Washington

Hosts Donny Kendal and John Nothdurft continue to explore the world of think tanks in episode #26 of the In The Tank Podcast. This weekly podcast features (as always) interviews, debates, roundtable discussions, stories, and light-hearted segments on a variety of topics on the latest news. The show is available for download as part of the Heartland Daily Podcast every Friday. Today’s podcast features work from the Freedom Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the Illinois Policy Institute.

If you own a business—maybe a taco stand, a dress shop, or an insurance agency—you know it takes a lot of hard work, good market analysis, a better product or service than your competition, and advertising. Add in a bit of luck, and you hope to grow your business—though vacant storefronts and boarded up buildings in towns and cities across America show that isn’t always enough. Each going-out-of-business sale represents the death of someone’s dream.

There is a growing body of research on the consequences of excessive land use regulation. The connection between excessive land use regulation and losses in housing affordability, has been linked to the doubling or tripling of house prices relative to incomes in places as diverse as Hong Kong, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

In “Court and Democracy” Jeffry Rosen speaks of the Supreme Court as playing a paradoxical role in American democracy. He states: “Americans think of the Supreme Court as the least democratic branch of the federal government, designed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution to ‘protect vulnerable minorities’ against the tyranny of the majority.”

President Barack Obama has dramatically ramped up the Washington, D.C., giant Crony-fest. Where economic sectors and companies Obama and his Democrats like get the gold mine – and the rest of us get the shaft. For instance, there was $80 billion for “green energy” in the awful 2009 “Stimulus” bill –80% of that coin went to Obama donors.

Americans are sick of the bickering in Washington and want both parties to cooperate and get something done. Friday, October 9, offered proof that this can still happen. The house passed H.R. 702, the bill to lift the decades old, and outdated, oil export ban with 26 Democrats, joining the majority of Republicans, and voting for it.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, we listen in as Research Fellow Heather Kays joins the Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Daily Podcast with host Jamie Lund. Kays joins the podcast to discuss education policy and the top five reasons teachers unions must change.

Five federal employees were charged in August with theft and fraud for falsifying documents to qualify their children for free lunch at Prince George’s County, Md., public schools. The alleged fraudsters — all employees of the Government Accountability Office — were discovered after an audit into the National School Lunch Program by the very federal agency for which they work.

The entirety of the United States is now a federal disaster area – rendered thus by Washington, D.C. Unlike areas hit by hurricanes, tornadoes and other acts of God – our cataclysm is entirely man-made. Decades of anti-Reality policies have left our nation an uber-addled mess.

Let us ponder for a moment who and what Google is. Google has made tens of billions of dollars – being all up in your business. Uber-efficiently doing what governments the world over have for centuries only at best bumblingly attempted – accumulating reams and reams of data on millions and millions of people.

Look, we get why Democrats want to use the giant-ness of the federal government to punish their enemies and reward their friends. Crony Socialism is in their ideological DNA. And they grow government as huge as possible – to then have the largest possible weapon to wield.

On Thursday and Friday, June 11-12, there will be a gathering of some of the nation’s and the world’s leading climate change “skeptics” in Washington, D.C. and joining them will be members of Congress and their staffs. The Tenth International Conference on Climate Change will occur and the odds are that the mainstream media, as it has done for all the previous conferences, will do its best to ignore it.

“Policy wonks sit around a table in Washington, DC and make ambitious plans for ruling the world without any understanding of what it takes to run a business, in this case, a health insurance exchange.”