Last Monday, I led a delegation of four Members of Congress to Alaska to see the portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) proposed for oil exploration and production. We talked with Alaskans, including the Native people who live on the North Slope, and got their views on whether additional development and production should be permitted.

After spending almost four days in the region, I am more convinced than ever that we need to allow increased oil production there, and do so immediately.

Spending $1.2 billion per day to buy oil from often unfriendly foreign countries, when we have significant domestic oil reserves, simply makes no sense. Instead, we should be pursuing energy independence as aggressively as possible. Not that long ago, America produced 60% of the oil we consumed. Today we produce only 30%.

It is estimated that there are between 7.7 and 11.8 billion barrels of oil in the portion of ANWR proposed for development. That is enough to displace 10% of our daily imports. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. How about a committee of five bureaucrats with a bit of knowledge and the power to govern the financial reporting of every public company in America?

CEOs like me know that the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) by which public companies report their assets, profits, and losses aren’t all that generally accepted. In fact, although all public companies must give their accounting in GAAP form, many choose to supplement it with what they consider to be a more meaningful non-GAAP version. Why are so many American companies forced to work their way around a national standard? Because in many instances GAAP makes it more difficult to understand a company’s finances. Read the rest of this entry »

Sen. Joe Biden’s (D-DE) foreign policy experience may have led to his selection as Barack Obama’s running mate, but his fiscal record is less than stellar.

Biden has received “F” grades on the National Taxpayers Union’s past 10 Ratings of Congress, which analyze every Roll Call vote affecting fiscal policy and assign members of Congress a “Taxpayer Score” and letter grade. (Most recently, Biden received a Taxpayer Score of 4%, ranking him 94th out of 100 Senators.)

Since NTU began assigning letter grades for its Rating in 1992, Biden has received “F” grades 81 percent of the time and no “A” grades (his highest grade was a C- for the 1996 Rating). Read the rest of this entry »

The Club for Growth PAC looked at Sen. Joe Biden’s record on economic issues, and it is dismal. On every economic issue, Senator Biden has voted for more taxes, more spending, and bigger government.

Joe Biden has voted against every major tax cut and for numerous tax hikes. He is an avid supporter of pork barrel spending, supporting the Bridge to Nowhere in 2005 and winning the ignominious Porker of the Month award from Citizens Against Government Waste in January 2002. Biden has been reliably anti-trade and pro-government regulation. On school choice, he even voted against a vouchers program for low-income earners. Biden has also stood with the trial lawyers, voting against reasonable tort reform and voted against preventing the plundering of Social Security.

When it comes to economic issues, Joe Biden is as bad as it gets.

The economy is the #1 issue this election. While the focus has been on the impact of a stock market in decline, a housing market crashing, increasing unemployment and sky-high gas prices, very little attention is paid to how America’s business climate affects individual Americans.

A recent OECD study shows that our corporate tax rate is 50% higher than our economic counterparts, the second highest overall among industrialized nations. An earlier OECD study explained that corporate taxes are the single most harmful to economic growth, more so than personal income or sales taxes. Read the rest of this entry »

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law 73 years ago today. That piece of legislation has proven to be one of the most successful in the nation’s history and it is so woven into the national fabric that Senator Barack Obama has called it “the cornerstone of the social compact in this country.”

It is so successful for a number of reasons but, most importantly, because it works. Before Social Security, the poorest people in the country were the elderly. Social Security turned the United States into a society where getting old meant that, after a life of work, a person could retire with security. The current statistics reaffirm just how important Social Security is for our retirees. Twenty percent live solely off of the program’s benefits, and 65 percent depend on it for more than half of their income. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, the GAO released a new report that led me to renew my call for Iraqi fiscal responsibility. The report found that the Iraqi government acquired a budget surplus of nearly $80 billion in the last three years.

It is outrageous that the Iraqi government continues to reap billions in budget surpluses from record-high oil prices, yet American taxpayers have spent $48 billion in Iraq for reconstruction projects alone. It defies common sense and any semblance of fiscal responsibility. This new report makes it crystal clear: it is long past time for the government of Iraq to step up and take responsibility for rebuilding its own country. Read the rest of this entry »

No, this post is not really about last week’s indictment of Senator Ted Stevens; he is innocent until proven guilty. Rather, it’s about the grim reminder to taxpayers that the 110th Congress’s ethics legislation (S.1) is not up to the job of protecting their hard-earned money. Substitute the name of any Senator or Representative for that of Ted Stevens, and one thing remains undeniable: the very first hypothetical test of the 2007 “no pensions for Congressional felons” law is a dismal failure. What message does this send to the American people, who according to some polls already rate Congress’s performance in the single-digits?

One reason for the problem is that S. 1, signed by President Bush in September 2007, deprives a lawmaker of his or her pension only for final conviction of certain offenses committed after the bill’s enactment. Most of the charges against Stevens are for offenses he allegedly committed before that time. Defenders of S. 1 point out that constitutional issues of retroactivity might arise if the provisions were written to simply apply to a final conviction after enactment, regardless of when the offenses occurred. This is not entirely an unreasonable position, though it would make for interesting litigation. Read the rest of this entry »

The American Academy of Actuaries, a professional association representing 16,000 actuaries, released yesterday a public policy position statement calling on policymakers to address Social Security’s long-term financial problems. The actuaries recommended that policymakers start by increasing Social Security’s retirement age. At the heart of the recommendation was the principle that this demographic problem demands a demographic solution.

For two decades Social Security’s trustees have reported that Social Security is not in actuarial balance. Translation: absent corrective legislation, in the foreseeable future, Social Security will not be able to pay timely benefits in full. Current intermediate projections show the program’s cash flow moving into the red in 2017, and the trust fund being exhausted by 2041. A misconception is that the program’s financial woes are linked entirely to the baby boom. In fact, long after the baby boomers have departed, Social Security’s income will cover only about 75 percent of its costs. This permanent imbalance is partially attributable to increased longevity. In 1940, 65-year-old males lived on average 11.9 additional years and 65-year-old females lived on average 13.4 additional years. In 2007 those figures soared to an estimated 16.7 and 19.2 years, respectively. Projections show life expectancy continuing to rise even higher. Social Security’s normal retirement age was increased only once in the program’s history, but life expectancy continues to increase. Another increase in the retirement age is needed to ensure the viability of the program, and the time to make a change is now. Read the rest of this entry »

Hill Associate Editor Ian Swanson discusses what lawmakers will tell their constituents over recess and how Congress will continue to fund the federal government when it gets back.