The Heritage Foundation's blog publishes conservative think-tank commentary on US policy, including taxes, the budget, internet regulation, and education.
Commenters link it as the Heritage Foundation's counterpoint on budget deficits and debt, and they argue with its positions.
If ad hominem is the best you can do...
I didn't provide anything deeper because this has been rehashed many times, and those claiming that G-S is what allowed the crisis have never offered anything of substance in those previous discussions.
But if you insist on more meat, consider (from the original citation [1]):
the evidence so far shows that Gramm-Leach-Bliley has helped soften the blow to taxpayers by allowing commercial banks to take over trouble investment firms. Just look at which organization’s have failed:
Bear Stearns was an investment bank before it was sold to JP Morgan Chase (which includes a commercial bank).
Fannie Mae were Freddie Mac were government sponsored entities before the government bought them.
Lehman Brothers was an investment bank before it want bankrupt.
Merrill Lynch was an investment bank befor it was sold to Bank of America (which is a commercial bank).
AIG is an insurance company with no commercial banking division.
Remember, Glass-Steagal was passed to protect commercial banks from failure by forbidding them from investment bank practices like trading in securities and underwriting stocks and bonds. As you can see above non of the failed institutions are commercial banks that got in trouble through risky investment banking. Instead, it is the commercial banks that are providing some stability to the system by purchasing troubled investment banks. Without Gramm-Leach-Bliley they would not even be allowed to technically do this.
Or…
This is essentially what Paul Krugman has been saying in the New York Times for a while now. Essentially the idea is this: in a bubble, or period of economic growth, large amounts of deficit spending is a bad thing. In a recession or depression, John Maynard Keynes famously argued that, counterintuitively, it may be highly beneficial to enter a short period of extreme deficit spending. The idea behind this is that in a recession or depression, the entire economic system contracts. In a period of success, everyone's a little more loose with their money: everything's goin great out there, why not take a risk? The opposite happens in a recession: people are worried, so save , save, save.
Troublingly, this is the exact opposite of what is needed to get out of a recession. In order to increase employment and restore growth, spending needs to increase, not decrease. If consumer spending is at an all-time low, why would corporations hire more people, instead of less? This is where Keynes came in. He argued that, unlike corporations, the government wasn't limited by the temperamental swings of the market. In fact, the government had the ability to do what very few corporations can: go into a very large amount of short term debt. The idea behind this is to commission large projects which force corporations to rehire and increase expenditures. As such, employment increases and salary for those employees does as well. Once consumers have a sufficient amount of disposable income, the…
US bases outside of America are vital to the US if it wants to operate on other continents[1]. The bases in Germany for instance were used for medical care of casualties from Iraq and Afganistan. It's fair to say that without such bases, the US probably could not operate in the way it does.
The US has aquirred it's bases for different historic reasons. Some, in the pacific, were leased off the UK for money. Others, like the bases in Japan and Germany, were forced on countries that lost a war with the US, and as few who fought in or supported that war are still alive, you can see why those countries might consider whether they benefit from them.
It is hard to separate beneficial activities that the US does, like the protection of shipping as it travels past East Africa, from it's pursuit of strategic objectives, such as rivalry for dominance in Africa with the Chinese, and middle eastern power blocks. And in addition, there is a legitimate counter terrorism aspect, which probably benefits the US more than other countries.
The thing is that the US had a great deal of control over Western Europe, imposed by force in the 1940s, and declining since then, and this was achieved as part of a struggle between the US and USSR, where European countries were really pawns. As the power declines (in part due to increasing strength and unity between EU countries), it's hard to imagine that the US will be able to maintain it's bases.
I think you should try to see it more…
If things stay as they are, things will be easier and cheaper. But things never stay the same, and even for their needs, crypto won't suddenly become useless (maybe the kind that relies on central parties, but people who take this stuff seriously probably don't rely on the "we promise we wont look at your key generation" in their threat models, and look, even AFRICOM uses Chinese satellites[0] which I'm sure numerous of SIGINT folks had to give their ok for, right?).
And there are things on the horizon like meshnets[1] that should prove to bring more challenges for governments (and private contractors/companies) that seek to tap backbones, DIY cellphones[2] that bypass coercive governments who sweet talk org/corps, and cheap drones that can be controlled by gestures of potential targets at the disposal of the masses[3] that enable crowd-sourced data collection and attack vectors previously not available to the common man.
Also, impromptu DoD initiatives[4], don't make me think things are as asymmetric as most people may think.
[0] http://blog.heritage.org/2013/05/07/american-military-communications-should-not-be-running-over-chinese-satellites/
[1] http://forum.chimeshnet.com/
[2] http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=2182
[3] http://startupdestiny.com/2013/11/19/why-i-hacked-an-ar-drone-with-leap-motion-and-node-js-part-1-of-2/
[4] http://www.zyn.com/sbir/sbres/sbir/dod/darpa/darpasb133-002.htm
You are correct there is an unfair assumption in the article of some 1:1 conspiracy of firing 1,000's of Americans with intent to replace them through some as of yet Immigration reform. However, to answer your question, yes there is evidence to suggest companies want to hire immigrants to fill the same jobs that Americans were laid off from.
This is a link to a case of first impression (lawsuit) for this kind of discriminant practice, firing Americans for foreign workers, showing American's were kept on board to train their foreign replacements, then fired without cause.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/16/1055249/-Discrimination-Lawsuit-May-Crush-H1-b-Practice-of-Training-Our-Foreign-Replacements#
Ironically, the discovery in the lawsuit tends to show that the foreign workers were more expensive, because more had to be hired to replicate the productivity of the "skilled American workers".
More evidence, but a stretch, is the Immigration reform proposed by "the gang of 8" which allowed for the corporate demanded H1-B's but created strict regulations (protections for the American workers before allowing the foreign candidate to be hired; for example the H1-B employee would have to be paid more than their American counter-part), which was opposed by these very same corporations. http://blog.heritage.org/2013/05/20/immigration-gang-of-eight-would-make-h-1b-program-unworkable/
As a professional liberal, it pains me to have to do this. But since nobody else is, here's the conservative take. Because, seriously, there are real debates about this stuff.
Imaginary Cato institute position: "Leaving higher education to the free market is always more efficient. People naturally make the most rational economic decisions in their journey to achieve maximum happiness. Government interventions, such as confiscating money through the threat of violence (this is what they call taxes) to support free higher education will always distort this market, leading to inefficiencies on the path to maximum happiness. Governments are incompetent and inefficient because of the lack of market incentives, while markets are ruthlessly efficient."
Imaginary Mitt Romney position: The financial support I have received from for-profit colleges is immense. Seriously, those places basically print money. We need more of them.
Real Heritage Foundation positions:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/01/ways-to-make-higher-education-more-affordable
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/08/10/the-assault-on-for-profit-universities/
I really do agree with the above comic strip. But liberals like me don't operate on a vacuum. Donate some money to us, you rich silicon valley types.