The Biden administration is making a stark departure from past administrations in how it talks about, and treats, religious freedom. In his remarks May 12 on the release of the 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom, Secretary of State Antony Blinken correctly asserted that “religious freedom is a human right,” one at the heart of what it means to be … Continue reading Biden Abandons Religious Freedom as First Among Rights
Category: Washington
I testified before the Senate on hospital consolidation. As my co‐panelist and Carnegie‐Mellon health economist Martin Gaynor testified, “the majority of hospital markets are highly concentrated, and many areas of the country are dominated by one or two large hospital systems with no close competitors.” According to one study, “90 percent of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) were highly … Continue reading Testimony: Excessive Government Reduces Competition in Health Care Markets
Lumber prices have gone through the roof over the past year—up 370%. The lumber needed to build a new home now costs nearly $36,000 more than just 12 months ago. The reasons include lower production levels at U.S. sawmills when the pandemic was raging, high demand for new homes as millennials enter the peak homebuying age group, and … Continue reading Tariffs on Canadian Softwood Lumber Hitting US Homebuyers Hard
One dysfunctional federal welfare program is contributing to a national labor shortage. Now, we can add Texas to the increasingly long list of states opting out. The program in question is the federal government’s pandemic expansion of unemployment benefits. At the start of the crisis, Congress expanded benefits to new categories of workers and added … Continue reading Texas Just Became the Latest State to Opt Out of a Broken Federal Welfare Scheme
Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on May 5 struck down the nationwide ban on evictions from rental properties put in place by the Department of Health and Human Services through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nine days later, though, after negative media coverage, she decided to leave the CDC’s … Continue reading Judge Rightly Finds COVID-19 Eviction Moratorium Unlawful, Then Stays Ruling Anyway
A couple months ago, in arguing that “The Fed should give everyone a bank account,” journalist Matt Yglesias cited what he took to be an instructive precedent: “Once upon a time, governments didn’t issue paper currency, and instead banknotes were printed privately by banks. But over time, we came to see this as a worthwhile public service.” His first sentence … Continue reading How U.S. Government Paper Currency Began, and How Private Banknotes Ended
If Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., continue to have their way, families across the U.S. will pay more in taxes so that millionaires in California can write off a new Tesla. Sound fair? Team Biden thinks so. Included within the White House’s $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” plan—which is dense … Continue reading So-Called Infrastructure Plan Would Federalize California’s Climate Mandates
For many on the left, sound science is sound only when it supports their ideological preferences. We saw that during the Trump administration, when leftists opposed an Environmental Protection Agency transparency rule that would have helped the public to evaluate the credibility of the science used in rulemaking. Now we are seeing it in the Biden administration.The … Continue reading Congress Needs to Undo EPA’s ‘Science Massacre’
President Joe Biden released three enormous spending plans within three months of taking office. These packages, each of which contain dozens of major provisions, should not be considered in isolation. While focus is currently on the so-called infrastructure and family plans, it’s important to keep in mind the flawed “COVID-19 relief” bill that Biden already signed in March. Combining … Continue reading 5 Ways to Understand Biden’s $6.4 Trillion Tax-and-Spend Agenda
The federal government has broken the bank with an astounding $6+ trillion in (ostensibly) pandemic-related spending to date, and President Biden wants to spend trillions more. Unfortunately, many Republicans in Congress have been too inconsistent on this issue to protest this spending binge in any meaningful way. But one of the few principled fiscal conservatives … Continue reading Rand Paul Warns America: Time to ‘Wake Up’ to ‘Profound Repercussions’ of Biden’s Spending Binge
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