Salon • May 17, 2013
While President Obama fired IRS commissioner Steven Miller this week for failing to stop the enhanced scrutiny the IRS gave 501c4 applications with conservative missions, most of the activity happened under a man who was never supposed to get the job: Miller’s predecessor, Doug Shulman. Indeed, the little-known story of how Shulman was appointed by [...]
The Blaze • May 17, 2013
Imagine a market where the government controls both the price of goods and how much producers can sell, and where excess goods are bought up by the government and steered toward government-favored industries and away from consumers. Think you’d have to go back in time to the Soviet Union to find such a program? Or [...]
The Blaze • May 15, 2013
The so-called “Marketplace Fairness Coalition,” one of a half-dozen groups using big-box retailer cash to organize support of Internet sales tax legislation, sent a very interesting letter last week to eBay CEO John Donahoe. In it, they include one of the best “sort of true but woefully incomplete” statements I’ve seen in a long time. They [...]
RealClearEnergy • May 14, 2013
Tax reform may involve simplifying the tax code, but actually achieving such a thing promises to be a terrifyingly complicated process. The battle over how (and by how much) to reduce the various tax deductions, credits and exemptions that litter the code will be contentious enough; reaching agreement on how to divvy up the revenue [...]
George W. Bush Institute • May 13, 2013
Public Radio’s Marketplace This Morning recently ran a piece featuring an in-depth investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting that highlighted the ability of U.S.-based companies to legally evade paying taxes on the profits earned from their overseas operations. The story presented a picture of U.S. corporate behavior that no doubt left many people indignant [...]
Tobacco Truth • May 10, 2013
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2003 prison smoking ban produced a pervasive black market, where single cigarettes cost inmates $30, and a pack runs as high as $200, according to the Daily News. That might sound shocking, but I predicted those unintended consequences nine years ago in a column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, after [...]
Huffington Post • May 9, 2013
Buried deep inside the $950 billion farm bill soon to come before the House and Senate agriculture committees is a policy proposal that easily ranks among the most misbegotten welfare-for-the-wealthy efforts ever to spring from the banks of the Potomac. The proposed new program, something called “Agricultural Risk Coverage” or “Shallow Loss,” literally offers something [...]
Eli Lehrer • May 3, 2013
Buried deep in the recesses of President Obama’s budget are two items that could have vast and potentially devastating consequences for millions of Americans involved with dozens of different risk markets. Though their names are more likely to induce slumber than tea party rage, these proposals serve as important reminders of the ways that misguided [...]
Huffington Post • May 3, 2013
With the stroke of his pen on a piece of insurance reform legislation, Florida Gov. Rick Scott will soon have the opportunity to begin writing another chapter to a rich and under-appreciated history of small-government environmentalism. The legislation he’ll almost certainly sign in the next few weeks — the “coastal preservation” title of a property [...]
Tobacco Truth • May 2, 2013
One of the longstanding federal warnings on smokeless tobacco is: “This product can cause gum disease and tooth loss.” This warning has no scientific basis. I previously discussed a study from Sweden concluding that snus use was not associated with gum disease. A 2012 study by the same research group concluded that “snus use does [...]
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