Neal McCluskey The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are out, and as Colleen Hroncich has discussed, they are not good, with record-low performance for twelfth graders, the “final products” of our K‑12 system. Importantly, standardized tests are limited instruments and are not the only important measures of how our system is performing. Our anxiety should also be ...
Jeffrey A. Singer For several years, state and local governments have imposed high “sin” taxes on cigarette packs, aiming to motivate smokers to quit for economic reasons. As is happening in states that impose high taxes on legal cannabis, if the taxes get too high, they prop up a black market. Residents of New York City face the highest cigarette taxes ...
Mike Fox “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” This timeless quote captures the ...
Colleen Hroncich When states enact school choice policies that allow funding to follow students to educational options beyond their assigned district school, opponents often claim there is no accountability outside the public system. But the shockingly poor results shown in the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the Nation’s Report Card, don’t really scream ...
Adam N. Michel The US tax code is highly progressive. Official US Treasury estimates show that the top 10 percent of income earners pay more than 60 percent of all federal taxes and 72 percent of income taxes. Yet some political rhetoric may lead many Americans to believe that the wealthiest taxpayers pay tax rates in the single digits or ...
Timothy Sandefur Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was born enslaved in Maryland, escaped, and rose to become a journalist, author, orator, diplomat, bank president, and civil rights leader. A self-made man, he championed the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are born free and equal. Unlike many critics, he argued the Constitution was fundamentally anti-slavery—a view explored by Cato Adjunct Scholar ...
Ilya Somin In W.M.M. v. Trump, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA) as a tool to deport Venezuelans is illegal. While multiple federal district courts have issued similar rulings, as have individual concurring opinions by judges on two other circuit courts, this is the ...
Chris Edwards A recent Wall Street Journal article found that there are 1,135 billionaires in the United States. The piece focused on how much wealth billionaires hold but told us little about the economic role they play. That role is crucial, although many people do not seem to understand it. New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said, “I don’t ...
Alex Nowrasteh Several prominent conservatives, such as Vice President JD Vance, mercantilist lawyer Oren Cass, and economist EJ Antoni, are making excuses for why less immigration isn’t boosting employment or lifting wages like they predicted. Cass seems especially surprised. He has claimed for years that native-born Americans would take jobs freed up by deportations. In a classic case of Cassian ...
Mike Fox Three hundred and fifty-five years ago today, in what would later come to define the historic conception of a criminal jury, an English jury refused to tender an unjust verdict. As the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn may now be a household name. But in 1670, Penn wasn’t yet a celebrated figure in American history. He was a ...