Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter The annual “winter crisis” at Britain’s National Health Service is starting early this year. Data released last week showed English emergency room wait times are the worst in 15 years. More and more patients are forced to wait in hospital corridors on temporary beds called ‘trollies’. The goal is to treat 95 percent of patients within 4 hours. In the last year the NHS managed to treat only 83.6 percent within that time, 6 percent less than the year before. In Britain,…

Kerby Anderson After the government announced the death of the ISIS leader, many wondered what might be the next step. ISIS has been defeated on the battlefield and their leader is gone. But there is still more to do. In his book, The State of Our Nation, Jim Denison described four steps that were necessary to defeat ISIS. These were: (1) take away its caliphate, (2) apprehend or kill its leader, (3) defeat its ideology, and (4) advance spiritual awakening….

Kerby Anderson Over the last few decades, cohabitation has gone from being rare to routine. So it isn’t too surprising that now there are more Americans who have lived with a partner than have married one. That is the conclusion of the latest Pew Research Center statistics. Also disturbing is the increasing percentage (69%) of Americans who say it is acceptable for a couple to live together even if they don’t plan to get married. The excuse used to be…

Kerby Anderson Why do nearly a majority (43%) of young people have a positive view of socialism? That is a question many pundits and social commentators have been pondering. The swing to socialism isn’t due to the presence of favorable examples of it in the world. Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Venezuela are impoverished, authoritarian countries. Even the soft-socialism in many European countries isn’t that attractive to anyone who takes the time to look at their economic record. Victor Davis…

Kerby Anderson With polls coming out nearly every day on nearly every topic, it is time to revisit the topic of national polling. The first issue is statistical accuracy. A typical three-day poll of 1000 people, if proportioned among the 3000 counties, can accurately represent American adults 19 out of 20 times within three percentage points. The real question about the polls isn’t whether they are statistically accurate but whether they are polling the right people and whether the people…

Kerby Anderson Two weeks ago the slaughter of Mormon women and children was a shocking reminder of the danger at our border and the terror so many Mexican citizens experience on a daily basis. Drug cartels control huge swaths of the Mexican countryside because government officials and law enforcement are out spent and out gunned. The attack was originally attributed to a case of mistaken identity. But the reality is that it was probably a warning sent to Mexican officials…

Penna Dexter Common Core is the latest iteration of the failed idea that the federal government should control education.  Implementation of Common Core was begun under the Obama Administration. It was supposed to increase American students’ “college and career readiness.” The results are in on Common Core and they’re pretty discouraging. Common Core was fully phased in three years ago and, for three years, scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have been dropping.  The National Assessment of…

Kerby Anderson One of the many themes being debated during this campaign season is income inequality. It is often the justification used for raising taxes and redistributing income. We can certainly have a moral debate about what we should do (if anything) about the differences in income, but first we need to have accurate numbers. Former Senator Phil Gramm and former commissioner John Early took the time to provide “The Truth About Income Inequality.” Census Bureau data fails to account…

Kerby Anderson Strong families are the foundation of a strong nation. That is the obvious conclusion stated by everyone from Michael Novak to Senator Ben Sasse. In a short commentary on America, Senator Marco Rubio joins the discussion He laments that for many Americans, marriage now resembles a luxury good, which he says keeps stable families from forming in the first place. “An economic gap has emerged in which working-class Americans are marrying less and less frequently.” Charles Murray documented…

Kerby Anderson In a normal world, it would be newsworthy when the Attorney General of the United States gives an impassioned speech about religious liberty. But we don’t live in that world, so the speech by William Barr has been either ignored or ridiculed. When he spoke at Notre Dame, he reminded the audience that the founders of this country had a “supreme test as a free society.” That test was “whether the citizens in such a free society [could]…

Kerby Anderson Should the federal government start pulling the tax-exempt status of religious organizations? Most Americans reject the idea, even though it was floated by a former presidential candidate who argued that “no reward, no benefit, no tax break” should be given to certain religious institutions. Unfortunately, you can find a significant number of other Americans who agree with his sentiment. That is why I think it is time to have a discussion about the tax-exemption given to churches and…