Bautista Vivanco One year after giving notice, the United States has officially left the World Health Organization. The United States was the WHO’s largest contributor. Its departure will significantly reshape global efforts to prevent disease, maybe for the better. According to Cato Senior Fellow Jeffrey A. Singer, MD, this withdrawal might offer a chance to rethink global and domestic public health. When ...
Walter Olson It can be hard to get some Americans interested in the well-documented problem of ICE and Border Patrol abuse, perhaps because they assume that the rights being trampled are “only” those of non-citizens rather than people like them (although every modern justice on the Supreme Court, including Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia, has taken the view ...
Travis Fisher Millions of Americans are bracing for a days-long winter storm that could potentially cause major damage, including extensive power outages. Ahead of the storm, we should reflect on the source of our safety against extreme weather. We are resilient to winter storms like Fern because of the economic development that comes from free markets and free societies. The ...
Scott Lincicome My latest column at The Dispatch examines what President Trump’s now-canceled Greenland tariff threat says about not only US trade policy but also the increasing use and abuse of “emergency” powers by the executive branch (and not just Trump). Summarizing previous Cato research, I note that the 1976 Senate special committee charged with emergency powers reform was appalled ...
Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon The Trump administration continues to tell America’s farm community that this is a golden age and that the administration’s tariffs are working. The data tell a different story. A new report from North Dakota State University’s (NDSU) Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies quantifies what American farmers and ranchers already know from their ...
Colleen Hroncich Justine Wilson thought she wanted to be a veterinarian, but in college she discovered she was more interested in activism and community education. After graduation, she worked at a nature camp that led classes for teachers and their students during the school year. “I would have a little group for 2 ½ days, and that wasn’t enough,” she ...
Dominik Lett Congress appears poised to pass full-year appropriations for fiscal year (FY) 2026, dodging a looming January 30 funding deadline. The proposed $1.7 trillion discretionary budget represents a $38 billion increase compared to enacted FY 2025 levels and $50 billion above the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act’s non-binding budget targets. While Republicans tout cuts to “woke” agencies, Democrats are claiming ...
Jeffrey A. Singer When governments ban products, they don’t eliminate demand—they redirect it. That basic economic fact is especially important in nicotine policy, where people don’t simply stop using nicotine because a preferred product disappears. Flavored vaping bans is a case in point. Many states and some cities have enacted bans on in-store and/or online sales of flavored vapes. However, adults also ...
Nicholas Anthony At the World Economic Forum, Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau proclaimed that he trusts “central banks with a democratic mandate” far more than the “private issuers of Bitcoin.” The problem? Bitcoin doesn’t have issuers. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, another speaker at the event, quickly corrected him, saying, “Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol. There’s actually no ...
Norbert Michel This week at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, the spectacle of American politicians attacking the goose that laid the golden egg continued with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. That flies in the face of Lutnick’s own success. He became one of the richest people in the world working at the global financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald ...