Government spending is growing at an astounding pace. Congress and the president have thrown hundreds of billions into stimulus packages, domestic programs, military spending and other initiatives. Total federal spending is growing at a 13.8 percent annual rate. ...more

November 1, 2008

The direction of the nation is at stake in this election. Hard economic times, a disappointing Republican administration and the seductive promises of a master orator are pushing America toward a European-style social democracy. If you don't want that to happen, vote for Republican Sen. John McCain. ...more

October 17, 2008

The Bush administration Saturday raised the price tag on its emergency plan to revive the U.S. financial system, asking Congress for authority to spend up to $700 billion to relieve crippled financial institutions of their mortgage-based assets, a sum that would exceed the current cost of the war in Iraq. ...more

September 21, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama learned how hard it can be to solve America's public education problems when he headed a philanthropic drive here a decade ago that spent $150 million on Chicago's troubled schools and barely made a dent. ...more

September 13, 2008

John McCain's decision to anoint Sarah Palin as his running mate looks eccentric for many reasons. Not the least is economic principle. Thanks in part to Palin, Alaska's economy is built on two things that McCain has spent the last few years railing against. ...more

September 11, 2008

A new nuclear plant may be nothing but a big bombing target. Any nation with nuclear power plants offers its adversaries, in effect, a quasi-military capability to use against it, proliferation expert Bennett Ramberg, an official in the George H.W. Bush administration, warned in 1984. ...more

August 26, 2008

If there is one term I am sick to death of already this political season, it is "flip-flop." In the era of "gotcha" politics, changing your mind has become synonymous with incompetence and is the worst "sin" a candidate could commit. Just like a second-grader insisting a classmate has "cooties," one side is always accusing the other of "flip-flopping on the issues." ...more

July 19, 2008

Home foreclosures will keep rising next year no matter who is elected president in November. ...more

July 7, 2008

John McCain can read polls as well as anyone, and what he reads might make him nervous. ...more

June 11, 2008

the scourge of earmarked, pork-barrel spending in Congress - across the Alabama River on the Gee's Bend ferry, to one of his old Navy posts at Cecil Field in Jacksonville and to the Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pa., where he marveled at the new technology. ...more

May 4, 2008