Suggested Economic Priorities
From the 125th anniversary WSJ edition. John Cochrane writes, Washington is stuck because that serves its interests. Long laws and vague regulations amount to arbitrary power. The administration uses...
View ArticleTwo SNEP Goals Connected
Jed Graham writes, The $2.8 trillion Social Security Trust Fund is on track to be totally spent by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. That’s one year earlier than projected in 2013 and...
View ArticlePaul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Proposals
He says, Each state that wanted to participate would submit a plan to the federal government. That plan would lay out in detail the state’s proposed alternative. If everything passed muster, the...
View ArticleUniversal Basic Income, zero marginal tax rate
Ed Dolan writes, a UBI would be administratively efficient and unobtrusive. It would require no verification of any personal trait or behavior…If the UBI were integrated into the existing federal...
View ArticleOren Cass on Paul Ryan
He writes, Ryan excludes Medicaid from his Opportunity Grants. But truly untangling the safety net requires disassembling Medicaid and allowing that funding to be reallocated, either to new healthcare...
View ArticlePaul Ryan on Income Assistance
On the safety net, his Expanding Opportunity plan says, It should always pay to work. But fixing these incentives is no easy task. To phase out benefits more slowly would mean to subsidize millions of...
View ArticleRobert Doar on the Ryan Plan
He says, He left out Medicaid, I think, because he recognizes that he couldn’t commit to preserving funding levels for it because it’s unrealistic as a fiscal matter. Unless we address Medicaid’s...
View ArticleDoubts About Devolution
Callie Gable finds that John J. DiIulio, Jr., has concerns with Paul Ryan’s idea of turning anti-poverty funds to the states. He mentions Pennsylvania’s Summer Food Service Program, a federal program...
View ArticleThe Case for a Basic Income Grant
Matt Zwolinski writes, Unlike other welfare programs which encourage or require recipients to consume certain specific kinds of good – such as medical care, housing, or food – a BIG simply gives people...
View ArticleAnother Alternative to the FDA Process
Alex Tabarrok writes, MelaFind was submitted for marketing approval in Europe in May 2011. It was approved just five months later. One key reason for Europe’s efficient approval process is that...
View ArticleAn Encouraging Sentence
From Jarrett Skorup: Abbott’s plan would specifically get rid of or significantly reform licensing for interior designers, salvage vehicle dealers, dog trainers, coaches, auctioneers, barbers,...
View ArticleOf Interest to Libertarians
1. From George Leef. Since 2003, the [North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners] has been issuing cease and desist orders to beauty shops or any other business that offered teeth whitening services. The...
View ArticleWhy I would be inclined to replace the FCC and the FDA
Francis Fukuyama writes, Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop...
View ArticleA Spectrum of Possibilities
How can the United States make better use of wireless spectrum? Broadly speaking, there are three categories of tools. 1. Engineering. Design and deploy transmitters and receivers that allow more data...
View ArticleA Classic Paper on Spectrum Property Rights
From Arthur S. DeVany and others. One possible way to take explicit account of the unpredictable variations in field strength is to devise a stochastic definition for the spectrum-use property rights....
View ArticleSpectrum Price Discrimination Using Zero-rated Apps
The Washington Post reports, Apps and Web sites that don’t count against the users’ data plan are popping up both in the United States and abroad, often under names like Wikipedia Zero or Facebook...
View ArticleA Sentence to Ponder
From an article on the decline of risk-taking and creativity in scientific research funding. The average age to receive NIH research grants has gone from 38 in 1980 to 51 today.
View ArticleHealth Policy Proposals
From a RAND paper. The first five options would decrease costs and risks of inventing new products or obtaining regulatory approval for products that would advance our two policy goals. 1. enabling...
View ArticleI Wish I Knew More About This
From Technology Review. Heimerl’s innovation comes in a gray box roughly the size of a microwave oven. It has solar panels on the outside to power cellular equipment inside, along with the software for...
View ArticleJoshua Gans on Apple Pay
He writes, This is why I think the resolution for the identification challenge is more significant. Last year, with the iPhone 5s, Apple finally got fingerprint recognition right. Last week I actually...
View Article
