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Earlier this week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an important religious liberty decision that protects the right of faith-based social service organizations to protect their religious identity and mission.

The case involves World Vision, a nonprofit Christian humanitarian organization focused on the causes of poverty and injustice. World Vision was sued for religious discrimination by two employees it fired after learning that they did not agree with World Vision’s doctrinal beliefs.

As a general rule, federal nondiscrimination law demands that private employers ignore religion in making employment decisions. But the same law includes an accommodation for “a religious corporation, association, educational institution, or society.” The question in Spencer v. World Vision was whether World Vision fit this definition and therefore qualified for the accommodation.

Two of three judges agreed that World Vision, even though it is not a traditional house of worship, is entitled to the institutional religious liberty accommodation. Circuit Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain wrote the opinion for the court.

This ruling comes at a time in the life of this nation when faith-based organizations face increasing burdens. Illustrations include D.C. lawmakers’ refusal earlier this year to protect the right of D.C. Catholic Charities to uphold its religious identity and character while providing social services in the District. Because it refused to compromise its religious belief that marriage is the union of a husband and a wife, Catholic Charities was forced to stop offering adoption services and providing spousal benefits to its employees.

Similarly, earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled that state universities can deny equal recognition to a Christian student group that refuses to accept members and leaders who disagree with the religious beliefs of the group. Under this ruling a Christian student group could be denied recognition “if it does not allow an atheist student to lead its Bible studies.”

Other examples can be found in this Heritage backgrounder and this book promoted by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Not surprisingly, many of the threats to religious liberty and right of association discussed in these and other sources stem from nondiscrimination dictates that seek to control the conduct of private citizens and private organizations.

Protecting the religious freedom of faith-based organizations and other civil society groups is an important part of building an American where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish. They meet important needs and shape people’s identity, and the existence of such organizations also serves as a check on government overreach. As Heritage’s William E. Simon Fellow Ryan Messmore has argued, the role, power, and influence of government grows when the role, power, and influence exercised by religious communities shrinks. The ability of groups like World Vision to make employment decisions based on their deepest convictions is important for sustaining freedom and a robust civil society.

The Ninth Circuit’s decision in the World Vision case will likely be proposed for further appellate review. For now, however, it stands as an important victory for institutional religious liberty.

Elaine L. Chao, labor secretary under President George W. Bush, will give a speech on government policies that hurt business Wednesday, Sept. 8, at a lunch event in Birmingham held by Michigan supporters of The Heritage Foundation.

It’s not just the majority of American voters who are itching from the rash of regulations, taxes and government bureaucracy that has stemmed from Obamacare. Small physician groups aren’t ecstatic with the White House’s latest effort to cajole them into swallowing some bitter pills regarding their day-to-day operations.

This week, several Obama administration officials, including a former member of the National Economic Council, published an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine that urged doctors to “embrace rather than resist change” coming from the new health reform law, which passed in March. These changes include the likely demise of many small physician practices as part of “vertical organization” approaches that would promote more hospitals and large-group practices.

“Physicians who embrace these changes and opportunities are likely to deliver the greatest benefits to their patients, the health system, and themselves,” according to the article, which was written by Nancy-Ann DeParle, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel and Dr. Robert Kocher.

But doctors are not buying the Obamacare agenda. Robert Lowes, writing for Medscape Medical News, reported that leaders of several physician groups, including the American College of Physicians, believe small practices should still be a viable delivery method in America’s health care system.

Health policy expert Robert Moffit detailed in a new Web Memo that regulation in Obamacare regarding Medicare payments irrevocably changes the doctor-patient relationship, undercuts physicians’ freedom to remain in smaller private practices, and threatens the continuation of fee-for-service medicine.

Not only will doctors likely be “coerced into standardizing patient care,” Moffit said they’ll also face pressure to participate in an Accountable Care Organization (ACO), a voluntary grouping of health care providers that agree to be accountable for the overall care of Medicare fee-for-service patients they are assigned to.

“In other words, the ACO will provide the bulk of [Medicare] beneficiaries’ primary care services…While consortia of health care providers (including university hospitals and large clinics) have experimented with the concept, ACOs are still a work in progress.”

Health officials in the Medscape article expressed concern that such regulation would prompt more doctors in small-group practices to leave medicine altogether. “If a physician’s only choice is to join a large corporation, we’re going down the wrong path,” former Heritage visiting fellow Dennis Smith said in the article. “We have the greatest health care system in the world because physicians have been independent.”

Approximately 32 percent of American doctors practiced in solo or two-physician offices in 2008, while 15 percent practiced in group offices of three to five physicians, according to a recent physician survey by the Center for Studying Health System Change

President Obama has called for a huge tax increase to take effect on January 1, 2011. Instead of reducing spending, he proposes to raise taxes on a wide swath of taxpayers—including small businesses—despite the weak economic recovery. Congressional Democrats stand poised (immediately following the November elections) to endorse the President’s request and threaten to go much further. Proponents of letting the tax cuts expire—which would indeed be a tax hike—have offered a wide array of justifications for this wrongheaded policy. Heritage Foundation fiscal policy expert J. D. Foster wades through the myths and straw arguments to set the record straight.

According to a press release, Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that the billions of dollars in federal stimulus money directed toward solar-power will cut solar power costs in half by 2015. It’s a grand sounding prediction, but his own Energy Information Agency projects that electricity from solar cells will cost nearly five times as much as electricity from natural-gas-fired power plants. And that’s without any adjustment for the unreliable nature of solar power or for the additional transmission costs.

Forcing those higher costs on taxpayers and ratepayers, spells bad news for the economy in terms of lost income, lost jobs, and higher electricity prices. Families could see their incomes drop thousands of dollars per year as the labor market loses a million jobs.

On the other hand the subsidies would seem like a great deal for the solar industry. However, before you call your broker, you might want to reflect on a previous experiment with government directed shift to the “energy of the future.”

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated the use of billions of gallons of ethanol to jump start what then seemed like a promising technology. Indeed ethanol production capacity rose from 4.3 billion gallons per year in January 2006 to 12.5 billion gallons per year in January 2009—a stunning 200 percent increase in just 3 years. Too bad the investment euphoria stimulated by credits and mandates wasn’t matched by market economics. The January 2009 demand for ethanol was only 8.4 billion gallons per year.

This 50 percent excess capacity drove many ethanol producers, including some of the largest, into bankruptcy. By January of that year the industry was hosting a conference to help match those in bankruptcy with lawyers and takeover artists.

Energy sources that need subsidies and mandates need them because they don’t make economic sense. If they did make sense there would be no need for mandates and subsidies. When it comes to providing affordable energy, supply and demand do a much better job than lobbyists and bureaucrats.

Pity the poor Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director. Congress passes and the President signs the most massive fiscal stimulus program in history, spending more money on Keynesian stimulus than has been spent so far on the Iraq war. But, unlike the Iraq war, the stimulus has been a complete bust.

Rather than launch a recovery, the stimulus managed only to launch a jump in the national debt. The economy enjoyed a mild bump late in 2009 as businesses rebuilt their inventories—a development completely unrelated to the stimulus—and then slid back to anemic growth in the second quarter and now appears to have stalled out entirely.

As part of the stimulus legislation, Congress mandated CBO report regularly on how well the stimulus is doing. Money spent, economy faltering, Congress wants happy news about their stimulus, and in response all CBO can do is continue to run their antiquated models telling us that down is up and slow is fast.

In the latest report, CBO’s models indicate that employment is higher by between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs thanks to the stimulus. In contrast, the unemployment rate hovers near 10 percent and would be much higher but for the millions of workers who’ve simply given up and left the workforce. Faced with such a contradiction between its economic models and the facts, what’s a CBO Director to do?

Rely on wrongheaded models, release fluff reports, keep congressional leaders off his back, and hope things get better.

Or face the facts, which are there for all to see: The stimulus failed because it had to. Keynesian stimulus can only rearrange demand in an economy while infusing it with new uncertainties. Growth happens only when business see real reasons to expand, reasons government spending cannot provide on net—a lesson the current ruling class in Washington fails to understand.

It’s not that stimulus per se was doomed to fail, but the Keynesian type of stimulus Obama pressed Congress to pass was doomed to fail. Obama placed his bet and now the country gets to pay it off in higher debt and more joblessness. It would help if CBO could acknowledge as much and thus participate in the process of changing course.

On Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors reported that July sales of existing homes fell by 27% from June of this year and by 25.5% compared to July 2009. This annual sales rate of 3.83 million homes was the lowest since NAR began keeping track of sales in 1999. Then yesterday, the Commerce Department reported that July sales of new homes fell 12.4% from June and by 32.4% compared to July 2009. This annual rate of 276,000 new units sold is the lowest since 1963, when government records were first kept. The source of the plunge is no secret: July’s numbers reflect the first month when existing home sales received no boost from the home buyer tax credit.

Americans have seen this movie before. Last fall after the Obama administration’s Cash for Clunkers program dried up, new automobile sales plummeted. General Motors’ sales plunged 36 percent in September 2009 compared with August. Ford plummeted 37 percent. Chrysler dove 33 percent. And Americans are still feeling the hangover from the original car spending binge. Thanks to the destruction of traded-in cars mandated by President Obama, used car prices have soared this year. This means that the most cash-strapped Americans who are already dealing with 9.5% unemployment now are finding it harder to find an affordable car, all thanks to government intervention in the marketplace.

The problem with both of these liberal programs is the same: there is no such thing as a free lunch. In both cases the additional government spending did not create any new demand; it only shifted the time at which American consumers were going to make a purchase they had decided to make anyway. Instead of ensuring an environment where market participants could ascertain the true prices of the goods they want to purchase, these government interventions added uncertainty into the economy by making it harder for existing businesses and entrepreneurs to plan their next move. These government interventions, paid for with borrowed dollars, did not create new wealth. They just diverted capital and resources from the other places where markets would have invested it spontaneously absent government action.

This is the same problem with President Obama’s failed stimulus. Government spending does not stimulate economic growth. All it does is move resources away from one sector of the economy to another. And government has a horrible track record at efficiently allocating resources. All that really happens is that, on net, jobs get destroyed in the transfer process. But the left refuses to recognize this reality.

In February 2009, at a House Democratic retreat in Williamsburg, Va., President Obama pressed for passage of his stimulus plan, reasoning: “This is not something that we’re just doing to grow government. We’re doing this because this is what the best minds tell us needs to be done.” But what if the people who President Obama believes have “the best minds” are just wrong? Forty-five years earlier, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan told the American people: “Anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we’re always “against” things—we’re never “for” anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Last week a group of economic bloggers met with some Treasury officials, including Secretary Timothy Geithner. When pressed on the failure of President Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, the Obama officials explained that they judged “HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock.” Shocked at the admission that HAMP was meant to bail out banks and not help owners, Media Matters fellow Duncan Black wrote: “When Liberalism Doesn’t Work It Discredits Liberalism.” Liberalism is not working. We’ll find out in the coming months just how discredited it is in the eyes of the American people.

Quick Hits:

• Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) told an audience in Greeley, Colo.: “We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet; in my view we have nothing to show for it.”
• Two of President Obama’s top environmental advisers, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s administrator Jane Lubchenco and Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley admitted yesterday they did not provide the environmental and scientific basis for Obama’s oil drilling ban.
• EPA has proposed a rule that would effectively ban all traditional lead ammunition, a law that the National Shooting Sports Foundation says would basically end shooting sports as we know them.
• New orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods excluding transportation equipment posted their largest decline in 1-1/2 years in July, pointing to a slowdown in manufacturing.
• On Tuesday night’s The Late Show, David Letterman took a jab at President Obama’s schedule, saying: “He’ll have plenty of time for vacations after his one term is up.”

As it pertains to cyber security, America still needs clearer lines of authority a more coherent structure of public–private interaction.

Washington think tanks and commentators continue to spin out impressive reams attempting to explain the necessity and virtues of adding a value-added tax (VAT) on top of all the taxes the federal government already collects. The fiscal policy problem is real enough—thanks to the Obama spending surge, federal budget deficits are unsustainable and a course correction is inevitable. What most VAT-istas refuse to acknowledge is that the problem is due to new spending, not a sudden collapse in the ability of the federal tax system to raise revenues. Even so, it’s not always easy to explain why the VAT is the wrong answer. In this the city of New York has rendered notable if unintended assistance.

Under the tax laws extant in the Big Apple, if a bagel is sold whole, then it is, well, a bagel. But if the bagel is sliced before it is sold, then it falls under the category of “processed foods.” And processed foods are subject to a higher tax—a nine cent higher tax, to be specific. Since New York City has already spent its way to fiscal oblivion while driving taxpayers out of the city with punitive taxes, this nine cents of tax is suddenly critical to the city’s financial survival. And so the New York Department of Taxation and Finance wants its nine extra cents, hold the lox.

This might be a funny story of the absurd, but it’s not a rare story to anyone who’s dealt with European VATs. These VATs, in effect national retail sales taxes, have been around for decades. From the beginning and over the years all manner of special rates and exemptions have been added to massage the costs and purchases of the nation’s consumers. Want a biscuit with your soup? The tax is one amount. Buy the biscuit wrapped separately and you pay a different amount. All times millions of products times millions of transactions daily.

It’s not that the income tax is pure. On the contrary, it’s a mess. But those who are pushing a pure VAT are living in a fantasy land if they think the United States Congress is going to enact a nice, clean VAT, free of special tinkerings, rates, and exemptions for such things as food, medicine, education, shelter, telephone service, electricity, heating oil, and on and on. The VAT would offer a whole new realm for Congress to play with other people’s money—and a whole new opportunity for lobbyists to ply Washington to manipulate those rules. New York’s silly bagel rule is just a slice of what would be to come.

Health care isn’t something most students worry about. Government stats show about 80 percent of college students are covered under a parents’ plan. For them, Obamacare may mean they can keep the insurance they already have for a few years beyond college, but it won’t affect the coverage they carry during school.

But what about kids without parental coverage? The new law’s requirement that insurance cover children up to age 26 won’t make any difference for them.

Currently, college students without coverage can enroll in low-cost student health plans offered through universities. These plans may include limits to keep costs down, but are often designed around to complement university health services to provide comprehensive coverage. Affordability is further achieved by rating student health plans on a campus-wide basis rather than according to the whole individual market.

Seven percent of students currently receive coverage from their school, but that could change under Obamacare, a concern that the American Council on Education expressed in a recent letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

“The application of several provisions under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), including certain insurance market reforms and the individual mandate, could make it impossible for colleges and universities to continue to offer student health plans,” the Council warns.

As the new law currently stands, it’s unclear whether student health plans would meet federal requirements to qualify as minimum essential coverage. If they don’t, students would have to find coverage elsewhere or pay the individual mandate in addition to the premiums of their student health plan.

Though the law includes a rule that institutes of higher education will not be prohibited from offering student insurance plans, the Council explains that problems arise because, “Short-term limited duration insurance, including many student health plans, does not qualify as either group health insurance coverage or individual health insurance coverage under the existing Public Health Service Act (PHSA) definitions. As a result, a student with comprehensive SHP coverage would not satisfy the minimum essential coverage requirement due to a definitional technicality.”

Schools may also find that some provisions of Obamacare might forbid them from offering coverage solely to their student populations, rather than the individual market at large.

Critics of student health pans, who see these low-cost options as inadequate, would prefer to apply Obamacare’s rules to student coverage. But, as Julie Appleby writes for Kaiser Health News, colleges fear that “requiring them to meet even some of the new rules could drive up premiums.”

Removing affordable options would likely discourage many students from carrying insurance altogether—yet another example of how Obamacare, which was supposed to improve insurance coverage, may end up making it worse.

The Treasury Department reported last week that nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who have enrolled in the Obama administration's mortgage relief program since 2009 have fallen out of the program. Yet, also last week, Treasury officials told a...

Retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral and former Defense Nuclear Agency Director Robert Monroe writes in today’s Wall Street Journal: “The Obama administration’s nuclear policy is set out in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was released in April, two days before the signing of New Start. The NPR is joined at the hip with New Start, and together they take this country down a dangerous path.”

Monroe continues:

Mr. Obama’s NPR treats nuclear weapons as an evil to be eliminated, rather than as the ultimate foundation of America’s security in a dangerous world. The review opens with Mr. Obama’s pledge to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” and “to take concrete steps toward that goal, including by reducing the number of nuclear weapons and their role in national security policy.”

Yet nuclear weapons have been our most effective means of avoiding and limiting conflicts, and of achieving our foreign policy goals, since World War II. Nuclear weapons ended the most destructive war in history. For a half-century thereafter they prevented a vastly more devastating war and were a huge factor in deterring proliferation.

By pledging not to develop new nuclear capabilities—including earth-penetration weapons and any new warheads—the new NPR also promises to let our deterrence atrophy. This ignores that threats and technology are changing, and our weapons must keep pace with them.

The abandonment of our nuclear deterrence is just the beginning of New START’s problems. The verification provisions are completely inadequate and the treaty also limits our missile defense capabilities.

You can read Heritage’s full New START analysis here.

Typically when the government and business get together, it’s the consumer who ends up paying. So when Washington, D.C.’s Department of the Environment (DDOE) teamed up with Patuxent Environmental Group (PEG) and other contractors to provide “free” energy audits, of course it didn’t end well for the consumer. But most residents didn’t realize that PEG would place liens on their houses for not paying for the audit.

Let’s start from the beginning. For the past two years, the D.C. government has been contracting out to inspectors to investigate where homeowners could improve the energy efficiency of their homes. Then the program started to run into problems.

According to one resident who tried to take advantage of the program, PEG completed the audit but sent no report detailing what the energy improvements should be:

Weeks went by, no report, so I called PEG and was told that they weren’t authorized to issue reports to homeowners and I should call the DDOE to inquire. That office said that PEG’s reports initially were too complicated and they were asked to simplify them and then they were too generic and so reports were being redrafted yet again and I’d get mine soon. Weeks later, no report so I called again. Again I was told to call the city government—frankly, I can’t remember the details except that each party was blaming the other for me not getting my report—and frankly I gave up the idea of ever getting one.

If that had been the case, the story may have ended there. Some taxpayer money wasted on a D.C. government program, but what’s new? In the beginning of August, some homeowners received this letter from PEG:

Unfortunately, we are unable to supply you with that report because the DDOE has failed to make payment for the inspection. After repeated efforts, letters, emails and meetings the DDOE has made no effort to resolve the issue. It is with great regret, that we are informing you that we are placing a lien on your property. As a matter of protocol, a contractor’s last effort to collect payment for service not paid is placing the lien.

The letter astonished and frightened residents for obvious reasons, but DDOE sent a letter to the same residents a few days later, saying, “PEG has no legal basis for placing a lien on your property.” PEG said that placing a lien was a “reservation of rights” but will not proceed with the filing of any liens. The dispute has devolved to a blame game between DDOE and PEG, with the government saying they told PEG to stop and PEG claiming that’s not the case. Even so, the DDOE promised residents a new energy audit “at no cost” to the residents.

Of course, the program does have a cost, but it will be borne by D.C. taxpayers. More often than not, the consumers that have the finances to make improvements on their homes will also have the finances to cover an energy audit. If consumers want to save money by improving the energy efficiency of their home, they should do so on their own rather than relying on taxpayers to foot a portion of the bill.

Will Jimmy Carter’s visit to North Korea undermine U.S. policy?

In a recent editorial somewhat misleadingly entitled “A Real Debate on Taxes,” The New York Times argues in favor of allowing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire for Americans of all income levels.

Their argument presents a few fatal flaws. First, a real debate on taxes is also a real debate on the current and projected skyrocketing levels of federal spending. Instead, the Times asserts that “more Americans—and not just the rich—are going to have to pay more taxes” in order to address looming deficits. The Times may prefer that taxes rise broadly, but there’s nothing at all necessary or inevitable about this.

The Times conveniently ignores the fact that it takes two to make a deficit: some combination of a shortage of revenue and an excess of spending. In fact, growing deficits today are clearly a symptom of out-of-control spending, not reduced revenue. Heritage budget expert Brian Riedl writes, “By 2020, spending is projected to be 6.2 percent of GDP above the historical average, while projected 2020 revenues are 0.2 percent of GDP above the historical average. Thus, the entire expanded budget deficit will be caused by rising spending, rather than by falling revenues—even if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are extended.”

Moreover, the Tax Policy Center’s William Gale explains that the 2001 and 2003 cuts “are not the main cause of the sizable deficit that exists today.” Rather,

In 2007, well after the tax cuts took effect, the budget deficit stood at 1.2 percent of GDP. By 2009, it had increased to 9.9 percent of the economy. The Bush tax cuts didn’t change between 2007 and 2009, so clearly something else is to blame.

The main culprit was the recession—and the responses it inspired. As the economy shrank, tax revenue plummeted. The cost of the bank bailouts and stimulus packages further added to the deficit.

Once the economy recovers, revenue will return to its historical levels. If Congress were to restrain spending—rather than raise it to 25 percent of GDP as per President Obama’s plans—the deficit would fall to manageable levels and the national debt would stabilize. Indeed, in contrast to President Obama’s budget, which would double the national debt by 2020, the cost of continuing current tax policy is relatively small.

From Washington’s perspective, extending current tax policy may look like a tax “cut,” but to American families paying the same amount in taxes next year as they do today, it is in no way a cut. Rather, allowing the tax cuts to expire will mark a drastic hike in what families pay to the federal government. It’s never a good time to raise taxes, but during a recession is about the worst time possible. Doing so just to permit an explosion in spending makes no sense at all. This is the real debate, but you won’t read about it in The New York Times.

Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the round 2 Race to the Top (RttT) winners. Nine states, along with the District of Columbia, will divide $3.4 billion in federal grant money.

The winners included D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island. Delaware and Tennessee won grants in round 1 of the competition. Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, isn’t impressed:

New York? Recent revelations about dumbed-down Regents exams hardly make it seem like a paragon of honest reform. Hawaii? How did last year’s school-free Fridays help them stack up so high? Maryland? Fostering charter schools was supposed to be important, but it has one of the most constricting charter laws in the nation. And Massachusetts? Well, it’s easy to see how it won—it just dropped its own, often-considered nation-leading curriculum standards to adopt national standards demanded by Race to the Top.

McCluskey is right to point out the most concerning outcome of RTTT: that it’s possible that the burdens associated with the federal red tape could outweigh the benefits.

To be eligible for the money, states were required to indicate that they would adopt national education standards and tests. For some states, adoption will likely mean lowering education requirements. Massachusetts, for example, which has signed on to adopt the national standards, already boasts some of the highest education standards in the country. That the state is so quickly tossing out its much-lauded standards and testing program in favor of national standards is concerning to many, including Senator Scott Brown (R–MA), who yesterday expressed his uncertainty about the standards overhaul.

And rightly so. National standards are unlikely to improve education and will put more power into the hands of federal bureaucrats and pull power away from parents.

Besides watering down education standards, the amount of money it will take for states to overhaul their current standards will be significant. According to Robert Scott, Texas’s Education Commissioner, the price for their state to implement the standards would cost the state up to $3 billion. On the other hand, the average RTTT award to states in this second round is only $333 million.

Moreover, states won’t have any financial help with the standards implementation process, adding more costs to already overburdened budgets. Past examples provide plenty of evidence that when the federal government increases school funding, bureaucratic red tape grows. Red tape means more administration, which subsequently ends up costing schools, not to mention taxpayers. And for that reason, the non-winners could end up being the real winners in this competition.

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The government cannot wait until the next disaster strikes to meaningfully engage the private sector.

In December 2009, President Barack Obama delivered his long-awaited decision on the way forward in the War in Afghanistan and pledged 30,000 additional troops for the effort under the condition that they would begin to come home in 18 months. While praising the President’s decision to send more troops, conservative lawmakers blasted the President’s announcement of a deadline for withdrawal, arguing that it would undermine our allies and embolden our enemies. Yesterday, the President’s policy met with another high profile critic, retiring U.S. Marine Gen. James Conway, who told reporters that the July 2011 withdrawal date has given a morale boost to Taliban insurgents who now believe they can simply wait out NATO forces.

General Conway confirmed what Heritage Foundation analysts have been warning about for the last nine months, that the deadline is “giving our enemy sustenance.” Conway revealed that indeed the U.S. has intercepted communication of Taliban insurgents telling each other that they only needed to hold out for so long.

Conway is right. As we noted last year, the President’s decision to impose a timeline was purely a political one, meant to appease the leftist base of the Democratic Party, not to ensure the security interests of the American people. But there are signs the Obama administration now recognizes the damage the timeline has done to U.S. strategy and is seeking to walk it back. That’s good news for America as it fights a war we must win.

Last week, Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, indicated that any troop withdrawal would depend on the “situation on the ground,” and on Monday, he noted that next year’s deadline is “not the date when the American forces begin an exodus.”

Vice President Joe Biden, during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Indianapolis earlier this week, also signaled the Obama administration is changing its message on Afghanistan. During that speech, the Vice President said, “We are not leaving in 2011, we are beginning a transition.” Biden also called for allowing the new strategy in Afghanistan time to succeed and gave a ringing endorsement of Gen. Petraeus. Biden said, “Don’t buy into that we have failed in Afghanistan…We are now only beginning, with the right general and the right number of forces, to seek our objectives…We needed the best general we had, and we now have him.”

Announcing a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops even before they had deployed was bad policy. Hopefully the Obama administration now recognizes this fact. But in order to reassure our allies and signal our enemies of U.S. commitment to the war, President Obama must unequivocally revoke the timeline.

Succeeding in Afghanistan will require more patience from the American people. A summer of high casualty rates and reports about corruption of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s administration are casting doubt among Americans about the effort. A recent poll shows six in ten Americans oppose the war. But the United States and its allies cannot walk away from Afghanistan before the job is done. The military’s new strategy is sound, and our troops should be given the opportunity to succeed. As The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano writes:

Fighting terrorists in South Asia is not easy. But it is a worthwhile effort that offers the promise of a more enduring peace and a safer world for our civilians and allies. Now is the time to vanquish al-Qaeda and its affiliates, not give them a second lease on life. Running away would end nothing. Indeed, it would be but the prelude to more 9-11 style misery.

Maintaining that commitment won’t be easy, either. While President Obama is facing criticism for imposing a withdrawal deadline from the right, he is also facing criticism from the left for backing away from his withdrawal pledge. But there is more at stake for the President than scoring political points. Hanging in the balance is the future of Afghanistan, where failure would spell the return of the Taliban, a resurgent Al-Qaeda, a new wave of terrorism in South Asia, increased potential for conflict between Pakistan and India, and the makings of the next 9-11.

For the United States, failure is not an option, it’s a choice President Obama shouldn’t make, and it’s a result the American people should not accept.

Quick Hits:

• U.S. home sales plummeted by 27.2% in July to a level not seen in more than a decade.
• House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday called on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to resign.
• The leaders of the AFL-CIO and the SEIU have agreed to coordinate spending $88 million or more in the midterm elections to support pro-union candidates.
• According to data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Obama’s failed stimulus program cost more than the Iraq war.
• A new analysis of nearly two dozen papers finds no link between natural disaster losses and climate change.

Obamacare will affect the private practice of medicine and surgery and impact Medicare patients.

Heritage’s sister organization, Heritage  Action for America, recently released a video asking this very question. It is  a humorous video (starring veteran actor Clint Howard) that points to a more serious problem. Where are the congressmen in August? Are they holding townhall meetings to address constituent concerns? If not, what are they hiding? Are they ashamed that they did not pass a budget? Ashamed of the vote on Health Care?

We have written about all this Congress has done in the last two years, and the August recess is a time that Congress is supposed to take time to address constituent concerns over their performance over the last year. If townhalls are not held it takes away an important part of the democratic process. Congress works for the people and the people deserve to be heard.

If you do choose to attend one of the few townhalls his summer, remember to take a copy of The Heritage Foundation’s Solutions for America. With over 20 chapters and 100 specific policy suggestions, Solutions has plenty of ammunition to keep any congressmen on their toes.