California’s law requiring background checks for purchases of ammunition kicked in on July 1. Since then, according to the state attorney general, there have been 345,000 background checks. In 101 cases, the purchases were prohibited and 62,000 buyers were denied or rejected. Those 62,000 people, as it happens, were legally entitled to purchase ammunition. The rejected include off-duty sheriff’s deputies purchasing shotgun shells to hunt ducks. State officials attribute the problem to glitches and discrepancies amount state databases, but legal gun owners and law-abiding citizens have plenty of room for doubt.

The leader of the “tories”, Boris Johnson, could not have asked for a more perfect opponent in last week’s elections than Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. It was delusionary on the part of the Labour Party to think they could win with a leader who seemed to have come straight out of the Marxist vulgate of the 1970s, who proposed to nationalize large industries and fiber broadband, reduce the work week while paying higher wages, raise public spending by thirty British pounds for every pound of increase in spending proposed by Johnson and add some 150 billion pounds to the debt, a perfect recipe for massive tax increases.

California deploys the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, but taxpayers may be unaware that the Golden State also leads the nation in occupational licensing. As Matthew D. Mitchell of the Mercatus Center notes, in a report submitted to the Federal Trade Commission, such licensing “represents a significant and growing barrier to work.” 

The Fraser Institute recently published new editions of its annual rankings of economic freedom in North America and around the world. These rankings, together with scholarly studies on the spread of economic freedom, tell an interesting story about Mexico and why it is important for the United States to be a good neighbor by being a role model.

In November 2019, Fraser released Economic Freedom of North America 2019 (EFNA), the 15th edition of its annual report measuring the extent to which “the policies of individual provinces and states were supportive of economic freedom, the ability of individuals to act in the economic sphere free of undue restrictions.” The report is based on 2017 data, the year with the most recent comprehensive data.

As part of the SoCal Policy Forum, a project of the Southern California News Group (SCNG) and the University of California, Riverside, a number of other policy experts and I were invited to weigh in on the causes of, and solutions to, poverty. Below are my responses, which were recently published in the Orange County Register and its sister SCNG papers, and can also be found on the SoCal Policy Forum website.

Question: From your perspective, what are the most effective means of keeping people out of poverty? What are the most effective means of lifting people out of poverty?

People have struggled with how best to deal with poverty since the earliest societies, but the answer is apparent if we merely look to history. From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution to modern times, poverty has been most radically and rapidly alleviated whenever people are free to work in an occupation of their choosing, keep the fruits of their labors, acquire and maintain private property, and rely on a stable legal system to protect their personal and economic freedoms.

Thanks to the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019, which has been described as “the worst budget deal in history,” the U.S. government will spend $57.9 trillion over the next 10 years, with $12.2 trillion of that spending requiring new borrowing that will add to the U.S. government’s bloated $22.7 trillion national debt.

Those already crazy numbers come from the Congressional Budget Office’s August 2019 estimate of the U.S. government’s budget outlook from 2020 through 2029. But if you’ve been paying attention to what the major contenders for the 2020 presidential election are proposing to spend, the numbers for unsustainable government spending will almost certainly be growing to “crazy, stupid” levels over the next 10 years.

Last week’s brief NATO celebratory summit meeting for the alliance’s seventieth anniversary displayed tumult and dysfunction. Three of NATO’s crucial players proceeded to roil the proceedings. And such disruption is not all bad.

Before the meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron—furious at President Trump’s lack of coordination with NATO allies in the U.S. troop pullback in Syria and other instances—lamented that NATO had suffered “brain death,” a clear jab at the alleged lack of U.S. leadership under Trump, and renewed his call for Europeans to augment their own alternative military capabilities. Unsurprisingly, Trump took personal umbrage at this remark aimed clearly at him, replying that Macron’s comment was “very insulting.” Also, the two NATO allies got into a bilateral trade tussle that threatened to expand Trump’s international trade war to yet another country.

One week ago, noted Stanford University economist John Taylor testified at a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives’ budget committee, whose members are reexamining the economic costs of the national debt.

After the hearing, Taylor summarized his remarks and reflected on previous testimony he provided on a related topic back in 2015:

The American Heart Association finds that over 1 million heart attacks occur in the United States every year. Fourteen percent of all heart attacks are fatal. Many heart attacks and other cardiovascular issues result from heart disease, which is even more common (and often more deadly).

When a heart attack happens, victims need immediate medical attention. In some cases, emergency heart surgery may be necessary. When it is, physicians often turn to a drug named Heparin.

Senator Rand Paul last week released a Fall 2019 edition of his Waste Report, describing some of the more unusual ways in which bureaucrats have wasted U.S. taxpayer dollars in recent years. Because many of us were either traveling for Thanksgiving or were otherwise distracted with holiday plans, it pretty much flew under the radar, but these turkeys of government spending are too good to go unnoticed. Here’s the list!