The ‘Public Option’ Is Back

By Michael F. Cannon

That didn’t take long at all.  Left-wing congresscritters have (re-)introduced legislation to create a “public option” in ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges.
The Congressional Budget Office scores the bill as reducing federal deficits by $53 billion by 2019.  How?  Paying doctors and hospitals less!  Put that on a bumper sticker! The public option would use Medicare’s price [...]

Emergency Spending

By Tad DeHaven

A recent paper by Veronique de Rugy examines how policymakers use various budgeting gimmicks to increase spending and obscure liabilities. One particularly abusive mechanism is the designation of supplemental spending as an “emergency.” The emergency designation makes it easier for policymakers to skirt budgetary rules, particularly “pay-as-you-go” (PAYGO) requirements.
The following chart from the paper shows [...]

Under Romney/ObamaCare, Even the Scapegoats Scapegoat

By Michael F. Cannon

In a recent post on how RomneyCare is increasing health insurance costs in Massachusetts (by encouraging healthy residents to purchase coverage only when they need medical care) and how ObamaCare will do the same, I linked to a Boston Globe article where an insurance-company spokeswoman made this odd claim:
We believe…the gaming in the system…is adding [...]

Re. Ezra Klein: Did State and Local Anti-stimulus Nullify Federal Stimulus?

By Alan Reynolds

A recent Washington Post column by Ezra Klein dreamed up a new excuse for the conspicuous failure of Obama’s so-called stimulus plan.   Klein argues that the stimulus of federal spending has been offset by the “anti-stimulus” of fiscal austerity by state and local governments.  For proof he quotes Bruce Bartlett, who is fast becoming the favorite go-to guy [...]

Congress Begins Conference on Financial Regulation

By Mark A. Calabria

Today begins the televised political theatre that Barney Frank has been waiting months for:  the first public meeting of the House and Senate conferees on the two financial regulation bills.  While there are a handful of important differences between the House and Senate bills, these differences are overshadowed by what the bills have in common.  The [...]

Fiscal Imbalance and Global Power

By Christopher Preble

Over at National Journal’s National Security Experts blog, this week’s question revolves around the health of the U.S. economy, and its relationship to U.S. power. 
The editors ask: 
How serious a threat is the mounting debt to the nation’s standing as the world’s only superpower? Can the U.S. continue to spend more than all other countries combined on its [...]

Regulatory Spending Actually Rose under Bush

By Tad DeHaven

Analysts across the ideological spectrum generally agree that the government’s regulatory bodies fail far too frequently. However, analysts seem to learn different lessons from this experience.
Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein cites numerous examples of failure and concludes, “It’s time for the business community to give up its jihad against regulation.”
He says:
It hardly captures the [...]

Sell Your Soul for What’s Behind Curtain #1?

By Neal McCluskey

Would you agree to sell your soul? And not just sell it, but sell it for an undisclosed prize? The states of Maryland and Kentucky would: Both have endorsed as-yet unpublished national curriculum standards for mathematics and language arts, declaring that they will relinquish their ability to set their own standards — to control their [...]