Publications

Simply trying to cut promised entitlement benefits is not a promising reform strategy. The solution lies in fundamental structural reforms to create new safety net programs that would be far more effective in achieving social goals, with only a fraction of the spending of current programs. This is the key to making entitlement reforms politically feasible.

On Oct.

President-elect Barack Obama could do a great deal of good when it comes to emphasizing the important role that technological advances play in our economy.

For years the Institute for Policy Innovation has supported fundamental tax reform, such as the suggested “flat” income tax.

Bush advanced personal accounts for Social Security during his 2000 campaign, focusing solely on the personal accounts and their benefits for working people, and contrasting them with the alternatives of tax increases and benefit cuts. But once elected, he allowed this reform model to be displaced by tax increases and benefit cuts as the core of reform, with personal accounts as the “dessert.” This left the reform without the grassroots appeal to overcome the opposition on such a politically sensitive issue as Social Security.

How many times have you been driving along talking on your mobile phone (with a hands free device, of course) and suddenly the call drops? Often enough that perhaps the most ubiquitous advertising phrase today is “Can you hear me now?” Immediately the mobile phone carrier gets cursed for the problem as we redial.

So what do you do if you’re Barack Obama and you’ve just been elected president of the United States and you’ve promised to spend a gazillion dollars to improve education and health care and the infrastructure and to hand out “tax cuts” (many of which will actually be income transfers) to 95 percent of the public? And you’re fiscally constrained because the government is bailing out or buying out banks left and right? What you need is some serious new inflows of cash, you need it fast, and, contrary to everything you’ve claimed on the campaign trail, you know you can’t get it all by dinging the people making over $250k.

Before the financial mess, Congress was debating a bill that would establish new rules for an incredibly promising field of medical technology.

As best we can tell, the free market had little or nothing to do with the banking crisis that has caused panic throughout the world.

So you thought Congress may have learned its lesson about creating huge entities that will need to be bailed out at taxpayer expense? If you did, you were wrong.