Author: Norman Leahy

Beating up on so-called “Big Tech” companies is a popular hobby among the nation’s politicians. It fits neatly within the grievance-mongering and blame-shifting traditions of our major political parties. A case study of such behavior comes from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed from President Joe Biden. After the performative throat clearing about how bad tech is, especially for the children, Mr. Biden’s ghostwriters offer a few broad policy solutions. This one was particularly jarring: …we need serious federal protections for Americans’ privacy. That means clear limits on how companies can collect, use and share highly personal data—your internet history,…

The question of whether taxes influence peoples’ decisions to move from state to state is an old one, and the answers frequently break along partisan lines. The right has long believed taxes do affect migration. The left? It doesn’t matter at all. But the Tax Foundation looked at data from moving companies and found there is some good evidence that tax rates play some role in where people live: The U.S. population grew 0.4 percent between July 2021 and July 2022, an increase from the previous year’s historically low rate of 0.1 percent. While international migration helped numbers on the…

The Federal Trade Commission is proposing a new rule that would end so-called “no compete clauses” embedded in millions of workers’ employment contracts. These clauses were always problematic. They intentionally restricted competition and directly harmed workers’ rights. Worse, they began to appear in work contracts for low-wage jobs. According to the Minneapolis Fed, this worked to lower already low wages. Some states have taken action to mitigate or ban non-compete clauses for all workers, but the FTC’s proposed regulatory ban would take on non-competes nationwide. Is a regulatory approach the right one? The R Street Institute’s Eli Lehrer thinks the…

It’s the rare member of Congress who (eventually) leaves office with less money in their bank account than when they first arrived in D.C. Put it down to good financial management, and even better pay, and move on, right? Not so fast. Members of Congress have a long history of actively trading stocks. It’s all supposed to be done according to the ethics rules, and all supposed to be reported. But it’s not exactly the sort of information that’s easy or convenient to find (by design). Enter Unusual Whales, which produces its own reporting on congressional stock trades. The report…

While House Republicans finally elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy to the speakership, the path the party followed to get there included a series of deals and promises on a host of procedural and policy issues. Among the most consequential: a promise to start cutting government spending. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop writes, the outlines of the deal include entitlements…and will unavoidably affect defense spending: McCarthy commits that House Republicans will create a plan for a balanced federal budget within 10 years, including “long-term reforms” to mandatory spending programs (entitlements like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid), as well as capping discretionary spending where…

Globalization is out of fashion in politics, and there’s no near-term sign the practice will rise to its pre-COVID, pre-populist level again. But do global businesses feel the same way? Are they prepared, or even willing, to shorten their supply lines, reshore their operations, and root for the home team? Conventional wisdom says “no.” But there’s a case being made that globalization is already dead….we just haven’t noticed it. As Kevin Xu writes about a recent speech Taiwan Semiconductor founder Morris Chang. Xu notes two critical items in Chang’s remarks: The most powerful, and somewhat uncomfortable, part of Chang’s speech…

Remember the Christmas cold snap that threatened to crash the electric grid in the Eastern U.S.? Among the energy and grid savings measures local utilities like Duke Energy were urging customers to take included: Avoid using large appliances – this means appliances with a three-pronged plug, such as dishwashers, ovens and dryers – during high-demand periods like early winter mornings. A later assessment of the power crisis said a big push toward electric heating helped make a dire situation worse: The states hit hardest by blackouts in [December’s] winter storm have significantly increased reliance on heating homes with electricity over…

Two recent stories on the 2022 elections offer cautionary tales for the major political parties and the people who identify with them. The short version: ignore the noise and focus on getting out the vote. The noise to ignore: polling. That’s hard to do in a world where political narratives are sometimes almost indistinguishable from betting lines. Polling has its uses, offering snapshots in time of select groups of voters. Independent polls with long track records, and transparent methodologies, tend to do better. Polls that check none of those boxes? Well, sometimes they blunder into the truth. Most of the…

One thing politicians of all stripes and parties have in common is their affinity for helping wealthy professional sports team owners build stadiums and arenas for their teams at taxpayers’ expense. The Buffalo Bills, for example, are getting upwards of $850 million in taxpayer support for a new stadium – the most lucrative subsidy deal since 2016, when Nevada taxpayers were taken for $750 million for a new Raiders stadium. At least the Bills have a winning record. But the subsidy for sports teams doesn’t end there. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin backed an unsuccessful, bipartisan effort to give Dan Snyder…

The federal government is intent on helping to expand electric vehicle sales, so much so it’s willing to hand out billions of dollars of tax subsidies to encourage people to make the switch to an EV. Inside the ill-named “Inflation Reduction Act” was a section promising EV purchasers: …a $7,500 tax credit to buy new electric vehicles and a $4,000 credit for buying a used one. Both credits would only be available to lower and middle income consumers. That last bit is important – and just the first of many caveats and conditions that, as Reason’s Joe Lancaster writes, could…