Jai Kedia There is no shortage of strange economic proposals in our current political landscape from both the left and the right. You can add changing gross domestic product (GDP) calculations to exclude government spending to this long and befuddling list. GDP is the measure of all final goods and services in the economy. It includes final goods and services ...
Jeffrey Miron On February 20, the IRS fired 6,700 employees, many of whom worked in enforcement and compliance. Some warn this will weaken enforcement, deepen fiscal imbalance, and make evasion easier. Others see the firings as a long-overdue rollback of an overreaching bureaucracy. A different question of interest—especially to libertarians—is whether shrinking enforcement and therefore tax collections is an effective step ...
Chris Edwards Republicans must cut federal spending to tame exploding deficits. DOGE is trimming the bureaucracy and the House budget plan trims entitlements, but more cuts are needed. A new Cato study identifies $181 billion a year in federal spending on corporate welfare, or business subsidies. The government hands out subsidies to agriculture, broadband, semiconductors, energy, airports, automobiles, and many ...
Stephen Slivinski Last week, the new Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson created a task force that, among other things, lists “harmful occupational licensing requirements” among its list of top concerns. All indications suggest that the FTC under President Trump is likely to be just as activist as the Biden FTC in equally bad ways but against different targets (like ...
Ian Vásquez This past Saturday evening, March 1, Argentine President Javier Milei opened up a new session of his country’s Congress with a speech that is worth listening to in its entirety. But on a day that the United States continues down the protectionist path and imposes high tariffs on its three largest trading partners, I thought it useful to ...
Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon For nearly 60 years, the United States steel industry has been one of the most protected sectors of the American economy. Policymakers have showered an unsavory mix of trade restrictions to benefit domestic steel firms including quotas, tariffs, aggressive trade remedies, and procurement preferences. With the Trump administration promising a new onslaught of protectionism, steel ...
Walter Olson Number seven in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy: Register and watch: I’ll be part of a livestreamed panel from UCLA this Tuesday (March 4) at 12:15 p.m. Pacific Time (3:15 p.m. Eastern) We’ll be discussing documentary proof of citizenship requirements for voting and the SAVE Act in Congress. Other panelists will include Arizona ...
Romina Boccia While Americans fixate on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to rein in wasteful spending, Congress is quietly plotting to make the nation’s fiscal situation worse. The House recently passed a budget resolution calling for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts plus $300 billion in new spending over the coming decade—all balanced out with $2 trillion in offsetting ...
Nicholas Anthony For government officials who have come to expect sweeping financial surveillance to be the norm, cryptocurrencies have been a difficult subject to grapple with. The ability to conduct peer-to-peer transactions without the involvement of a third-party strikes at the entire foundation of the US financial surveillance regime. To take a recent example, Harvard fellow Timothy Massad told Congress ...
Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett As government funding runs out by March 14, Democrats are attempting to use the appropriations process to block recent cost-cutting measures led by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), raising questions about the possibility of a government shutdown. The executive’s ongoing attempts to reduce fraud, waste, and ...