Mass Transit's Real Contribution to Travel
Much of the debate over mass transit focuses on the role transit plays in commuting. Transit's role can be very important, as in New York where transit serves three quarters of the commutes into...
View ArticleThoughts on the Dodd Bill
Yesterday, the president made a new push for Wall Street reform rules. It is an important topic. It is badly needed reform. It is an issue Congress is screwing up.Leading the financial services reform...
View ArticleEducation Reformers Get Schooled
In 1990, in one of the most innovative developments in modern American education, the Milwaukee public schools created a parental choice system. Some low-income parents got vouchers that could be used...
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Special Thanks to the Top 40 Percent of Taxpayers
From Kurt Brouwer at Fundmastery Blog:here is a chart using data from the Congressional Budget Office to show the percentage of all Federal taxes (individual income taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes,...
View ArticleLower and Simplify Taxes!
It's that joyous time of year: income tax time. So I spend time with my accountant. I don't want to see him, but I must. I could not do what he's doing. The tax code has grown so complex that today...
View ArticlePushing Back on Claim Bankruptcy Can't Handle Big Bank Failure
This week, Mike Konczal wrote a post criticizing the GOP's position on financial services reform. While I have no love for the Republican party, he did say something pretty misleading that I want to...
View ArticleA Positive View of the Jobless Recovery
Reuters reported yesterday that the Fortune 500 companies tripped their profits in 2009 from the previous years level, to $391 billion collectively. Fortune magazine also noted that those same...
View ArticleFrom Paris Hilton to John Edwards
In recent years, the porn industry has gotten screwed harder than a beleaguered Marquis de Sade heroine, first by rampant piracy, then by a vicious recession. Now that thousands of former customers...
View Article24-Hour Party People
Yesterday I waded into a mass of tea party protesters gathered at the front of Colorado's Capitol and completely forgot to brace myself for a "small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht" (as New York Times...
View Article53% Oppose Regulation of Internet
A new Rasmussen poll finda thatJust 27% of Americans now believe the Federal Communications Commission should regulate the Internet like it does television and radio. That marks a 22-point drop in...
View ArticleThe Americanization of British Politics
As a transmitter of a dangerous cultural virus, the American traveler in Britain is always prepared for that conversation; the one that blithely insists that it is his heritage, his vapid, corpulent,...
View ArticleD.C. Taxi Corruption Update
Last summer Washington, D.C. reeled from revelations about taxi companies bribing city council staffers to get favorable treatment as part of taxi regulation reform. I noted the inevitability of this...
View ArticleAfter Tragedy, Can Russia and Poland Reconcile?
If last week's plane crash in Russia that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others—including some of Poland's top government officials and military leaders—had been a fictional event, it...
View ArticleQuestions Legislators Should Ask About High-Speed Rail
My name is Robert Poole, and I'm the Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit public policy think tank. After receiving two engineering degrees from MIT, I've spent...
View ArticleVMT Reduction Is the Wrong Goal for Transportation Policy
One of the leading academic transportation policy journals, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, invited Adrian Moore, Sam Staley, and Bob Poole to write an essay for a symposium on...
View ArticleLooking at Hoenig on the Dodd Bill
Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig writing in The New York Times Saturday makes a couple of sharp critiques of the Dodd financial services reform bill. His theme is that "the...
View ArticleNursing Our Way Out of a Doctor Shortage
Thanks to health care reform, millions of previously uninsured Americans will have policies enabling them to go to the doctor when necessary without financial fear. But it's a bit like giving everyone...
View ArticleThe Rise of Decline
When Andrew Joseph Stack, a software consultant with a history of tax troubles and marital problems, crashed his Piper Cherokee into the Austin, Texas, office of the Internal Revenue Service in...
View ArticleDown the Health Care Wormhole
If we can put a man on the moon, we can re-write the basic laws of supply and demand and get more quality health care, dispensed by fewer providers per patient, at lower prices for all Americans. Sure...
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