Real life can never give social scientists the kind of laboratory-quality tests that natural scientists can create, but sometimes it comes close. Since the two Koreas–North and South–are virtually identical culturally, it would appear that the different political systems explain the outcome illustrated by the figure below, which comes from last …
The government isn’t very good at picking technologies to invest in. Undeterred by this track record, however, some members of Congress now want to create a new subsidy program for cars powered by natural gas. Time to remember two great moments in government technology policy. In the early 1960s, an …
In California, there’s never been a tougher time to be in the business of taking private property from one person and giving it to another. First, Governor Jerry Brown proposed eliminating the state’s 400 some redevelopment agencies. Now, the agencies have been told by the courts that declaring blight just won’t …
U.S. taxpayers will spend $431 billion just complying with the tax code this year, according a new study by Arthur Laffer, Wayne Winegarden, and John Childs. That’s not money collected by the Internal Revenue Service; that figure represents just the value of the time taxpayers will spend keeping records and filling out …
On a variety of fronts—Medicaid mandates, individual health insurance mandates, national education standards—state governments are vigorously pushing back against an overweening federal establishment. This resistance to federal power includes a number of folks who are promoting a constitutional remedy that has never yet been employed in our nation’s history—a convention …
Government employees owe $3.3 billion in back taxes, CNBC reports. According to Heritage Foundation fellow James Sherk, the typical federal worker “receives 22 percent more in wages than an equally skilled private sector worker … .” And, says Sherk, when both wages and benefits are toted up, federal workers are …
Yesterday marks six months since the passage of Obamacare. Here’s a quick review of what’s happened since then and what we have learned about the law: 1. Almost immediately after passage of the law, a number of major corporations had to take large write-downs against expectations of higher health care …
“Some of the country’s most prominent health insurance companies have decided to stop offering new child-only plans, rather than comply with rules in the new health-care law that will require such plans to start accepting children with preexisting medical conditions after Sept. 23,” the Washington Post reports. The Post quotes one …
