| |
|
October 2007
IPI Cobden Fellow Doug Bandow is featured in the American Spectator, calling the Law of the Sea Treaty a second United Nations.
The Law of the Sea Treaty, rejected by President Ronald Reagan, is back before the U.S. Senate. The LOST turns unowned natural resources over to the UN; creates a byzantine regulatory structure for seabed mining; establishes international taxation without congressional approval; and transfers U.S. technology to Third World states. It also subjects American navigational rights to international arbitration.
Read More...
|
|
|
Do You Need a License to Do That?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation wonders if the government is overprotecting us.
States require lots of occupations—including doctors, lawyers and real estate agents—to have a license to operate within the state.
Now a study from the Reason Foundation finds that licensing requirements vary significantly by state. California has the most, requiring licenses for 177 occupations, and Missouri with 41 has the least. The average is 92.
But the Reason study also highlights some of the most ridiculous license requirements.
- Fortune tellers have to have a license in Maryland;
- Elevator operators in Massachusetts;
- Manure applicators in Iowa; and
- Rainmakers in Arizona.
Read More...
 Do You Need a License to Do That? |
|
|
If news accounts and industry sources are correct, the FCC is about to abrogate thousands of contracts all over the country, in the name of slightly-enhanced competition.
It is stunning that the FCC would assert the right to wave a magic wand and obliterate thousands of perfectly legitimate contracts all over the country. As a believer in limited government, it frightens me to see a federal regulatory authority assert such a right. This is precisely the kind of regulatory behavior that has made conservatives strident critics of regulators, and has made deregulation a policy priority for anyone who believes in limited government.
And it’s particularly troubling to me to see a regulatory body that is majority Republican-appointed doing such a thing. A regulatory body that has utterly forgotten the Reagan philosophy of government.
Read More...
|
|
|
Since I wrote about the accelerated pace of action on renewing the Internet Tax Moratorium last Friday, the pace picked up even more. The Senate approved a compromise seven-year extension of the Moratorium, nicely splitting the difference between the propose four-year and 10-year extension proposals. The House is moving the Senate-passed version to beat the November 1 moratorium expiration date without any further fuss.
If so, that is what one might call 'good-ish' news. Both the House and Senate bills, as I discussed last time, further erode the class of services and situations covered by the Internet Tax Moratorium. VOIP is already fair game, and probably email too, under the extension bills now on the verge of enactment. What's more, while there is still some interest in pressing for a permanent moratorium, absolutely no one (in Congress, that is) seems interested in taking on the issue of the slow, steady erosion of the Moratorium itself. Read More...
|
|
|
Rural Access Robbery
If you need more proof that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) telecom regulations and rate structures are out-of-touch with the digital communications era, you only need to go to Riceville, Iowa.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the FCC-managed access charge scheme allowed a couple of “enterprising entrepreneurs” to exploit the regulations and rack up huge profits when they created a conference calling system that purposely routed a massive amount of conference traffic through a rural carrier solely to tap into the higher access charges mandated by the FCC for smaller rural carriers.
Read More...
|
|
|
Going against all odds, Sen. John Sununu is pressing the Senate to approve a permanent, federal ban on discriminatory Internet taxes, and at least he will be able to force a Senate vote on the issue in the coming days. The House has already acted, but only on another four-year extension of the internet tax ban that, give or take a few months, has been in effect since 1998. Sununu is in a little bit of a procedural box, since Sen. Tom Carper, with support from the Democratic leadership, has a secondary amendment pending that sticks with the House four-year extension.
Parliamentary magic tricks aside, there's another problem. What the House passed...and what Sununu and Carper both based their proposals on...isn't just an extension of the old Internet Tax Moratorium but a "modernized" version that narrows the definition what an Internet access tax is. Bottom line: this new version opens up a whole batch of new loopholes for state and local governments to tax, in their inimitably creative fashion. Read More...
|
|
|
In a Dear Colleague Letter to Members of the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday, Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling and three other members of the Republican Study Committee—Paul Ryan (Wisconsin), John Campbell (California) and Michele Bachmann (Minnesota)—urged fellow House Members to reject paying for a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax by raising other taxes.
The Hensarling Four emphasized that they support efforts to prevent middle-class taxpayers from being subjected to the AMT, but not by “offsetting tax increases on other people and businesses.”
I wrote Hensarling and his co-authors the following letter congratulating them on their efforts:
Open Letter to: The Hensarling Four
Jeb Hensarling
Paul Ryan
John Campbell
Michele Bachmann
From: Lawrence A. Hunter
Senior Fellow, Institute for Policy Innovation
Kudos on your Dear Colleague letter yesterday asking fellow House Members to reject a Faustian tax trade in which the Alternative Minimum Tax is patched and “paid for” by increasing taxes in other areas of the Internal Revenue Code. Read More...
|
|
|
American football is the coolest sport in the world. I'm a big Dallas Cowboys fan. But America's professional football league, the National Football League (NFL), has to be the greediest league of any major sport.
The NFL's greed leads them to things like speculating about holding a Super Bowl in China, depriving Americans of their championship game in order to try to crack a new market. That's long into the future.
But the NFL's greed will reach the tipping point this year, on November 29th, when the Green Bay Packers visit the Dallas Cowboys for one of the more anticipated games of the season, and more than half of Americans won't be able to watch the game.
That's because more than half of Americans don't get the new NFL Network. Read More...
|
|
|
Should the Government Give Newborns a Savings Account?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says the government must tax you first.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has suggested giving every newborn child a $5,000 savings account that will grow over time.
Since there’re about 4 million U.S. babies born annually, taxpayers would have to cough up about $20 billion in the first year alone. Plus interest for 18 more years.
If that money were deposited in a personal savings account, the government’s financial obligation would end after funding every account.
But don’t bet on that. Senator Clinton opposes personal accounts for Social Security. Read More...
Savings Accounts for Newborns? |
|
|
Why Democrats Should Be Thanking Republicans
Democratic leaders Sen. Harry Reid and Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel should be thanking—THANKING—154 House Republicans.
Those Republicans—along with only two Democrats—refused to override President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation. And in so doing have made House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel’s job a little easier.
See, Rep. Rangel has an AMT problem. That refers to the Alternative Minimum Tax that passed Congress in 1969 to ensure that wealthy people paid “a fair share” of income tax, but that now threatens a substantial portion of the middle class.
Read More...
|
|
|
Today was a big day at IPI, at least from an office point of view.
Today we switched over to a VoIP (Voice over IP) telephone system, which involves (among other things) changing ISPs.
Changing ISPs means temporarily disrupting your mail server, if you run your own email server, as we do.
Fortunately, we subscribe to a service called No-IP. In addition to providing spam filtering and email storage (in case of email server failure), No-IP makes DNS changes (such as the one we had to make today) easy and quick.
Within 5 minutes of changing the IP address of our mail server, our email was already flowing properly to our new IP address.
So we highly recommend No-IP. Read More...
|
|
|
In today's Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal, WSJ's "Numbers Guy", Carl Bialik, mentions IPI's Copyright Piracy Study in his column, "Efforts to Quantify Sales of Pirated Goods Lead To Fuzzy Figures."
Read More...
|
|
|
IPI President Tom Giovanetti's lastest oped, "A Tale of Two Climates" is featured in the DC Examiner.
In the piece, Giovanetti goes against the grain of global warming doomsdayers to discuss how climate change may actually have economic benefits for all mankind.
Read More...
|
|
|
What's to Blame: Patents or Poverty?
When the latest Intel or AMD GigaWOW computer chip is introduced, it is too expensive for all but the most demanding customers. But, over time, the price of the GigaWOW drops to the point where almost everyone can afford it.
It’s the same with medicines. The newest AIDS drug, for instance, is going to be expensive—that’s obvious to anyone with a passing acquaintance with economics—since the costs of R&D and development are staggering ($800 million per approved drug at last estimate).
The problem, of course, is that no one wants to pay $800 million for that first pill. Everyone wants to buy the 2nd pill for a dollar.
That’s one of the reasons why patent protection is necessary for high-risk industries such as pharmaceuticals. Read More...
|
|
|
California's Santa Ynez Valley Journal features IPI Senior Fellow Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter's oped "The Fatal Conceit of America's Lawmakers".
An Excerpt:
Read More...
|
|
|
Is It Time to Tax the Internet?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says it is if the states have their way.
State tax revenues continue to grow, but not as fast as state spending — 8.6 percent in 2007, according to The Wall Street Journal.
That means the states want to raise your taxes, and the Internet is their favorite candidate. For example:
- Governors want to tax anything you buy on the Internet.
- Others want to tax Internet access by adding a fee to your DSL bill.
- And some have even proposed taxing the emails you send.
Several years ago Congress passed a tax moratorium prohibiting states from imposing new taxes on Internet sales and access. But congressional knees are weakening.
Read More...
Is It Time to Tax the Internet? |
|
|
Somebody's finally listening!
As we have noted, the moratorium on the taxation of Internet Access is scheduled to expire on November 1st. And as we have been opining, surely Congress doesn't want credit for having raised consumers' Internet bills by potentially double digits. But today, the U.S. House voted 405-2 to extend the moratorium for another four years.
Hopefully there is still a chance that the Senate will demand a permanent extension, but the House action demonstrates that someone in Congress is finally listening to the implications of letting that moratorium expire. A win for the good guys. Read More...
|
|
|
| Read George Pieler, IPI Senior Fellow, and Jens Laurson’s latest oped featured on Forbes.com. In the piece entitled “Who Needs Free Trade Anyway?” the authors discuss the strengths of unilateral free trade. Read More...
|
|
|
Read Barry M. Aarons new oped today in The Hill, “Don’t Create Internet-Tax Monster”.
In the piece, Aarons discusses the economic consequences should the Internet tax moratorium expire.
Read More...
|
|
|
When a 'Compromise Is Really a Defeat
A few weeks ago, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for a “universal savings account,” funded by a 1 percent contribution (read: “tax”) on income from both employers and employees. These personal accounts in private financial institutions would grow over time, similar to what free market economists and policy experts have pushed for years as the solution to Social Security's coming financial crisis.
That’s probably why some proponents of Social Security reform have hailed Emanuel’s proposal as a possible compromise to fix Social Security.
Read More...
|
|
|
Read Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter's latest oped, "Supporters of Drug Re-importation are TRIPping," published by Georgia's The Post-Searchlight newspaper.
An excerpt:
Congress is soon expected to consider whether U.S. consumers should be able to purchase medicines from abroad.
The legislation to allow drug re-importation is expected to include a provision that represents one of the most destructive government interventions into free markets since the New Deal.
Called "forced sale," the provision would compel American companies to sell drugs to any foreign re-seller planning to re-import them back into the United States, and they will be required to sell them at a price and in quantities dictated by the U.S. government.
Read More...
|
|
|
| Read Dr. Lawrence Hunter’s latest oped published this week in Pennsylvania’s Phoenixville News. In “The Lawmaker’s Conceit,” Dr. Hunter discusses new plans to “fix” America’s healthcare system. Read More...
|
|
|
Listen online to IPI Resident Scholar Merrill Matthews latest commentary on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
In this spot, Matthews discusses if even President Ronald Reagan could live up to the image politicians today make of the conservative leader.
Read More...
|
|
|
Some of my friends accuse me of always looking for the "Grand Unification Theory" (GUT) when it comes to policy. That's a polite way of saying I'm always in search of pie-in-the-sky solutions to practical policy problems; that I'm an intransigent ideologue rather than a pragmatist who knows how to get things done in Washington .
I retort that we used to call that devising model solutions based on principles; that in Washington, DC, there is usually great virtue in principle-based gridlock; and "getting nothing done" is usually far preferable to doing something wrong just for the sake of doing something.
I think the misperception that my commitment to principle makes me the Anti-Pragmatist arises, in part, because I am extremely sensitive to (I feel in my GUT) barely perceptible but fatal flaws in policy prescriptions that not only destine the policy to fail in the first instance but also contain the poisonous seeds of larger policy catastrophes that sprout from them. Read More...
|
|
|
There will be much rejoicing and shooting of guns in the air and smoking of hookas tonight in the CopyLeft movement: Their comrades in Venezuela have triumphed.
. . . the concept of intellectual property will be removed from the Constitution. The National Assembly committee assessing the changes advanced by President Hugo Chávez, decided to change Article 98 to obliterate de rights linked to the "economic derivations" of cultural creation.
I'll at least give the Venezuelans credit for properly understanding the philosophical basis for their opposition to intellectual property.
We are suppressing the capitalist commercial exploitation . . .
Read More...
|
|
|
Pirates Plundering the U.S. Economy
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s newest report, “The True Cost of Copyright Industry Piracy to the U.S. Economy,” sheds light on the harm from copyright piracy not just to U.S. copyright producers and industries, but to the overall economy.
According to IPI’s analysis, widespread theft of copyright-protected products, including motion pictures, video games, sound recordings as well as business software, has cost the U.S. $58 billion in annual economic output and 373,375 jobs.
When people steal, other people lose their means of prosperity and the country suffers. Just as stealing cash from a neighbor’s wallet is wrong and robs him of his economic prosperity, so too does theft of intellectual property rob individuals—and the nation.
Read More...
|
|
|
Open Letter to Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WS)
From Lawrence A. Hunter
Subject: You’re the best but your tax proposal isn’t
Dear Paul:
There is not a single Member of Congress I admire and respect more than you. You and I both are old Kemp guys from Wisconsin, and I count you a genuine friend, a rarity on Capitol Hill. You have always been an unsurpassed champion for free markets, limited government and personal freedom. I think you should run for president.
That said, Paul, I must oppose your Taxpayer Choice Act, which would allow people to choose between being taxed under the current Internal Revenue Code or an alternative income-tax code permitting taxpayers to trade in all current deductions and credits and in exchange be taxed at a 10 percent rate on earnings up to $100,000 and 25 percent on the rest. Read More...
|
|
|
Today we get another reminder of all of the wonderful benefits that we Americans are missing out on because we don't have government-run universal health care.
According to this news report, the Nirvana of British health care includes nurses not having time to wash their hands, and not having time to wash excrement off of patients' bodies.
The result of this lack of basic hygiene in government-run British hospitals is the death of at least 90 patients from an infectious "superbug."
It's not just me calling it a lack of basic hygiene. That's exactly the phrase in the official UK government report.
Read More...
|
|
|
Do Pirates Make Money or Lose It?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says, it depends on whether you’re making films or stealing them.
While Pirates of the Caribbean has been a huge moneymaker for the film industry, film piracy is a huge money loser for the whole economy.
A new study from the Institute for Policy Innovation tries to calculate the impact of film piracy on jobs, income and government revenue. According to the study:
- Film piracy cost the U.S. economy about 140,000 new jobs, with two-thirds of those jobs outside of the film industry.
- That means it cost workers $5.5 billion in lost earnings.
- And film piracy cost the government nearly $840 million in lost revenue.
Read More...
Do Pirates Make Money or Lose It? |
|
|
In his attempt to convince readers there are only painful options to pay “the immense costs of retiring baby boomers,” Robert J. Samuelson (“Escaping the Budget Impasse,” October 3, 2007) commits a version of the false-dilemma fallacy known as “Morton’s Fork” where an advocate attempts to force a false choice between two equally unpleasant options. Samuelson’s refinement of “Morton’s Fork”—call it “Samuelson’s Pitchfork”—entails four equally unpleasant options: massive tax increases, painful Social Security benefit cuts, draconian cuts in other government spending and undesirably large budget deficits.
Read More...
|
|
|
23 Days 'til New Taxes?
According to the Los Angeles Times, "several states are poised to institute new taxes on Internet access the moment the current moratorium lapses."
That's the Los Angeles Times, not some right-wing, anti-tax, nutjob group (of which we at IPI, of course, count ourselves members).
So why doesn't the Democratically controlled Congress pass an extension of the Internet Tax Moratorium, which expires in 23 days on November 1? Do the Democrats want to be known as the party that allowed the Internet to be taxed, after Republicans kept it relatively tax free for all these years?
Part of the answer may lie with the power of the state and local government lobbies, which has never seen a source of revenue that they don't like.
Read More...
|
|
|
That hissing sound is the sound of all the air going out of my Fred Thompson for President balloon . . . it didn't last long.
Thompson has come out for "fixing" Social Security by making Social Security an even worse deal for American workers.
This is fixing Social Security for the government, rather than fixing Social Security for American workers. It's actually a betrayal of American workers, and a betrayal of all of the work done by the Social Security reform movement for the past 20 years.
It says something else about Thompson. He doesn't think big.
Instead of seeing Social Security reform as the opportunity to transform a failing transfer program into a vehicle for wealth creation and the elimination of poverty, he just wants to reduce Social Security benefits even further, which means that American workers will get an even worse deal for their Social Security payroll taxes, AND the problem will simply be pushed down the road another generation or two.
This is a giant disappointment. Read More...
|
|
|
IPI Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara is featured today in Barron’s.
Ferrara's oped, entitled “Slimming Entitlement Costs,” discusses avenues to “modernize and thoroughly restructure entitlement programs” using pro-growth reforms. The key, Ferrara says, is “allowing efficient capital and labor markets to serve the goals of these programs.”
Read More...
|
|
|
In the wake of the first (of a promised series) of House hearings on reform of insurance regulation, two things become immediately clear. First, the insurance industry is speaking with several different voices on what should be done, but agrees that something should be. Second, Congress itself seems on the same wavelength, and indeed may just be reflecting the state-of-policy-play in the industry.
That makes the path to reform hard to predict. One piece of good news is that, on the evidence of the House Financial Services Committee hearing, while Congress is in the mood for industry-bashing (and has not left insurance alone either, especially on issues such as credit-rating inputs into insurability questions, and the ubiquitous problem of coastal hurricane damage and contested claims), it seems at first blush to have somewhat more regard for the special problems of risk-management. Read More...
|
|
|
Tom, my friend, in response to your admonition not to give up on the power of positive lecturing where the Fed is concerned (Vitaliy Katsenelson gets it right on the Fed in Business Week), it is not as if we haven't been talking about what central bankers ought and ought not to be doing during the past 30 years:
At a minimum, reject discretionary monetary policy, abandon interest-rate targeting and adopt a price rule—my preference is the price of gold but I won't quibble over a basket of inflation-sensitive commodities.
It hasn’t happened, and never will, not because all central bankers are necessarily stupid or malevolent, but because no matter how smart and benevolent they may be, a central banker’s task in trying to manage a fiat-money system is an impossible one; their errors inevitably accumulate as they commit one error after another trying to correct their previous errors; those errors compound themselves and ultimately result in an economic crash. Read More...
|
|
|
| Check out Dr. Larry Hunter’s latest oped published this week in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In the piece entitled, “Hillary’s health care bomb could blow up a good system,” Hunter analyzes Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton’s latest proposal for a universal health care system.
Read More...
|
|
|
Is Russia Still Moving Towards Deomocracy
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says no, and it’s destroying the youth.
The hope that Russia would shift from a communist dictatorship to a democracy is quickly fading.
Just look at the growing Russian youth movement called “Nashi,” which in Russian means “ours.”
Last summer, 10,000 Russian youth attended a camp to swim and hike. Oh, and to have sex and denounce political opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Though alcohol is banned, unmarried sex to procreate is encouraged, in rooms called the Love Oasis.
Meanwhile, the organization promotes an almost cultic support for Putin and his policies, including harassing foreigners and any Russians who question the Putin regime.
More a Read More...
Is Russia Still Moving Towards Democracy? |
|
|
When I was in graduate school lo those many years ago, the “scientific” (as opposed to “ideological”) justification for extensive government intervention into private lives and private markets was rooted in Paul Samuelson’s “public goods” edifice. This was the one coherent body of thought outside Marxism that tried to explain systematically how and why markets “fail,” and how and why government could intervene to “correct” that market failure. In today’s hackneyed politizeese, Samuelson’s framework was a “market-based” justification for economic regulation and intervention by government.
Read More...
|
|
|
A Road They Shouldn’t Have Taken
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson released a report last week intended to light a fire under Congress to do something about Social Security. In the report, Treasury claims (quoting):
- Social Security faces a shortfall over the indefinite future of $13.6 trillion in present-value terms.
- Delaying changes to Social Security reduces the number of cohorts over which the burden of reform can be spread. Not taking action is thus unfair to future generations. This is a significant cost of delay.
- By itself, faster economic growth will not solve Social Security’s financial imbalance—realistically, there is no way to “grow out of the problem.”
So far so good, but then the secretary adds: - Social Security can be made permanently solvent only by reducing the present value of scheduled benefits and/or increasing the present value of scheduled tax revenues. Read More...
|
|
|
|
|
Home
Author: Erin Fitch || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA