Think Tank West

The Washington Post reports: Would you gladly pay more for a cheeseburger today if it keeps your local librarian working tomorrow? Several members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors think so. So do supervisors in neighboring Loudoun County, who hope the General Assembly will allow them to impose a meals tax, too. If the [...]

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

I caught a lot of flack from my Republican friends for my post blaming the FY2009 deficit on Bush instead of Obama. Well, I must be a glutton for punishment because I can’t resist jumping (albeit reluctantly) to Obama’s defense again. I’m venting my spleen for two reason. First, FoxNews.com posted a story headlined “Obama [...]

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

Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years.  Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back. One gimmick makes the new entitlement [...]

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

While perusing the Internet, I saw an article by Iwan Morgan, who is the author of The Age of Deficits: Presidents and unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. The author asserted in this article that, “The deficit explosion on his watch was a nasty surprise for Ronald Reagan not a deliberate strategy to [...]

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

The longest and least uplifting chapter in my new Cato book Mad about Trade is Chapter 9, where I describe all the remaining duties and restrictions our government imposes on our freedom to trade with people in other countries. We are certainly not “the most open market in the world,” as a member of President [...]

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

John J. Miller of National Review introduces many of us to Elmer Kelton, who, he writes in an email, “may be the best writer you’ve never heard of.” Kelton, who died in August, wrote both classic and modern Westerns. And while he may not have written the Great American Novel, he just might have written [...]

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

Although the debate has been raging for months, it has just come to my attention that the man responsible for the second-most number of murders ever – after Mao, of course, with Hitler a distant third – is to have his bust placed at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. Defenders of the Stalin bust argue that, whether we [...]

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

Democratic National Leadership Council chairman Harold Ford, former IBM chairman Louis Gerstner, and KB Homes founder ELi Broad have an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal in which they admonish the Obama administration to hang tough on the “Race to the Top” education sweepstakes. They also declare that ”competition brings out the best performance. That’s true in athletics and in business, [...]

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

Former Google executive turned Obama administration deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin made some unfortunate comments at a law school technology conference last week equating private network management to government censorship as it is practiced in China. By many accounts, President Obama’s visit to China was unimpressive. It apparently included a press conference at which no [...]

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

In a new study, Glen Whitman and Raymond Raad demonstrate that America leads the world in medical innovations that ease and extend our lives. And in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Melinda Beck details some of the health care advances that we should give thanks for this Thanksgiving Day: • Fewer Americans died in traffic fatalities in [...]

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