The American Enterprise Institute prides itself on producing leading research in several key policy areas that weave a tapestry of the organization's core beliefs: respect and support for the power of free enterprise, a strong defense centered on smart international relations, and opportunity for all to achieve the American dream.
-
“The Founding Fathers granted the federal government several enumerated powers and a few implied ones. The Supreme Court, in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, decided to take that idea a few steps further and granted the federal government the authority to use its taxing power to compel the citizenry to do whatever it wants it to do.”
-
“At the moment of turning [in the Middle East], we are absent without leave. This is a moral, as well as a strategic and political failing, for which we are bound to pay. Our friends will shun us and think us weak; our adversaries will agree and continue to exploit an opportunity they never expected.”
-
“Slavery and Jim Crow were horrible injustices, and the civil-rights movement was a shining moral triumph. But the light of that movement shouldn’t be used to blind us to important distinctions, chief among them: We don’t live in that world anymore.”
-
“The Obama administration must have been hearing some awfully threatening noises from the business community lately, because its unilateral delay of Obamacare’s employer mandate, from 2014 to 2015, is otherwise very difficult to explain. The delay is an embarrassing move for the White House and will create some serious new headaches for Obamacare’s defenders.”
-
“The current debate about the interest rate on subsidized student loans is a case study in dysfunctional politics … Last year's election-induced "panderfest" answered the question by not really answering it at all: both presidential candidates called for a year-long extension of the low rate, saving borrowers about $9 a month, costing $6 billion and setting the stage for more drama this spring.”
-
“In the context of the Obama carbon policy, an expansion of wind and solar power would accompany a contraction of the coal-fired power sector, and a contraction of other sectors due to an overall increase in electricity prices. Moreover, there is also the adverse employment effect of the explicit or implicit taxes that must be imposed to finance the subsidies needed to increase wind and solar generating capacity.”
-
“The neurobiological domain is one of brains and physical causes; the psychological domain is one of people and their motives. Both are essential to a full understanding of why we act as we do. But the brain and the mind are different frameworks for explaining human experience. And the distinction between them is hardly an academic matter: it bears crucial implications for how we think about human nature, as well as how to best alleviate human suffering.”
