Romina Boccia and Ritvik Thakur Medicare1 isn’t just facing a trust fund shortfall—it’s threatening America’s entire fiscal future. While headlines warn that the Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund2 will run out in 2033, the real danger comes from a different part of the program: Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI). SMI refers to Medicare spending by Part B (doctors’ visits and outpatient ...
Neal McCluskey The Trump administration has proffered nine universities a deal: Take our rules, and we will give you special access to federal money and “partnerships.” It’s a deal that all the colleges should reject because it would involve selling their souls. And the problem is not that the deal is coming from Donald Trump. Although some aspects of the ...
Adam N. Michel At the center of the government shutdown is a disagreement over whether to extend a temporary pandemic-era expansion of the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credits. These subsidies cover health insurance premiums for the roughly 7 percent of Americans who use the government-run Obamacare insurance marketplace. Sold as a temporary boost during the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsidies ...
Michael F. Cannon Everyone says Medicare is facing a “trust fund shortfall.” Not only is that a gross falsehood, the reality is much worse. The very phrase “Medicare trust fund” is a pure falsehood. There is no such thing. That which the phrase describes contains no funds, nor should one trust anybody who pretends it does. When people use the ...
Solveig Singleton and Jerome Famularo Financial service products and markets are complex, which is partly why some insist that consumers need the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Ironically, the CFPB itself has failed to appreciate this complexity, enacting rules that do more harm than good because of unintended consequences. This post, the third in a series on CFPB reform, surveys ...
Nicholas Anthony This year is the 55th anniversary of the Bank Secrecy Act. At the 50th anniversary, Michael J. Casey wrote in the Cato Journal about how “the system’s pervasive identifying, tracking, and reporting of transactions imposes very real costs on the global economy.” It’s been five years, and things have largely gotten worse. Banks filed 27.5 million reports and spent ...
Jeffrey Miron In a recent Washington Post op-ed, tax policy expert Scott Hodge reminds us that many universities engage in numerous activities that are tax-exempt but have only an indirect or modest connection to education: According to the latest Internal Revenue Service tax data … the top 100 private colleges generated $207 billion of revenue in 2023. Roughly 80 percent ...