Dominik Lett Read the new paper here. The Cato Institute has just released an updated version of the emergency spending paper I co-authored with Romina Boccia last year. The key takeaway: Congressional abuse of emergency spending designations is worse than we initially thought. Adjusted for inflation and including interest costs, Congress has spent a whopping $15 trillion through the use of ...
Alex Nowrasteh Many of you read my Cato blog post from September 11 about the frequency of deadly, politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States. People are apprehensive about these attacks in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a left-wing, politically motivated terrorist. Here’s a short follow-up with my data and a detailed explanation of the ...
Jeffrey A. Singer and Bautista Vivanco As promised, the White House released the recommendations of the MAHA Commission—the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy Report”—on September 9 as part of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative. The report does not add to the pre-made conclusions and unsupported or poorly sourced claims found in the Commission’s MAHA Report last May. ...
Jerome Famularo Recently, we published a briefing paper that highlights our case against the US Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund. The CDFI Fund is essentially a welfare program that subsidizes financial services through tax credits and grants. Congress should eliminate the CDFI Fund because it is a tool for redistributing resources from taxpayers (present and future) to politically ...
Nicholas Anthony Amid failing to justify financial surveillance to Congress, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) quietly published a new requirement that allows the government to surveil transactions as little as $1,000. If this announcement seems familiar, it may be because earlier this year, the agency tried to surveil transactions as little as $200 at the southern border. The order ...
Erec Smith The assassination of Charlie Kirk is sending shockwaves across the American political landscape. Kirk, a husband, father of two, and a prominent conservative pundit and political organizer known for his work with college students, was shot during an event at Utah Valley University on September 10. The attack on Charlie Kirk was not just personal; it was violence against ...
Jeffrey A. Singer The MAHA Commission released its Make Our Children Healthy Again strategy report on September 9. While parents are the primary audience for direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug ads, the government now plans to regulate what they see more heavily. The question is simple but crucial: who should decide what information patients can access—the regulators or the patients themselves? Page ...
Jai Kedia The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will meet this week to deliberate on changing the target for the federal funds rate (FFR), the main policy rate used to affect economy-wide changes. After a series of poor employment reports, betting markets and business media expect a rate cut, with a 25 basis point decrease the most likely outcome. However, last week’s inflation report ...
Jeffrey Miron Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, recently announced that Florida would eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates, making shots for measles, chickenpox, hepatitis B, and more optional (although some changes would require legislative approval). In response to strong pushback, however, including from President Trump, Florida appears to be walking back at least some of this policy change. Still, Ladapo’s position ...
Colleen Hroncich Things weren’t going the way Ar’Jillian Gilmer expected. After much prayer, she had taken a leap of faith and left a secure job as a public school teacher to create Gilmer’s Learning Solutions. “I advertised homeschool support, and I’m thinking, ‘On a Tuesday at 10:00 a.m., I’ll get Rachel. She’s going to come, and I’m going to help ...