Free Republic

President Donald Trump is hinting at a second task force responsible for getting Americans back to work. Appoint it now, Mr. President. Don't wait until the virus peaks. This second task force should prepare the country to reopen, with new tools to fight the virus. The president's top epidemiologist, the esteemed Anthony Fauci, insists "the best tool we have" is "physical separation." But mandating that people stay home is costing Americans their jobs and will force businesses into bankruptcy. The nation needs an alternative strategy. A chorus of government health officials and academics, like Harvard's Marc Lipsitch, want the shutdown...

“Give me a stay-at-home order out of an abundance of caution for I certainly would prefer that over you giving me death” – Patrick Henry’s lesser-known and decidedly more cautious brother, Frank War is the sacrificing of lives for the preservation of your country’s way of life. Sometimes it’s for the preservation of your civilization. Today, pundits and politicians alike tell us that we are facing our gravest challenge since World War II: the fight to destroy the Coronavirus. To that noble end, we are to hole ourselves up in our homes, and shutter our restaurants, schools and businesses. We’re...

Washington -- Conservatives and libertarians around the country are becoming increasingly uneasy about what Washington is doing to our economy. Before the coronavirus struck, many were anxious about the swamp packing another $1 trillion of debt into our deficit. Now Washington is talking about spending close to $2 trillion to treat the coronavirus, which would be $1-2 trillion that we do not have. At the president's daily briefing, one thing we never hear is concern about the staggering debt that we now have and the staggering debt our leaders are contemplating taking on. The Democrats showed restraint. They showed...

The debate in the United States over whether to move away from free markets and toward socialism may change dramatically as the latest coronavirus spreads throughout the world. That’s because in the fight against the global pandemic, we’ll likely witness one of the most compelling arguments in our lifetimes emerge in favor of free-market systems – and lives will be saved in the process. The pandemic will demonstrate that nations with the freest markets and freest people tend to have the health care systems with the greatest capacity to handle such a crisis. Free-market incentives have produced health care systems...

Today just might be the day you receive your invitation to respond to the 2020 Census. Now, I don’t think anyone is waiting by his or her mailbox in wild anticipation of a census form, but in this presidential election year, it’s important to realize just how crucial this census could be to future presidential elections. While we choose a president every four years, we conduct a census only every ten years – and our country has experienced enormous changes in the past decade. As we embark on a new census, congressional reapportionment and electoral votes hang in the balance....

Hispanic Americans are thriving like never before in today’s strong and growing economy, and it's all thanks to President Trump. When Barack Obama was in the White House, millions of Latinos across America struggled to find jobs and recover from the devastating Great Recession. While the political establishment in Washington obsessed over stock prices and corporate profits, too many Latino families were unable to make ends meet, wondering if the American Dream had died.As a Latina entrepreneur who also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Latino Coalition, I’ve met hundreds of Hispanic Americans over the years...

Following increased interest in expanding access to paid family and medical leave, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., joined forces with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., to promote the Family and Medical Insurance Leave, or FAMILY, Act. If we believe the act's supporters, it would cost close to nothing and provide essential benefits to employees who don't currently receive them. Unfortunately, these claims are bogus. Under the FAMILY Act, the federal government would offer 12 weeks of paid time off to enable workers to care for infants, recover from major illnesses and care for severely ill relatives. During that time, employees would receive...

If elected, Bernie Sanders would crush American families with bloated bureaucracy, explode the national debt, and drastically raise taxes on middle class Americans. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Brian Riedl has calculated that all of Sanders’s proposals could cost up to a staggering $97.5 trillion over the next decade, and total government spending would bloat to 70 percent of GDP. The ten-year budget deficit would be nearly $90 trillion, and the government would employ nearly half of all Americans.Sanders would fund his radical proposals by raising taxes on you and everyone you know. Sanders has openly admitted that he wants to...

There's an old saying about baseball and life that no one ever had a 1.000 batting average. It turns out that's not exactly true. At least when it comes to the Trump economy, anti-Trumpers defied the near-impossible statistical odds and somehow have batted 1.000 on their predictions. They managed to get it wrong every time. A chorus line of President Donald Trump's critics, including the best and brightest minds of the liberal intelligentsia, predicted an economic and stock market free fall if Trumponomics were implemented. They weren't just wrong; in many cases, they were fantastically wrong. So wrong that Paul...

In his 2016 victory speech, Donald Trump talked about “the forgotten men and women of our country,” declaring that they “will be forgotten no longer.” Today, after months of impeachment proceedings, accusations of wrongdoing, and a media that has reported overwhelmingly negative stories about him for three years, his polling numbers are at their highest ever. Why? Because the president kept his promise to remember the forgotten, and he’s continued to push ahead with policies to help them and every American. President Trump’s “forgotten men and women” are the farmer, the factory worker, and the middle-class men and women...

So-called “deaths of despair” in rural areas — from drug overdoses and suicide — have become so common that they have even affected our national life expectancy figures. Life expectancy in the United States has fallen for three years in a row. That is a reversal not seen since 1918 (during a pandemic) or in any other wealthy nation in modern times, as Nobel-prize winning economist Angus Deaton has pointed out. What should be done? Small town woes in many areas can be traced to the erosion of manufacturing jobs. A typical example is Lordstown, Ohio (population 3,300) which revolved around a...

As Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore up President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech page by page, she put the finishing touches on one of the greatest political rehab jobs of all time. The Democrats have managed to turn Trump into a thoroughly sympathetic figure. From the start, Trump has not been treated like a normal president by people on either end of the political spectrum. On the left, Trump is viewed as a fascist, un-American monster, thoroughly unprepared for and undeserving of the highest office in our land. They never accepted his election and never gave him a...

Three years into the Trump administration, we see a clear pattern forming. The Obama administration implemented labor rules that make the labor market less flexible, often at the expense of smaller businesses, but in ways that made unions happy. The Trump administration then takes these rules away. The latest example is the dismantling of the Obama Labor Department's joint employer rule. As the new Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia and the Office of Management Director Mick Mulvaney explained recently in The Wall Street Journal, "When joint employment exists, two separate companies are responsible for ensuring that workers receive the federally...

This is a new one. The New York Times headline read: "Minimum Wage Raises Could Lower Suicide Rates, Study Says." But there was a subheadline: "It was the latest study to suggest that effects of wage increases reach beyond economic welfare, but some experts pushed back on the findings." Let us "push back." The study was published in January in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The Times article noted that 47,000 Americans committed suicide in 2017 and said: "The new study examined suicide rates from 1990 through 2015 across all 50 states and Washington, and measured how they...

Some polls in recent weeks have provided an encouraging picture for President Donald Trump of strengthening support among black voters. I like these kinds of reports. But I wonder how much of reality they are really capturing. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, reports on new polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation showing outsize support from blacks for "Medicare for All." According to this report, 74% percent of blacks compared with 69% of Hispanics and 44% of whites support a single-payer health care plan. Even when told that there would be a high likelihood that such a plan would mean...

Apologies to Elton John, but in Washington and throughout so much of the country, can you feel the hate tonight? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked by reporter James Rosen if she hates President Trump. She responded with an "if looks could kill" fire in her eyes and denounced Rosen for his question while claiming she doesn't hate Trump. Former Vice President Joe Biden verbally attacked and challenged an 83-year-old man in Iowa to a push-up contest at a gathering of Democrats. The man asked about Biden's son and how he managed to get a lucrative job with a Ukraine...

A $15 minimum wage has already destroyed hundreds of small businesses and many more jobs in cities like New York and San Francisco, and – as interest grows within state and local governments – it now threatens the livelihoods of millions of workers nationwide. New research by my colleagues and me at the American Consumer Institute examines four major labor market policies – minimum wage hikes, predictive scheduling, mandatory paid leave and joint-employer regulations – and finds these labor regulations will lead to four million fewer jobs. The study estimates that half of these job losses will result as more...

At this Thanksgiving Season someone needs to step forward and say thanks to President Donald J. Trump. He has given this country a period of peace and prosperity the likes of which we havenÂ’t seen since the 1950s. And there is nothing for which to be more thankful than peace and prosperity. Consider, in the closing months of his first term in office, so far, up until now, Donald Trump is arguably the first president in 40 years to avoid getting us into a new hot war. Media pundits donÂ’t associate Donald Trump with peace but there you have...

It’s time to leave the Impeachment Circus to play out on its own. Let’s stay focused on why the Republican Party needs to win in November.According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, recent evidence suggests that the income inequality between the haves and have-nots in the United States grew last year grew to its highest level in more than 50 years. Contrary to what Democrats would have you believe, that is great news! People who are finding better jobs, being promoted into more responsible positions, and earning more profit in an expanding economy are leaving behind the people who settle for...

America's September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969, according to the most recent Department of Labor report.The tight labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For example, New Seasons Market, a West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom Equipment, a Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.For the first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of...