Today, oil imports account for about 40 percent of America's $750 billion annual trade deficit, a deficit that drains the GDP and kills jobs. Expanding the domestic production of hydrocarbons to reduce imports as well as increase exports will function as an enormous subsidy-free stimulus to the U.S. economy, directly creating all manner of jobs across the nation and indirectly creating millions more jobs as the... More

Federal agencies from the FDA to the EPA to the FCC threaten the rule of law.

IRS rules put private pension funds in a difficult place.  The rules were very clear: if the fund was overfunded, you had to either stop making contributions, or increase the benefits.   And the IRS refused to budge.  So the pension plans increased the benefits. When the market tanked at the end of the 1990s, plans were severely underfunded.

How bad and widespread are California cities' fiscal problems? "Virtually ubiquitous and massive,'' says Rod Kiewiet, professor of political science at California Institute of Technology.

Two provisions in particular will require thousands of new IRS agents, and billions in funding, to enforce: the law’s individual mandate, forcing most Americans to buy government-approved health insurance; and its employer mandate, forcing most employers to take money out of workers’ paychecks to purchase costly health insurance on their behalf.

The line between vigilance and harassment is not bright, and the potential for abuse is great with our tax code. It should be apparent that this power, which is inherently arbitrary, ill suits a society that sees itself as free.

Pharmacology is fast becoming an information industry. The search for a new drug is increasingly a search for information about how a molecule of our design will interact with different arrays of molecules. The FDA has spent the last 30 years pondering how, if at all, molecular science might be shoehorned into the clinical trial protocols that Washington first used over 70 years ago and formalized in licensing rules... More

Now in the name of saving the planet from climate change, environmentalists are proposing an immense global campaign to cut down and burn trees and scrubs in order to reduce fossil-fuel use. The initiative could be dismissed as a weird irony, if it weren’t for its phenomenal costs, which include likely destruction of biodiversity, increased water use, and reduced global food production. And it may end up increasing... More

Does anyone really think that the correct policy for Greece over the last few years would have been to leave the structure of the economy in tact — the corruption and lack of private sector competitiveness, the lax tax collection, the inefficiency of the government, the extensive subsidies and monopolies and state ownership of firms, the regulatory strangulation — and simply lent the government... More