Cameron's Home-Buying Bungle | Cato Institute

Cameron's Home-Buying Bungle | Cato Institute: "Borrowing a sizable amount of money can easily make a family vulnerable to unexpected unemployment or income shocks, especially after paying a large deposit on a new house. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Americans who saw their houses foreclosed learned this the hard way.

Moreover, because the costs of selling a piece of real estate are substantial, home ownership also creates a disincentive to labor mobility, tying people to places that may not have the best economic opportunities a decade or two from now. It may not be a coincidence that Spain, with a home ownership rate of 80%, suffers from 25% unemployment."

"In the end, the more important question seems whether people have access to affordable, convenient, good-quality housing. If that’s not the case, a reasonable government policy ought to encourage growth in the supply of the physical housing units, thereby making them more affordable both to renters and home buyers."

"This includes not only scrapping various land-use restrictions, but also urban-planning regulations that currently make it difficult to put up tall residential buildings."

Immigration Is Good for Wisconsin's Economy | Cato Institute

Immigration Is Good for Wisconsin's Economy | Cato Institute: "Even if supporters of reform got their pie-in-the-sky wishes, immigrants would only temporarily drive down wages, and that’s only if they compete directly with American workers. That rarely happens because, for the most part, immigrant and American workers have different skills.

A third of immigrants have less than a high school degree, but only 8% of U.S.-born American workers do. Immigrants with less than a high school degree just don’t compete with U.S.-born educated workers.

In addition, immigrants tend to speak English poorly, at least initially, so many specialize in jobs that don’t require much English. That creates opportunities for Americans to specialize in jobs that require English proficiency, jobs that also pay more."

"As unauthorized immigrant workers were weeded out of the Arizona workforce, an exodus of 130,000 since 2007, very few Americans took their places. Unauthorized immigrants left the state and took their jobs with them."

The Government (Non) Shutdown | Cato Institute

The Government (Non) Shutdown | Cato Institute: "Democrats have already agreed to support a continuing resolution at a funding level that is lower than they originally desired. Although I was initially concerned that the opposite would be the case, the House GOP’s willingness to go to the mat over Obamacare probably enabled this small win for taxpayers.

As it stands, Democrats are willing to fund those portions of the government that require annual appropriations at $986 billion (on an annualized basis), which is essentially the same figure that the House GOP proposed. On the downside, because that figure originally proposed by the GOP would still be above that which the still-in-effect sequestration would allow for the new fiscal year ($967 billion), the stage would be set for another round of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the mandatory cuts in January."

Shutdown Problems: Brought to You by Big Government | Cato Institute

Shutdown Problems: Brought to You by Big Government | Cato Institute: "Roughly 80 percent of federal workers will continue to go to work.

Moreover, it’s not as if this hasn’t happened before. In fact, between 1977 and 1996, there were 17 government shutdowns, ranging from 1 to 21 days. Yet somehow the Republic survived."

It’s Amazingly Simple to Balance the Budget | Cato @ Liberty

It’s Amazingly Simple to Balance the Budget | Cato @ Liberty: "we can balance the budget in just three years if spending grows by “only” 1 percent per year

The chart also shows that you can balance the budget in just four years if spending is allowed to grow “just” two percent annually.

And if you for some reason think that the burden of government spending should rise faster than inflation, then we can balance the budget in seven years by restraining spending so that it grows 3 percent each year."

"we’ve actually enjoyed two consecutive years of government spending being lower than it was the year before. Something to keep in mind just in case you thought the Tea Party didn’t make a difference or if you didn’t think sequestration was a big victory."

'No Place to Hide' from NSA, Then or Now | Cato Institute

'No Place to Hide' from NSA, Then or Now | Cato Institute: "In one case, for example, “on the subject’s first day of access to the SIGINT system, he queried six email addresses belonging to a former girlfriend, a U.S. person.” He got a demotion and two months’ reduced pay.

In 2008, a former Navy intercept operator stationed at a NSA facility described how his colleagues used to pass around highlights of soldiers’ phone calls home from Iraq.

The word would go out that “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny.”

LOVEINT abuses are comparatively small-time, but they hint at the dangers endemic to our burgeoning Surveillance State: Information is power; the modern NSA’s capabilities are indescribably powerful and power corrupts."

Bankrupt Ideas Lead to Bankrupt Governments | Cato Institute

Bankrupt Ideas Lead to Bankrupt Governments | Cato Institute: "During the second Clinton administration, federal spending was about 20 percent lower as a percentage of GDP than it is now. Yet I do not recall starvation among the American people, nor the acutely ill being thrown out of hospitals because they could not pay, nor children not finding schools to attend. It did not happen, nor did it happen from the end of the Civil War until World War I, when federal spending was only about 3 percent of GDP, in contrast to today’s 22 percent."

"Mrs. Pelosi may think there is nothing more to cut, but her own government continues to find huge waste. Medicare fraud and abuse alone now costs more than $115 billion per year, and even though the problem is well known, it persists decade after decade, as Mrs. Pelosi and her colleagues do nothing to stop it. But then, again, it is not their money that is wasted. According to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. government has 77,000 unused or underused buildings that cost taxpayers $1.67 billion annually to operate and maintain."

Silent Circle: NIST encryption standards untrustworthy | Security & Privacy - CNET News

Silent Circle: NIST encryption standards untrustworthy | Security & Privacy - CNET News: "A 2007 presentation by two Microsoft researchers called into question the standard's algorithm -- Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation, aka Dual_EC_DRBG -- and raised the possibility that it offered a back door into encrypted communications to someone who knew specific secret numbers.
"If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG," said security researcher Bruce Schneier in a blog post about Dual_EC_DRBG at the time."

Who's still offline and why? The real reasons | Internet & Media - CNET News

Who's still offline and why? The real reasons | Internet & Media - CNET News: "The US still has a "digital divide," but it's not the one most people would imagine. According to the survey, the most significant factor is age: Nearly half of non-users are age 65 or older. Education is the second-most important factor -- more than 40 percent do not hold a high school diploma. Other factors, including sex, race, income level, and geographic location, are less significant, and continue to decrease."

"the most frequently reported reason given by Americans who do not to use the Internet is that it isn't relevant to them. Usability was the second-most cited reason. Together the two accounted for 66 percent of those who are not online. Price and availability were the least-important reasons."

"Although 4G and other networking technologies can and do deliver speeds that exceed the FCC's broadband threshold, the agency excluded mobile entirely from its statistics on access, citing a lack of "reliable" data on precisely how many of the 19 million could or even do get service from mobile broadband providers.
Rather than estimate, the FCC simply counted the entire wireless industry as zero."

"Including data on mobile broadband access provided in the FCC's report but left out of its calculations, the number of Americans without any home broadband provider falls as low as 5.5 million. That's less than 2 percent of the population.
To put that number in perspective, consider that landline telephone service never achieved more than 95 percent (PDF) adoption in American homes. Indeed, according to the US Census Bureau, more than 3.5 million Americans still lacked complete indoor plumbing as recently as 2011. Yet universal telephone service has been the policy of the US since the formation of the FCC in 1934. And public efforts to improve household sanitation predate the founding of the Republic. "

America Can Aid Syrians without Military Intervention | Cato Institute

America Can Aid Syrians without Military Intervention | Cato Institute: "So far, neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have taken in more than 1.7 million of the refugees. Sweden has announced that it will grant permanent residency to the 14,700 Syrian refugees already there, as well as some subsequent arrivals. Germany has also decided to take in 5,000 Syrian refugees.

In contrast, in 2011 and 2012, the U.S. allowed just 374 Syrians to gain asylum status, while only 60 refugees were approved."

"The United States used to be the world’s safety net for refugees, especially religious ones. The Pilgrims fled the Netherlands, Irish Catholics escaped English oppression, Jews from Eastern Europe escaped pogroms, and Armenians fled genocide and war to settle in California. But then America changed its immigration laws in 1921, and the government shamefully turned away German Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and Chinese fleeing the Japanese invasion.

The United States could help avoid an even worse humanitarian crisis in Syria by guaranteeing TPS status to all peaceful Syrians who make it to the U.S. It’s important to note that TPS is not a green card and cannot lead toward citizenship. Furthermore, any war criminals or individuals affiliated with criminal or terrorist activity would be excluded. TPS status could be a game-changer for Syrians and it could be done just by changing a few words in the U.S. code."