Adam N. Michel The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program was created to spur private investment in distressed communities. More than two decades later, the results resemble a government-run investment fund for real estate developers, banks, and politically connected nonprofits. As my Cato colleagues Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo document in their recent briefing paper, “The Case Against the CDFI ...
Adam N. Michel The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law, but the fight to restore fiscal discipline and support economic growth has only just begun. The next test will be how aggressively the administration follows through with regulatory implementation. In a new Fox News op-ed, I detail how successful repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s green subsidies will ...
Jeffrey Miron and Jacob Winter A Senate committee recently advanced a bill that would ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks. Federal law already prohibits federal employees from insider trading. The case for insider trading bans is weak partly because enforcement is difficult. A recent study illustrates by examining “whether the stock trades of high-ranking IRS officials are associated ...
David J. Bier Illegal profiling accounts for a substantial portion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in 2025. While ICE has other tactics to arrest peaceful immigrants—such as during immigration hearings, appointments, and check-ins—ICE agents are deliberately targeting workers in heavily Latino jobs and neighborhoods, sometimes based on its community tip line where residents claim to “see” illegal immigrants ...
Jai Kedia The US dollar (USD) is the world’s reserve currency and has served as a safe haven for investors from around the world. This status largely reflects the strength of the US economy and the relative stability of its goods, services, and financial markets. Yet the USD has lost roughly 8 percent of its value since the start of ...
David J. Bier Illegal profiling accounts for a substantial portion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in 2025. While ICE has other tactics to arrest peaceful immigrants—such as during immigration hearings, appointments, and check-ins— ICE agents are deliberately targeting workers in heavily Latino jobs and neighborhoods, sometimes based on its community tipline where residents claim to “see” illegal immigrants ...
Mike Fox Two hundred ninety years ago today, in what would come to be known as a celebrated early example of jury nullification in the New World, a New York jury freed dissident publisher John Peter Zenger from the clutches of a government determined to silence its critics. With British subjugation fresh in their minds, the Framers envisioned the jury ...
Adam N. Michel The newly created Trump Accounts in the One Big Beautiful Bill are being pitched as a way to boost savings, build generational wealth, and possibly replace Social Security. They are unlikely to do any of those things. The accounts are seeded with a $1,000 federal deposit for babies born before 2029. But the accounts offer limited additional ...
Colin Grabow Seven years ago, the Cato Institute launched its project on reforming the Jones Act—the 1920 law that restricts intra-US water transport to vessels that are US-flagged, US-owned, and built in US shipyards—with the release of its first policy analysis scrutinizing the law. Since then, the Jones Act has received considerable attention, numerous bills have been introduced aimed at ...
Kyle Handley Some tariff supporters have tried to rebrand tariffs as nothing more than a consumption tax, arguing they’re just like the value-added taxes (VATs) that many other countries use. See, for example, here and here. The implication buried in these claims is that because other countries use VATs, they should be offset by US tariffs—and that any such tariffs would be ...