In The News

What is piracy’s cost to the content community? Estimates vary widely but in the US they’ve seen numbers ranging from the $6.1 billion a year suggested by the MPAA and LEK Consulting to $20.5 billion annually in costs to the broader US economy, per a MPAA-commissioned study by the Institute for Policy Innovation in 2006.

Two weeks after efforts in the Senate to repeal Obamacare were thwarted by a few Republican senators, there is talk of another attempt at taking aim at what is officially called the Affordable Care Act.

While the Republican Party's healthcare proposals languish on Capitol Hill, Matthews says the Trump administration has a golden opportunity to broker a historic healthcare deal with Democratic lawmakers, as long as Donald Trump sits on the sidelines. "If Trump assigns cutting a deal to Mike Pence, he may be able to get it done. Trump seems too volatile."

Merrill Matthews Jr., Ph.D., a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, credits two factors with driving U.S. energy dominance: property rights and technology.

IPI commends Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, for introducing the ECPA Modernization Act of 2017, which fixes a glaring hole in the Fourth Amendment privacy protections Americans should enjoy on their electronic data.

The Cruz-Lee provision in the Senate health care bill could allow people to return to the policies they once had—and many desperately wanted to keep—before Obamacare effectively outlawed them.

"Probably the best way to stabilize the markets is for states to shift to an invisible high-risk pool, as Alaska and Maine have done," Matthews said. "But it isn't entirely clear how well that works for larger states with multiple carriers. And it isn't clear Republicans will provide any money for that."

What’s surprising is that Texas — a state that has embraced a limited-government, free-market approach — still delegates and defers so much power to outdated regulatory agencies.

There is at least one sector where “Made in America” means a stronger economy — not a weaker one.

In comments filed today, IPI applauded the FCC’s Restoring Internet Freedom rulemaking, especially the agency’s reversal on the Wheeler FCC’s “most unfortunate and unnecessary error”-- the 2015 mistake of reclassifying broadband as a Title II common carrier communications service.