Adam N. Michel After five rounds of voting, the pass-through tax deduction was chosen as the worst tax expenditure. The 20 percent business deduction arbitrarily favors certain types of businesses over others and adds tremendous complexity to the tax code. The results from the Tax Expenditures Madness bracket suggest that Congress fundamentally rethink how the United States taxes business income. ...
Jeffrey A. Singer In 2019, Colorado lawmakers reduced possession of up to four grams of most controlled substances to a misdemeanor. Distribution or sale of controlled substances remained felonies. The law took effect as the fentanyl wave was making its way across the country, from east to west, and shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in alcohol and illicit drug use and fentanyl-related ...
Erec Smith On March 25, Free Black Thought live-streamed a forum hosted by TakeCharge, a nonprofit committed to demonstrating that America offers opportunities for all, regardless of race or social status. TakeCharge encourages Black Americans to reclaim their cultural identity through faith, family, and education, emphasizing personal and community responsibility. This forum, titled “The Crisis of the Black Family,” was moderated ...
Neal McCluskey As discussion about ending the US Department of Education continues, we now look at where to put civil rights enforcement, covered by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), if the department is dismantled. A few days ago, Andrew Gillen did the same thing with student loans. Importantly, unlike student lending and almost everything else the Department of Education does, ...
Colleen Hroncich Milton and Rose Friedman. As educational freedom and school choice have spread in recent years, it’s become clear that not all programs are created equal. But how to rank them is tricky. Many organizations, including Cato, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC, have education freedom indices that incorporate a variety of metrics. The latest—and simplest—ranking was released last month: ...
Colin Grabow, Scott Lincicome, and Kyle Handley For all of President Donald Trump’s talk about reciprocity, it turns out that he just wanted higher tariffs. After weeks of threatening “reciprocal” tariffs to match the higher tariffs and trade barriers of US trading partners, Trump announced yesterday that the United States was slapping a 10 percent tariff on everyone. Dozens more countries face still higher tariffs—up ...
Tad DeHaven Where does one begin? Well, in no particular order, and certainly not a complete listing, here are five absurd aspects of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tax hike on American consumers and businesses. And, yes, the entire situation itself is absurd. Penguins Better Stop “Ripping Us Off” The Heard and McDonald Islands are remote volcanic islands in the southern ...
Jeremy Horpedahl and Phillip W. Magness While the Trump administration had already rolled out tariff increases against our largest trading partners—Canada, Mexico, and China—several weeks ago (and then delayed some of them), we finally got a picture of President Trump’s big tariff plans on April 2. And those plans are worse than most economists probably imagined. At his announcement of ...
Thomas A. Berry President Donald Trump has singled out several of the nation’s largest law firms for serious, potentially business-ending sanctions by executive fiat, citing the firms’ past representation of his political opponents and their lawsuits against the United States. These sanctions include the loss of access to federal facilities and federal employees, the en masse suspension of security clearances ...
Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett On April 2, the Senate unveiled a new budget blueprint, a crucial step in using reconciliation to enact President Donald Trump’s agenda. This budget isn’t just a missed opportunity; it actively worsens our nation’s debt trajectory. The resolution abandons the House’s concrete spending reductions desperately needed in today’s high-debt environment, sets a dangerous precedent by ...