Ever since President Trump and budget director Mick Mulvaney released a proposed federal budget that includes cuts in some programs, the Washington Post has been full of articles and letters about current and former officials and program beneficiaries who don’t want their budgets cut. Not exactly breaking news, you’d think. And not exactly a balanced […]
The horrifying scene at a practice field in Alexandria, Virginia, at which Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in a shocking flurry of gunfire, could have been much worse. Rand Paul pointed out that “it would have been a massacre” had a member of the House leadership not been there. His presence guaranteed that the heavily armed […]
n a column from December of 2015, the Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady unveiled an inconvenient fact that poverty warriors on the American left and right would perhaps prefer remain hidden: from 1980 to 2000, when the U.S. economy boomed, the number of Mexican arrivals into the U.S. grew from 2.2 million in 1980 to […]
President Trump and congressional Republicans have a second chance to take a whack at the Obamacare piñata – and the beauty of it is that this time, Democrats may want to take a swing at it, too. “It” being the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a.k.a the death panel that was much in the news during the debate over passage […]
You’ve likely seen the headlines lately regarding the latest fad frenzy: fidget toys. These toys, most popularly fidget spinners and fidget cubes, are simple gadgets that have taken over schools and classrooms across the country, to the point that they are now being banned by many of them. Initially touted as a concentration tool for children with attention issues, […]
Illinois is a mess. Taxes and spending already are too high, and huge unfunded liabilities point to an even darker future. Simply stated, politicians and government employee unions have created an unholy alliance to extract as much money as possible from the state’s beleaguered private sector. That’s not a surprise. Indeed, it’s easily explained by the […]
It was December 12, 2015, when headlines in the world’s leading newspapers, in implausibly bold type, celebrated the “historic” agreement in Paris between all nations of the world to curb carbon emissions and thereby stop climate change: or so they said, as if elites get to say what is and is not historic. The spin, […]
An article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the European leg of President Trump’s first foreign trip came with the headline: “Leaders Confront US on Russia, Climate.” In particular, non-US G-7 leaders are all strongly in favor of the 2015 Paris climate agreement that would require participating countries to limit carbon emissions, among other restraints […]
A few days go, as I sat with my eyes fixated on my television screen during a particularly riveting Netflix marathon, an alert on my iPhone went off and interrupted an otherwise perfect night of binge-watching. As I glanced down to see what fresh new hell awaited me in the hectic non-fiction world, I noticed […]
The Congressional Budget Office score of the American Health Care Act [claims to shows] that the bill will reduce deficits by $119 billion over the next decade and result in 23 million more people being uninsured by 2026. This leaves the impression that people would be better off if Obamacare were unchanged. But a new […]
It’s clear that many big government policies are creating winners and losers in America. The story has been the same for decades. Government makes friends with a company or an industry, blocks out the competition with regulation, and in some cases gives the company subsidies. Such cronyism is bad for innovators and for consumers. But […]
There is a moment I found a bit startling in the new Anne of Green Gables series on Netflix. The farm is in trouble and the bank is talking foreclosure. The family starts to panic. Anne suggests that many people will chip in and help the family through these hard times. The mother reacts with […]
As Venezuela descends into a nightmare of starvation and violence, the long-standing debate over the feasibility of socialism takes on new relevance. Years of explicitly socialist policies from the Chavez and Maduro regimes have taken their toll, as nationalization and a variety of other attempts to abolish or subvert market processes have destroyed what was […]
May can be a particularly dangerous month for schoolchildren. According to 13 years of recent data collected on mental health emergency room visits at Connecticut Children’s Mental Health Center in Hartford, May typically has the most. Under Pressure Boston College psychology professor, Peter Gray, looked more closely at this data and found that children’s mental […]
Earlier today, I gave a speech about populism and capitalism at the Free Market Road Show in Thessaloniki, Greece. But I’m not writing about my speech (read this and this if you want to get an idea of what I said about American policy under Trump). Instead, I want to share some remarkable data from […]