9. Focus decisions for primary and secondary education back to the local level, and fund them in the same way as colleges and universities, with a mixture of direct local government funding, vouchers, grants from foundations and businesses, etc. Let decisions on...
Policies
Tax Leadership Begins at Homes
My career focus has been on commercial real estate for almost forty years, and I am therefore tangentially interested in the housing market—and I also own a home with a mortgage. I must be missing something about the home mortgage interest deduction (MID). Real estate...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Eight
8. Repeal Obamacare, start over, and replace it with a grant for individuals and families to shop among healthcare providers, allowing the consumer to choose his or her plan but providing funds for everyone to be covered by a minimum comprehensive plan, if they...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Seven
7. Within six months perform a cost-benefit analysis on every federal department which has been created in the last fifty years, like Education, Environmental Protection, etc. The goal should be to prove why the department’s budget should not be cut in 2012 by at...
Is the U.S. a Christian Nation?
This is an important question, and it has several facets, each of which is worthy of reflection. For the moment I’d like to focus on whether this is a Christian nation in the sense that it is supposed to be one, or at least was one in the beginning. In this context,...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Six
6. Increase retirement ages and contributions for Social Security over the next five years so that the program is “fixed” for the foreseeable future, and no longer a source for political debate.
Obedience to the Unenforceable
In our friend Fitz Allison’s insightful new book, Truth in an Age of Arrogance, I found a quote by someone I’d never heard of, Lord John Fletcher Moulton. I looked him up; he was a brilliant English mathematician and jurist at the beginning of the last century. The...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Five
5. Instead of “Cap and Trade”, in 2011 add a ten cent federal tax to each gallon of refined gasoline, and then increase that tax by five cents every year for the next twenty years. Use the funds to do energy research, to provide seed capital for viable alternatives,...
How Public Policy Can Affect Almost Everything
For those of you who have studied F. A. Hayek for years, my recent epiphany (see earlier post) must seem almost laughable. Like a music historian who, after forty years in the field, suddenly discovers Tchaikovsky. Though written almost seventy years ago, The Road to...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Four
4. For 2011, every branch and department of government at every level, except Defense, will have to get by on ten percent less income, including salaries. Let the government’s skilled managers decide how to accomplish this reduction in each department at every level;...
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