Think Tank West

Do you remember how, during the debate over proposals to create personal accounts for Social Security, opponents called the $1 trillion transition cost intolerable?   Now, a $1 trillion floor for health care reform is seen as a sign of success.   Says something about priorities, doesn’t it?

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While the big news of the day wouldn’t seem to have a public policy angle, Michael Jackson’s death allows us to remember that such phenomenal career achievements can only be possible in an economic system that rewards and harnesses talent. The King of Pop’s creativity allowed him and his family to make hundreds of millions [...]

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I’ve just discovered that my calculation of DC education spending per pupil was wrong, and I have to publish a correction. I wrote back in March that total DC k-12 spending, excluding charter schools, was $1,291,815,886 during the 2008-09 school year. That still appears to be correct. But to get the per-pupil number I divided [...]

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A thorough new study of 30 nations from the Institut Constant de Rebecque in Switzerland reveals serious shortcomings in America’s tax system. The report, entitled “Tax burden and individual rights in the OECD: An International Comparison,” creates a Tax Oppression Index based on three key variables: the overall tax burden, public governance, and taxpayer rights. The [...]

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As a follow-up to Jason Kuznicki’s post from January, I am pleased to report that yesterday Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski signed HB 2817—a bill that eliminates the cartelization of the moving business in the Beaver state. The old law required the Oregon Department of Transportation to notify existing moving companies of businesses that wanted to [...]

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The first comes from the group Patients United Now.  Keep this video in mind the next time you hear someone say that a new “public option” is not about a government takeover of the health care sector. The next video comes from the Independence Institute in Colorado.  It is a nice complement to my colleague [...]

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The Supreme Court’s decision today in Safford Unified School District #1 et al. v. Redding was a victory for privacy and decency. The Court held that a middle school violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a thirteen-year-old girl by strip searching her in a failed effort to find Ibuprofen pills and an over-the-counter painkiller. The [...]

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The Heritage Foundation has a chart up on its blog, showing defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product and declaring that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels.” This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out [...]

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Pat  Michaels and I have written an op-ed on the climate change bill due for a vote tomorrow in Congress, and our opinions on its provisions are summarized pretty well there. In short, the bill appears to offer very little in the way of reduced global warming in return for harm to the domestic economy [...]

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Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) has announced that he has reached agreement on scoring a series of options that will reduce the cost of his health care reform bill to just $1 trillion over the next 10 years.   Whew.  Now we can all rest easy. Still, no agreement on the tax increases needed [...]

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