Tag Archive | "american spectator"

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Unfunded Mandates

Unfunded Mandates

Today’s American Spectator Online has a piece by CEI VP Wayne Crews and I on curbing Congressional abuse of unfunded mandates. If the term is new to you, unfunded mandates are basically an accounting gimmick that lets government understate how much it costs taxpayers:

rather than fund a new federal job training program through a Department of Labor appropriation, Congress could mandate that all Fortune 500 firms provide, and pay for, such training. The first appears on the federal budget, the…

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Posted in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Politics as Usual, RegulationComments (0)

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Regulation of the Day 57: Minimum Price Agreements

Regulation of the Day 57: Minimum Price Agreements

A new Maryland law makes it illegal for manufacturers to set a minimum retail price for their products in sales contracts. The law is meant to increase competition. Unfortunately, it will have the opposite effect.

As Wayne Crews and I explain in the The American Spectator, it could prevent retailers from competing with each other on non-price grounds, such as customer service, product demonstrations, and advertising.

Some products, such as televisions or cars, have high information costs. Customers want to know a lot…

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Posted in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Legal, Regulation, Regulation of the Day, Tech & TelecomComments (0)

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Don’t Forget Cap and Trade!

Don’t Forget Cap and Trade!

Even though 4 Democratic Senators are so nervous about the electricity tax called cap-and-trade they are urging their leadership to drop it from the global warming bill, no-one should count on that happening yet. More Senators need to wake up to the significant problems cap-and-trade has, and there is no better example of those than the European version of the scheme. With that in mind, my colleague Roger Abbott and I have written a piece for the American Spectator today that…

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Posted in Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, RegulationComments (1)

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Young in American Spectator: “Unnecessary Baggage”

CEI Fellow in Regulatory Studies, Ryan Young, talks about the latest bill in Congress to regulate your carry-on habits.  Find the article here.

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More on Deflation

Good stuff from Joseph Lawler at the American Spectator, defending Robert Samuelson from, err, Robert Samuelson. He concludes:

No reasonable observer of government activity would believe that it would engage in temporary interventionism. We saw this play out with the bailout: they asked for the power to do implement one very specificly defined measure, and ended up doing whatever they wanted. Why trust those same characters with any more policy tools, and why think they wouldn’t let the inflation genie out…

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Posted in Bailout Watch, EconomyComments (0)

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Bailout fails — Move on to Mark-to-Market Reform

Oh, Happy Day! And it certainly is for all those who value freedom, responsibility and the true free market in which individuals are free to profit from their risks on the condition that they don’t stick the rest of us with their losses.

It’s not hyperbole to say the Republican and Democratic backbenchers who defied both parties’ leadership to defeat this $700 billion package of Wall Street socialism literally saved America. Whatever their reasons, this defeat (or rather victory for freedom),…

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Posted in Bailout Watch, EconomyComments (14)

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Stocks Climb as House Rejects Bailout

Though the bill may have been defeated for the wrong reasons—like the lack of freebies, giveaways, and handouts that many on the left had hoped for—the defeat of the bailout bill in the House has brought stocks out of their decent. The Dow Jones is now climbing.

But how can this be? How could a bill that was designed to save our economy, our country, and the world be the cause of the Dow’s drop today? Easy, the bill was introducing…

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Posted in Bailout WatchComments (6)

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