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Economist John Lott, noted for his academic advocacy of gun rights, says that when Barack Obama was his colleague at the University of Chicago, the future president treated him as if he were “evil.” Lott relates his interactions with Obama in his new book, co-authored with Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, “Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We can Do Now to Regain Our Future.” “The book relates a couple out of the dozen-and-a-half conversations that I had with him,” Lott told The Daily Caller. ”But they were all very short, cut off by Obama turning...

In President Obama’s address to the Associated Press Luncheon on Wednesday, he claimed that he is preventing disaster. Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s proposed budget cuts would still allow publicly held debt to increase by $5.5 trillion over the next ten years, but to Obama, they mean Americans will be dying from starvation and defenseless from hurricanes and other natural disasters. “Demagoguery” is not too strong of a word to describe Obama’s speech. Two million mothers and young children will be left without “access to healthy food.” Violent crime will soar and illegal aliens will flood across our borders because of...

Their refutation makes for fascinating and sometimes humorous reading. Consider, for example, the prediction Krugman made the day Obama signed the original stimulus bill into law: “I am still guessing that we peak out at around 9% [unemployment] and that would be late this year [2009]." Furthermore, Krugman declared that double-digit unemployment was “not the most likely event.” As Norquist and Lott note, unemployment hit 10.1% and remained above 9% two years after Krugman predicted it would peak. Once it became clear that President Obama’s stimulus plan had failed to ignite the economic recovery he promised, Krugman and others began...

In President Obama’s address to the Associated Press Luncheon on Wednesday, he claimed that he is preventing disaster. Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s proposed budget cuts would still allow publicly held debt to increase by $5.5 trillion over the next ten years, but to Obama, they mean Americans will be dying from starvation and defenseless from hurricanes and other natural disasters. “Demagoguery” is not too strong of a word to describe Obama’s speech. Two million mothers and young children will be left without “access to healthy food.” Violent crime will soar and illegal aliens will flood across our borders because of...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner keeps resorting to a familiar excuse for the slow recovery — the financial crisis. “Recoveries that follow financial crises are slower and more protracted, as Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have famously written. They are slower,” he told the Economic Club of New York last month. It is an argument President Barack Obama has relied on repeatedly during his presidency. For example, in April 2011, Obama lamented: “[The economy] is not growing quite as fast as we would like, because after a financial crisis, typically there’s a bigger drag on the economy for a longer period...

President Obama, Jesse Jackson, and others have chosen to personalize the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., highlighting the racial issues by expressing concern for people who look like they do or live where “blacks are under attack.” Many conservatives and liberals have also already concluded that the shooter committed a crime. All of these reactions are premature. In response to the shooting, Florida governor Rick Scott has set up a commission to review the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Gun-control organizations, including the Brady Campaign, have gone beyond this and even more drastically called for the end of...

Editor's note: FoxNews.com is pleased to present an excerpt from "Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future " the new book by Grover G. Norquist and FoxNews.com contributor John R. Lott Jr. Chapter 3: The Stimulus Made Things Worse What Was Promised Matt Lauer: At some point will you say, “Wait a minute, we’ve spent this amount of money. We’re not seeing the results. We’ve got to change course dramatically?” . . . President Obama: Look, I’m at the start of my administration . . . And . . ....

Chapter 3: The Stimulus Made Things Worse What Was Promised The overall impact on jobs saved or created is just about what was predicted. —Austan Goolsbee, the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, December 3, 2010 Even before the 2010 midterm elections, with Democrats controlling massive supermajorities in both the House and Senate, President Obama had passed five stimulus and jobs bills. If you add up the promises, he boldly promised well over 5.5 million jobs “created or saved.” But reality turned out very differently: There were 2 million fewer people working in September 2011 than when Obama...

With the price for a regular gallon of gas topping $3.80 on Monday, angry politicians are blaming the higher prices on speculators and greedy oil companies. On Friday, President Obama announced that he was “making sure that my Attorney General is paying attention to potential speculation in the oil markets.” 23 Senators and 45 congressmen, all Democrats except for one independent, are calling for urgent action against the “speculators” they hold responsible. These members of congress want the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use its new regulatory powers under a law Obama signed two years ago to limit the amount...

With regular gas prices topping $3.70 last weekend, angry politicians are blaming the higher prices on speculators and greedy oil companies. On Monday, The Hill newspaper reported that 23 senators and 45 congressmen, all Democrats except for one independent, called for urgent action against the "speculators" they hold responsible. Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania demanded, "Consumers shouldn't be forced to pay higher prices at the pump because of speculative bets on Wall Street." These politicians want the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use its new regulatory powers under a law signed by President Obama two years ago to limit the...

The recent sudden drops in both initial unemployment insurance claims and unemployment rates have generated a slew of positive news stories and lifted White House spirits. Fox News contributor and former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen even writes about the “high-fiving in the White House.” But other numbers show a much weaker job market and economy; the average unemployment duration remains near its all-time high, hiring is stuck near record lows, and there are almost 3 million workers in part-time rather than full-time jobs. Further, GDP grew just 1.7% last year and few new companies are being started. So which scenario...

Thursday Senate Democrats narrowly voted down an attempt to end President Obama's mandate that Catholic organizations provide their employees with abortions and contraception for no co-pay or deductible. Democrats pulled out the heavy artillery, sending out an e-mail last night charging that Republicans want to “tear down access to better care.” The campaign linked this vote to the specter of Republicans “bann[ing] many common forms of birth control, including the pill, and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization.” Obama’s so-called reversal a couple of weeks ago that switched mandates from religious organizations to insurance companies that they buy policies...

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities. Gun-control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue, and their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene and...

The number of unemployed Americans last month fell by 339,000, the fifth largest drop since January 2009. But there was an even much more shockingly large number -- almost 1.2 million additional Americans were classified in January as not being in the labor force (see figure here). Unfortunately, that has been the consistent story that has made this “recovery” unique as more and more Americans have just given up looking for work. This last number not only means that the official unemployment number is misleading, but it will also likely determine where the unemployment rate ultimately goes. Indeed, the Congressional...

During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama pushed for higher tax rates on what he called “the wealthiest Americans.”  He declared: “Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.” As usual, the president motivated the higher taxes with references to “fair play” and getting the wealthy to pay their “fair share” of taxes. “Fairness” was the codeword of the State of the Union address, not the chronic problem of lingering high unemployment, something the president never even mentioned. ...

As we watch the Eurozone struggle with its financial challenges Keynesians keep telling us the solution to our economic problems is to spend more money, to pile up bigger debts. A week and a half ago, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of more than half of the Eurozone's countries, and the failure of those policies should be very obvious by now. Solving the Greek debt crisis hit yet another snag on Sunday afternoon. New aid for Greece from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank would have relied on private bondholders “voluntarily” agreeing to a 50...

President Obama keeps pushing for gun control. "I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar,” President Obama told Sarah Brady, the former president of the Brady Campaign, this past spring. His push as been quiet but relentless. Just this past week Obama signaled that he was going to just ignore two new parts of the 2012 Omnibus Spending bill. Although he signed the spending bill into law, he simultaneously issued a so-called "signing statement," a note that presidents have started attaching to legislation...

Congress is expected to vote Tuesday on whether concealed carry gun licenses should be treated the same way we treat driver's licenses for cars. With 245 co-sponsors in the House, the only question is whether there are the 290 votes necessary to override President Obama's veto. For decades, treating licenses for guns like those for cars was something that gun control advocates wanted. In his 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore promised: "We require a license to drive a car in this nation in order to keep unsafe drivers off the road. As president, I will fight for a national requirement...

The "Fast & Furious" scandal is getting messier and messier. New e-mails finally released late this past Friday reveal that the Department of Justice personal viewed the then-secret operation as a way to push for more gun control laws. Despite administration promises to the contrary, whistleblowers have endured "isolation, retaliation and transfer." Meanwhile the operation's managers have done pretty well, some have even received promotions. Thursday Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that the operation was "wholly unacceptable," but he still offers absolutely no explanation to explain why the program was instituted. What's going on here? Let's see... - You have...

<p>Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C.</p> <p>Politicians predicted disaster. "More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence," Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision.</p>