Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett A government funding deadline is approaching this Friday, December 20, and congressional leadership appears poised to punt the annual funding debate to March with a stopgap funding measure. Disaster aid is at the heart of the current impasse. President Biden requested nearly $100 billion in emergency funding in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton ...
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 ...
Jennifer Huddleston This blog is part of a series on technology innovation and free expression. Over the last several years, members of Congress on both the left and the right have introduced legislation to “rein in big tech.” However, these approaches aimed at America’s leading tech companies often represent a significant shift in competition policy, which would impact not only ...
Ian Vásquez Today, December 17, we’re releasing the tenth edition of the annual Human Freedom Index, which we co-publish with the Fraser Institute. The report paints a picture of the state of global freedom and freedom within 165 countries, drawing on 86 indicators of personal, economic, and civil liberties dating back to the year 2000. The index reflects our belief ...
Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett As part of the Cato Institute Report to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we submitted the following recommendations to address the abuse of emergency designations and advance fiscal responsibility. Emergency spending is out of control. Congress has designated nearly $12 trillion as emergency-related spending since 1992, circumventing statutory spending limits and enabling inflationary deficit ...
Jeffrey A. Singer On December 10, the country’s first state-sanctioned overdose prevention center (OPC) held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Providence, Rhode Island. The center, located at 45 Willard Avenue, near the Rhode Island Hospital campus, was established and will be operated by the private non-profit harm reduction organization Project Weber/RENEW. In July 2021, Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee signed into ...
Michael F. Cannon Via this Cato white paper, I submitted the following recommendations to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a private-sector organization that will advise President-elect Donald Trump on how to reduce inefficiency in the federal government. The following recommendations would achieve the Democratic goal of limiting the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance and the Republican goal of giving ...
Norbert Michel The Wall Street Journal reports President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers are exploring “pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate, or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington.” These kinds of reforms can’t come soon enough. As Cato’s new report to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) explains, US financial markets have too many regulations and too many regulators. Many of the regulations protect incumbent firms, ...
Stephen Slivinski I don’t like the Elf on the Shelf. For those not in the know (or who don’t have kids), the Elf on the Shelf is a small, plush creature you place somewhere in your home—on a shelf perhaps—in advance of Christmas that is purported to be Santa’s eyes and ears on the scene, reporting back to him all ...
Mustafa Akyol A new review of my recent book, The Islamic Moses, was published today in Religion & Liberty Online, a publication of the Acton Institute: “Recovering Islam and Judaism’s Shared Golden Age.” The writer, Farah Pandit, is a young Pakistani journalist who is currently a PhD student at Boston University. He rightly notes that my book highlights the much-forgotten ...