By Paul Winfree and Brian Blase – Congress has an opportunity to reform Medicaid, the nation’s third-largest, and most flawed, entitlement program. Done right, reform could protect the vulnerable, promote private coverage and save hundreds of billions of dollars. Done wrong, it won’t reduce federal spending and will hurt Republicans at the ballot box by making more voters dependent on government welfare.
Medicaid’s financing is fundamentally broken. Because of ObamaCare, the federal government pays $9 for every $1 of state spending on able-bodied working-age adults, compared with roughly $1.33 for pregnant women and disabled children. That incentive pushes states to favor healthy adults over the vulnerable in enrollment and access to providers and better services. Read More
(B) Fiscal Policy
The Scary Math Behind the World’s Safest Assets B
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By Spencer Jakab – Say you added just 1 percentage point to the average interest rate in the CBO’s forecast …That would result in an additional $3.5 trillion in federal debt by 2033. The government’s annual interest bill alone would then be about $2 trillion. For perspective, individual income taxes are set to bring in only $2.5 trillion this year.
Compound interest has a way of quickly making a bad situation worse—the sort of vicious spiral that has caused investors to flee countries… Read More
New York vs. Florida, by the Numbers B
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By The Editorial Board – WSJ – Some numbers tell a story about comparative governance. Comparative governance is a useful course of study, not least because bad governance is so costly to people and prosperity. We often write about the migration from the Northeast to Florida and other states, but sometimes the contrast is best illuminated with some data. Read More
The Trouble Isn’t Liberals. It’s Progressives. B
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By Charles Murray – …progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong unifying leader. They were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective. They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded.…are …enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state…think it’s just fine to subordinate the interests of individuals to … cheer the president’s abuse of executive power and … have no problem rationalizing the stifling of dissent…. Read More
How Income Equality Helped Trump B
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By Phil Gramm and Robert B. Ekelund Jr. – Working Americans sense that taxes and transfers now leave them little better off than those who work less. An article on…the most comprehensive accounting to date of how taxes and government payments affect income distribution in the U.S. …The most surprising finding is the astonishing degree of equality among the bottom 60% of American earners, generated in part by the explosion of social-welfare spending… Read More