Free Republic

Anew piece in the Wall Street Journal by CTUP’s Stephen Moore and Casey Mulligan reports that the “stimulus” bill will reduce employment by between 6 and 8 million jobs because it pays people not to work. The new bill will create one of the largest expansions in government welfare benefits since LBJ launched the failed War on Poverty (poverty won). The bill includes six months of weekly $400 bonus unemployment benefits on top of the normal weekly benefits, a $3,000 per-child tax credit, an expansion of food-stamp and rental-assistance benefits, $2,000 per person checks, and expanded health-care benefits. A family...

<p>WITH THE HUGE amounts of money appropriated by Congress and additional billions pledged by international donors to address the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is now evident that if an issue has priority, money can be located. Without question, Iraq and Afghanistan must be rebuilt, but other pressing human needs cannot be forgotten. As World Bank President James Wolfensohn recently emphasized, the world devoted about $800 billion to military expenditures in 2002, compared with $56 billion in development assistance. To put it another way, UNICEF's annual budget is being spent on military purposes every 15 hours, even as 1.3 billion people, half of them children, live on less than $1 per day, in almost unimaginable conditions of deprivation.</p>