Think Tank West

By Adam Schaeffer Tradeoffs are an incurable part of reality. Unfortunately, many school choice supporters like to believe that there are no tradeoffs between school choice policies; public and private school choice, targeted or restricted, big or small, voucher or tax credits, it’s all choice and it’s all good. But some good things are better [...]

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By Ilya Shapiro I agree with Jillian Bandes’s characterization of the Democrats’ “bottom of the order” questioning (the committee being stacked 12-7, the day began with the junior Dems) and indeed was dreading having to sit through all sorts of parochial bloviations.  Even Al Franken wasn’t too exciting, just making the point Justice Kennedy was [...]

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By Juan Carlos Hidalgo La Nación of Argentina reports today [in Spanish] that—shocker!—the Argentine government used funds from the nationalized pension funds to finance its current spending. Let’s remember that over a year and a half ago, the administration of Cristina Fernández announced the nationalization of the private pension funds—$30 billion worth of assets—under the [...]

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By Chris Edwards I testified to President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform today on Capitol Hill. The Commission is tasked with creating a package of specific budget reforms by December to be considered by the House and Senate. I suggested that the Commission propose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, transportation [...]

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By Jim Harper Thomas L. Norman’s Risk Analysis and Security Countermeasure Selection is a relentlessly practical book intended to aid security consultants, of which Norman is one. There are literally dozens of codes, standards, and risk assessment methodologies that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accepts for different institutions and infrastructures. As he details the excruciating [...]

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By Jim Harper Politics and extortion share a similar logic: Give to the one who can hurt you the most.

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By Michael F. Cannon The Massachusetts health care law that Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006, and the nearly identical federal law that President Obama signed this year, create perverse incentives that are causing health insurance costs to rise and could eventually cause health insurance markets to collapse. A report released yesterday by the Massachusetts [...]

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By Andrew J. Coulson Yesterday, Bill Gates addressed 4,100 charter school leaders and activists and told them that their movement “is the only place innovation will come from.” Certainly there are innovative charter schools–and others that deploy traditional methods with such skill and dedication as to achieve results far above the norm (think Ben Chavis’ [...]

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By Daniel J. Mitchell That’s the name of the website of Jack Dean, who is interviewed in this new Reason.tv video about how excessive pension promises to bureaucrats are creating a fiscal nightmare for state and local governments.

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By Michael F. Cannon In a recent Wall Street Journal oped, Carnegie-Mellon economist Allan Meltzer explains how ObamaCare is delaying economic recovery: Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics. First, administration economists and their outside supporters neglected the longer-term costs and consequences of their actions. Second, the administration and Congress have through their deeds [...]

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