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Total 323 results found since Jan 2013.
Hit by Scandal, Petro Can Still Ruin Colombia
Daniel RaisbeckLess than a year ago, I wrote of the almost certain regret that awaited the prosperous, urban, multiple ‐degree‐holding types who voted for Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s Chavista president. They thought they had supported a Nordic‐style social democrat—failing to notice that they had helped to elect a tropical socialist who, given his past as a guerrilla group member and Hugo Chávez supporter, was also a potential autocrat.Caveat emptor (or rathersuffragator) indeed. But I never thought that voter’s remorse would set in so quickly. Or so extremely.According to poll data from June 1...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 11, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Daniel Raisbeck Source Type: blogs
More Evidence That Opioid Policymakers Keep Aiming at the Wrong Target
Jeffrey A. SingerA new study released earlier this year adds more evidence to the mountains of evidence that policymakers trying to solve the overdose crisis have been aiming at the wrong target.Researchers from the Dartmouth University School of Medicine recently published in theAnnals of Surgery the results of a prospective clinical trial of 221 opioid naïve surgical patients prescribed opioids at discharge and followed for one year after surgery. Eighty‐eight percent of the patients had cancer‐related operations. Their surgeons prescribed opioids for pain control when they discharged them home from the hosp...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 30, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
Let Them Stay
Paul MatzkoDr. Muhil Ravichandran has a PharmD from Rutgers University and works in cancer research. She has lived legally in America for almost her entire life and is a model immigrant. Yet because of America’s broken immigration system, she’s going to beforced to leave her home and take her much ‐needed talents elsewhere.Ravichandran legally moved to the USA with her family when she was two years old, but when she became an adult she was no longer covered by her family ’s legal status. While in college she qualified for a student visa, but upon graduation she was forced to fall back on the vagaries of the ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 2, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Paul Matzko Source Type: blogs
Nutrition: Major Government Fail?
Chris EdwardsAmericans are getting used to failures by government experts. Government economists have a dismal forecasting record. Government actions and advice during the pandemic were often misguided. And dozens of former government intelligence experts got the Hunter Biden laptop storywrong.A less recognized but also important failure may be in nutrition. Federal experts appear to have issued faulty advice for decades, even as American obesityexploded from 15 percent in the 1970s to 42 percent today. Federal guidance on nutrition has a large influence on health practice across society. Some researchers argue that Am...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 26, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
Fast Facts about Medicare and Social Security
Romina Boccia and Dominik LettMedicare and Social Security are the two largest federal government programs that are also growing the fastest. They are fiscally unsustainable as currently structured. Medicare consists of four parts which provide inpatient care (Part A), outpatient care (Part B), prescription drug coverage (Part D), and subsidies for seniors to choose alternative health insurance providers through Medicare Advantage (Part C). Social Security consists of Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI). For the purposes of this fact sheet, Social Security will refer to OASI only. This fact...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 13, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Romina Boccia, Dominik Lett Source Type: blogs
Farm Bill 2023 and Obesity
This study found U.S. farm policies “have generally small and mixed effects on farm commodity prices, which in turn have even smaller and still mixed effects on the relative prices of more‐ and less‐fattening foods.”Farm subsidy/ nutrition issues are hotly debated, and I have not done a detailed research review. If Congress withdrew subsidies from corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice, would U.S. farming shift toward healthier fruits and vegetables? Are the subsidized crops and related oils a cause of obesity, and has the go vernment given Americans bad nutrition advice about these products for decades, asNina T...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 6, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
The New Deal and Recovery, Part 27: Deposit Insurance
ConclusionPart 27: Deposit Insurance_____________________[1] To this list we might add a fourth item, noted by Golembe in a subsequentinterview, to wit: that the deposit " insurance " provided for by the 1933 Banking Act wasn ' t really insurance at all. Unlike genuine insurance policies, it covers depositors for losses regardless of whether the losses were due to recklessness on their or their banks ' part. And unlike genuine insurance funds, the FDIC ' s insurance " fund " is an accounting fiction, the truth being that the " premiums " it collects from banks go into the federal government ' s general coffers. " The gover...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 28, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: George Selgin Source Type: blogs
Markets at Work: DNA Sequencing
Chris Edwards and Ilana BlumsackTheWall Street Journal recentlyprofiled companies racing to slash the cost of genome sequencing. The progress has been remarkable, and the advances may generate vast benefits for human health. The article says that two decades ago it cost millions of dollars to sequence a genome, but since then one company has led the way in driving costs down:“Illumina in 2010 released a machine enabling genome sequencing for about $10,000… Subsequent innovations dropped the cost to $1,000 in 2014, and to $600 in 2020. Illumina is rolling out a new instrument series, NovaSeq X, that reduces it to ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 3, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards, Ilana Blumsack Source Type: blogs
The New Deal and Recovery, Part 23: The Great Rapprochement
George SelginWhat finally brought the Great Depression to an end? We ' ve seen that, whatever it was, it took place not during the 30s but sometime between then and the end of World War II, when a remarkable postwar revival occurred instead of the renewed depression many feared. We ' ve also seen that, while postwar fiscal and monetary policies weren ' t austere to the point of preventing that revival, they alone can ' t explain it, because they can ' t explain the reawakening of private business investment from its decade-and-a-half-long slumber.Animal SpiritsTo get to the bottom of that reawakening, we must first recall ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 7, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: George Selgin Source Type: blogs
Is China Mellowing?
John MuellerIs China mellowing? If so, Secretary of State Antony Blinken ’s upcoming visit there could lead to important changes in U.S.-China relations.When necessary, China ’s president Xi Jinping seems able to abandon even policies with which he has been closely identified. In 2016, he grandly proclaimed his Belt and Road Initiative to be“a project of the century,” but when loans to a rash of unworthy creditor nations went sour, the program was slashed from $75 billion per year to $4 billion in 2019. And in December he abruptly (perhaps much too abruptly) abandoned his cherished zero ‐Covid policy afte...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 2, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: John Mueller Source Type: blogs
Overstating Crypto Crime Won ’t Lead to Sound Policy
Jennifer J. Schulp,Jack Solowey,Nicholas Anthony,& Nicholas ThielmanLast week, the Justice Departmentannounced criminal charges against Anatoly Legkodymov for violating anti-money laundering laws while operating Bitzlato, an off-shore crypto exchange alleged to have processed over $700 million in illicit funds over several years. Concurrently, the Treasury Department ’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)ordered covered financial institutions to cease transacting with Bitzlato.Like all financial instruments, crypto is used for crime, and this fact ought to be taken seriously. But blunt claims like Senator E...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 27, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Jennifer J. Schulp, Jack Solowey, Nicholas Anthony, Nicholas Thielman Source Type: blogs
Infrastructure Act ’s Cryptocurrency Reporting on Hold, Says IRS
Nicholas AnthonyIn the final days of 2022, theInternal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ’s infamous cryptocurrency reporting requirements were being put on hold. While this sudden change is far more welcome than when Congresswrote the law seemingly overnight in late 2021, the temporary pause shouldn ’t distract from the fact that the reporting requirements should be repealed entirely.A Quick Refresher on the Infrastructure ActAs the name suggests, theInfrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was primarily written with the supposed intention of rebuildingroads, bridges, railwa...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - January 4, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Nicholas Anthony Source Type: blogs
Emergency Spending Is on the Rise: Here ’s How Congress Can Stop It
Romina Boccia and Dominik LettCongress has spent a combined $1 trillion through supplemental appropriations over the last five years in inflation‐adjusted 2021 dollars. While most of the supplemental spending since 2020 was in response to COVID-19, supplemental appropriations are on the rise over the long term (chart below).Supplemental appropriations are primarily emergency spending that falls outside of regular budgeting procedures. Congress is increasingly using crises as justifications to spend more. Now, the Biden administration has asked Congress to tack on an additional$85 billion in emergency spending to dis...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 20, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Romina Boccia, Dominik Lett Source Type: blogs
Cambridge Eliminates Parking Minimums, Reduces Development Costs
Vanessa Brown CalderWith the City Council ’s recent vote, Cambridge, Massachusetts becomes the latest city to reform parking requirements. Cambridge is unique among Massachusetts cities in that it is the first tofully eliminate parking minimums citywide. But it is not unique among U.S. cities more generally, and comes as a wave of other locations, including San Francisco, California; Lexington, Kentucky; andSt. Paul, Minnesota; have made sweeping parking reforms.Parking minimums are a type of urban regulation that require developers to provide a predetermined number of parking spaces for a certain number of residen...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 8, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Vanessa Brown Calder Source Type: blogs
Good News on Federal Worker Pay
Chris EdwardsNew data show that growth in federal worker pay lagged growth in private ‐sector pay in recent years. The average federal worker still makes far more than the average private‐sector worker in total compensation, but the advantage has narrowed. From the taxpayer perspective, the moderation in federal worker costs is good news.Figure 1 shows average wages for the U.S. private sector and for the federal government’s 2.2 million civilian workers. Federal pay growth outpaced private pay growth for the decade up until 2011 when a three‐year soft wage freeze kicked in. After that, federal wages re...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 19, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
