DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING "Cost of Freedom Recap" CONTAINS STRONG OPINIONS WHICH ARE NOT A REFLECTION OF THE OPINIONS OF FOX NEWS AND SHOULD NOT BE RELIED UPON AS INVESTMENT ADVICE WHEN MAKING PERSONAL INVESTMENT DECISIONS. IT IS FOX NEWS' POLICY THAT CONTRIBUTORS DISCLOSE POSITIONS THEY HOLD IN STOCKS THEY DISCUSS, THOUGH POSITIONS MAY CHANGE. READERS OF "Cost of Freedom Recap" MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN INVESTMENT DECISIONS.
NEW FOCUS ON NATION'S DEBT AS PRESIDENT TRUMP ISSURES FEDERAL HIRING FREEZE
Steve Forbes: The key thing is follow through by the Cabinet's secretaries and budget for overseas spending for the federal government because you have congress subcommittees and with their pet agencies.The key is reducing the scope of the federal government, If you don't do that, this bloat will come back again
John Tamny: I don't think so, I'm all for slowing the growth of the federal government. I think this is a symbolic distraction; it's going to give the citizenry a more efficient government? No, it's not. Government is over bloated. If you want to give people a better government. Greatly shrink federal head count. They're not doing that here.
Rich Karlgaard: Jimmy Carter is underappreciated, the guy who deregulated. I understand the point that this is symbolism, but sometimes symbolism is where you have to start. The Reagan revolution got going when he fired the air traffic controllers and that seemed like a huge statement.
Bruce Japsen: Well, I mean, the problem is with, you know, Donald is talking about his executive order. It seems like executive orders by etch-a-sketch where he's changing all the time. I mean, he has a lot of caveats in there for defense and military personnel and policing and so forth and then he's talking about investigations into the election because he's going to probably have to hire, you know, a lot of grave diggers to find out-- find the 3 million people that voted for hillary and not him. He's all over the place with this.
Elizabeth MacDonald: Tom Coburn says it's 400 billion in waste and redundancy. This would be waste I see. D.C. Is blind to it, and D.C. Is a boom town. In the united states government we are paying government union workers to work from their couches at home on government duties. That's the problem.
Bill Baldwin: I think this is a frivolous gesture that distracts us from what John is talking about. How about eliminate the Department of Education and return that power and that money to the states. That's a good place to start and I've got more departments to start with.
NEW DEBATE OVER SCHOOL CHOICE AS COTE TO CONFIRM BETSY DEVOS AS EDUCATION SECRETARY NEARS
Rich Karlgaard: Boy, she is absolutely right. One of the scandals that happened in American society is that social mobility, upward mobility we've always taken for granted for in the great United States is getting worse and worse and a lot of it has to do with these poor, not the good ones, but the poor public schools. They need competition and the poor kids need it most of all.
Bruce Japsen: Yeah, but I mean high school graduation rates were up under the Obama administration and I think that certainly that both sides would agree that there should be more done at the local level. I don't know if, you know, cutting spending is certainly an answer…
Elizabeth MacDonald: That's taxpayer money. To rich's point. Why is it okay that wealthy parents can pick the schools where their children go to, and poor can't. And if they get grades, we support that. The public schools has not been good and the media has been in the bag. Pell Grants. We give to students and student loans to pick their public or private college. I don't see why that's fair
Bill Baldwin: We should all support as a matter of moral principle school choice by poor families. But Betsy DeVos is looking at a miracle to transform the students to winners
Steve Forbes: Charter schools do better than public schools and crave an environment for learning. Parents may have been indifferent and kids indifferent in that kind of environment. By golly, they change, it's not static, people change in a good way.
John Tamny: I don't think so. Why is it that conservatives want to then have the government centrally plan our way out of the education problem? I'm all for competition, i think it improves school, but I'm with Bill and always have been with Bill on this. Bad schools are more than people want to admit a function of disinterested students and disinterested parents, if you don't fix that.
FACEBOOK FUELS NEW DEBATE AS IT TAKES ADDITIONAL STEPS TO TARGET 'FAKE NEWS'
Steve Forbes: David, other than pedophilia, that kind of content or overt calls for violence, they really should just let it roll. People can start to sort this thing out on their own, and when you get something false out there, there are plenty of people out there ready to pounce on it and Facebook is a legal private company that can legally do whatever they want, but they have such influence on what sites succeed and don't succeed. A site gets rude like Breitbart, they can do harm to them. Let it roll.
John Tamny: That's the beauty of it. It's not that markets are perfect, they're failing all the time and we correct the failures. Facebook is a private company; it should be allowed to fail in how it filters news.
Bruce Japsen: Well, they could be going down a slippery slope here because if they want to be more of a traditional news organization, Fox, pick what to lead your show with, what not to use. That might be what people want. I check trending twitter topics and sometimes you get a laugh out of it when you find out it's somebody commenting. They could be less social media and they could lose people.
Bill Baldwin: You could call it censorship, but what I'm paying them to do, Forbes magazine, a book publisher, you want them to weed out the bad stuff.
Bruce Japsen: I kind of agree with bill on this one. Look, Facebook is a large publicly traded company, they want-- you know, their shareholders are going to want them to continually build value in the company and I think that will guide Facebook to play it, you know, down the middle pretty well.
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