bill offering amnesty.
The
liberals’ push on each of these issues will
be destructive to our liberties. The Heritage Foundation and Heritage
Action
have been fighting liberal policy each step of the way.
Heritage
continues to fight on immigration,
pointing out major flaws in the Gang of Eight’s plan and calculating
how much
an amnesty would cost American taxpayers.
Heritage
has also criticized the move for a new
Internet sales tax to help states raise more funds to grow government.
The
Senate is considering forcing businesses to collect taxes for states
where they
have no physical presence—an affront to representative government and
the
camel’s nose under the proverbial tent of Internet regulation.
Liberals
effectively control the agenda in
Washington. Harry Reid (D-NV) has the gavel in the Senate, and
President Obama
has the bully pulpit. Washington is focused on what they want to talk
about and
what they are pushing. A compliant press corps certainly amplifies
their
message.
But
conservatives in the House of
Representatives are not helpless. They should try to set the agenda on
the
economy. Last session, they passed some 40 bills that they said would
be good
for the economy, all of which died in the Senate. But in this Congress,
they
seem to have given up.
Read
the rest of the article at Heritage
Foundation
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