Michael F. Cannon Steve Moses has been studying and advocating for better long-term care (LTC) for decades. In the latest Cato Policy Analysis, “Better Long-Term Care for Billions Less,” Moses explains how Medicaid dominates the market for LTC services and supports, reduces LTC quality, and subsidizes wealthier individuals at the expense of the poor. Counterintuitively, Medicaid subsidizes LTC for middle-class ...
Walter Olson Number seventeen in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy: The Supreme Court agrees to review a Fifth Circuit panel decision finding that Congress’ naming of a uniform national election day makes it unlawful for states to accept some ballots posted by that date but received later, as roughly 30 states do. [SCOTUSBlog on Watson ...
Andrew Gillen The Cato Institute has long excelled at originating and disseminating policy ideas. As libertarians, however, we tend to be uncomfortable with the hard work of advancing those ideas through the levers and gears of the policy world, since that typically entails give-and-take compromises and partial victories at best. As Richard Rorty put it, “In democratic countries you get ...
Nicholas Anthony Many people celebrated President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting “political debanking.” Yet, those same people seem to be silent now that the president created new pressures to effectively debank the left. Ebrima Sanneh, a reporter for American Banker, broke the story as banks began to grapple with two seemingly conflicting executive orders. The first order came on August ...
Jeffrey Miron Apparently, yes: In California, recent evidence shows that facilities subject to cap-and-trade have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 3–9 percent. Our findings, however, reveal that toxic emissions from facilities subject to cap-and-trade policies were about 26–42 percent higher on average in the five years after the introduction of the program than they would have been otherwise. Why? ...
Dominik Lett On November 9, Senate Republicans reached a deal with eight Democratic senators to end the government shutdown. Although Congress and the president have yet to formally approve the package, it seems likely that the longest shutdown in US history will soon end. Predictably, the deal is a mixed bag that punts most of the hard decisions to the coming months. Democrats agreed to pass full-year appropriations ...
Jeffrey A. Singer Last night, the Senate passed a continuing resolution along with three appropriations bills, one of which, an agriculture appropriations bill, effectively shut down the US hemp industry. Growers use the plant Cannabis sativa to produce both hemp and marijuana. Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, Congress classified “marihuana” (spelled that way in the statute) as a Schedule I ...
Mike Fox When fellow Husky owner Michelino Sunseri broke the Grand Teton speed record, his athletic achievement should have been cause for celebration. Instead, it fueled a lengthy legal battle with the United States Department of Justice. Today, thanks to a full and unconditional pardon from President Trump, Sunseri can finally put the ordeal behind him. Sunseri—who made an honest mistake—was ...
Matthew Cavedon In 2016, Ashtian Barnes was killed by Harris County, Texas, Deputy Constable Roberto Felix, following a traffic stop for unpaid tolls. As Barnes apparently tried to drive away, Felix jumped onto the moving car and indiscriminately opened fire, killing Barnes instantly. The Fifth Circuit initially sided with Felix, applying its narrow “moment of threat” test that only focused ...
Neal McCluskey It’s curious: Both opponents and proponents of school choice—government funding myriad options families select, not just government schools—often write like the educational freedom movement started in the 1950s. Advocates often point to Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” which called for decoupling government education funding from provision, as the launch point for ...