We generally think of retirees and their survivors when we talk about Social Security, but that's not all that Social Security does. Some 4.7 million disabled workers who have worked long enough to qualify for Social Security benefits draw Disability Insurance. Those benefits come from a separate Disability Insurance trust fund that is part of our payroll tax.
"In heaven there is no beer, that's why we drink it here," the song goes. And now we know why. Beer is good for us. Just ask the researchers.
For some odd reason urban sprawl – which is really nothing more than suburban development outside central urban areas – has sparked a national debate over land use. Indeed, in a survey of 1,000 registered voters, the Competitive Enterprise Institute found that two-thirds of the respondents identified "sprawl" as a concern.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an indirect consequence of the horrible massacre at Littleton and other school shootings is that the gun market is booming. In addition, whenever the Congress wants to "do something" to stop these extremely rare events, the threat of new gun controls boosts gun sales.
A lot of my Republican friends are excited about the Medicare reform legislation being pushed so hard by Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) and Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.). I wish I could be as excited as they are, but politics and the past make me skeptical.
Bear in mind that all human activity combined contributes something like 3 to 5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. If then, global warming is in fact occurring, is it likely that humans can do much about it?
Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and Leonid Kuchma of the Ukraine. What a difference a nation's leader can make. All three countries struggled for years under communist rule, but only two have made the transition toward free elections, free press and free markets. What's the difference? Their leaders.
What do Bolivia, Brazoria County, Texas, and Philip Morris have in common? A tobacco liability lawsuit, of course.
Just in time for taxpaying season, an official report says that the government isn't quite sure what it does with all that money it collects because it doesn't keep very good books. Of one thing, however, the report is certain: "the U.S. government's most important financial resource [is] its ability to tax and regulate."
Never go to the grocery store when you're really hungry; you'll find yourself spending a whole lot more than you planned. Similarly, Congress should never address tax issues when the public coffers are empty, and for the same reason: it will find itself spending a whole lot more than it planned.
For years the great economist Milton Friedman used to say that the correct measure of the size of government is not total taxes, but total spending. That is because spending is a truer measure of the resources government is taking out of society, especially when there is a large budget deficit. However, in a time of budget surpluses, Prof. Friedman's analysis needs updating. Simply looking at spending is no longer an adequate measure of the size of government. Nor is just looking at on-budget revenues a sufficient measure of taxation.
The mayors of New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami-Dade County and Bridgeport, Conn., have filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers to recover costs related to firearm violence in their cities. Other cities seem likely to file suit in the near future. They want gun makers to reimburse their cities for the public health and safety costs associated with treating and preventing injuries caused by firearms used in crimes.
About the only thing in Washington in worse shape than Medicare is the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare.
When I sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, I proposed a plan to convert Social Security from the current pay-as-you-go system to a fully funded retirement program. Eleven years later, both Republicans and Democrats have come to agree that the current system is facing financial collapse, and reforming Social Security is finally on the Washington agenda.
We can lay to rest another of the education establishment's specious arguments against school vouchers: that the private schools will skim off the best students, leaving the public schools with the others.
Two years ago, a bad guy named Charles Dickerson voluntarily confessed to the FBI that he had robbed seven banks in Maryland and Virginia. Dickerson's lawyer, however, asked the court to suppress his client's freely given confession because the agents allegedly had "Mirandized" him too late. Throwing out a confession usually means that the guilty criminal goes free, and that would be the likely outcome in Dickerson's case. The district court duly suppressed the confession.
In his year-end report, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said the trend to federalize crimes already covered by state laws "not only is taxing the Judiciary's resources and affecting its budget needs, but it also threatens to change entirely the nature of our federal system."
Milton Friedman deserves our gratitude for a multitude of contributions to American economic theory, political thought and public policy. But possibly his greatest contributions have been destroying the credibility of Keynesian economics and making libertarian philosophy and the idea of free markets academically respectable.
Although President Clinton talks about the need to save Social Security, the White House has refused repeated calls to put forth a specific plan because it might be politically divisive. No one has ever accused this administration of being a "Profile in Courage" except, of course, the White House press office.
Can politics get any more absurd? It's not just the depths of the president's trial in the U.S. Senate or his state of the union speech buying off voting groups by throwing around more taxpayers' money. Now we have the "living-wage" movement. You may not have heard of it but, amazingly, the living wage has become a big deal in many big cities across the country. Its victims include taxpayers, small businesses and inexperienced and low-income workers.
Tough new sentencing laws have succeeded in making criminals stay longer in prison, giving them more leisure time to contemplate the errors of their ways.
President Clinton's recent proposal to spend up to $6.2 billion to provide a $1,000 annual tax break for individuals or their families who need long-term medical care sounds like a helpful way to defray the costs of chronic and nursing home care.
Santa forgot to check his list twice this year. Some of the naughtiest people are receiving the largest Christmas gift: a group of trial lawyers who joined with states to sue tobacco companies and a group of public officials who can't wait to spend money from the settlements.
Let us hope that in the rush to fix Social Security's long-term problems, we also note that Medicare is already in crisis — and the Medicare situation promises to get worse and worse. Giving all our attention to Social Security and ignoring Medicare is comparable to setting a patient's broken arm while ignoring his ruptured appendix.