First Lady Michelle Obama is on a campaign to eliminate “food deserts”. You live in a food desert if you are more than a mile and a half from a supermarket. The problem, says the first lady, is that folks who live in food deserts don’t have the option to buy and eat healthy foods. [...]
Cascade Policy Institute’s Steve Buckstein writes in today’s Oregonian on the many costs of Oregon’s failed regulation of over the counter cold and sinus medications.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues [here] that both Obama on the left and Santorum on the right are twisting the truth about the state of American manufacturing and the impacts of political intervention. The bottom line? Things are better than you think and consumers have benefited enormously.
AT&T has abandoned its effort to acquire struggling T-Mobile in a deal that the government suggested might lead to higher wireless prices, though economic theory and experience suggest just the opposite. Diane Katz, writing in The Foundry, observes that the government doesn’t hesitate to impose hundreds of billions in regulatory costs, but doesn’t want to [...]
The Obama Administration’s lawsuit challenging AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile reflects an almost reflexive belief that bigger is badder when it comes to business. Except, of course, when the business is too big to fail. Yale Law Professor George Priest argues, in today’s Wall Street Journal, that the government is wrong in this case and that [...]
Nina Fedoroff writes in The New York Times about the regulatory obstacles to safe and much needed genetic engineering of food crops. Despite the Obama Administration’s promise to eliminate unnecessary and ineffective regulations, Fedoroff offers more evidence that the opposite is happening.
The “individual mandate” aspect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) has naturally drawn the most attention due to the multiple lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. However, section 2572 of Obamacare, titled “NUTRITION LABELING OF STANDARD MENU ITEMS AT CHAIN RESTAURANTS AND OF ARTICLES OF FOOD SOLD FROM VENDING MACHINES,” presents an interesting [...]
[photo: Karin Dalziel] In the ironically titled Transportation Opportunities Act, the Obama Administration has proposed a new tax on miles traveled. The proposal is based on a Congressional Budget Office Study commissioned by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat. The rationale of the proposed new tax is explained in the abstract [...]
