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Blog Archive 2013

InsiderOnline Blog

To Do: Unravel the EPA Coverup

• Learn about the Environmental Protection Agency’s continuing efforts to keep secret its coordination with outside liberal environmental groups. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Christopher Hor More...

The Department of Education Offends Student Rights

With a letter sent to the University of Montana last week, the Department of Education is undermining the rights of students and faculty at every college and university that accepts federal funding, r More...

Medicaid Considerations

Expanding Medicaid on the federal dime may seem like a free lunch for the states, but it’s not that simple for many reasons—in particular that even the federal government cannot forever spend money it More...

More IRS Dots

Here are some other things we learned this week about what’s been going on at the Internal Revenue Service: • While some conservative organizations have been waiting for more than three years for the More...

Farm Bill = Corporate Welfare

Congress is working on another farm bill, which is another way of saying that soon Congress will vote once again to take money from taxpayers and consumers and hand it out to big business. From Daren More...

About the IRS Mess: Power Is the Problem

• There’s a history of the IRS being misused for political purposes, notes Michael Scherer at Time: John F. Kennedy sanctioned an “Ideological Organizations Project” at the IRS that investigated r More...

Journalist Who Writes on Politics Cheers Limits on Non-Profits That Don’t Share His Politics

According to Jeffrey Toobin, the scandal at the Internal Revenue Service isn’t what the agency was asking groups with “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names. The scandal is that the IRS isn’t cracki More...

The Questions Are the Scandal

The scandal at the Internal Revenue Service isn’t just that the review of tax-exempt status applications was tilted against groups with conservative-sounding names. The scandal is that the Internal Re More...

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Policy Studies

The Digital Future of Molecular Medicine: Rethinking FDA Regulation

Source: Manhattan Institute

The FDA’s current protocols treat patient selection as a problem that the drug company must solve before the clinical trial begins or, to a limited extent, when it is in its very early phases. At best, this means that the drug is prescribed to many patients wh More...

The U.S. Corporate Tax Code: Ripe for Bipartisan Reform

Source: Pacific Research Institute

The U.S. corporate tax code is ripe for bipartisan reform—the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate of any OECD country but collects some of the lowest federal corporate tax revenues as a share of GDP. A low-rate flat tax on the broad base of business value More...

Startup Businesses and the Growth of Real State Gross Product

Source: Pacific Research Institute

Notwithstanding the often-repeated conventional wisdom that “small business” is responsible for most employment growth, the modern scholarly literature finds that it is new (and perhaps young) businesses—startups—that contribute disproportionately to both gros More...

U.N. Human Rights Experts: More Transparency and Accountability Required

Source: The Heritage Foundation

The independence of mandate holders is important to their ability to objectively fulfill their mandates, but they should also be accountable and subject to dismissal. Similarly, budgetary transparency and mandatory disclosure of sources of funding and other su More...

The Taxman Cometh: The IRS’s Role in Implementing Obamacare