The Washington Times

Making Tax Day Less Painful (The Washington Times)

. . . Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that these $800 billion a year in "tax expenditures are really spending programs designed to look like tax cuts." . . . more

Congress is set to face one of its most important votes this year - whether to offset the costs of continuing to provide relief from the alternative minimum tax (AMT). The implications for the nation's fiscal and economic health are huge.

The cost of extending AMT relief for another year is $51 billion. While hardly small, that's modest compared to the costs of new tax and entitlement proposals that will likely emerge in the coming months and years (such as proposals… more

The influx of Mexicans into the United States will change how race is perceived in American society, says Gregory Rodriguez, [director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation]. ...

Author of a new book, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, Mr. Rodriguez said at a Washington press conference this week that Mexican-Americans have been "racially categorized" for centuries and that integration is a must for American society.

His… more

Recent Democratic debates on national security have focused on charges and countercharges over who is better prepared to be commander in chief. Not enough attention has been paid to whether any of the major Democratic candidates offers a vision of U.S. foreign policy substantially different from that set out by the Bush administration.

While Barack Obama has criticized Hillary Clinton for promoting a "Bush lite" foreign policy, his own advocacy of preventive strikes against al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan is… more

The United States must face the fact that most of the world's energy resources are in the hands of powerful states such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela that are increasingly hostile to U.S. interests and consumers, analysts and senators said yesterday. Partly because of fumbled foreign relations by the United States, an "axis of oil" is developing outside of U.S. influence that encompasses Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, among other giant energy producers and consumers. To curtail… more

Growing instability across the Middle East has prompted foreign policy think tanks to brainstorm ways to stabilize that region. One idea circulating in Washington last week called for admitting Israel into NATO... Ralf Fuecks is the president of the Berlin-based Heinrich Boll Foundation, an independent organization affiliated with the German Green Party. He suggested at a conference Wednesday that Israel be offered membership in NATO on the condition that it resume negotiations for a two-state solution… more

A Muslim man who was a spy in the mid-1990s for several European intelligence services inside the global jihad network that later became al Qaeda has written a memoir saying the agencies did not understand the nature of the threat the group posed.

"Inside the Jihad," written under the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, is a copiously detailed account of a young man's journey from the fringes of the Islamist movement in Belgium to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan....

Nasiri doesn't… more

The Bush administration has a strong record of working to establish democracy abroad. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were motivated by several factors, but in both cases an authoritarian regime was toppled and a foundation laid for a new democratic government.

This record made it all the more striking when President Bush recently seemed to side with the authoritarian Chinese government over the democratic Taiwan. The president's statements discouraged Taiwan from moving toward independence and even indicated displeasure with Taiwan's… more

On the just completed trip of Treasury Secretary Snow to China, the focus was not upon human rights, North Korea, or any of the topics that have become the core of U.S.-China relations. Rather the discussion was on China's currency -- the reminimbi or Yuan -- and its peg or government set exchange rate with the U.S. dollar.

This may sound like the dry minutiae only of interest to bankers and Treasury officials, but the peg is an important reason for… more

In 1988, I turned to my boss, Lee Atwater, campaign manager for George H.W. Bush's victorious presidential campaign, and said, "It's a Solid South now -- a Republican Solid South." That was wordplay on the obsolete cliche of a solidly Democratic Dixie. But Atwater, a South Carolinian, shrugged. Yes, Republicans had swept the region in three consecutive presidential elections, but that proved nothing about the future. "The South'll never be solid again," he predicted, citing the influence of "demassifying" factors,… more