The Issues
This page is in its infancy, be patient
Health Care
The banner issue of the day right up there with the economy. Democrats primarily are advocating massively expanding government to create cradle to grave nanny system because of the alleged failure of the free market system to solve the problem. The Republicans have little to counter offer. Yet nobody brings up the question of exactly WHY the system is failing. Admittedly it is a tremendously complicated problem, as all economic issues are (and this is fundamentally economic), but at the root is the glaring fact that our health care system is one of the most over regulated industries in the world today. Socialists will always point to what they simplistically perceive as free market failures, but historically it always comes down to government intervention causing massive imbalance.
One example of this is mentioned in the Friedman interview excerpt I have here.
Another is the old monopoly "robber baron" system. A memo by Alan Greenspan "Antitrust" dispels this fallacious arguement.
Tariffs
Here is a study on the impact of the Bush steel tariffs: http://www.metalforming.com/govtreg/JobStudy.pdf
From the study:
"... 200,000 Americans lost their jobs to higher steel prices during 2002. These lost jobs represent approximately $4 billion in lost wages from February to November 2002. ...... Every U.S. state experienced employment losses from higher steel costs, with the highest losses occurring in California (19,392 jobs lost), Texas (15,826 jobs lost), Ohio (10,553 jobs lost), Michigan (9,829 jobs lost), Illinois (9,621 jobs lost), Pennsylvania (8,400 jobs lost), New York (8,901 jobs lost) and Florida (8,370 jobs lost). Sixteen states lost at least 4,500 steel consuming jobs each over the course of 2002 from higher steel prices. ...
... Steel tariffs caused shortages of imported product and put U.S. manufacturers of steel-containing products at a disadvantage relative to their foreign competitors. In the absence of the tariffs, the damage to steel consuming employment would have been significantly less than it was in 2002. ..."