Think Tank West

In a remarkable display of chutzpah, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan is quoted in the Christian Science Monitor stating that “Tax havens have declared war on honest taxpayers.” This is from a politician who routinely votes for higher taxes and has a rating of “F” from the National Taxpayers Union because he votes against taxpayers [...]

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Two stories from the British press highlight regulatory excess from the Brussels bureaucracy. The Times reports that a winemaker is being harrassed because he is selling his wares in 37.5cl bottles instead of the 50cl or 35cl sizes allowed by European regulation: An award-winning winemaker whose wares are sold at the royal palaces is facing [...]

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Fred Kaplan’s new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, is written in a pleasantly breezy, journalistic style that makes it easy to blow through in an afternoon. While a lot of the material in the book will be familiar to those who’ve been closely watching the trainwreck-in-slow-motion that is the [...]

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According to a report by Tallahassee’s News Channel 7, the Florida Education Association may sue to shut down that state’s scholarship tax credit program. Under this program, businesses can donate to non-profit scholarship funds that subsidize tuition for low-income kids at the private schools of their families’ choosing. In return, the businesses can claim dollar for [...]

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Tuesday the Supreme Court slipped the Gordian knot of a case that could have come straight from a law school exam, involving federalism, treaty interpretation, the scope of executive power, criminal procedure, and conflicts between international and domestic law.  The issues in Medellin v. Texas boiled down to: 1) Whether a particular decision of the [...]

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Move over Ron Paul, my heart belongs to Jack! How long until we see a “Kevorkian Girl” on You-Tube? The assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian announced that he was running for Congress as an independent. If elected, he said his main priority would be promoting the Ninth Amendment, which protects rights not explicitly specified elsewhere in [...]

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In a New York Times piece of March 23, “It’s Hard to Thaw Frozen Markets,” Tyler Cowen concludes that “regulators should apply capital requirements consistently to the off-balance-sheet activities of financial institutions.” That conclusion follows from a surprisingly innocent confidence in regulation in general and capital requirements in particular. But it also follows from a [...]

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Hillary Clinton’s latest pitch, from today’s New York Times: We need a president who is ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy. God help us.

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Two months ago, the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern ignited an educational firestorm when he declared that, contrary to his past hopes, school choice cannot save American education. Only a focus on classrooms and curricula can do that, he argued, going so far as to laud a “thought experiment” that found a dictatorship with a “rich [...]

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I wrote two months ago that I thought that Hillary Clinton “can credibly claim to be the best-prepared presidential candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940: she spent eight years in the White House, seeing the way politics and policies work from the eye of the storm. ” But in the past couple of weeks [...]

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