By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  May 19th at 12:19 PM  | 

Later today the Senate is set for a “cloture” vote — the vote to end debate, for which you need 60 votes — on the nomination of Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  I’m not going to weigh in here on the issue of whether judicial nominees ought to be filibustered in general — or if the Republicans ought to be the first to foreswear the tactic even without a guarantee that Democrats would do likewise in the future — but if ever there were an “extraordinary circumstance” fitting into the Gang of 14 agreement that broke the judicial logjam under President Bush, this is it.

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  March 30th at 09:30 PM  | 

Promoted from the diaries by Caleb. By Tad DeHaven The federal government has been meddling with sugar production since 1934. Today’s convoluted system of supply controls, price supports, and trade restrictions benefits domestic sugar producers at the expense of consumers and utilizing industries. In other words, sugar producers “win” and the rest of the country “loses.” Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) just introduced the “Free Sugar | Read More »

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  March 7th at 01:38 PM  | 

$61 billion sounds like a big spending cut, but we should put that number in perspective. In a short new video, based on a Cato@Liberty blog post by Cato budget analyst Tad DeHaven, producer and host of the Cato Daily Podcast (iTunes) Caleb Brown walks us through what a drop in the bucket this amount really is: Please consider sharing this video with your readers, colleagues, students, | Read More »

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  November 9th at 09:35 AM  | 

Vice President Joe Biden believes that human progress depends almost entirely on government vision and government incentive. Donald J. Boudreaux, Cato Institute adjunct scholar and George Mason University economics professor, details why Biden is wrong both generally and in the specific case touted by Mr. Biden. Produced by Caleb O. Brown. Shot and edited by Evan Banks:

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  November 1st at 11:14 AM  | 

By Roger Pilon Today POLITICO Arena asks: Given the Civil Rights Commission’s investigation of DOJ’s handling of the New Black Panther case, talk of voter irregularities in Arizona, and the request by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) that DOJ investigate whether tea party groups are intimidating black and Hispanic voters in her Houston-area district, how serious a threat are voter intimidation and irregularities? My response: | Read More »

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  October 26th at 02:26 PM  | 

By Tad DeHaven Postmaster General John Potter has announced that he is stepping down. The Washington Post speculates on the reason for Potter’s departure: It is not immediately clear why Potter decided to step down, though USPS staffers and others in the postal community — a wide fraternity including the shipping industry, labor unions and large retailers — signaled recently that he was likely to | Read More »

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  October 18th at 01:04 PM  | 

Posted by Adam Schaeffer It’s fascinating to read Progressives as they think through a difficult policy problem. Kevin Drum writes (at Mother Jones!) that we can’t improve education or mitigate poverty: “I continue to think that the biggest problem here is simply that no one has any really compelling answers. . . You can go down the list of every ed reform ever touted, and | Read More »

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  September 21st at 02:27 PM  | 

By Adam Schaeffer Polls consistently indicate that President Obama has lost proportionally more ground on job approval with white and Hispanic than with black Americans. But data from question-experiments within the yearly Education Next/Harvard poll suggest the opposite in regard to Obama’s influence on education policy opinions. Obama’s policy influence with black respondents has dropped significantly more than it has with respondents overall; Obama’s position | Read More »

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  September 16th at 12:08 AM  | 

By Chris Edwards President Obama wants to raise the top two individual income tax rates for 2011. The top rates will rise from 33% to 36% and from 35% to 39.6%, unless the president and Congress agree to extend the current rate structure. Before taking action on this issue, policymakers should consider the following facts and data. (All information is cited in my related congressional | Read More »

By: catoinstitute (Diary)  |  September 16th at 12:07 AM  | 

By Tad DeHaven Most of the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts has focused on whether to extend slightly lower marginal rates for higher earners who already bear a huge burden. But at the other end of the income spectrum, a growing share of Americans don’t pay income taxes. Indeed, the Bush tax cuts increased the share of U.S. households that pay no income | Read More »