- 63% of Americans want to increase trade with other nations.
- Should we have a generous child tax credit paid for by higher corporate income taxes? AAF finds that even in the best-case scenario, labor supply would fall by 0.4 percent, after-tax wages by 0.3 percent, consumption by 0.1 percent, investment by 1.2 percent, and GDP by 0.4 percent.
- A favorite story on the enviro left is that Rapa Nui (Easter Island) experienced population collapse because of ecocide. [And therefore, is a harbinger of everything that is happening today.] Turns out the story is wrong. And this isn’t usual. James Pethokoukis says almost all “degrowth” scholarship is shoddy.
- Europeans are less than 3/4 as rich as Americans. And contrary to popular belief, only a small amount of the gap can be accounted for by the fact that Americans work more.
Category: Thursday Links
Thursday Links
- Capretta reviews the Einav/Finkelstein book: We’ve Got You Covered.
- Why should people get vaccinated for low-probability risks?
- Matt Ridley: The most lethal industrial or scientific accident that has ever occurred was the covid virus leak from the lab in Wuhan. So why does the scientific community refuse to discuss it?
- Only 14% of federal spending is “discretionary.” Eliminating the federal deficit would require eliminating all discretionary spending plus an 11% reduction in “non-compressible” expenditures (mandatory programs, defense, and interest on the public debt).
- Idaho having difficulty executing a prisoner. Whatever happened to the firing squad?
- There is a reason why the kakapo’s mating habits are so strange.
Thursday Links
- The case against the Earned Income Tax Credit.
- Why is the “Lab Leak” hypothesis so controversial?
- CBO: restoring solvency to the Social Security and Disability trust funds would require an immediate 31-percent payroll tax increase or a 24-percent across-the-board benefit cut.
- Update on Obamacare: “The percentage of individual market consumers enrolled in plans with broad provider networks declined from 36 percent to 11 percent between 2014 and 2023. An increasing share of individual market enrollees are in Medicaid-managed-care-like plans…”
- Another update: “ACA plan networks in 2021 included on average only 40% of doctors in a patient’s area and even fewer in such places as Cook County, Ill. (14%), Orange County, Calif. (25%), and Los Angeles (25%). More than a quarter of physicians who participated in traditional Medicare don’t participate in any ACA plan.” (WSJ)
Thursday Links
- How can it be a crime for a consulting firm to help a drug company promote its product to customers?
- Members of Congress consistently beat the market on stock trades.
- Eli Lilly will allow self-pay patients to purchase (direct-to-consumer) the weight-loss drug Zepbound for less than half the list price.
- 10 states have passed new laws this year aimed at reducing the growing burden of prior authorization requirement.
- Opportunities for Democrats to learn about public policy while they were in Chicago: the city has the highest homicide rate in the country and only 21% of eight graders are proficient in reading. But did they really learn anything? (WSJ)