Think Tank West

Tom Daschle has joined Timothy Geithner in the not-so-exclusive club of Obama Cabinet appointees who evaded tens of thousands of dollars in federal taxes until they were vetted for their Cabinet nominations. It’s too bad Leona Helmsley can’t be nominated as Commerce Secretary. I sympathize with anybody trying to hold down his tax bill. Government [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

Last month, Cato released a paper titled, “Does the Doctor Need a Boss?“ Our friend Greg Scandlen called it “one of the most offensive papers I’ve ever read.” Scandlen is one of the leading lights of the consumer-directed health care movement. He is a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, founder and director of Consumers for Health Care Choices, a [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

I was asked by a radio host more than once this week what I thought of the fact that some big business leaders were standing by President Obama in his pursuit of the gargantuan “stimulus” package. There is an unfortunate public perception that supporters of free markets are knee-jerk supporters of anything that could be perceived [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

After his first major interview with an Arab TV network, it is clear President Obama is striking a decidedly different tone in talking about terrorism. In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, legal policy analyst David H. Rittgers discusses the new direction Obama will take in the fight against terrorism. “This is a serious departure from some [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

No U.S. Supreme Court decision in the modern era has been so quickly and widely reviled as the infamous Kelo decision, in which the Court ruled that the government could take Susette Kelo’s house in New London, Conn., and the homes of her neighbors, and give the property to a private developer. The courts justified [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

Once a grim statistic gets some play in the media, it keeps getting repeated even if it is completely erroneous. On the Washington Post front page Saturday: “In soup kitchens, food pantries and universities across the country, activists are planting the seeds for an overhaul of the way America feeds its more than 35 million hungry people….” [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

National Journal’s Sydney Freedberg asks a group of distinguished foreign policy types, “Is the two-state solution dead?” Pat Lang offers some sensible remarks: It is expected ritual to say that the Palestinians and Israelis want peace. What is never specified as part of that incantation is the description of just what sort of peace each group wants. Here it [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

The preliminary GDP estimate for the fourth quarter of 2008 is $11,599.4 billion (in 2000 dollars). That was 0.965% smaller than the third quarter — a figure commonly multiplied by four to convert it into a more dramatic 3.8% annual rate. But these quarterly rates are highly erratic, even in recessions, so converting them into compound annual rates [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

Over on the Tech Liberation Front blog, I’ve been following the Obama administration’s early steps on transparency, a subject we dove into at a December Cato policy forum called “Just Give Us the Data!” President Obama committed to make his administration “the most open and transparent in history.” Boilerplate promises like this often go into [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »

How many times do we have to repeat that the United States spends more per elementary and secondary student than almost any other industrialized nation before our political leaders stop talking like our schools get by on pennies a day? And how often do we have to point to state spending to show that, annual cries of the sky [...]

Filed under: American Domestic Policy, American Foreign Policy by
No Comments »