Brief Analyses / Privacy

Privacy from Government in a Transparent Society

Individuals face a greater threat to their privacy from government than from the private sector. In general, people have little or no control over what information is collected, how much is shared or how securely it is stored. If a business refuses to keep private information about one's consumer preferences secure, consumers can take their business elsewhere. But they hardly have the same opportunity when it comes to the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Internal Revenue Service.

Brief Analyses / Health

Fighting the Last War

Congress is considering several versions of a Patients Bill of Rights. In the Senate, the "bipartisan" McCain-Kennedy-Edwards bill is going to duke it out with the "propartisan" Breaux-Frist-Jeffords bill and others. In the House, Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.), declaring that he was tired of waiting for the White House to compromise, prepared to move ahead with his own legislation. Meanwhile, Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, announced that the President will veto any legislation that goes too far.

Brief Analyses / Privacy

Financial Privacy: The Choice Is in the Mail

In one of the largest financial-customer notifications ever, banks and other financial institutions are mailing information to every customer of record to clarify how they collect and use people's financial information and what options customers have with regard to the sharing of this information. Many bank customers have already received notices. The mail campaign is a result of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

Brief Analyses / Privacy

Personal Privacy in a Transparent Society

A torrent of personal information about each of us is available now and experts agree that it will increasingly become available to others who want to use it. Society has become much more transparent due to the advent of inexpensive computer technology, storage devices and the Internet. This development has led to concerns about how this information might be used by employers, marketers, health insurers and others. Carefully crafted laws that promote clear disclosure (and enforcement) of privacy agreements can help people protect themselves without sacrificing freedom of speech.

Brief Analyses / Taxes

The Marriage Penalty: A Tax On Working Couples

The most significant change in the U.S. labor force in the last 60 years has been the increasing participation of women. Women now account for 46 percent of the total U.S. workforce, and nearly half of married women with children (47 percent last year) work.

Brief Analyses / Health

MSAs for Everyone, Part III

The idea behind Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) is that individuals are able to own and control some of their own health care dollars. Instead of turning all the money over to an employer or insurance company, part of the funds are placed in an account from which patients pay directly for medical services. Further, individuals ultimately get to keep any MSA funds they do not spend

Brief Analyses / Health

A Better Patients' Bill of Rights

Congress is poised to pass a law specifically designed to encourage litigation against health plans. Advocates of the so-called Patients' Bill of Rights are selling this legislation as necessary to permit members of health maintenance organizations to sue their plans. However, this is not an accurate description of the bill:

Brief Analyses / Taxes

Questions and Answers About Personal Social Security Retirement Accounts

Between now and 2015 Social Security will accumulate large surpluses. Social Security reform proposals before Congress would utilize these surpluses by allowing workers to invest 2 percentage points of their payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts (PRAs). The PRA balances, with their accumulated interest and dividends, would replace an increasing portion of retirees' Social Security benefits and reduce the government's obligation to pay retirement benefits.

Brief Analyses / Social Security

The Nightmare in Our Future – 2001 Update

Social Security and Medicare are in trouble. By 2016, both programs will begin paying out more in benefits than they receive in payroll taxes. And the government will no longer be able to maintain full benefit payments to retirees at current tax rates. These programs will consume an ever-increasing portion of workers' incomes if the government is to keep its promises.

Brief Analyses / Crime

Creating Factories Behind Bars

The Bush administration has announced its intention to reach across party lines and look at old problems in new ways. Perhaps nowhere would this strategy reap a greater harvest than in jointly alleviating the 93 percent unemployment rate behind the gates of American prisons and a workforce shortage that threatens American competitiveness.

Brief Analyses / Crime

Restorative Justice, American Style

Ted McGarrell, a criminology professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, has teamed up with the Hudson Institute and the city of Indianapolis to try an experiment that offers something besides jails to control crime. "Restorative justice," a program being tried with youthful first-time offenders, is based on three principles:

Brief Analyses / Economy

Saving for a Rainy Day

In its January forecast, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected budget surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion between 2002 and 2011, up from $4.6 trillion a year earlier. This forecast assumes (1) no tax cut, (2) no spending increase and (3) no Social Security privatization. The forecast therefore assumes that the surpluses will be used to pay down the government debt available for repurchase and then buy assets that earn a return similar to that earned on Treasury issues. This means that beginning in 2006, the government would do something it has never done: accumulate and hold significant levels of private financial assets.

Brief Analyses / Health

Medicaid Waivers: Wrong Cure for High Drug Prices

The Health Care Financing Administration (the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid) can waive some federal requirements for Medicaid eligibility to allow states to experiment with new ways of delivering health care to the poor. Near the end of the Clinton administration, HCFA granted waivers to Maine and Vermont for programs allowing many people ineligible for Medicaid to get Medicaid prescription drug coverage.

Brief Analyses / Taxes

If You Like Complicated Hidden Taxes, You'll Love Phase-outs

The Tax Code is littered with rules that phase out various deductions, exemptions and credits as taxpayers' incomes rise. These rules create hidden increases in marginal tax rates for unsuspecting citizens and greatly complicate tax calculations. Some of the items that taxpayers lose with higher incomes are deductible individual retirement accounts, Roth IRAs, the earned income tax credit (EITC), the exclusion of Social Security benefits from taxable income, the child credit, education credits and deductions, a portion of itemized deductions, even the personal exemption.

Brief Analyses / Regulations

California's Electrical Mess: The Deregulation That Wasn't

In 1994 California enacted legislation intended to deregulate the electric power business in the state and establish a competitive market. By January 2001, flaws in the California approach had become evident with the state's utilities driven to the brink of bankruptcy and Californians suffering electricity shortages and blackouts.

Brief Analyses / Taxes

Repeal the Grave-Robbing Tax

A key component of President Bush's tax plan is eliminating the gift and estate tax, also known as the "death tax." This tax hits estates of more than $1 million in net assets with rates as high as 55 percent. The death tax raises very little revenue, yet it does significant harm to the economy, imposes very high compliance costs and fails to curtail the transmission of wealth from one generation to the next. It is arguably the most counterproductive tax in the entire Internal Revenue Code.

Brief Analyses / Health

Canada: A Health Care System on the Edge

Patients are lined up in the hallway, stretcher after stretcher. There are so few chairs that anxious relatives stand by the gurneys for hours. A woman with a migraine sits with her hands pressed to her ears. She waits like this for a couple of hours, perhaps longer.

Brief Analyses / Global Warming

Cooling Overheated Global Warming Rhetoric

The November 2000 negotiations at the Hague, Netherlands, on implementing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change took place against a backdrop of lobbying by environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These NGOs used selective science and inaccurate news reports to demand that the United States accede to international demands for drastic, immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, a closer look at the evidence shows that they downplayed uncertainties in the studies that they cited, and ignored other studies that cast doubts on the need for immediate emission cuts.

Brief Analyses / Taxes

Myths about Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

For more than 50 years, America has relied on employers as the primary source of health insurance coverage. For the most part, this has been a successful approach, providing coverage in 1998 to 155 million people, compared to only 15.5 million who purchase their own coverage.

Brief Analyses / Social Security

The Power of Compounding and Social Security

Albert Einstein called it the greatest mathematical discovery of all time. Benjamin Franklin supposedly said it was the eighth wonder of the world. MasterCard, Visa and American Express use it – with devastating effects for unwary cardholders. The tool is compounding, and if harnessed correctly, it can save Social Security while ensuring a safe, comfortable and secure retirement for even the lowest-income Americans.

Brief Analyses / Health

Reimporting Prescription Drugs

Physicians and patients in the United States have better access to innovative treatments than do those in any other developed country. And the U.S. has become the world leader in biotechnology, including the development and manufacture of new drugs. The main reason is the lack of price controls. In almost every other industrialized country, choice of and access to the most effective new drugs are limited by drug price controls and other government restrictions.

Brief Analyses / Social Security

Facts about Social Security

Social Security reform has emerged as one of the defining issues of the 2000 election. Proposals to "save" Social Security have fueled an onslaught of criticism and praise of the current system – some accurate, some in the neighborhood and some not even close. A number of myths and half-truths about Social Security have clouded the dialogue.

Brief Analyses / Taxes

Should IRA's Be Expanded?

On July 19 the House voted to expand the amount taxpayers can invest in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and 401(k) retirement plans. With the help of 181 Democrats, the Republican-initiated proposal passed 401 to 25. Despite the measure's bipartisan support, it prompted a polemical attack from the White House, which issued a "fact sheet" against congressional tax bills, arguing they would drain money from the surplus, leave too little for "key priorities" (spending) and fail to equally benefit those who pay taxes and those who do not.