Nicholas Anthony Today marks the publication of my latest report: Understanding Debanking. The report reviews the growing phenomenon of debanking—the sudden and often unexplained closure of financial accounts. While media and political narratives often attribute these closures to political or religious discrimination, I found that the majority of debanking cases stem from governmental pressure. Yet, documenting these experiences is only ...
Chris Edwards The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) costs federal taxpayers more than $110 billion a year and is vulnerable to at least 10 types of fraud. Some types of SNAP fraud have ballooned in the digital economy. Card “skimming” has plagued SNAP and may have cost billions of dollars over the years. The government deposits food stamp funds onto ...
Michael F. Cannon Democrats and Republicans agree: consumers need relief from rising Obamacare premiums. Help may be on the way, thanks to Kentucky Rep. Vanessa Grossl (R‑Georgetown). On January 1, Obamacare premiums rose an average of 26 percent for 24 million enrollees and 25 million uninsured who are sitting out Obamacare’s overpriced coverage. I am old enough to remember when ...
Benjamin Giltner Over the holidays, President Trump announced that the US Navy would begin building a new class of battleship, unsurprisingly called the “Trump class.” The United States faces a delay in shipbuilding capacities, with these ships necessary to bolster America’s grand strategy to project its power across the globe. Yet, building these battleships—or any battleship for that matter—is a terrible ...
Adam N. Michel The United States places an unusually heavy share of the tax burden on higher earners. You wouldn’t know this from hearing some politicians claim that the rich escape next to tax-free or deserve to be taxed at higher rates. In reality, the data show the opposite. The most recent example is a study by the Fraser Institute, ...
Colleen Hroncich Last year, Congress created a federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) that help families choose the best educational options for their children. This tax credit goes beyond the role of the federal government and should not have been created. But, because it’s coming, it is crucial that it be executed well. In November, the Department ...
Matthew Cavedon My Cato colleague Dr. Jeffrey Singer recently endorsed New York’s pending legalization of Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). While his perspective reflects a more conventional libertarian judgment than mine, I want to offer a differing take. Dr. Singer is a surgeon and a committed libertarian. I agree with many of his positions, including opposing the War on Drugs, ...
Ryan Bourne Newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week promised New Yorkers that he would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” He knows what he’s doing in setting up this dichotomy. “Collectivism” is not a slip of the tongue or a vague moral appeal to kindness. It is a loaded ideological term with a long, ...
Brent Skorup Just before Thanksgiving, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that investigators in the Department of Justice had obtained more than two years of Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R‑OH) phone records. The subpoena, issued in April 2022, demanded “all call detail records” from Rep. Jordan’s phone company from January 2020 to the present. This disclosure is alarming for several reasons. For ...
Stephen Richer The United States Post Office recently updated the Domestic Mail Manual in a way that will affect “Postmarks and Postal Possession.” The USPS’s explainer states: “[W]e have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the ...