Clark Neily Imagine you were operating a shark-diving charter boat in Florida and came across a long fishing line that you believed to be the work of poachers. You haul in the line, release a number of fish, and take the rig back to the marina after notifying state officials. If it turns out you were mistaken and had actually ...
Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States experienced a much higher rate of inflation than at any time during the prior few decades. Like the prices of many goods and services, the cost of housing rose rapidly, with the median home price increasing by almost $100,000. (Figure 1.) Unsurprisingly, many potential homebuyers ...
Robert A. Levy On a fairly regular basis, Americans are warned that the federal government may no longer be able to meet its legal obligations if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. The result: default, with financial chaos to follow. Despite that stark warning, political agreement remains elusive. Liberals will not accept meaningful spending cuts and conservatives will not accept meaningful ...
Tad DeHaven Greenfield investment occurs when a foreign company establishes (or expands) a business in the US. Most foreign direct investment (FDI) in the US are acquisitions. However, the “US affiliates of foreign multinationals spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year in the United States on research and development and capital expenditures, with the biggest shares going to manufacturing.” ...
Colleen Hroncich Second and third graders designing affordable housing that a family now lives in? That sounds too impressive to be true, but that’s what can happen when children are in the right educational environment, like Limestone Community School in Lawrence, Kansas, which opened in 2021. Madeline Herrera founded Limestone after years of frustration as a public school teacher. “I ...
Matthew Cavedon In a December 18 amicus brief to the Supreme Court regarding Cunningham v. Baltimore County, the Cato Institute argued that a lower court was wrong to apply qualified immunity protection to a police officer because it could find no prior decision involving nearly identical facts. In this case, the police officer fired his rifle through the wall of ...
Michael F. Cannon California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is demonstrating one of the pitfalls of putting the government in charge of public health. Public health officials are monitoring the spread of H5N1 avian influenza among animals and even a few humans. Reports indicate the virus has appeared in animals in 16 states, including at more than 600 dairies in California. ...
Robert A. Levy The incoming administration seems poised to exercise an array of controversial executive powers. Here are some of the legal considerations. Can the president impose tariffs without congressional approval? Recent laws give the president substantial authority on tariffs to protect industries harmed by global trade, but blanket tariffs on all foreign goods might not withstand challenge. That’s especially true ...
Chris Edwards America’s air traffic control (ATC) needs restructuring. ATC has become a high-tech business, but we run our system as an old-fashioned bureaucracy inside of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The system is antiquated, mismanaged, and is headed for a crisis as aviation demands continue to rise. The solution is privatization, which President Trump supported during his first term. ...
Vanessa Brown Calder A variety of Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs could use immediate attention from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and public housing and other supply-side housing subsidies are high on the list. Public housing has a history of failure, and over the years, government spending on public housing has declined in favor of other programs, ...