California’s punishing cost of living isn’t inevitable—it’s policy-driven. Burdensome regulations have sent housing and energy prices soaring, crushing incomes and deepening poverty. Smarter deregulation could bring back the Golden State’s long-lost affordability and historic role as a “land of opportunity.” In 2024, California had a poverty rate of 17.7%, meaning about 7 million people were...
Is your business “needed”? Bizarrely, in many states, if you want to start a business, you first must convince bureaucrats that your business is “needed.” Four years ago, Louisiana blocked social worker Ursula Newell-Davis from helping kids with special needs. Bureaucrats said she hadn’t proved her business was needed. “Why does the state of Louisiana...
Like many of America’s once-great metropolises, Portland, Oregon, has seen better days. Drug-addled homeless continue to ravage the streets, and businesses have begun packing their bags for greener pastures, following the thousands of city residents who have had enough. The reason Portland has become such a disaster is simple: It prioritizes the needs of its...
Ronald Reagan had a saying about how government works: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” His point was that bureaucrats love to “solve” problems, which inevitably creates new problems that they then “solve” again. There are few better examples of this than how...
Zyns are super popular. They are little pouches people tuck into their lips to get a hit of nicotine. Zyn has competitors, like Velo and On!, but Zyn has most of the market. Young people love the pouches. They are safer than cigarettes. Their nicotine is addictive, but nicotine isn’t what makes tobacco deadly. “[The]...
The Trump administration is proposing almost three dozen new rules to scale back gun regulations that proliferated during the Biden administration. The 34 rules placed in the Federal Register on Wednesday included reversing a 2024 Biden administration rule that attempted to force firearms dealers to run background checks on buyers at gun shows. Gun control...
Most Americans were glad to get another Tax Day behind them this month. It’s galling to hand over a third of everything you earned last year to government to waste, fraud, and abuse. Consider the raw numbers. Last year the federal government took just over $5 trillion. States and localities took another $2.5 trillion. Out...