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About 3,500 acres of southern Arizona have been closed off to U.S. citizens due to increased violence at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The closed off area includes part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge that stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu told Fox News that violence against law enforcement officers and U.S. citizens has increased in the past four months, forcing officers on an 80 mile stretch of Arizona land north of the Mexico border off-limits to Americans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stays optimistic as President Obama calls anew on his congressional allies to push through comprehensive health care reform. To pay for the Democrats' trillion-dollar health care plan, New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, on Friday called for new tax hikes on the wealthy.

Remember last week when the media touted a new cost estimate by the Congressional Budget Office suggesting that Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee had found a magic want enabling them to cover 97 percent of the uninsured for $600 billion? Well, we now know that the cost is more like $1.1 trillion, and likely higher. As I cautioned when the CBO numbers came out last week, the $600 billion estimate did not include the price of massively expanding Medicaid, a costly provision of all of the various Democratic health care proposals. But now the CBO...

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers, and academics beat the drum for a far larger government role in health care. Much of the public assumes that their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. Before we turn to government as the solution, however, we should consider some unheralded facts about America’s health care system. 1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent...

"Only a small part" of the nation's $787 billion economic stimulus had been spent through the end of last month, according to congressional analysts, despite the Obama administration's boasts Wednesday that the plan is a big success. "One hundred days later, we are already seeing results," President Barack Obama said during a visit to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada . "Across America, recovery is under way," Vice President Joe Biden said in a statement accompanying a 28-page progress report. However, Douglas Elmendorf , the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office , was more cautious in his "State of...

The $787 billion U.S. economic stimulus package may not be able to live up to lofty expectations, painting President Barack Obama into a policy corner once the money runs out. With only a little under 7 percent of the stimulus actually paid out so far, it is a bit early to try to measure success. However, the White House is already fielding questions about whether another spending package will be needed. The problem is that while a sum of $787 billion may be vast, it pales in comparison to the more than $12 trillion in household wealth that has been...

Barack Obama called for House passage of the cap and trade tax bill last Friday by calling it a jobs bill. The bill is designed to raise the price of energy in the U.S. so much that it will reduce the use of fossil fuels by 17% by 2020 and by 83% by 2050. Sentencing the U.S. economy to high cost energy is not a particularly good strategy for creating jobs. The Charles River Associates, a Harvard based economics consulting firm, estimates a net loss of jobs from the bill of about 2.5 million each year. This is surely a...

JERUSALEM -- A new poll shows only 6 percent of Israeli Jews see President Barack Obama's administration as pro-Israel, while 50 percent see it as pro-Palestinian. That is a dramatic change from the previous U.S. administration of George W. Bush, which 88 percent termed "pro-Israel" and just 2 percent labeled pro-Palestinian. Many Israelis reject Obama's call for a total settlement freeze and have come to see him as overly sympathetic to Palestinian claims.

The government should focus on regulating behavior rather than overhauling the whole economy to prevent a future economic crisis from taking hold, Jack Welch, author of "Winning" and "Straight from the Gut," told CNBC Thursday. "I'm telling you, you regulate behavior and you get better results. Through management, through boards… stronger leadership," he added. GE is the parent company of CNBC.

FedEx reported a larger quarterly loss Wednesday and gave an outlook well below Wall Street estimates for the current period, citing the recession's impact on package volumes and rising fuel costs that will hit its bottom line. The package delivery company, whose shares fell nearly 3 percent, said the next two quarters would be "extremely difficult," but added that there were there were signs that the pace of economic decline had slowed.

The new consumer protection entity included in the Obama administration’s package of financial reforms would create an agency with significant regulatory powers, covering a wide variety of products and services. The new entity will be called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. It would have "broad authority" to regulate all providers of financial products and services, be "independent and accountable;" as well as have rule-making and enforcement authority. "In failing to check widespread abuses in subprime mortgage lending, lax consumer protections contributed significantly to the current financial crisis," the summary reads, "The financial crisis, in turn, revealed inadequacies in consumer and...

President Obama pushed hard Monday for a health care overhaul, saying the system is "a ticking bomb" for the budget that could propel America down "the route of GM" without a legislative fix. Obama went before the American Medical Association in Chicago to declare anew that the existing system leaves too many uninsured and forces "excessive defensive medicine" by doctors worried about malpractice suits. He also declared once again that he does not favor socialized medicine and cautioned people to beware of "scare tactics and fear-mongering" by critics who make this claim. Obama did tell his audience of physicians and...

The president suggests trimming federal payments to hospitals by about $200 billion over the next 10 years, saying greater efficiencies and broader insurance coverage will justify the change. Hospitals, especially those with many poor patients, say the proposed cuts are unfair and will harm the sick and elderly. Even if Obama and Congress could hit the overall goal of $948 billion in health care savings over 10 years, it still might not be enough to cover all the nation's uninsured. Outside experts say the 10-year cost could range from $1.2 trillion to $1.8 trillion, depending on factors such as how...

The IRS wants to tax the use of cell phones issued to individuals as a fringe benefit. According to The Wall Street Journal, "The Internal Revenue Service proposed employers assign 25% of an employee's annual phone expenses as a taxable benefit."

CEO Lloyd Blankfein said on Wednesday he believed a current upturn in world markets was probably not a full recovery from crisis and said he expected a further long recession. "I think it's going to be a long proctracted recession," he told an international regulators conference in Tel Aviv. Addressing a current upturn in markets, he said: "There is no reason to think this is it ... So many things have to be sorted out. Why would this be the recovery? "The chances are it's not."

The Congressionally-appointed panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) recommends running again the stress tests on US banks, as economic conditions have worsened, its chair, Harvard University professor Elizabeth Warren, told CNBC Tuesday. "We actually make recommendations to do it all over again right now," Warren told "Squawk Box." "We've already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment," she added. The oversight panel's report noted that the unemployment rate is now 9.4 percent, with a 2008 average of 8.5 percent. "If the monthly rate continues to increase during the remainder of this year, it will likely exceed the 2009...

On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama issued his first executive order: He was closing the detention center at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and calling a halt to the military commissions created in late 2001 to try terrorist suspects detained there. Like the startling opening chord of a Beethoven symphony, Obama’s action was intended to herald a new tone in America’s “war on terror” and a restoration of America’s moral standing. Then several strange things happened. Obama’s order “closing” Gitmo actually left it open for a year, ostensibly until new arrangements could be made for the 240...

This recession is introducing many Americans to a novel experience -- the pay cut. Fifteen percent of employers surveyed by the Society of Human Resource Management reduced pay in the past six months -- a threefold increase from earlier this year. Downward pressure on salaries is intensifying. While job losses slowed in May, the unemployment rate jumped to 9.4 percent — the highest since July 1983. The Conference Board's measure of consumers' income expectations has dipped to the lowest level in its 21-year history.

Even the Russian newspaper Pravda, once the primary dezinfomatsia organ of the old Soviet Union, recently published an article by Stanislav Mishin entitled, "American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper," in which Mishin writes that Obama has pulled the plug on the American way of life. Mishin observes: "It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath-taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hopeless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. ... First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based...