The Strait of Hormuz lies between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, providing passage for some 15.5 million barrels of crude oil per day, amounting to one third of the world’s seaborne oil shipments. In a word, it is a 34-mile-wide chokepoint, making Iran’s threat this week to shut down the strait all the more serious for the global community. The Iranian regime’s provocative warnings came on Tuesday from Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi who threatened to close the strait if Iran faces sanctions for its nuclear ambitions. And … More

For the rest of the week, we will be highlighting the top 10 videos, blog posts, papers, and charts of 2011. Listed below are the top 10 Heritage videos as determined by views on The Heritage Foundation’s YouTube channel. Have a YouTube account? Subscribe to our channel to be among the first to find out about new videos. #10: Freshmen Lawmakers Make the Case for Government Spending Cuts Many of the freshmen serving in the 112th Congress were elected last November riding a wave of Tea Party activism, fueled in … More

The U.S. military is on a dangerous course. Under the projected defense spending caps brought on by the Budget Control Act of 2011, funding for modernizing the military will be squeezed to a dangerous degree. That includes reduced spending on the procurement of new weapons and equipment and research and development on new defense technologies as the infographic below shows. (Article continued below.) In a new paper, Heritage’s Baker Spring, the F. M. Kirby Research Fellow in National Security Policy, explains the impact the reduced funding will have on America’s defenses: The result … More

Reports have surfaced that conservatives in Congress may propose further increasing income adjustment in Medicare to lessen the program’s insolvency. This is a great idea. While the left continues to argue for higher taxes for the likes of Warren Buffett to maintain the status quo of a costly, failing Medicare program, it makes more sense that Congress should simply stop subsidizing them. As Congress continues to pursue solutions to the entitlement spending crisis, one question that must be answered is whether the United States should even have universal federal entitlements … More

The “super committee’s” failure to reach an agreement to reduce federal spending is supposed to trigger automatic spending cuts—some of which could decrease funding for the Department of Education beginning in 2013. This has the education unions and Secretary Arne Duncan up in arms. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, stated that this decrease in funding represents “drastic across-the-board cuts to vital programs” resulting in “massive reductions to education programs.” “Massive”? Let’s put this in perspective. The total cuts, if enacted—which some suggest is doubtful—would represent a … More

Ready to trade in your car for a bike, or maybe a subway instead? Interested in fewer choices for your home, paying more for housing, and being crammed into a denser neighborhood? You can have all this and more if radical environmentalists and “smart growth” advocates have their way and local, state, and the federal government impose the policies set forth in the United Nations’ Agenda 21. You might have heard of this nefarious-sounding policy in a recent Republican presidential debate, but even if you haven’t, here’s some background information: … More

A beleaguered Indian federal government tried last week to break out of its rut and boost what is finally recognized as a struggling Indian economy. It did so with a bold and valuable decision to expand foreign participation in retail. Foreign companies will be able to wholly own single-brand stores and majority-own multi-brand stores. There are a number of qualifiers to this long-awaited liberalization, including the right for Indian states to say no, which several have already exercised loudly. These state governments are making an error, as are the national … More

In 1969, as President Nixon’s Domestic Policy Council sought ways to spend the forthcoming “peace dividend”—savings projected from the wind-down of the Vietnam War—council members ran into an inconvenient fact: The fiscal windfall did not exist; any post-war “savings” were already committed to a range of new spending, including some of the blossoming Great Society programs of the previous Administration. It was the first time total government spending did not decline after a war. Today, some members of the congressional “super committee” want to go back to the future—by spending … More

This week, the U.S. national debt clock hit a nightmarish milestone: a record $15 trillion. Words can’t even begin to describe the scope of borrowed federal spending, but it is no doubt a staggering figure that has risen dramatically in the last decade and is more than $4 trillion higher than when President Barack Obama took office less than three years ago. Unfortunately, Washington does not appear poised to take action to rectify the problem, and those with their hands on the wheel are ignoring the root of the problem: spending. … More

What’s a supercommittee to do? Total national debt just hit a new record at $15 trillion, an increase of approximately $700 billion since the Supercommittee’s August inception.  Hard as its members try, they just do not seem to be able to deliver the required $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction measures.  The situation has deteriorated so badly that even some Republicans are offering up tax hikes.  While this is precisely the wrong solution, it has created another insidious problem. Squabbles over the size of tax hikes are overshadowing the more vital … More