Among the celebrants at the inaugural balls will be top contributors to the President’s reelection campaign, but their real celebration will be April 15, when they continue to be the beneficiaries of a “tax loophole” Obama pledged to close in 2008—but that remains gaping wide open despite his rhetoric about now making “the rich”...
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One suggestion for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions is to implement a revenue-neutral tax on carbon emissions. If we implemented a carbon tax and cut income taxes by the same amount, we would be reducing taxes on something we want (income) and increasing taxes on something we don’t (air pollution). As good as it...
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Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, have warned sellers against “price gouging” in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Their words and policies are supposed to help people during a catastrophe, but the opposite is true. As columnist Matthew Yglesias explains in Slate, stopping...
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The Daily Mail of London has reported that despite its support for global warming alarmism, Britain’s National Weather Service (U.K. Met Office) has quietly unveiled a report admitting that there has been no warming from January 1997 through August 2012. (Here also are the data sets for the report as well as an analysis...
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The EPA issued new rules requiring the average fuel efficiency of new cars and trucks to get 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. President Obama said, “These fuel standards represent the single most important step we’ve ever taken to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” The new standard is a goal, not a policy....
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It was one thing for gullible college students in the late 1960s to present themselves for voluntary sterilization as a result of their buying into Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb myth. In keeping with the premise of the annual Darwin Awards, it might be just as well that those so prone to falling for groundless...
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Today President Obama was advocating the renewal of wind energy tax credits to promote green energy. Meanwhile, last week the Obama administration placed a 31% tariff on the importation of solar panels from China. So, is he for green energy, as the wind energy tax credit would suggest, or against it, as his raising...
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James Delingpole reports in the Telegraph of London that James Lovelock, the “greenest” of the “greens,” now admits that the doomsaying over global warming is wrong. [O]ne of the archest of the world’s arch Greenies – James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis and therefore, more or less, founder of the world’s most powerful...
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Argentine president Cristina Kirchner recently caused an international uproar with her decision to expropriate 51 percent of YPF, Argentina´s main oil and gas producer, and a major affiliate of Spain´s Repsol, one of the world´s great energy concerns. As has so often been the case with Latin American nationalizations, the move was accompanied by...
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We are delighted to announce the publication of the Spring 2012 issue of the Independent Institute’s peer-reviewed journal, The Independent Review. This issue’s articles and book reviews deal with the following questions: What does evidence from hunter-gatherer societies suggest about whether human beings are better adapted for individualism or collectivism? Read the article. What...
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