Repeal the Debt Ceiling
This article appeared onSubStack on May 12, 2023.Unless Congress cuts spending or raises taxes in the near future, the federal government will hit its debt ceiling later this summer. At that point the United States will either default or pursue “extraordinary measures,” such as minting a trillion dollarcoin.President Biden wants a “clean” increase in the ceiling; Republicans want a substantial cut in spending in exchange for raising the limit. In all likelihood, the two sides will appear to make no progress until the last second before default; they will then jointly announce a compromise that both sides portray...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 12, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey Miron Source Type: blogs
Chileans Vote to Step Back from the Socialist Brink
Daniel RaisbeckBack in August of 2022, I wrote about how a small band of sanctimonious, sophomoric malcontents had—astoundingly—taken over the Chilean state. President Gabriel Boric, who was elected to his country’s highest office in 2021 at the age of 35, had assembled a team of former student activists. Since the early 2010’s, their main contri bution to Chilean society had consisted of leading numerous protests against the country’ssoi disant“neoliberal” model. First, it was against school choice and profit in the education sector. Then it was against the private pension system. Finally, in 2019,mild ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 10, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Daniel Raisbeck Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Let's do the time warp again
The Book of Ezra continues to be chronologically challenged. The character of Ezra finally appears, in the 7th year of the reign of Ataxerxes, which would be 72 years after the death of Cyrus and something like 80 years after the return from exile described in the opening chapters. Therefore Ezra ' s father, and grandfather must have chosen to remain in Babylon, along with other priests, musicians, and temple servants as described in verse 8. While in Babylon, these people apparently exercised their offices, and Ezra studied to assume his hereditary priesthood. Why and how this happened is not explained, and it ' s especia...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 10, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Will the Added IRS Funding Create Value?
Chris EdwardsThe Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 included $79 billion in added funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the coming decade. The funding will roughly double theagency ’s budget by 2031 in nominal dollars, with 57 percent of the added funding for enforcement but just 6 percent for business systems (computers) and 4 percent for taxpayer services. House Republicans are seeking to repeal most of the new funding as part the debt negotiations.The $79 billion IRS funding increase isprojected to raise tax revenues $180 billion over the coming decade, for a net gain of $101 billion. Supporters...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 9, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
Is the Debt Ceiling Unconstitutional? What about Default?
Robert A. Levy1. Describe the current impasse regarding the debt ceiling.Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns that the federal government may no longer be able to meet its obligations if the debt ceiling is not raised by June 1. The result: default, with financial chaos to follow. Despite that stark warning, the debate over spending cuts continues. Democrats want a stand‐alone “clean” vote on raising the ceiling. Republicans want to use the debt ceiling as leverage to force spending reductions. Political compromise remains elusive.2. What do legal experts say about default?Enter a handful of imaginative lawye...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 8, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Robert A. Levy Source Type: blogs
SNAP and Obesity
Chris EdwardsCongress is scheduled to reauthorize the Farm Bill this year, the largest part of which is the $127 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SNAP, or food stamp, program is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It was created in 1964 to improve nutrition for low ‐income families, but the economic situation and food consumption of such families has greatly changed since then.Cato ’s John Early and colleagueshave described how real levels of poverty in America have plunged over the decades. One change has been food consumption. Chart 1 shows that calories have risen subs...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 3, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
Catastrophic Enrollment Declines at Some Community Colleges
Marc JoffeCollege enrollment has been shrinking, putting pressure on institutions below the elite tier. Although most attention has focused on failures of for ‐profit colleges and smaller private liberal arts schools, public colleges are not immune from distress. Community college enrollment has been especially weak. A review of federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data from 2011 and 2021 shows that several community colleg es have suffered catastrophic enrollment declines over the ten‐year period. These institutions may be candidates for consolidation, which would save taxpayer money.N...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 1, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Marc Joffe Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Neighborhood dispute
Ezra 4 is chronologically muddled, evidence that the text accreted over time. Of course, we don ' t know how much of this actually happened. On the one hand, it ' s hard to see why these stories are here if there isn ' t some basis for them, on the other hand some of this doesn ' t seem very plausible. I ' ll try to sort out some of the complications. In verses 1 and 2 Zerubabbel is not identified but he is the leader of the community, identified elsewhere in the Tanakh as being of the Davidic line and as the governor of Judah. The reference to Esahaddon king of Syria is to the story in 2 Kings 17, in which the Assyri...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Rationing by red tape
One of the worst features of our absurd Rube Goldberg non-system of Medicine is that it buries people in paperwork in order to get the benefits they ' re entitled to. When my mother went into a nursing home, I assumed I could complete the application to get her onto Medicaid myself, but it turned out that even for a guy with a Ph.D. in Social Policy who was a full-time professor of health services, policy and practice, it was impossible. I had to hire a lawyer, and we have to pay the lawyer every year to do the required re-determination. And by the way, the only entity that ' s ultimately paying my mother ' s lawyer is the...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 28, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A bit about the history of Medicaid
Medicaid was actually something of an afterthought in the 1965 Medicare legislation. As Moore and Smith write, “There was so little comment that Medicaid did, indeed, seem like a casual add-on. A legislative draftsman said that he could scarcely recall working on Medicaid.” Since retirees receiving Social Security were covered by Medicare, Medicaid originally benefited only recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC, the program generally known at that time as “welfare,” and the smaller categories of recipients of aid for the blind and disabled.Although state participation in Medicaid was voluntary...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 21, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Lobbying Turns Green
David BoazI don ’t mean to keep writing the same article about lobbying and special interests over and over. But the federal government keeps creating more and more opportunities for special interests to hire lobbyists. This weekThe Economist writes,with up to $800bn in clean ‐energy handouts now up for grabs over the coming decade, …The energy industry as a whole spent nearly $300m last year on lobbying, the most since 2013 (see chart 1). Big oil and electric utilities, which had been reducing their spending on influence ‐seeking before 2020, haveramped it up again; spending is growing in line with that...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 19, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: David Boaz Source Type: blogs
Expensing Is Key in Any Pro ‐Growth Tax Package
Adam N. MichelAs Congress searches for policies to meet our current economic challenges, maintaining full expensing —which has begun to phase out—should be top of the list. Full expensing protects business investment from the costs of inflation and supports economic growth by reducing barriers to new investments.Expensing (also called 100 percent bonus depreciation) allows businesses to deduct the full cost of new investments in the year they are made. Without expensing, investment costs must be deducted over time. For example, if a farmer buys a new combine and can only use one-fifth of what he paid to offset revenues...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 19, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Adam N. Michel Source Type: blogs
Why in the Delta Quadrant of the galaxy would you care . . .
If somebody does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth? That ' s just the way some people are. What possibly harm does it do to anybody else? And how could it possibly harm or offend you if some people like to entertain in the persona of a person of a different gender than they usually present, and other people are entertained by them? (Maybe you should check out Dame Edna.)What we ' re talking about here is the ridiculous ginning up of a moral panic by Republican politicians who have lost the country on abortion and same sex marriage. They don ' t actually want to offer any policy solutions to the econo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 17, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Fast Facts about Medicare and Social Security
Romina Boccia and Dominik LettMedicare and Social Security are the two largest federal government programs that are also growing the fastest. They are fiscally unsustainable as currently structured. Medicare consists of four parts which provide inpatient care (Part A), outpatient care (Part B), prescription drug coverage (Part D), and subsidies for seniors to choose alternative health insurance providers through Medicare Advantage (Part C). Social Security consists of Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI). For the purposes of this fact sheet, Social Security will refer to OASI only. This fact...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 13, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Romina Boccia, Dominik Lett Source Type: blogs
Importance of Startup Businesses
Chris EdwardsThisCato study examined the role of startup businesses and the angel investors who fund them. It discussed how startups create jobs, generate innovations, and inject competition into markets.Covering some of the same ground, a new piece in theWall Street Journal by Christopher Mimsdiscusses differences between large and small high ‐tech firms. Compared to large firms, small firms tend to have less bureaucracy, assume more risk, act more quickly, and may have better worker incentive structures.The moment Noam Bardin, former chief executive of navigation app Waze, knew that life at a big company w...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 11, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
