Anti-Tax Tea Parties, College Quotas and Job-Killing Regulations
People across the nation rally to oppose high taxes and government spending in the spirit of the original Boston Tea Party.
President Obama’s apparent support for gender quotas in higher education arouses controversy.
Drinking water rules force the closure of a Minnesota meat plant and the loss of 200 jobs.
For more news, listen to the LibertyWeek podcast here.
1. POLITICS
People across the nation rally to oppose high taxes and government spending in the spirit of the original Boston Tea Party.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Communications Director Cord Blomquist on the Tea Party Mania:
“The good folks from MillionTeaBags.org [and Reagan.org] dropped by CEI…after the Park Service told them that while they had a perfectly legal permit to demonstrate in Lafayette Park, that they hadn’t specifically asked if they could display the 1 million bags of tea they had trucked in. It’s tougher to have a tea party these days—regulations and permits were not a part of the first one. Thankfully, some of these tea partiers were friends of CEI. So the tea bags—at least a portion of them—were stacked to the ceiling in our conference room. Each bag of tea represented the donation of someone to the project, meaning that over a million Americans are sick and tired of being treated like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama’s ATM.”
2. LEGAL
President Obama’s apparent support for gender quotas in higher education arouses controversy.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on how the issue could play out:
“Based on a campaign promise Obama made to feminist groups in October 2008, [author Christina Hoff] Sommers foresees the Obama Administration moving to artificially cap male enrollment in math and science classes to achieve gender proportionality — the way that Title IX currently caps male participation in intercollegiate athletics. The result could be a substantial reduction in the number of scientists graduating from America’s colleges and universities.”
3. ENVIRONMENT
Drinking water rules force the closure of a Minnesota meat plant and the loss of 200 jobs.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Risk & Environmental Policy Angela Logomasini on the trade-offs to enforcing stringent rules:
“…poorly drafted drinking water regulations do more harm than good. In particular, the that greatly increased the stringency of the drinking water rule for arsenic promised no real benefits, but its high cost hurts communities and individuals. It forces communities to abandon important things – like the purchase of fire trucks or more useful upgrades to infrastructure – to pay for a rule that does nothing for them.”
Listen to LibertyWeek, the CEI podcast, here.