Archive

Posts Tagged ‘American Enterprise Institute’
February 5th, 2017 at 10:05 am
The Pressing Opioid Epidemic
Posted by Print

In an interview with CFIF, Sally Satel, M.D., Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, discusses how to treat America’s pressing opioid epidemic, mental health policies, and political trends in medicine.

Listen to the interview here.

October 14th, 2016 at 6:49 am
Podcast: The Role of Debate Moderators
Posted by Print

In an interview with CFIF, Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow and Research Coordinator at the American Enterprise Institute, discusses the 2016 election in terms of public opinion, the role of debate moderators and the impact of politics on friendships.

Listen to the interview here.

September 27th, 2016 at 1:11 pm
High Risk: The Debate Over the Price of Specialty Drugs and Zika Virus
Posted by Print

In an interview with CFIF, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, discusses the history and regulations surrounding drug prices, who should finance important medical advancements, and the continuing Zika threat.

Listen to the interview here.

July 14th, 2016 at 9:36 am
Does a VP Pick Matter?
Posted by Print

In an interview with CFIF, Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow and Research Coordinator at the American Enterprise Institute, discusses the vice presidential chatter on both sides of the political aisle and whether it is possible for a vice presidential pick to help a presidential campaign.

Listen to the interview here.

June 12th, 2015 at 12:55 pm
Podcast: How Pointless Regulations Hurt Patients
Posted by Print

Thomas P. Stossel, M.D., American Enterprise Institute Scholar, discusses his book Pharmaphobia: How the Conflict of Interest Myth Undermines American Medical Innovation, how heavy regulation makes medical innovation difficult and expensive, and how bureaucrats, reporters, politicians, and predatory lawyers have built careers attacking the medical products industry.

Listen to the interview here.

March 28th, 2014 at 8:26 am
Podcast: Putin’s Ukraine Strategy
Posted by Print

In an interview with CFIF, Leon Aron, Resident Scholar and Director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, discusses how far Russian President Putin will go in Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine, what will stop him, and the impact, if any, of sanctions imposed by the United States.

Listen to the interview here.

October 25th, 2012 at 6:32 pm
Income Inequality: It’s Easy to be Poor When We Don’t Count the Safety Net
Posted by Print

The American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur have an important (and devastating) piece in today’s Wall Street Journal breaking down the misleading facets of the left’s argument that the U.S. is currently suffering through a crisis of economic inequality. Here’s a particularly eye-opening excerpt:

In the first place, studies that measure income inequality largely focus on pretax incomes while ignoring the transfer payments and spending from unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid and other safety-net programs. Politicians who rest their demands for more redistribution on studies of income inequality but leave out the existing safety net are putting their thumb on the scale.

Second and more important, it is well known that people’s earnings in general rise over their working lifetime. And so, for example, a person who decides to invest more in education may experience a lengthy period of low income while studying, followed by significantly higher income later on. Snapshot measures of income inequality can be misleading.

Thomas Sowell frequently makes a point complimentary to Hassett and Mathur’s second observation above: that measuring income inequality over time tends to be deeply misleading because membership in any given income bracket is highly fluid, with people’s income often shifting dramatically over time. Thus, someone who’s in the bottom quintile of income in today’s measurements may be in the second quintile from the top in 15 years’ time. But we tend to analyze these groups as if their composition is static.

Hassett and Mathur’s first point, however, is the one that always bowls me over. If the point of a safety net is to remove people from the perils of indigence, yet the government refuses to factor those provisions into measurements of income, we end up with a perpetually imperiled underclass that only exists on paper. As Mark Twain said (supposedly quoting Disraeli), there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

June 8th, 2012 at 8:35 am
Podcast: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise
Posted by Print

In an interview with CFIF, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks discusses a concrete and actionable plan for defending America’s core economic values from the corrosive doctrine of wealth redistribution and his latest book, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise.

Listen to the interview here.

February 1st, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Who Killed the Electric Car? The People Who Made It
Posted by Print

Over at RealClearMarkets, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green has a wonderful take-down of California’s delusional alternative energy mandate, which would “require that 15.4 percent of all vehicles sold by 2025 must be electric cars, plug-in hybrid cars, or (currently non-existent) fuel cell cars.” Green notes that this is the second time the Golden State has gone down this road, after a similar mandate — imposed back in 1990 — had to be scrapped due to its total infeasibility.

As you may recall, it used to be fashionable amongst conspiracy-minded greens to posit that the electric car had been undermined by some nefarious cabal of big oil, the auto industry, and hydrogen fuel cell advocates. They even made a film about it: 2006’s “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, which included the contributions of such noted experts in transportation economics as Martin Sheen, Mel Gibson, and Phyllis Diller. As Green points out, however, the electric car and its alternative fuel cousins have never taken the market by storm for a much simpler reason — they’re just not economically viable:

The GM Volt sells for a non-competitive $40,000, and is barely selling despite federal tax subsidies up to $7,500, and some state subsidies that further sweeten the pot. Plug-in hybrid technology is more expensive to manufacture, more expensive to repair, more expensive to insure, and, after 22 years, they still have overheating and fire problems.

As Robert Bryce points out in his book Power Hungry, electric cars are the “Next Big Thing. And they always will be.” Bryce observes that EV-boosters have been flogging electric cars since 1911, when the New York Times declared that “the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical.”

Scan the hard data on any alternative energy source being promoted as a panacea and you’ll find much the same thing: Too little performance for too much money and too little convenience. And that’s the real tragedy of mandates like California’s or federal handouts to firms like Solyndra. The reality is that we probably will shift away from our reliance on conventional sources of energy like coal and oil in the future. But in order to do so, alternative energy sources will have to be scalable, affordable, and efficient. Providing subsidies for those technologies before they reach that point only delays their viability by reducing the financial incentive to get a better product to market.

The upshot? Reliable green energy may indeed be on the horizon for California. But if it does arrive, it will be because of the efforts of businessmen, not bureaucrats.