Free Republic

When you compare the 50 laboratories of democracy after sorting them based on how their citizens voted in November 2008, only 10 Democratic-voting states are net recipients of federal subsidies, as opposed to 22 Republican states. Only one red state (Texas) is a net payer of federal taxes, as opposed to 16 blue states. One blue state (Rhode Island) pays as much as it gets.

This time of year, we pause to take stock of what happened in the year that has passed. Although there were plenty of policy developments to dislike in 2017, in the spirit of the holidays, I will stick to my three favorites. Forget, for now, about immigration policy, free trade setbacks, the busting of the budget caps and the continuation of the war on drugs and the pain it causes its victims. 2017 may or may not have been a net positive; that's for each of you to decide. First, President Donald Trump just signed a historic reduction in the...

We Are Out of Money American governance won’t begin to inch forward until the political class faces basic facts. American conservatives, particularly the fiscal variety, tend to hold up the European Union as a model of irresponsible, big-spending economic policy. But consider this: According to E.U. rules, member countries cannot maintain budget deficits above 3 percent of gross domestic product; nor can their total debt rise above 60 percent of GDP. As Veronique de Rugy points out in this issue, the U.S. budget deficit in 2009 was three times the E.U.’s limit, and total debt will zoom past the 60...

You know you've got a problem when your tax schemes are even being rejected by the French. While there's always a danger in reducing the causes of political unrest to a single issue, the plan to impose yet another regressive $9 billion annual carbon tax proved to be a catalyst for the "yellow vest" protests that are roiling Paris. The nonviolent version of the French carbon-tax revolt is spreading globally, too. Last November, Washington state voters rejected a very well-funded effort to pass the first ballot-approved carbon tax ever. The province of Ontario is suing the Canadian government to block...

In fiscal year 2018, $137 billion was paid “improperly” by the federal government, according to a recent report. That number sums all the improper payments by what the government calls high-priority programs. They are programs with improper-payments estimates exceeding $2 billion annually.If it makes your head spin, it should.Always the optimist, I have tried hard to find some good news in this year’s number. I have been tracking such improper payments for a while, and I am happy to report that, while they grew dramatically between their FY2013 level ($106 billion) and FY2015 ($137 billion), they haven’t gone up since.Now...

The Bush administration's newly released budget projections reveal an anticipated budget deficit of $450 billion for the current fiscal year, up another $151 billion since February. Supporters and critics of the administration are tripping over themselves to blame the deficit on tax cuts, the war, and a slow economy. But the fact is we have mounting deficits because George W. Bush is the most gratuitous big spender to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter. One could say that he has become the "Mother of All Big Spenders." The new estimates show that, under Bush, total outlays will have risen...

When Barack Obama was just a baby, nuclear energy was touted as the technology that would finally provide pollution-free, limitless electricity for all. In its famous 1962 Port Huron Statement, the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society gushed about how “our monster cities…might now be humanized” thanks to nuclear power. Like so many predictions about the future, that one rather dramatically missed the mark. Surprising as it may seem, the United States still generates around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants. This despite the fact that no new facilities have been built since the notorious Three Mile...

This week’s charts show total receipts, expenditures, and assets left in the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund. Data from the 2013 Trustees Report show that the disability fund is currently predicted to be three years from insolvency. Under more pessimistic assumptions, the insolvency date is pushed up to 2015. The fact that the DI trust fund is not currently depleted shouldn’t mislead us into thinking we have until 2016 to deal with the shortfalls.Spending on Social Security has more than doubled in the past decade, and DI now accounts for almost 20 percent of Social Security’s budget, up...

Actions Speak Loudest: Who's the more fiscally conservative, Clinton or Bush? by Veronique de Rugy August 8, 2002Veronique de Rugy is a fiscal policy analyst at the Cato Institute. President Bush may be repeating the sins of his father. Although elected on a Reaganesque, tax-cutting platform, he has veered left. President Bush has signed a bill to regulate political speech, issued protectionist taxes on imported steel and lumber, backed big-spending education and farm bills, and endorsed massive new entitlements for mental-health care and prescription drugs. When the numbers are added up, in fact, it looks like President Bush is less...

Social Security is, barring an immediate and massive overhaul in how benefits are paid to the back-end of the Baby Boomer generation and beyond, on its deathbed. There can be no mistaking that fact. Veronique de Rugy explains at Reason: Since 2010, [Social Security] has been running at a cash-flow deficit – meaning that the Social Security payroll taxes the government collects aren't enough to cover the benefits it's obliged to pay out. That should have been a signal that the time had come to look at reform. Instead, we've spent the last seven years ignoring the problem. To get...

Last week, Oregon became the first state in the nation to adopt a mandatory statewide rent control policy. Yet, rent control never delivers on the promise that it will multiply the affordable housing in high-value markets to serve middle- and lower-class families. It also always has negative consequences, and this time will be no different. The new statewide law applies to landlords who have at least four units, one of which is at least 15 years old. It prohibits them from increasing rent more than seven percent over inflation annually. The bill also prohibits no-cause evictions after the first year...

The government has been shut down for over two weeks and is on track to become the longest shutdown in U.S. history. As for how long the current standoff between the Trump administration and the Democratic congress is going to last, your guess is as good as mine. It's a gamble for both sides. That makes it the perfect time to write a column about gambling. As I have mentioned in previous columns, it's been reported that the Department of Justice is drafting an opinion to reverse a 2011 finding from the Office of Legal Counsel that paved the way...

The ancient Roman historian Livy observed that “the unknown always inspires terror.” That was not a novel idea for the Romans – fear of the unknown is as old as humanity itself. Much more recently, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reminded us just how many kinds of “unknowns” there were to fear. “There are known knowns,” he famously explained in a 2002 press briefing. “There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns...

The primary job of Congress is to pass a budget. Yet year after year, its members fail to do their job. This year is no different. The week before Christmas, and in the midst of a budget deficit that's exploding along with the national debt, the Senate rushed to prepare a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open for a couple months. In other words, we're left with unnecessary uncertainty and a growing pool of red ink. The Senate measure has an expiration date of Feb. 8, so its main intent was to temporarily prevent a government shutdown --...

Donald Trump achieved the presidency telling the American people he would "Make America Great Again." Given that during eight years of Barack Obama's presidency there was not a single year in which national satisfaction, as measured by Gallup, averaged above 30 percent, tapping into Americans' general dissatisfaction with the state of the nation was good campaign strategy. This February, national satisfaction reached the highest its been under Trump, 36 percent. However, in March it plunged back down to 28 percent. And this big drop was fueled by a big drop among Republicans. National satisfaction among Republicans dropped from 67...

Editor's Note: Steve Chapman is off. The following column is by Veronique de Rugy. How can we produce better health for more people at a lower cost, year after year? By lifting all the rules and barriers that prevent health care innovators from bringing new lifesaving products to consumers and force doctors to beg bureaucrats and insurance administrators for permission to save lives. For years, free market types focused most of their attention on how to provide better health insurance coverage than their liberal counterparts. But is this the right approach? Health care coverage is different from health care. Though...

The federal government never misses a chance to max out its spending limit, according to a Mercatus Center study. Since 2000, the debt limit has been raised 10 times. And each time, the government spent nearly to that limit, says Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. These increases serve as a “symbolic cap”, de Rugy wrote. “They (Congress) are the ones who decide what the limit is,” de Rugy said. “On your credit card, you are not the one who determines if you deserved a higher limit. It’s a credit card...

Imagine that each month, you spend $2,000 more than you earn and charge the difference to your credit card. You make interest payments but never attempt to pay down your debt, instead just letting it grow. There will inevitably come a time when you have to ask the credit card company to increase your limit. That's how Uncle Sam has handled his spending and, as a result, debt. Now, come Feb. 28, he hopes that his ability to borrow will be extended once again. This is where the analogy between you and the federal government ends. In your case, if...

In September, we learned that Equifax had suffered a massive data breach that exposed the personal information -- including names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers -- of 145 million Americans. It was the latest in a string of cybersecurity breaches in recent years. The frequency of such attacks -- with other prominent examples including breaches of systems belonging to Target, eBay, Yahoo and Home Depot -- demonstrates the complexity of securing sensitive information in the internet age. If there's one thing that all these breaches have taught us, it's that cybersecurity is hard. There's no easy legislative fix, and...

Trade agreements have been greatly successful at lowering trade barriers around the world. But they're not without their flaws. Each agreement, in practice, tends to retain some counterproductive protectionist policies and may even export some bad policies. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), or "new NAFTA," is no different. As soon as President Donald Trump got into office, he threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement. He imposed metal tariffs on steel and aluminum for the stated purpose of forcing Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the 25-year-old trade agreement. The result was the USMCA. Assessing the impact of...