A common promise among politicians is to “run the government more like a business.” The Obama Administration seems to have promised to have “government run more businesses.” The latest in the line of government takeovers and mandates is the proposal to subject heavy-duty trucks to fuel-efficiency regulations. These efficiency mandates …
Claim Check, which supposedly fact checks public statements, employs the different-must-be-wrong-theory in dismissing a Heritage analysis because it is an “outlier.” It seems that many forecasters in Washington are more afraid of being alone than they are of being wrong. That is, they would rather be wrong with everybody else …
The Obama administration recently issued an inter-agency report on the employment effects of its deep-water drilling moratorium. The Administration finds employment effects that are roughly half of those from a variety of other estimates. However: If the Administration were consistent in its logic, its job-loss estimates would double or quadruple …
The Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 set lighting requirements that, in essence, outlaw the familiar incandescent light bulb. The impact of lighting mandates on energy security is minuscule, since electricity comes almost entirely from secure domestic sources, such as coal. (Petroleum generates about 1 percent of domestic …
According to a press release, Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that the billions of dollars in federal stimulus money directed toward solar-power will cut solar power costs in half by 2015. It’s a grand sounding prediction, but his own Energy Information Agency projects that electricity from solar cells will cost …
President Obama has picked another “winner” among green technologies meant to portend an energy revolution. This time it is a Korean-owned battery factory in Michigan, part of a $2.4 billion government investment in electric car battery technology in spite of a global glut of battery supply. However, the question is …
Here’s a principles-of-economics question: Suppose the U.S. gross domestic product (national income) is currently $14 trillion. Then suppose the U.S. raised all tariff, income tax, and sales tax rates to 100 percent. How much money would the government collect? If you realized that nobody would generate taxable income under such …
