ScaifeNet because we can't let Soros have all the fun...

Despite the Obama Administration’s assertion that the push for states to adopt national education standards and tests is completely voluntary, concerns have been raised from the beginning about the federal “carrot and stick” approach driving their adoption.

A key qualification for a Race to the Top grant was moving toward adoption of “common” standards and tests, and the Department of Education has indicated that receipt of federal Title I money—the largest federal obligation to public schools—could be contingent upon a state’s adoption of the standards. Catherine Gewertz at Education Week outlines some of those concerns:

The federal-intrusion sentiment pre-existed Race to the Top, of course. That resentment was one of the ingredients in the implosion of earlier attempts at national standards. Keen awareness of that history shaped the name and rhetoric around this effort (think state, not national, standards). …That put the leaders of the common-standards work in the position of having to disentangle the initiative from the Education Department’s support of it. …

Making the rounds at conferences and such, the organizers made no secret of their view that the feds’ messaging was complicating their own. They uttered the phrase “state-led” so often that I began to see it bannered, as if dragged by a shoreline advertising plane, in my dreams. They squirmed under the public perception that states were adopting the standards in a Race to the Trough driven by tough economic times, rather than for their own inherent merit.

But with 36 states and D.C. having adopted the common standards, it would seem that the feds’ discomfiting embrace has paid off richly for the initiative. There was no mistaking the RTT [Race to the Top]-induced adoption pattern: Every single state that either won a grant or was still vying for one adopted the standards. Quite neatly, that allowed the common-standards organizers to keep highlighting the state-led nature of the work and keep shooting down the national-standards bugaboo, while also benefiting from the accelerated adoption schedule fueled by Race to the Top.

“Discomfiting embrace” is a perfect description of the Obama Administration’s approach to education reform. But thankfully, national standards are by no means a fait accompli, and states should shake off this federal overreach into their educational decision-making authority.

The editor's note: Among the startling facts about America's fiscal situation are these: Federal spending has grown 62 percent faster than inflation since 2000. President Obama's budget will double the publicly held national debt by 2020. Under current policies, by...

Vice President Joe Biden is at it again, this time spouting off on his desire to raise taxes through the looming expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

The White House favors extending current tax policy—but only for individuals making under $200,000 and families making under $250,000, allowing rates to increase for the “the super rich.” (A family making $250,000 is doing well, to be sure, but super rich?)

But the bigger logical lapses lie in the White House’s arguments in support of higher taxes. The reality is that there is no reason or excuse to raise taxes on anyone, and it is unreal to do so during a flat economy.

Vice President Biden claims that “the country cannot afford $700 billion in cuts for the wealthy.” First of all, allowing current tax policy to continue is not a tax “cut.” When taxes go up, that’s a tax hike. And extending current tax policy for all earners would actually cost $628 billion—less than the stimulus bill and a small fraction of the $8 trillion President Obama’s budget adds to the debt over the next 10 years.

This claim also assumes that exploding deficits are due to lower revenues resulting from the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. But, as William Gale of the Tax Policy Center points out, the main culprit for currently low revenues “was the recession—and the responses it inspired. As the economy shrank, tax revenue plummeted.” As the economy recovers in coming years, tax revenue will rebound to its historical averages. By 2020, tax revenues are actually expected to be 0.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) above historical average—even if the 2001 and 2003 cuts are extended. It is skyrocketing spending—which will be 6.2 percent above its historical average in 2020—that taxpayers can’t afford, not the lower tax rates they have enjoyed for the past decade.

The Vice President goes on to say that the wealthy spend “all they’re going to spend anyway.” Whether that’s true or not is not particularly germane. Biden seems to be implying that only consumption benefits the economy, but when the wealthy save, they are making funds available for others to spend in consumption or investment. A symptom of the confusion in Washington these days is that lawmakers think saving is a bad thing. Heritage budget expert Brian Riedl explains the difference the importance of leaving earnings in the hands of investors:

Consider the 2001 tax rebates. Washington borrowed billions from the capital markets, and then mailed it to Americans in the form of $600 checks. [This] merely transferred existing income from investors to consumers. Predictably, the following quarter saw consumer spending growth surge from 1.4 percent to 7.0 percent, and gross private domestic investment spending drop correspondingly by 22.7 percent.

Finally, the Vice President makes the crucial point that, during a recession, we shouldn’t be raising taxes on small business. But that’s exactly what allowing the tax cuts to expire would do. Heritage tax expert J. D. Foster writes that “while only a small portion of taxpayers reporting small-business income would face Obama’s higher rates, those facing the higher rates are the successful and expanding small businesses that create new jobs the economy needs to grow.”

The Heritage Foundation today announced creation of the Center for Policy Innovation, a new division charged with designing “the next generation of breakthrough policy ideas.”

Remember Audi’s absurd “Green Police” Super Bowl commercial where green cops arrest citizens for using plastic bags, plastic water bottles and sort through the community’s trash cans to ensure they’re recycling? Well, the absurdity is about to hit the streets of Cleveland. Cleveland.com reports:

It would be a stretch to say that Big Brother will hang out in Clevelanders’ trash cans, but the city plans to sort through curbside trash to make sure residents are recycling—and fine them $100 if they don’t. The move is part of a high-tech collection system the city will roll out next year with new trash and recycling carts embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes.

The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn’t been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables.

The high-tech collection system is an expansion of a 15,000-resident pilot program that commenced in 2007. Proponents of the program argue that not only is the $2.5 million program good for the environment, but because the city will collect revenue from the fines and from recycled goods, the trash police will eventually raise revenue. The article mentions that the city pays $30 per ton to place garbage in a landfill but would receive $26 per ton for recycling goods. We know that the city will pass the costs onto the consumer, but the article makes no mention of whether residents will reap any savings benefits.

Much more problematic is the intrusion onto individual liberties. Like much of the “Green Police” commercial—and the environmentalist movement as a whole—the goal is to change human behavior. But a recent Rasmussen survey “shows that only 17% of adults believe most Americans would be willing to make major cutbacks in their lifestyle in order to help save the environment. Most (65%) say that’s not the case.”

Skeptics of catastrophic temperature increases compare belief in global warming to a religion, saying that alarmists base their views on faith much more than concrete science. This could have significant consequences if Congress enacts cap-and-trade legislation or other policies that aim to increase Americans’ energy bills. The goal, of course, is to force consumers to use less energy.

We should allow for choice and respect the choices of others. If someone chooses not to drink bottled water because they believe it is bad for the environment, so be it. (Interestingly, the environmentalist push that tap water is unsafe led to the rise of bottled water.) Those who choose to drink tap water should respect the preference of those who enjoy bottled. Conflicts will certainly arise among people with different preferences, but to advocate that one is morally right and one is morally wrong is objectionable.

Obamacare supporters claim that the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution does indeed give Congress the power to force everyone to buy health insurance. If that's true then Congress really can do anything it wants and we do not...

A recent story by Fox News provides yet another example of the United Nations Development Program’s refusal to accede to an unfortunate reality: that the organization’s efforts to work with, and through, the world’s most despotic regimes are regularly twisted to serve the goals of the regime rather than the people suffering under their rule. According to the story:

An independent assessment of a $100 million United Nations Development Program aid effort in Burma calls it ‘disappointing,’ and ‘unsatisfactory,’ and suggests that major portions of the program be discontinued next year. Nonetheless, the director of UNDP intends to keep it alive with as-yet unspecified fixes.

The assessment of the UNDP’s Human Development Initiative suggested there were ‘modest or only limited differences’ between the Burmese villages that got UNDP support and those that didn’t.

Among the areas of negligible impact: health care, education and ‘food security,’ meaning the vital business of whether the poorest were producing and saving enough food to eat in the military-controlled country also known as Myanmar….

Even while admitting that Burma is a ‘difficult and unpredictable’ environment for HDI, however, the assessors state firmly that UNDP’s own problems with community development programs are the most significant. Among them: lack of clear focus; inability to show that it has accomplished much beyond the delivery of tangible goods, such as fertilizer; lack of staff training; and perhaps most importantly of all, lack of any clear strategy to wean the people they are helping off continued outside assistance.

Aid to Burma—whose government has been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Obama Administration, is suspected of pursuing a clandestine nuclear program, and has imprisoned opposition politician and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi 15 out of the last 21 years—has come under increasing scrutiny.

As reported in the FoxNews story, UNDP is under instructions from its Executive Board to ensure that its funds stay out of government hands. However, a 2007 report by a Burmese human rights group asserted that U.N. funding, including UNDP funding, supports state-controlled programs that employ extortion and forced recruitment to “expand military control over the population while divesting itself of the cost of operating programmes and simultaneously legitimizing its policies in the name of development.” In 2008, news stories revealed that the “United Nations discovered ‘very serious losses’ of at least $10 million on foreign exchange transactions involving relief money sent to cyclone-battered Burma.”

This is hardly surprising. A number of allegations have been made in recent years concerning improper activities funded by, or linked to, UNDP staff or projects in authoritarian states, including North Korea, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. In some repressive states, the U.N. and NGOs can work around the government to help the people directly. In these cases, there is some justification for continuing U.N. humanitarian activities. In cases like Burma and North Korea, however, government interference and assertion of authority over humanitarian activities in country is so extensive that humanitarian efforts are crippled. Despite the best efforts of the U.N. and other providers of humanitarian assistance, aid is permitted only if it benefits the regime. In such cases, UNDP programs—and those of other U.N. agencies like WFP and UNICEF—end up inadvertently rewarding the government.

Many argue that the U.N.’s humanitarian work should continue regardless of whether the government benefits because some portion will aid the suffering population. There is little doubt about the suffering in places like North Korean and Burma. However, it is the repressive policies of the government that have most directly contributed to that suffering. Aiding the government, even inadvertently, perpetuates that suffering.

The Fox News story reports that internal assessments have assured the Executive Board that UNDP has not allowed its funds to be used by the government. At the very least, however, considering the “difficult and unpredictable” environment in Burma, UNDP assistance merits closer scrutiny to see if it is inadvertently benefiting the regime.

At August 30 meeting of the UNDP Executive Board—of which the U.S. is a member—the U.S. Mission to the United Nations should closely question all UNDP activities in repressive regimes like Burma, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and others countries and demand full and complete access to all UNDP documents and assessments to inform their examination. At a bare minimum, the U.S. should call for all such programs to be suspended unless the governments: (1) allow the U.N. and NGOs to hire and use local and international staff without government interference; (2) grant complete and free access to projects, distribution centers, and aid recipients to ensure that aid is not being diverted by the government; and (3) not impede non-governmental organizations helping to deliver aid and assess need.

Since 1950, state and local spending has grown twice as fast as private sector spending, according to this chart from the Mercatus Center. ...

"The nation doesn't have to wait for the Obama experiment to finish to learn the outcome," writes Amity Shlaes. In her latest column, she points out that the divergent paths of Maine and New Hampshire over the last 60 years...

States and localities need to play a larger role in counterterrorism and disaster response.

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan first unveiled his Race to the Top (RttT) program in July of last year, he admitted that “when I was superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, I did not always welcome calls from the U.S. Department of Education. That’s because the department, from its inception in 1980, has traditionally been a compliance-driven agency.” But, he continued, that was all about to change because his RttT program, funded by $4.35 billion of economic stimulus cash, would be a “competition” that scrutinized “state applications for a coordinated and deep-seated commitment to reform.” He later added: “As I have said many times before, this isn’t just about the money — this is about working together and putting the needs of children ahead of everyone else.”

Fast forward to this past Tuesday when Secretary Duncan identified the ten recipients of second round RttT funding that did not include the state of New Jersey, which fell just three points shy of the winners circle. The Newark Star-Ledger then revealed that a clerical error cost the state 4.8 points (out of 500 possible) because New Jersey’s application submitted data comparing the 2010 and 2011 state budgets, not the 2008 and 2009 data that the application required. Wednesday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) accepted full responsibility for the error, but also used the incident to launch a trenchant critique of the entire program:

That’s the stuff that drives people nuts about government and that’s the stuff the Obama administration should answer for. Are you guys just down there checking boxes like mindless drones, or are you thinking? … When the president comes back to New Jersey, he’s going to have to explain to the people of the state of New Jersey why he’s depriving them of $400 million that this application earned because one of his bureaucrats in Washington couldn’t pick up the phone and ask a question, couldn’t go on the Internet and find information.

Mindless box-checking is just the beginning of RttT’s problems. When Tuesday’s results were announced, the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, was quick to claim that it was Gov. Christie’s failure to get “buy in” from unions on the application that ultimately cost the state millions in federal cash. Specifically, Gov. Christie’s insistence on not caving-in to union demands that he weaken the state’s teacher accountability standards lost him far more points than the clerical error did. And New Jersey was not the only state to lose out because of the Obama administration’s slavish devotion to teacher union votes and cash. Proven education reform leaders like Louisiana and Colorado also lost points and finished out of the money because their state’s chosen reforms threatened union priorities. Meanwhile Hawaii (which the Data Quality Campaign ranked 17th for education data systems, which the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools ranked 34th for the strength of their charter laws, and which got a D- from the National Council on Teacher Quality) finished third and will receive $75 million. Oh, but they had 100% “buy in” from the unions. So much for Secretary Duncan’s claim that RttT was committed to “putting the needs of children ahead of everyone else.”

As pernicious as teachers union influence has been on RttT, it is merely a symptom of the larger disease that is the top-down government bureaucracy approach to education. Secretary Duncan loves to talk about the “competition” that RttT has inspired among the states. But there is a fundamental difference between the competition for federal government funds and real market competition. When Apple competes for the mobile music industry, it does so by winning over consumers with a better product. When Amazon competes to become the leader in online retail, it does so by serving customers needs better. Not so with RttT.

As Gov. Christie points out, New Jersey’s RttT application was over 1,000 pages long and took thousands of hours to complete. Instead of states spending their money and manpower to improve schools and educate children, the government asks them to put taxpayer dollars toward constructing massive grant applications. The incentives are all flowing in the wrong direction. Instead of focusing on making children and parents happy by devoting resources to make a better education product, states have been devoting resources to make Washington bureaucrats happy with a better grant application product. Filling out grant applications has never educated a single child anywhere ever. But grant applications are what RttT is all about, and they have made RttT the biggest waste of your education dollars ever.

Co-authored by Rachel Sheffield.

Quick Hits:

• According to Gallup, Iraqis approved more of their own country’s leadership than U.S. leadership in early 2010.
• According to Rasmussen Reports, voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on all 10 of the important issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports.
• One of the three terrorist suspects arrested this week by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police once moon-walked across a Montreal stage during an audition for Canadian Idol.
• A woman with a Mexican flag ran onto the baseball field in San Diego Wednesday night to protest Arizona’s immigration enforcement law while the Arizona Diamondbacks were batting against the San Diego Padres.
• Bob Shrum, who has worked for Ted Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry, is now advising President Obama to permanently cut taxes on capital gains and investment to 15%.

It is with great anticipation that I announce an exciting new direction for Heritage today: the creation of the Center for Policy Innovation. This has long been a dream of our colleague Stuart Butler and others here at Heritage, and we are excited to finally make it a reality.

Dr. Butler, who has led our domestic and economic research team since 1982, will become Director of the Center he has envisioned. He will also remain a member of our Senior Management team and serve as a Distinguished Fellow.  He has been a dear friend, loyal mentor and courageous leader for over 31 years here at Heritage and his continued drive to improve the way we generate big ideas is greatly appreciated.

Dr. Butler has been a font of ideas that have transformed the conservative movement. Whether it was Enterprise Zones, Welfare Reform, School Choice or—the subject of his most recent attention—healthcare, he has dedicated his life to thinking how to make American lives better. 

Dr. Butler will lead a virtual team of insiders and outside individuals to think through and devise innovative breakthrough policy ideas – essentially a “think tank within a think tank.” One of the first challenges the Center will take on is how to break the paralysis on fixing the long-term fiscal crisis facing America. Learning from the nation’s most innovative companies, it will form specialized teams drawn from Heritage researchers and outside experts to work on these policy design projects.

As Dr. Butler leaves his current day-to-day role to concentrate full-time on this new effort, he will be replaced as Vice President for Domestic and Economic Policy Studies by David Addington.

Mr. Addington is a brilliant policy expert with over twenty years of senior experience at all levels and branches of governance. As a trusted advisor to two White Houses, the Defense Department and four congressional committees, Mr. Addington understands Washington and how policy ideas become law.  Most recently, Mr. Addington served in the Office of the Vice President, first as Dick Cheney’s counsel and later as his chief of staff.

These are exciting times at Heritage. This year, we launched Heritage Action for America, opened up our new offices on the House of Representatives side of Capitol Hill and have led the conservative fight for good public policy in America like never before.

Many people, especially liberals, misread conservatism as a force that strives to slow down change, a mere speed bump on the road to progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the great Russell Kirk wrote, “Change in society is natural, inevitable and beneficial; the statesman should not try vainly to dam the whole stream of alteration, because then he would be opposing Providence.”

Leading “the waters of novelty into the canals of custom,” as Kirk put it, has been the lifework of Stuart Butler, and we’re lucky to have him keeping us on the cutting edge. Great organizations continue to improve from within, and that is exactly what Heritage continues to do. Please join me in congratulating Stuart on his new role, and welcome David to the Heritage family.

Editor’s Note: On the right, please watch our exclusive interview with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and then below, please read an original guest blog to The Foundry from the Governor himself.

We’ve been through a global recession. Now we’re fighting through a stalled recovery. Revenues are the lowest they’ve been in half a century. Their finances a wreck, many states have effectively sunk into bankruptcy.

Indiana is still afloat. In fact, we’ve fared better than most. We continue to meet our obligations without raising taxes, and the reserves we carefully built and protected will get us through the downturn.

But as if we did not already have enough on our plates, the passage and implementation of Obamacare presents us with a whole new set of challenges and a costly to-do list.

I note with special sadness that first and foremost amongst the bill’s consequences will be the probable demise of the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP). This program is currently providing health insurance to 50,000 low-income Hoosiers. With its Health Savings Account-style personal accounts and numerous incentives for healthy lifestyle choices, it has been enormously popular and successful.

Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, soon to cover one in every four citizens, will not only scoop up most of HIP’s participants, but will also cost the state between $3.1 and $3.9 billion over the next decade. It is hard to see how my successors as governor will be able to avoid a steep state tax increase to pay for it. Meanwhile, our medical device companies and small businesses will shed jobs as they wrestle with the taxes and penalties levied to help finance Washington’s “reforms.”

Of course, it’s a misnomer to even refer to this as “reform.” It doesn’t reform anything. Instead, it perpetuates and magnifies all the worst aspects of our current system: fee for service reimbursement, “free” to the purchaser consumption, and an irrationally expensive medical liability tort system. It’s a sure recipe for yet more overconsumption and overspending.

There were better options.

Since my election, my state coworkers have had the choice of Health Savings Accounts in lieu of traditional health care plans. The first year this option was made available, some 4 percent of us signed up for it. Six years later, more than 70 percent of our 30,000 state workers have opted for the personal account.

This trend has had a startlingly positive effect on costs for both employees and the state. State employees enrolled in the consumer-driven plan saved more than $8 million in 2010 compared to their coworkers in the old-fashioned preferred provider organization (PPO) alternative. Indiana will save at least $20 million in 2010 because of our high HSA enrollment.

It has also been the source of significant changes in behavior, as state workers with the HSA visit emergency rooms less frequently and are more likely to use generic drugs than co-workers with traditional health care. Hoosiers enrolled in HIP have experienced similar changes in behavior with generic drugs now accounting for 84 percent of all prescriptions used by enrollees.

This is a sharp contrast to the prevalent model of health plans in this country that encourage individuals to buy health care on someone else’s credit card. What seems free will always be overconsumed, compared to the choices a normal consumer would make. Hence our plan’s immense savings.

The condescension of the “reformers” is misplaced. It turns out that typical Americans are neither too dense nor too intimidated to make sound decisions about their own health. This is, of course, a fact that national policy makers sadly ignored during their overhaul of our health are system. Now the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces.

To solve the illegal immigration problem, the U.S. government must unequivocally enforcing existing laws.

The Independent Institute will soon launch what looks like a really good tool for breaking down the cost of government into truly personal terms. MyGovCost.org (www.MyGovCost.org) is not live until August 31, but we took a sneak peak. The site...

The Obama Administration was mistaken to believe it could improve the Human Rights Council from within.

The cold blooded murder of 72 illegal migrants by members of Mexico’s notorious Zeta cartel in the state of Tamaulipas is another stark and gruesome reminder of the current criminal and drug-related turmoil in Mexico.  According to press reports the victims came from Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil and Ecuador.  The lone survivor stated the migrants were killed for failing to pay off their Mexican captors.  This massacre runs against the conventional narrative that the escalating violence in Mexico primarily pits drug trafficker-against-drug trafficker.  It shows the significant overlap between transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling.

Why then were these migrants and tens of thousands like them still willing to risk the perilous journey?  Why is there still such a high expectation that migrants will successfully cross the U.S.-Mexican border and find shelter in the U.S?

Amnesty International rushed to blame the Mexican government for failing to “protect” illegal immigrants.

“This discovery once again demonstrates the extreme danger and violence that Central Americans face on their treacherous journey north, as well as Mexican authorities’ abject failure to protect them,” Amnesty International said. “Mexico must immediately investigate this massacre, bring the perpetrators to justice and establish the identities of those killed so that their families can be informed.”

Such harsh criticism of Mexico alone is not entirely merited.  The Tamaulipas massacre is yet another indication of systemic failures and of a chain of complicity that runs up and down the line.  It begins in Central and South America where leaders, politicians and large segments of society view the export of migrants to the U.S. as an easy solution to poverty and poor economic policies.  It involves Mexico where porous borders, lax enforcement and corrupt officials either ignore or even facilitate massive movements toward the U.S.  It involves the ruthless criminal cartels who victimize even the weakest without mercy.  It ends in the U.S. where failures and inconsistencies in enforcing immigration law and the Obama administration’s implementation of a de facto amnesty for the vast majority of illegal immigrants, helps to fuel the hopes of illegal migrants headed to the U.S.

As Heritage’s Jim Carafano observed last year: The Administration can’t fight cartels and ignore illegal immigration.  People smuggling is part of the problem, not a separate issue.”  He adds, “legalization will only make matters worse. Granting asylum to people here illegally would only encourage more illegal border crossing. It always has in the past, because people assume that—if they enter illegally, they’ll eventually be “amnestied” too.  Likewise, failure to enforce workplace and immigration laws only encourages more to ignore the law.”

These latest victims among Mexico’s 28,000 drug-related dead certainly carried with them a firm belief they could successfully cross the U.S.-Mexican border.  It was this hope – understandable but both patently illegal and highly dangerous – that led to the tragic ending on a ranch in rural Mexico.

A recent national study shows that the majority of U.S. parents and their teens support sexual abstinence before marriage. But the Obama Administration doesn’t want you to know this.

Early last year, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) completed the National Survey of Adolescents and Their Parents: Attitudes and Opinions about Sex and Abstinence. Results show that the majority of parents favor abstinence and the abstinence message. However, while HHS released a brief summary of the results, when researcher Dr. Lisa Rue of the University of Northern Colorado requested to see the full report of the taxpayer-funded study, HHS repeatedly refused. They told her it was not public information. However, the study had been shared at two public venues.

Finally, at the beginning of this week, after pressure from the public, HHS released the full study.

Dr. Rue points out that taxpayers and citizens have a right to such information and that access to these results is necessary to aid in the designing of school and community sex education programs.

However, this may be precisely why the Obama Administration was reluctant to release the study. According to the National Abstinence Education Association:

[The study] calls into question whether recent sex education policy decisions truly reflect cultural norms or clear evidence-based trends.

Last year, President Obama eliminated all funding for abstinence education. While an amendment to the health care bill reauthorized $50 million for abstinence funding, also included in the bill was an additional $75 million funding stream for comprehensive sex education. Yet the results of the HHS study indicate that 70 percent of parents are opposed to premarital sex in general as well as for their teens. (The majority of teens also reported opposition to premarital sex.) Moreover, the study shows that 83 percent of parents support their teens receiving the abstinence message in school.

It’s no surprise that parents and teens support abstinence. Adolescents who abstain from sexual activity report greater academic achievement and lower rates of depression and are less likely to have a child outside of marriage. Furthermore, they are less likely to experience poverty or end up on welfare. A variety of abstinence education programs have shown positive benefits for youth, including at-risk youth.

Such a divide between Washington’s ideals and those of the people—in this case, parents and youth—is yet another example of a disconnected government pushing its own interests.

Instead of covering or simply ignoring the facts, policymakers would be wise to support measures that help youth remain abstinent. Parents—and even their teens—know that abstinence is best. It’s time the Obama Administration figured this out, too.

James Downie, standing in for Jonathan Chait at The New Republic, believes that The Heritage Foundation’s view of the relationship between first principles and foreign policy is wrong, and contrary to George Washington’s vision. Inevitably, he seeks to prove his point by quoting Washington’s Farewell Address. His case would be even less persuasive if he’d read a little more, or a little more thoroughly.

But before we go into that, it’s worth drawing attention to Downie’s concluding point: “the Founding Fathers don’t provide much of a foundation at all” for foreign policy. That’s a characteristically liberal view, and utterly wrong. Only a simpleton would argue that Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams tell us exactly and directly what we should do today.  But the Founding Fathers created the United States as a sovereign nation. That in itself is directly and obviously relevant to the conduct of American foreign policy, both because it is what enable us to have a foreign policy in the first place, and because it emphasizes the value the Founders placed on sovereignty.

More than that: the Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which express both our values and define the institutions by which we make policy—including foreign policy. And they were men of wisdom and experience, who wrote widely and well on every aspect of governing. The Left dislikes appeals to the Founders for a simple reason: they have a vision for the United States that is rooted in the progressivism of the late 19th century, not in the thought of the Founders.

The most important fact about the United States is that it is a nation built on an idea. This idea is that people are endowed by their creator with God-given rights, and that they form a government to protect those rights. This is not just an idea, of course: it is a statement about values, about morality, and about freedoms. The United States cannot have a foreign policy that dismisses or ignores this idea, because, as Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter found out to their detriment, the American people will not stand for it for very long. And though the American idea has deep roots in Western civilization, it was the Founders who built a nation on it. We can therefore learn a lot about ourselves, and what principles our policies should be based on, by learning about them.

So let’s return to George Washington. If Downie had read a little further in Washington’s Farewell Address —only to the next sentence, in fact—he would have found the following: “If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when . . . we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.” Washington was not, in our terms, a realist.  But he was also not an idealist. He believed in advancing the American interest, but he also believed that interests did not speak for themselves. They had to be guided by justice. So while Washington did not use the term “values”—that is our modern language—the idea that foreign policy had to rest on our sense both of justice and of our interests is his own.  And Heritage is proud to follow in his tradition.

In the context of his Farewell Address—with the wars of the French Revolution raging in Europe—Washington’s primary concern was to assert the value of American unity and independence, and to assure that the new nation was defended against attempted subversions from, or conquests by, France or England. That particular problem is no longer relevant, but Washington’s broader concern for American independence, the sovereignty of American institutions, and the need to support the common defense are of enduring importance., As we wrote earlier this week, those are exactly the beliefs that Heritage holds as central to the making of American foreign (and domestic) policy.

Of course, defining “justice” is no easy task. We might gain some insight into what Washington meant by this by looking further at the Farewell Address, and some of his other statements. One of these is particularly short and readable: his speech on resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Army to Congress on December 23, 1783. Every American should read this statement. In it, Washington said that:

Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence.

Justice is concerned with assessing rights and remedying wrongs, and with a sense of fairness. If we understood what kind of government Washington thought was right and what was wrong, we could better judge our just duties—which clearly for him also include upholding signed and ratified treaties—toward other states. What, therefore, is “a respectable Nation”?

It is clearly connected to the possession of independence and sovereignty. In the context of Washington’s resignation, it means the possession of well-ordered armed forces that are subordinate to civilian authority.  But it means more than that. It means that, as he put it in this Farewell Address, “those entrusted with its administration [should] confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres.” It means that we should “cherish public credit.” It means that a respectable nation is a sovereign nation of laws, able to govern itself constitutionally and affordably at home, and defend and negotiate for itself abroad, in a way that accorded with its conception of justice and its interests. It means, in short, the U.S., and other nations that live up to those standards.

And it therefore means one more thing. Washington—like the other Founders, and like The Heritage Foundation—did not cherish many illusions about international relations. His view was that “it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character.” But he also believed that democratic governments—he called them “popular,” the language of his day—were different from, and better than, autocratic ones, because they expressed the American idea.

In his words, “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?… In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

In other words, the American people must be virtuous, because otherwise free government will not endure  That virtue consists in part in education, partly in religion, but also in dedication to the nation, its institutions, and the Constitution. The government of a free people gives force to their opinions, which are grounded in their virtues and which define their conception of justice.

And those opinions will not stop at the borders of the nation. The American people can therefore be expected to judge other states, and our policies towards them, by the same fundamental standards they apply to their own government. They will ask, first, whether the other states are basically respectable. And all too often, today, the answer is that they—and the international institutions they populate—are not. Why, for example, is it respectable for Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to sit in judgment as members of the U.N. Human Rights Council on the U.S.’s human rights record?

The importance of respectability is no reason, as Washington warned – and as we said – to indulge in imprudent moralizing, precisely because power matters a great deal in foreign policy.  Nor, therefore, should we base policy on illusions about engagement or diplomacy without strength.  But Washington’s own words gives the lie to the common argument that he was a simple-minded realist, uninterested in, or hostile to, any connection between our conception of justice, our understanding of our interests, and our policies in the world.  The fact that liberals believe this testifies only to their impoverished view of the Founding Fathers and American foreign policy.

In the run-up to her (or perhaps husband and former President Nestor Kirchner’s) expected bid for re-election in 2011, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is flexing her government’s muscles to pressure the media for favorable coverage.  Opposition leaders, however, call it an attempt to silence critics. Fernandez is sending draft legislation to Argentina’s Congress mandating governmental regulation of “the production, sale and distribution of newsprint in the public interest.”

The Kirchners are taking yet another page from Hugo Chávez’s playbook. He clamped down on freedom of speech in Venezuela years ago, but his popularity is tanking anyway due to his incompetence and corrupt cronyism. It is little wonder that the Kirchners are trying to squelch the truth about their job performance. Another former president, Eduardo Duhalde, recently explained why: “Inflation is hitting the poor very hard and the middle class is already disenchanted with the government,” Duhalde said. Of course the Kirchners are no strangers to censorship and corruption, as they are old pros at masking official government statistics to report lower-than-real inflation figures—something they have been doing for years.