Category: United States
Deleting regulations: Of Sunstein and sunsets
The busy nudgemeister
CHEERS greeted Barack Obama’s hiring of Cass Sunstein away from the University of Chicago. Mr Sunstein, a lawyer, now head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is in charge of lifting the heavy…
Insider trading in Congress: Taking STOCK
Mr Bachus has questions to answer
AT LAST they can agree on something. On February 9th, in a spirit of bipartisanship that is rare these days, the House passed a bill making it explicit that members of Congress are not allowed to eng…
Nuclear power: The 30-year itch
Let’s fire up a few more
IN HIS state-of-the-union message last month, Barack Obama said that America needs “an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.” Mr Obama boasted about…
Reforming gang members: Where homies can heal
Homeboy Industries is an anti-crime programme run by Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest.
Homeboy Industries
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The president’s budget: Another doomed exercise
BACK in 2009 Barack Obama’s first budget called for repealing his predecessor’s tax cuts on the rich, eliminating tax breaks for multinationals and boosting the tax rate on capital gains. A year later Mr Obama repeated those proposals, and added ne…
Excessive regulation: Tangled up in green tape
PITY the engineers responsible for keeping America’s coal-fired power plants up to standard. Late last year a court halted the adoption of new regulations on interstate air pollution that would have affected lots of them—just tw…
Lexington: Buttering-up and scolding
WHEN he wants to relax, the man most likely to be the next leader of China enjoys watching American basketball on television. He has fond memories of his brief stay with an American family in Iowa more than a quarter of a century ag…
Gay marriage: Equal protection indeed
Onwards and upwards
“THE freedom to marry”, wrote Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, “has long been recognised as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by fre…
Drugs policy: Pills and progress
ON A recent evening, some 50 people turned up for their weekly reckoning at Judge Joel Bennett’s drug court in Austin, Texas. Those who had had a good week—gone to their Narcotics Anonymous meetings and stayed out of trouble—g…
Jobs and the economy: A game of two halves
EVEN people who don’t normally care much for football tune in to the Super Bowl to watch the best commercials Madison Avenue can dream up. The most talked about this year was Chrysler’s gritty tribute to the economic revival of …
