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Posts Tagged ‘Cato Institute’
July 25th, 2016 at 3:27 pm
This Week’s “Your Turn” Radio Show Lineup
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”

Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Lance Izumi, J.D., Koret Senior Fellow and Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute: Education Update and Reforms;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Alex Pfeiffer, Young Apprentice Reporter at The Daily Caller: DNC’s Leaked Emails;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Blake Barclay, Blogger, Political Correspondent, and High School Student: RNC 2016 as viewed by a member of the iGeneration; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: Open Mic

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.
December 19th, 2014 at 10:28 am
Podcast: 46% of Doctors Give ObamaCare a “D” or “F” Grade
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In an interview with CFIF, Dr. Jeffrey Singer, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute and Doc Squads Member, discusses the “2014 Survey of American Physicians,” how ObamaCare is disrupting the doctor-patient relationship and worsening the quality of patients’ care, and how increased use of emergency rooms result in a hidden tax.

Listen to the interview here.

October 24th, 2014 at 11:09 am
Governors Graded on Efforts to Restrain Government
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In an interview with CFIF, Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy Studies at Cato Institute and Editor of DownsizingGovernment.org, discusses the 2014 fiscal policy report card on America’s Governors and how state and local taxes harm America’s competitiveness.

Listen to the interview here.

October 11th, 2012 at 2:37 pm
New Cato Study Shows Tea Party Governors Delivering on Promises
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The Cato Institute came out this week with its Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors and the results are very good for Tea Partiers. The nation’s top five chief executives in terms of fiscal stewardship are virtually all proud limited government advocates who have followed through on their promises of reining in government:

1 (tie) — Sam Brownback (R-Kansas); Rick Scott (R-Florida)

3 (tie) — Paul LePage (R-Maine); Tom Corbett (R-Pennsylvania)

5 (3-way tie) — Bobby Jindal (R-Louisiana); Jack Dalrymple (R-North Dakota); John Lynch (D-New Hampshire)

Lynch deserves some credit for being the sole Democrat to crack the top of the list, but not nearly as much as the Republicans who swept to huge majorities in the Granite State’s legislature and forced the governor to abide by New Hampshire’s “live free or die” ethos.

And the nation’s worst fiscal leaders? Is it any surprise that it’s a cadre of blue state liberals?:

46. Christine Gregoire (D-Washington)

47. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii)

48. Mark Dayton (D-Minnesota)

49. Dan Malloy (D-Connecticut)

50, Pat Quinn (D-Illinois)

The full report is here.

August 29th, 2012 at 2:47 pm
CATO: The Charter School Paradox?

Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute argues a provocative thesis about the effect of public charter schools:

How can charter schools spend less money on average than regular public schools and yet cost taxpayers more overall at the state level? How can charter schools increase educational options and diversity in the public school system and yet decrease options and diversity in education overall? And how can some charter schools outperform regular public schools on average and yet decrease achievement overall?

I call these outcomes the Charter School Paradox, but it is only a paradox if we take a very narrow view of the effects of charter schools. When we expand our perspective to include their effects on private education, we find that these seeming contradictions are really the unintended consequences of inadequate, public-sector-only reform. On average, charter schools may marginally improve the public education system, but in the process they are wreaking havoc on private education. Charter schools take a significant portion of their students from private schools, causing a drop in private enrollment, driving some schools entirely out of business, and thereby raising public costs while potentially diminishing competition and diversity in our education system overall.

Schaeffer’s commentary is based on a larger study published by Cato colleague Richard Buddin.

Some of the key findings of Buddin’s study are that public charters in urban areas draw one-fourth to one-third of their student bodies from private schools.  The direct cost of these private-to-public migrants is estimated to be $1.8 billion a year (as of 2008) in new spending.

According to Schaeffer and Buddin, unless education reformers enact “good private school choice reform, such as education tax credits,” expanding the number of public charter schools could “cannibalize the private sector, increase public costs, and decrease options and competition.”

Conservative governors like Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and others have been rightly praised for reforming their public education system by increasing the school choice options for parents.  Going forward, they and others would do well to continue pursuing policies that protect private education while improving its public counterpart.

October 4th, 2011 at 1:27 pm
EPA Stacked the Deck on Endangerment Finding

Don’t bother me with the facts; we’re trying to save the world here!

That’s essentially what Patrick Michaels of the CATO Institute says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did when it decided that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the environment and must be regulated.

The problem for EPA is that its own Inspector General recently stated that the process EPA used to justify its decision violated both federal law and scientific integrity.  According to Michaels, federal law requires any endangerment finding that is “highly influential” to be rigorously peer-reviewed to ensure that economy-altering regulations are based on the best science available.

EPA violated that standard when it based its endangerment finding on a facially biased United Nations report favorably reviewed by at least one federal climatologist who worked for EPA – a clear conflict of interest.

The stakes are high.  EPA’s endangerment finding is the legal basis for the agency to dictate energy regulations down to the kind of light bulb Americans can use in their homes.  By cooking the books that authority rests on, EPA has destroyed any credibility it may have had.

Let the legal challenges begin (again).

January 17th, 2011 at 11:28 pm
Global Warming Extremist Hansen: America’s Problem is Democracy
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Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been upping the ante for global warming hyperventilation for decades. After all, this is the man who said that global warming would leave parts of Manhattan underwater in 20 years — 22 years ago.

Yet Hansen, who enjoys mainstream respectability on the left, has trumped even his own debased standards for cluelessness with a recent round of remarks in China. Writing in the Washington Times, the Cato Institute’s Patrick J. Michaels has some of the gory details:

According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are “the barbarians” with a “fossil-money- ‘democracy’ that now rules the roost,” making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections.

Mr. Hansen has another idea to circumvent our democracy. Because Congress is not likely to pass any legislation making carbon-based energy prohibitively expensive, he proposed, in the South China Morning Post, that China lead a boycott of our economy:

“After agreement with other nations, e.g., the European Union, China and these nations could impose rising internal carbon fees. Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.

“The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil-fuel addiction … or … accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being.”

It may not be necessary for climate change alarmists to make common cause with authoritarian statists the world over. But how many times does it have to happen before we can assume that it’s a feature, rather than an accessory, of the environmental left’s worldview?

March 17th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
More Good Talking Points on Health Care “Reform”

The Cato Institute’s Michael F. Cannon engages in some crisp health care “reform” myth-busting for AOL News today.  My favorite is his succinct evisceration of the claim that the Senate bill isn’t a government takeover of health care.

This legislation would force all Americans to purchase health insurance coverage. Government would control what kind of insurance you purchase, where you purchase it, how much you pay and what kind of medical care you receive. Our health care sector would be “private” in name only.

Once government controls those decisions, there will be nothing left to socialize. Make no mistake — this is a vote on socialized medicine.

December 11th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
An Alternative to Being the Party of “No”

The Cato Institute has a terrific critique on the Democrats’ comprehensive health care “reform” bill.  Throughout the article runs a description of the expansive interpretation given to the U.S. Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause by the Supreme Court, and further stretched by Congress.   The best part though is a counter-proposal for increasing competition in the health insurance market while lowering costs.

If Congress were interested in using the commerce clause for its intended purpose, we would be debating the Health Care Choice Act, which would permit the interstate purchase of individual health policies. The Democrats, however, bottled up that bill in committee.

They would rather exploit the cartelization of health insurance in selected states to argue for a government-run insurance company. Never mind that a major reason for those cartels is the prohibition against purchasing insurance across state lines.

The Health Care Choice Act is an elegant piece of legislation designed to allow health insurance carriers to sell – and consumers to purchase – plans across state lines.  Of course, there are federalism concerns about allowing different states to regulate according to their own policy preferences.  Then again, the Health Care Choice Act does give the GOP something to support in the health reform debate.  Additional commentary on the proposal is available here.