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Unpacking Jared Lee Loughner

The Southern Poverty Law Center presents itself as a watchdog monitoring the political extremes, and a large portion of the press takes that pose at face value, despite decades of evidence that the...

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Republicans Begin to Tackle Federal Spending

The Republicans in the House of Representatives seem to have recognized that fiscal restraint will be a key to their success in the next presidential election.The House Republican Study Committee,...

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Gen. Barry McCaffrey on Tolls, VMT Charges and PPPs

Stopping off in Houston for a dinner hosted by the Bayou City’s chapter of the Society of American Military Engineers, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey raised the pressing need to rethink highway...

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On the Household Debt Problem

One of the not so frequently discussed problems with the economy is the household debt problem. Debt-to-income ratios spiked in the past decade, and the weight of household debt has had far ranging...

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It is Time for Public-Private Partnerships in New York

According to the New York Times, ....New York Governor Andrew Cuomo "is considering reducing the state’s work force by up to 15,000 people in his budget. While most of the focus has been on Medicaid...

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No, That is Not Evidence That Obamacare Has Created Jobs

In the wake of the House's vote to repeal Obamacare on Wednesday, a number of the President's cabinet advisors have struck back by touting the law's purported benefits. Secretary of Labor Hilda L....

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Gun Control Wouldn't Have Stopped Loughner

A very public shooting spree, with victims including a congresswoman, a judge, and a little girl, committed by a known lunatic, using equipment that had previously been banned: Jared Loughner’s crime...

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"Broke States and Bailouts"

Last week I wrote about how states' fiscal woes are far from over. Specifically, tax revenue is rebounding from a diminished base, bailouts have expired and government spending on entitlement programs...

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Fear of a Red Planet

Have you heard that Hollywood is remaking the '80s classic—yes, classic—Red Dawn? Rather than Nicaraguan and Cuban forces invading the heartland with their godless socialism, a Chinese incursion will...

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A Beating in Pittsburgh

A year ago this month, Jordan Miles, an 18-year-old music student at Pittsburgh's Creative and Performing Arts High School, was walking to his grandmother's home in the city's Homewood neighborhood...

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Land-Use Regulations and Housing Booms and Busts

The on-line academic journal EconJournal Watch (Vol. 8, Issue 1, January 2011) has an interesting and very useful exchange between Wendell Cox and economists Haifang Wang and Yao Tang on whether...

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Denver Public Water Utility Draws Criticism

Last week Jared Jacang Maher of Face The State wrote a provocative piece on the internal auditing conducted by Denver Water (which I discovered via Chuck Plunkett of The Denver Post.) Maher found...

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Grading Barack Obama

Few legal scholars have blown as many minds and impacted as many national arguments as Richard Epstein. His 1985 volume Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain made the controversial...

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Grading Obama's First Two years

We are officially into the third year of the Obama presidency, so how was the first two years? I was on RT last week to offer a grade on the economy, the war, and foreign policy: 

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Land-Use Regulations Undermine Population Growth in Massachusetts

Harvard economsts Ed Glaeser has a nice, pithy commentary at the Boston.com (January 23, 2011) arguing that land-use regulations are directly responsible for slow population growth in Massachusetts. In...

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Wealthy (Dems) Enjoy the Greatest Mortgage Interest Benefits

A new article published Martin Sullivan at Tax Analysts (HT: TaxProf) puts an interesting political spin on the mortgage interest tax deduction (MID), a once ironclad tax measure that could be modified...

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Islam and the Intolerance Problem

While the attempted murder of an American Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, has prompted an outpouring of grief and soul-searching, the fatal shooting of a prominent elected official in another...

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Government Pills

Government expands on failure. All too often, government failure is treated as evidence that we need more government. Instead, government failure indicates that we should look for alternative results...

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State Budget Reform Toolkit

Today, states face structural deficits created by overspending. Most of the legislative "fixes" over the past few years for state budget gaps have merely postponed or obscured the problems rather than...

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Larimer County Officials Can’t Have Their Cake and Eat It Too

Monte Whaley of The Denver Post recently reported on the decrease in garbage at the Larimer County, Colorado landfill saying, "Less garbage is flowing into Colorado's landfills extending the life of...

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State Budget Reform Toolkit Released

I'm pleased to announce that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released the State Budget Reform Toolkit today. The Toolkit—a joint project of ALEC, Reason Foundation, Americans for Tax...

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When Numbers Get Unserious

"The challenge for the president,"The New York Timesreported before last night's State of the Union address, "is to convince independents and centrists of his fiscal responsibility without further...

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President Obama, China, High-Speed Rail and the Sputnik Moment

Last night in his State of the Union address, President Obama urged Americans and Congress to embrace this generation's "Sputnik" moment and spend more on technology and innovation to spur economic...

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We Can’t Win the Future By Repeating the Past

How can we “win the future,” as President Barack Obama exhorted us to do in his 2011 State of the Union address, when our top elected official remains so drearily stuck in the past? And despite the...

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The Sorry State of Our Union

State of the Union speeches generate much buzz amongst the Washington press corps, most of whom won’t remember its contents in three months, and little from the American public, most of whom understand...

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SOTU Offers Little Substance on Taxes

You've probably already read three times by now that last night's State of the Union address was long on rhetoric and short on solutions, or some permutation of that. This is true, of course, and...

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My State of the Union Address

President Obama fulfilled his constitutional duty and gave his report on the state of the union this week. Here's mine:We're in deep trouble.You know why. Our debt has passed $14 trillion, and yet our...

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Education and the State of the Union

Barack Obama spent about 1,000 words of his 7,000-word State of the Union address on education, which might make you think this will be a big year for education reform.But despite an abundance of words...

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No Bailouts In Sight for Cash-Strapped States

Most coverage of President Obama's State of the Union address has focused on what was said. However, yesterday John Gramlich of Stateline-a project of the Pew Center on the States-focused on what was...

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Florida Taxpayers Ultimately Responsible for Extra High-Speed Rail Costs

There is considerable confusion about the financial risks for taxpayers if the proposed Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail system is built.  Some public officials, like Rep. John Mica, have taken the...

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Man Versus the State

On May 29, 1963, Private Walter E. Williams of the U.S. Army’s 30th Infantry Division wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy denouncing the pervasive racism of the American government and...

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Cutting Defense Spending

Yesterday I appeared on Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano to discuss cutting defense spending. My main view here is that we need to think about cutting defense not in aggregate figures, but rather on...

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Should We Ban Walking While Wired?

You've had the experience of walking along and negotiating around someone who is walking slowly, weaving, or bumping into other pedestrians for an obvious reason: He or she is talking on a cell phone,...

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The Anti-Cop Trend That Isn't

Between January 20 and January 25, 13 police officers were shot in the U.S., five of them fatally. Two officers in St. Petersburg, Florida, were killed while trying to arrest a suspect accused of...

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TSA Blocks Private Screeners Despite Success and Good Reasons to Outsource...

After the close of business last Friday, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole announced that no more airports will be permitted to participate in the congressionally authorized...

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We Know How The Budget Got Here... Now What?

The Tax Policy Center's Joseph Rosenberg takes a crack at tracing the unsustainable path of the fiscal budget over the last 40 years while outlining a way to get us off it. It's interesting that while...

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What’s the Matter with Provincetown?

Barack Obama the hard-left bomb thrower is gone. I miss him already.Yes, I know. The president routinely depicted by detractors as the demon seed of the ’60s counterculture is in fact an establishment...

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Most Texting Road Violations Come From Older Drivers

North Carolina imposed a ban on texting while driving last year. It turns out, it's not teenagers who are the biggest culprits. An analysis of texting violations by the Associated Press revealed that...

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Wet at Last

Californians did not legalize marijuana in November, but Dallasites did finally manage to legalize alcohol. By a margin of nearly 2 to 1, voters approved a ballot initiative that allows grocery and...

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Colorado Senate Explores Taxicab Regulatory Reform

For decades, the Denver metropolitan area has suffered from a lack of competition in the market for taxicabs. In January 2011, Colorado State Senator Ted Harvey (R- Highlands Ranch) introduced  SB...

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Colorado Takes Another Swipe at Taxicab Regulatory Reform

For decades, the Denver metropolitan area has suffered from a lack of competition in the market for taxicabs.In January 2011 Colorado State Senator Ted Harvey (R- Highlands Ranch) introduced SB 11-065...

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Demanding Too Much From the Economy

Through both the recession and the present lethargic recovery, progressive commentators have blamed slow job creation on insufficient aggregate demand. Progressives like Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and,...

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Bioethicists Can't Handle the Truth

“A final lesson from the history of bioethics is the consensus that if you can't offer a patient anything to prevent or to ameliorate a terrible disease, why test for it?,” writes University of Alabama...

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Will Plans to Boost Investment in Start-Ups Bear Fruit?

Yesterday, the Administration announced a package of new plans to incentivize investment among small businesses, hopefully kick starting job growth and business lending in the private sector. One such...

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No Military Immunity

Vicky Hartzler, a freshman representative from Missouri, says one of her top priorities is "reining in runaway spending." Yet she exempts one-fifth of the federal budget and more than half of...

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The Cost of Congestion: 130 Days of Flow Through Alaskan Pipeline

Last week, the Texas Transportation Institute released it's annual Urban Mobility Report. Its got lots of good information, and this one is more accurate and more sophisticated in its approach. In...

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“Orphaned Transportation Earmarks” Part II

I first reported on the “orphaned transportation earmarks” (read unspent moneys) here base on a USA Today article  The bottom line from the research by Cezary Podkul and Gregory Kort is that $13...

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The Right Kind of Activism

For discussion's sake, let's just concede that every four years or so the American public is fooled into voting for a demagogue who's mastered a pleasant-sounding, market-tested populism. Let's then...

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Homeownership Rates and Housing Subsidies

Numbers can be really enlightening when you start moving around the pieces. Let's take a look at some the homeownership numbers over the past few decades.Last week, homeownership data released by the...

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He Loves the Mandate, He Loves It Not.

There’s an old game played by love-struck teenagers trying to figure out what the object of their affection thinks of them. Take a flower and pull the petals off one-by-one. For each petal, alternate...

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