The Bears Defense Has a Tough Job Today

Posted on January 23, 2011 | Comments Off on The Bears Defense Has a Tough Job Today

Original version here.

Go Pack go!

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Posted in Sports

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What Happened to the Anti-War Movement?

Posted on January 21, 2011 | Comments Off on What Happened to the Anti-War Movement?

It all but disappeared when President Obama was elected. Apparently it was mostly a partisan phenomenon.

I predict the same thing will happen to the tea party movement if a Republican wins in 2012.

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Posted in International, The Partisan Mind

CEI’s Agenda for Congress: End Corporate Welfare

Posted on January 21, 2011 | Comments Off on CEI’s Agenda for Congress: End Corporate Welfare

CEI’s biannual Agenda for Congress is out. You can read the whole thing here (PDF, 84 pp.), or you can see the table of contents and access individual articles here.

Wayne Crews and I wrote the corporate welfare section. Here’s a taste:

One of government’s primary current undertakings is transferring wealth. Many such transfers are from taxpayers to corporations. Before the financial crisis and recession, these transfers were called corporate welfare. Now they are called stimulus, bailouts, or infrastructure investments. But a rose by any other name has thorns just as sharp…

Corporate welfare, whether in the form of subsidies or competitor-hampering regulations, creates distortions and inefficiencies, injures consumers, and undermines the evolving, competitive market process.

PDF version here.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Publications, Spending

Tim Carney Knows How Washington Works

Posted on January 21, 2011 | Comments Off on Tim Carney Knows How Washington Works

Tim’s latest column, “Bail them out, regulate them, then work for them,” is a must-read.

Amy Friend, a former staffer for Sen. Chris Dodd, played a large role in writing the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill. And she just got a new job at a lobbying firm. Tim explains:

There are two types of people on K Street: access people, who can get you in the door; and policy people, who know what’s on every page of every relevant bill and regulation. Friend is the latter. While business will dry up for other Dodd alumni on K Street, Friend is valuable because — to quote one Republican lobbyist — “she knows what’s on page twenty-three-[bleep]ing-hundred of that bill,” and every other page, too.

In other words, Friend didn’t just write a landmark piece of legislation — she wrote her meal ticket.

Tim doubts that Friend is corrupt. But her story is very common in Washington. Lobbying wouldn’t be such a booming business if regulation wasn’t, too. And the revolving door between the Hill and K Street can be very profitable, even when no corruption is involved. Most people forget that regulators act just as self-interestedly as the people they regulate.

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Posted in Bailouts, Economics, Political Animals, regulation

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CEI Podcast for January 20, 2011: The Future of Space Policy

Posted on January 20, 2011 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for January 20, 2011: The Future of Space Policy

Have a listen here.

CEI Adjunct Scholar and space policy expert Rand Simberg explains why NASA stagnated after its early success in bringing man to the moon. Fortunately, the future of private exploration is looking brighter every year. Private exploration’s increasing viability means that it is time to reevaluate NASA’s role in future space travel.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Spending, Technology

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The Economics of Toilet Seats

Posted on January 19, 2011 | Comments Off on The Economics of Toilet Seats

Up or down? The debate is as old as the toilet itself. An enterprising young economist named Jay Pil Choi wrote a working paper titled “Up or Down? A Male Economist’s Manifesto on the Toilet Seat Etiquette,” and it turns out the correct answer is neither.

If the seat is always left down, men incur an inconvenience cost of 2: 1 to lift the seat, and 1 to lower it. Women incur a cost of 0. This is hardly fair.

Leaving the seat up is no better. The costs are the same. They just switch gender. This isn’t fair for women, who must lower the seat and raise it every time they use the loo.

Choi’s paper suggests a third way: leave the seat as you left it. As he explains:

With either up or down rule, each member of one gender group has to incur the inconvenience costs two times with each usage… This inefficiency can be avoided by using the selfish rule since the inconvenience costs are incurred only when the consecutive users are from different genders.

Quite clever. The highest possible inconvenience cost is 1. And if consecutive users are of the same gender, inconvenience costs are 0.

Unfortunately, this blogger must continue to follow the down rule because his cats are too thirsty for their own good.

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Posted in Economics, General Foolishness

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Barely Satire

Posted on January 19, 2011 | Comments Off on Barely Satire

Looks like one of the staff writers at The Onion may be an economist: Revamped WPA To Create 50,000 New Jobs By Disassembling, Reassembling Hoover Dam

This especially made me laugh:

Other public works projects currently underway include the bulldozing of libraries, the burning of national forests, and the defacing of public murals, which will be followed by a massive plan to rebuild libraries, revive national forests, and repaint public murals.

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Posted in Economics, Stimulus

6 Painless Ways to Cut Federal Red Tape

Posted on January 19, 2011 | Comments Off on 6 Painless Ways to Cut Federal Red Tape

President Obama signed an Executive Order this week that will initiate a “government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.”

Over at AOL News, Wayne Crews and I explain why this will hardly change a thing. We also offer 6 suggestions for reducing regulatory burdens with a minimum of political pain. Here are three of them:

  • Appoint an annual bipartisan commission to comb through the books and suggest rules that deserve repeal. Congress would then vote up-or-down on the repeal package without amendment, to avoid behind-the-scenes deal-making.
  • Require all new regulations to have built-in five-year sunset provisions. If Congress decides a rule is worth keeping, it can vote to extend it for another five years.
  • Consider Sen. Mark Warner’s, D-Va., “one in, one out” proposal, which holds that for every new rule that hits the books, an old one must be repealed.

Read the rest here.

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Posted in Publications, regulation

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Sens. Lieberman, Conrad to Retire

Posted on January 19, 2011 | Comments Off on Sens. Lieberman, Conrad to Retire

2 down, 533 to go.

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Posted in Political Animals

CEI Podcast for January 12, 2011: Public-Private Partnerships

Posted on January 12, 2011 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for January 12, 2011: Public-Private Partnerships

Have a listen here.

Land-use and Transportation Policy Analyst Marc Scribner talks about his new CEI Issue Analysis, “The Limitations of Public-Private Partnerships.” Marc argues that PPPs are an improvement over the status quo in surface transportation because they introduce at least an element of competition into a sector where there is usually none. But PPPs are harmful in real estate developments because they tend to favor politicians’ preferences over those of consumers.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Economics, Public Choice, regulation

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