Romina Boccia Below are abbreviated remarks I delivered before the US House Committee on the Budget on December 11, 2024. You can find my full testimony here and watch the hearing here (my remarks are at 20:15 ‑25:55). Chairman Arrington, Ranking Member Boyle, and distinguished members of the Committee, Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is ...
Colin Grabow My family spent Thanksgiving in New York City, where we did many of the usual tourist things such as a picture with Wall Street’s Charging Bull sculpture, ice skating in Central Park, and a (mercifully short) visit to Times Square. The first item on our sightseeing agenda, however, was the Statue of Liberty. Looking at the ferry that ...
Colleen Hroncich Tonya Kipe saw the flaws of the public school system both as a mom and a teacher. She loved her elementary teaching position at first but grew frustrated by how cookie-cutter and robotic it became. Hers was one of eight second-grade classrooms at her school, and they were all expected to be keeping the same pace despite having ...
Jack Solowey This blog is part of a series on technology innovation and free expression. On December 5, President-Elect Trump announced that entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and ALL-IN Podcast co-host (i.e., “bestie”) David Sacks will be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.” An underappreciated feature of this czardom is that AI and crypto will be part of the same portfolio. While ...
Eric Gomez The US arms sale backlog to Taiwan was reduced by $436 million in November 2024 as the first tranche of 11 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) arrived. With this delivery, the arms sale backlog is now valued at $21.95 billion. See Figures 1 and 2 for a breakdown of the backlog by weapon category and a side-by-side ...
Jeffrey Miron The United States currently recognizes eleven federal holidays: Independence Day (1870), Washington’s Birthday (aka Presidents’ Day) (1879), Christmas (1885), New Year’s (1885), Labor Day (1894), Veterans Day (1926), Columbus Day (1937), Thanksgiving (1941), Memorial Day (1967), MLK Jr Day (1983), and Juneteenth (2021). In so doing, the government implicitly endorses some ideas over others, so national holidays are ...
Jeffrey A. Singer A December 12 report in the UK Independent implies Elon Musk thinks most homeless people are “violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.” That’s an oversimplification, to say the least. The report claims President-elect Donald Trump wants the government to force homeless people into drug treatment and mental institutions or ...
Mike Fox Carrying large amounts of cash is not a crime in the United States. But tell that to Stephen Lara, a Marine Corps combat veteran who was stopped by the Nevada Highway Patrol for allegedly following a truck too closely. A trooper interrogated Lara, who acknowledged having $87,000 in cash in the trunk of his car. Lara was never arrested or ...
George Selgin Having questioned, in a previous post, some proclaimed benefits of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and specifically the claim that building such a reserve would strengthen the US dollar, I now wish to say something about what the proposed Bitcoin reserve will cost. In particular, I wish to discuss the cost of the BITCOIN Act’s plan to have the ...
Erec Smith This blog is part of a series on technology innovation and free expression. In all likelihood, President-elect Trump will repeal Biden’s Executive Orders (EOs) on racial justice (EOs 13985, 13988, 14020, 14021, 14031, 14035, and 14091.) Although repealing these EOs is a large step toward reinstating values once thought concomitant with American culture (equality, freedom of speech, and ...