FreedomTalks

What’s the single easiest thing we could do to fix health insurance?  Allow individuals to purchase insurance across state lines, thus creating a national market and quickly, efficiently deregulating the options for every person in every state.   Right now, Rep. John Shadegg has a bill that would do just that.
The CEI blog quotes a WSJ […]

Volokh’s Ilya Somin points out another problem with the FairTax: It doesn’t provide an easy, efficient way of figuring out exactly how much your total tax liability is:
For all its flaws, the income tax system at least gives taxpayers a fairly clear indication of what their total income tax liability is: every April you have […]

Via To the People, this is heartening news: The Maryland GOP is going to court to stop the implementation of new taxes.  Looks like the tax-hikers are playing rough though:
Attorney Irwin R. Kramer, who is representing the group of Republican legislators, said he didn’t think the state’s argument has any merit.
“In 20 years of […]

Looks to be a pretty quiet day here in Washington. Most people are still recuperating from the holiday and waiting till after New Year’s to get back into the swing of things. 

Fortunately, this gives us time to catch up on our history, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal and Amity Shlaes. In today’s column, […]

As I’ve noted repeatedly here at FT, the latest federal budget is a pork-laden mess.  After promising to get earmarks under control, the Democratic-led Congress still decided to pass a bulky omnibus that includes some 9,000 earmarks totaling more than $12 billion.  These earmarks constitute a massive waste of taxpayer money, and they lend themselves […]

Slate’s got a smart article on green building certifications, which Washington D.C. now requires for all major city buildings, public and private. Guess what? Turns out the certification doesn’t really guarantee that the building is anything close to eco-friendly, and in some cases may even encourage buildings to be less so.  The major problem, however, […]

The New York Times suggests that some of the current waves in the subprime credit market might not be caused by nasty companies in need of more federal regulation, but by something a little more obvious, and more clearly malicious: mortgage fraud.  And it turns out that fending off this sort of fraud isn’t a […]

Good morning! Posting at FreedomTalks will be slower over the next week as we at FreedomWorks pull our noses out of the newspapers, shut down Google Reader, and head home for the holidays. Who knows? Some of us might even turn our Blackberries off!
In the meantime, here’s a roundup of stories worth reading […]

Here’s some good news for the day: The FTC has approved the Google/Doubleclick merger. For a background on why fears about the merger are overblown, since TLF’s Cord Blomquist.

What’s wrong with Congress’s plans to regulate mortgage lenders?  In today’s NRO, John Berlau gives us the lowdown.