For 233 years, Independence Day has been the celebration of the day we declared our independence from the tyrannical reign of King George III. Since Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence it has been a symbol of freedom known worldwide. Thomas Jefferson noted, in a letter to John Adams in 1821 that:

[T]he flames kindled on the 4 of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

July 4th is a day to celebrate our freedom, specifically the freedom to govern ourselves. Even in the midst of sharp political divide, Americans have always known that July 4th is the day we celebrate our freedoms that the Founders fought and died for. But are these sacrifices appreciated in the same way they once were? This week, USA Today printed an item asking people to send messages to other Americans on what we need to remember this year:

Americans celebrate the values that unite us on the Fourth of July, but today the country seems sharply divided. As the country copes with unemployment, immigration and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, what do you think the nation needs to remember this Independence Day? What are the messages you would like to share with other Americans? Write to letters@usatoday.com by June 21. Please include a name, address, and day and evening phone numbers for verification.

Americans should remember the extreme sacrifices the Founders made so we could be free. We also cannot forget the extreme danger that was involved by just signing the document. That seems to be taken for granted nowadays, but it was an act of true bravery. One of the bravest, Ben Franklin, commented after he signed it:

We must hang together, or assuredly, we will hang separately

What else should Americans remember on Independence Day? Are the first principles that founded our nation being adequately considered in Washington today? The Heritage Foundation has some ideas. Tell us below, and send your thoughts to USA Today (letters@usatoday.com).

Gallup recently asked a sampling of Americans, “How serious of a threat to the future of the United States do you consider the following…” The results are clear: Americans judge the national debt on par with terrorism as the top threat facing the nation. Further, independents – a crucial constituency during an election year – believe the debt to be the single most threatening issue facing the country, even topping terrorism.

A quick analysis of the numbers reveals why the public is alarmed. Today debt held by the public stands at approximately $8.6 trillion, up from around $7.5 trillion less than a year ago. Over the past 30 years, debt held by the public has averaged about 39.4 percent of gross domestic product, and last year stood at 53 percent, the highest since 1955. Unfortunately, instead of taking swift actions to address the worsening problem, Congress and the White House have chosen to double down on the unrestrained spending policies of the past. Obama’s budget (the only budget available because Congressional Democrats refuse to draft one this year) sees debt held by the public hitting 90 percent of GDP by 2020.

As the world is currently seeing in Greece and across Europe, there are consequences to excessive debt levels. The American people understand the danger; the question is when our leaders will.

United States Senators went on record this afternoon and the result was unfortunate.  53 Senators voted against a resolution offered by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) that would have disapproved of the Environmental Protection Agency’s backdoor global warming regulations.  Today’s outcome was a victory for anti-growth environmentalists, but a devastating loss for the American people.

The EPA’s regulations will marginalize any potential economic recovery by making investment and job creation more expensive.  Why?  Because the costs of regulation are staggering.  The EPA estimates the average permit will cost applicants $125,000 and 866 hours of labor.  Some businesses will simply close.  The lucky ones will move overseas, cancel expansion plans and just lower wages.  All of those are bad options considering the American economy has lost nearly 8 million jobs over the past 30 months.

Despite the outcome of today’s vote, many liberals recognize the EPA cannot be left to its own devices, which means there will be other, more subtle efforts to limit the EPA’s regulatory dragnet.

Chief among them is a proposal offered by Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).  His proposal would simply delay the implementation of the EPA’s regulation.  Delaying these destructive regulations is not inherently bad, but it does not address the fact that bad regulations are indeed coming.  It creates regulatory uncertainty is bad for the economy and bad for the American people.

According to Greenwire (subscription required), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) promised the Senate would vote on Rockefeller’s proposal before the elections.  The article implied Reid’s promise was designed to prevent the Murkowski resolution from passing.

Another potential alteration of the EPA’s regulatory scheme comes from Senators Tom Carper (D-DE) and Robert Casey (D-PA), both of whom voted against Senator Murkowski’s resolution.  Their approach is rumored to “protect” small businesses while focusing the economic pain on only the biggest emitters.  Any student of economics knows those so-called “big emitters” will pass those costs along businesses and families.  Even worse, the plan would only “protect” the little guy until 2016.

While those two policy prescriptions are misguided, the real danger is that Senators will use this failure as an excuse to move forward legislatively on a cap-and-trade scheme or renewable electricity mandate.  A Heritage analysis found that the House-passed global warming bill would destroy 2.5 million jobs and $9.4 trillion in economic growth.  Similarly, an analysis of a renewable electricity mandate would reduce employment by more than 1 million jobs, add to our national debt and undermine our quality of life.

By voting against the Murkowski resolution, Senators have failed to address the primary concern of Americans—the economy.

In a rather confessional tone, Jeffrey Sachs declared in his recent op-ed:

The global fiscal stimulus championed last year by the Obama administration is coming undone, repudiated by the same Group of 20 that endorsed it last year. Now, against a backdrop of a widening sovereign debt crisis, we need to abandon short-term thinking in favour of the long-term investments needed for sustained recovery.

Indeed, the current period of uncertain and fragile economic rebound poses a critical opportunity to ponder the principles that can revitalize economic growth. More than ever, the urgency to adhere to sensible principles is high as a wave of interventionism has seen government take more control of our private economic activity, wearing away economic freedom hard won through years of determined work. Government’s rush to fix the perceived causes of the economic crisis has demonstrated the dangers of interventionist policies by big government. Rather than fixing economic problems, they can actually exacerbate them.

Unfortunately, our government seems to be exhibiting a “fire, ready, aim” mindset with regards to government action in the economy. Fixing something without fully understanding why it’s broken can be very dangerous and further erode our economic freedom.

As Sachs points out, “[President Obama] and his advisers ignored one of the key insights of modern macroeconomics: that the result of fiscal policy depends not only on current taxes and spending but also on their expected trajectories in the future.” Policy choices made at this critical juncture of the economic uncertainty will indisputably shape the growth trajectory for our economy in coming years.

If our policy makers, Democrats and Republicans alike, are serious about restoring and securing our economic future, they should begin with a renewed commitment to economic freedom, which is key to a vibrant, innovative and growing economy. The challenge is to revamp the reform agenda to focus on creating more economic freedom, not less. Our leaders should trust Americans to find the best opportunities to create jobs and economic growth. That is the best and most principled approach to move beyond the current economic woes as quickly as possible…

First of all, the online sport was all too real. The participating ninth grade boys reportedly posted information and constructed their “draft” using ninth grade girls from other area prep schools. They posted nasty, sexually oriented comments about each of nine girls on the web site. The intention was to begin a round of parties over last Labor Day Weekend to which the girls would be invited. The participating Landon students would then try to obtain sexual favors from the girls and track and tally their results in order to determine the sex league champion.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times surfaced the story (school officials stepped in and suspended several of the male students but state that disciplinary records are confidential) and called for a “curriculum overhaul” at the school. “Young men everywhere,” she wrote, “must be taught, beyond platitudes, that young women are not prey.” The Landon School administration stated that it has “an extensive ethics and character education” program that includes “civility toward women.”

But something deeper than “incivility” was at work in this incident. The notion that teenagers can and should be taught to engage in whatever sexual explorations suit them is widespread, and in fact this message is heavily subsidized by government programs and policies. Abstinence programs, the best of which are effective and more properly understood as programs designed to instill real character and true civility, are derided by entities that receive the lion’s share of public funding.

The appalling antics of rising freshmen at one prep school are a reflection of appalling advice from many adults who think nothing of having their own fantasies about a national “Petting Project” or teaching kids multiple ways to use others for sexual gratification. The good news is that for anyone genuinely seeking the kind of curriculum overhaul Dowd recommends has a number of very good – even fantastic – options.

This week, we learned that the Obama administration is orchestrating a $125 million propaganda campaign to sell the recently enacted health-care law to the public.  That effort will be funded by labor unions and other groups from the Democratic political orbit.  It comes on top of the misleading government mailer sent to the nation’s seniors, at the expense of taxpayers, touting the supposed benefits of ObamaCare for the elderly.  On Tuesday, the president himself will join the fray again to make the sales pitch, this time promoting the colossal waste of taxpayer money associated with $250 per senior bribes to be issued this summer and fall.

The problem the White House has, however, has never been insufficient public relations spin.  The problem is the substance.  Americans care deeply about their health care, and they have seen right through the Democratic rhetoric on ObamaCare from day one.  They know that it is a poorly conceived experiment, built on the flawed assumption that the problems in U.S. health care can be solved with heavier regulation, subsidization, and micro-management from Washington, D.C.

In Medicare, the results of the new law will be disastrous.  ObamaCare will cut payments to the private insurance component of the program (called Medicare Advantage, or MA) by nearly $200 billion over ten years.  The chief actuary of the program says this cut will eventually drive 7 million seniors — many with low-incomes — out of the plan they would prefer to enroll in.  And it will mean thousands of dollars in benefit reductions for every MA enrollee, beginning next year.  These seniors won’t be silenced with patronizing and one-time checks.  In addition, the new law imposes arbitrary price cutting for all manner of Medicare services, which the chief actuary says will harm access to care by forcing scores of institutions to stop taking Medicare beneficiaries.

Last week, we learned that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has postponed issuing guidance on the ill-conceived “medical-loss ratio” requirement in the new law because, as passed by Congress, it will cause massive and unnecessary disruption to millions of current insurance enrollees.  One estimate is that 1 to 2 million people with individual insurance will lose their coverage if the requirement is imposed because national insurers will be forced to exit the market to avoid large business losses.

The president has said repeatedly that Americans will get to keep the insurance they have today if they like it.  But that’s quite clearly not going to be the case.  Douglas Holtz-Eakin, of the American Action Forum, has released a new study that shows some 35 million Americans will get bumped from job-based coverage under the new law and be forced into the new government-managed system.  That’s because the massive new subsidies promised by the government will make dropping insurance unavoidable for thousands of employers.  He also predicts the migration out of employer plans will drive up the overall federal costs dramatically, adding another $500 billion over ten years to the costs projected by the Congressional Budget Office for the bill.

Perhaps that why CBO’s Director, Doug Elmendorf, is saying that the federal government’s health costs are still unsustainable, even after passage of the new law, despite repeated presidential promises that ObamaCare would solve our budget problems by painlessly “bending the cost curve.”

The truth is, the more we learn about ObamaCare, the worse it gets.  It’s filled with budgetary gimmicks and flawed assumptions that will bankrupt the U.S. treasury. Its taxes will force deep cuts in employment in the medical device and other industries.  Restaurants and other employers will have strong incentives to avoid hiring workers from low income households in order to lessen the burden from the law’s mandates and penalties.  It will disrupt insurance for millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with the coverage they have today.  And the government’s clumsy cost-cutting efforts will undermine the quality of American medicine.

Most Americans already instinctively understand all of this.  But it’s also clear that the administration and its allies will spend millions trying to persuade them that up is down when it comes to health care. We have launched this web site to set the record straight.  ObamaCareWatch.org pulls together all of the best evidence and analysis about the legislation, as well as relevant news items and commentary, in an accessible and searchable format for anyone to use as they need to.  Our aim is to provide Americans with the facts so that they can hold those who sponsored and passed ObamaCare accountable for what they have done.

Cross-posted at ObamaCare Watch.

Political candidates apparently can choose no better campaign issue this year than excessive government spending and the exploding debt it’s producing.  In one campaign after another, voters high and low on the economic ladder respond in the same way when challengers berate incumbents for reckless debt accumulation: raucous, fist-pumping applause and that same grimace that must have graced the faces of our revolutionary forebears.

This prime issue of the 2010 election season no doubt will be the subject of analysis by students of politics for years to come. Even now, however, we know something. Anyone who ponders the question of why voters are so hot about public sector debt will quickly discover that otherwise diverse voters are relatively united in their apprehension that ballooning sovereign debt threatens our economy.

Are voters right to be so worried about how rising debt threatens their economic future, or are some politicians and most pundits right that, once again, the voters’ emotions have won over their reason?

Well, it turns out that the voters are right, if new research from Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University stands up under academic scrutiny.  Reinhart and Rogoff study the relationship between rising debt levels, inflation and economic growth rates for 44 developed and developing countries. Their dataset contains 3,700 annual observations across a wide range of political and economic settings.

What did they find? For the period 1946 through 2009, developed countries (which includes the United States) grew at an annual rate of just shy of 4 percent when debt was no greater than 30 percent of GDP. For debt burdens above 30 but below 90 percent, economic growth slowed down but remained, on average, around 3 to 3.5 percent per year. However, a debt burden of over 90 percent of GDP was associated with a significantly slower economy: the average growth rate is negative and the median rate is just at 2 percent.

When Reinhart and Rogoff focused just on the U.S., the association of high debt burden and economic slowdown becomes even more pronounced. They use data from 1790 through 2009. When debt rises to 90 percent of GDP, both the average and the median economic growth rates are negative and the inflation rate skyrockets to above 5.5 percent.

What makes this research so telling is the commonly accepted prediction that U.S. sovereign debt is on its way to 100 percent of GDP and doing so quickly. The International Monetary Fund predicted that total U.S. government debt would reach that level in 2015, just four years from now. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that debt will be above 90 percent by 2020. If one adds in the debt U.S. government agencies owe one another, the U.S. debt could be above 100 percent next year.

No wonder voters are angry about the growth rate in public debt. Given that most elected policy makers continue to borrow for current spending, maybe the voters know something the politicians have yet to learn.

Did you know that the federal government spent $2.6 million training Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly? Were you aware that Washington is on track to spend $30,543 per household in 2010? What about a recent audit that classified nearly half of all purchases on government credit cards as improper, fraudulent, or embezzled?

The federal government is addicted to spending our money and can’t seem to kick the habit. Heritage scholar Brian Reidl has released a new paper chronicling all this spending. Our latest video highlights just some of the startling figures he uncovered and makes the case that we must get government spending under control if we want to restore America’s fiscal health.

Please take a moment to watch our video and share it with friends and family. America needs to know the scope of the problems we face.

Typically, international conferences like the Review Conference of the International Criminal Court are predictable, even boring. The months (or, in this case, years) prior to the conference are spent in meetings, sifting through various positions and policy red lines among the delegations, so that differences are minor by the time the conference kicks off, making the path to a consensus agreement clear.

The most important priority for the conference organizers and many of the delegates is that the conference be viewed as a “success.” On rare occasions, conferences deadlock on major issues, and the delegates eventually agree on a less ambitious final agreement than was originally envisioned. Inevitably, this watered-down outcome is nevertheless presented as a triumph.

Extremely rare is an international conference than cannot be viewed as anything other than a failure. The 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was one: Not only were the delegates unable to agree to a binding agreement, but they failed to achieve consensus support for the non-binding Copenhagen Accord.

What is happening in Kampala is the reverse of the typical pattern for international conferences. Instead of a gradual convergence around a common proposal or text as countries compromise or abandon positions that lack broad support, in Kampala we have seen new proposals for the amendment on the crime of aggression pop up like mushrooms.

• Argentina, Brazil, and Switzerland offered an alternative to the official amendment text on Monday that would permit the ICC to investigate an alleged crime of aggression if the U.N. Security Council determines that an act of aggression had been committed. However, it also would allow the ICC prosecutor to proceed with an investigation if theSecurity Council had not made such a determination six months after the prosecutor notified the Security Council that he wished to proceed with an investigation; in this second scenario, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber would be able to authorize the investigation. Thus, the proposal would have two “triggers” for the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.
• Canada offered an amendment on Tuesday. It again included the Security Council trigger and the Pre-Trial Chamber trigger in the event that the Security Council makes no determination on aggression within six months of being notified by the ICC prosecutor. Critically, though, the Canadian proposal would allow the ICC to proceed with the case absent aSecurity Council determination of aggression only if the states involved had accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC over the crime of aggression by ratifying the Rome Statute and the amendment on the crime of aggression. Thus, both the alleged victim(s) and perpetrator(s) of the act of aggression would have to “consent” to the authority of the ICC to investigate a crime of aggression (unless, of course, the U.N.Security Council determined that aggression had been committed).
• Later on Tuesday, Slovenia offered a modified version of the Canadian proposal that would allow the ICC prosecutor to approach theSecurity Council a second time to try and convince it to refer the alleged case of aggression to the ICC. It also recommended that state parties revisit the crime of aggression sometime in the future, after seven-eighths of the member states had ratified the amendment on the crime of aggression, to consider additional “triggers” or other changes.

The African and Latin American delegations and the pro-ICC NGOs are very much opposed to the Canadian and Slovenian proposals, which they see as greatly weakening the independence and authority of the ICC. They worry that, absent aSecurity Council determination of aggression, the proposals would require an “aggressor” state to have ratified the Rome Statute and the amendment on the crime of aggression. They believe this is extremely unlikely for most potential aggressors and would therefore curtail the ICC’s powers.

A number of other states, mostly European, supported the Canadian amendment because it builds on customary international law based on state consent and reciprocity. Shockingly, one country even defended the Canadian proposal as an appropriate recognition of national sovereignty. (References to national sovereignty at the U.N. are nearly as rare as U.N. resolutions praising Israel.)

The proliferation of proposals for the amendment on the crime of aggression is a clear sign that fundamental differences remain. The most contentious issue remains whether a U.N.Security Council determination of aggression should be the sole trigger for an ICC investigation of an alleged crime of aggression. Currently, there is no bridge over this divide.

As the conference winds down and time constraints come into play, the pressure to have a “successful” conference could lead to a compromise. The compromise most likely to arise is an agreement expressing the lowest common denominator: adopting only the flawed definition of the crime of aggression without any accompanying means for the ICC to exercise authority over that crime, or adopting the definition with a sole Security Council trigger, since that option is contained in all the proposals. In either case, it would be important for the U.S. to successfully get the delegates to adopt its “understandings” on how that definition should be interpreted if it is to mitigate the problems potentially posed by the definition of the crime of aggression.

However, a good bet right now is that no consensus will be reached on the crime of aggression by the end of the conference and nothing will be adopted.

Either result should be considered a positive outcome from the perspective of the United States.

Cross-posted at The Corner.