Defense of Bank Secrecy by Austria and Luxembourg Is Good News for Tax Competition

It is no exaggeration to say that destroying tax havens is probably the number one goal of the world’s statist politicians and international bureaucrats. The European Commission has a new assault against low-tax jurisdictions. The Paris-based OECD is preparing to renew its ant-tax competition project. And American politicians such as Barack Obama want to persecute […]

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Philip Pullman on the Loss of Civil Liberties in Britain

Philip Pullman had an opinion piece in the Times of London today to mark the Convention on Modern Liberty, a one-day gathering of activists interested in civil liberties. Weirdly, the piece isn’t available at the Times anymore, and it has not been for several hours. Even the Google cache has been unreliable, though it’s up […]

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Why Acquisition Reform Fails

Senators Carl Levin and John McCain this week introduced legislation to improve how the Pentagon buys things — defense acquisition reform. The President is on the same page. So chances are the Pentagon’s acquisition workforce will have a new set of rules to learn some time this year.
Here’s the bill.  Highlights: a series of new reporting […]

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The Washington Times and Debunked Statistics

Yesterday, the Washington Times editorialized in favor of E-Verify, the inchoate government background check system for all American workers, saying, “[T]he system is 99.5 percent accurate, according to DHS, and it permits employers to verify work eligibility in minimal time (10 minutes or less) and at minimal cost ($419 per year for a federal contractor […]

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Here’s an Idea: Don’t Do Either!

One of the biggest pieces of news coming from President Obama’s budget preview is that he’d kill federal guaranteed student lending — in which the feds subsidize private lenders — and move everything to direct lending straight from the government. He promises that cutting out the middle man would save about $4 billion a year.
In […]

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Week in Review: Obama’s Speech, a $3.6 Trillion Spending Plan and a New Cato Senior Fellow

Obama Outlines National Plan in First Address to Congress
President Obama’s first address to Congress laid out a laundry list of new spending and provided hints as to what will be contained in the budget — a so-called “blueprint for America’s future”– he submitted to lawmakers Thursday.
In a new video, Cato Institute scholars offer their analyses […]

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