Adam N. Michel The House-passed reconciliation bill includes a new tax measure designed to retaliate against foreign taxes that discriminate against American businesses. This new tax takes aim at the proliferation of targeted and extraterritorial taxes, legitimized and promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) two-pillar Inclusive Framework. I recently summarized the OECD project, its current status, ...
Jennifer J. Schulp On June 10, the House Financial Services Committee and the House Committee on Agriculture will hold markups on the “Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025,” aka the “CLARITY Act.” Consideration of this bill has been a sprint, with a discussion draft released just over a month ago and the bill introduced with bipartisan cosponsors less than ...
Chris Edwards A Washington Post investigative piece confirms what we’ve been saying for years at Cato about federal housing subsidies. The $14 billion a year low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) drives cost inflation in “affordable” housing projects. The WaPo article focuses on subsidized DC projects with costs ranging from $700,000 to $1.3 million per unit, as shown in the table. ...
Jeffrey A. Singer In a May 30 article for the Wall Street Journal, Steven Malanga from the Manhattan Institute rightly criticized certain states that have legalized recreational marijuana for using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the retail industry. Malanga went further. To suggest that states were mistaken in legalizing weed, he cherry-picked data from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), ...
Dan Greenberg Court of International Trade. Nearly 150 years ago, as the nation’s Civil War dragged on, President Lincoln grew increasingly frustrated with the Union Army’s generals. Lincoln viewed America’s military leaders as too passive and too reluctant to use force properly and effectively. From Lincoln’s perspective, the Union troops typically engaged in brief skirmishes and retreats that resolved little or ...
Chris Edwards The Republican reconciliation bill would trim Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These are shared federal-state programs, with the federal government currently paying 69 percent of Medicaid costs and 93 percent of SNAP costs. The proposed GOP reforms would have the states pay a modestly higher share of the costs, which has prompted worries that state ...
Michael F. Cannon President Trump and Senate Republicans will consider measures to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. Along with Medicaid, Medicare is the primary contributor to our federal debt, which has now reached $30 trillion—equal in size to the entire US economy—and is still growing. Affluence-test Medicare premiums. The most politically viable option is to require high-income Medicare ...
David J. Bier The House of Representatives recently passed its budget reconciliation spending bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1). The bill changes numerous aspects of tax and spending law, but its most significant spending increases are for immigration. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill will direct an astounding $168 billion of the budget to immigration ...
Mike Fox May 28 started like any other day but ended with a profound triumph for my Cato colleagues and me. As Cato’s President Peter Goettler said, “Sometimes it’s the constancy and consistency of our efforts that move the climate of ideas a bit more each day in the direction of individual liberty and limited government. And only after years of ...
Colleen Hroncich Should the Department of Education be shut down? Normally, I’m an easy yes on that question for several reasons: the federal government has no constitutional role in education; the department is essentially just a middleman, siphoning off money to fund its bureaucracy and increasing the red tape states and schools must deal with; there’s no evidence having a ...