Tag: posts

Today is Tax Day, the day by which
Americans’ tax returns must be postmarked or electronically
submitted in order to avoid the wrath of the shakedown artists at
the Internal Revenue Service. Mind you, that’s not the same as

Tax Freedom Day, the day on which Americans as a whole have
earned enough money to pay the year’s total tax bill—that’s April
21 in 2014, three days later than last year. But the bill due on
Tax Day isn’t high enough for some, nor is Tax Freedom Day late
enough in the year. Jonathan Cohn, of The New
Republic, thinks the U.S. government should follow the example
of other regimes that demand a bigger take from people’s labors and
that “a
bigger April 15 bill would mean a better society.”

What Cohn fails to mention is that tax-happy governments tend to
drive tax-averse people to hide in the shadows, concealing vast
shares of the economy from officials, and severely limiting the
reach of the state. If prople like Cohn really want to emulate
other country’s tax rates, he’ll have to take their off-the-books
economies, too—and the limits they impose on what the state can
actually take.

Cohn
writes in praise of all the good things he sees in a high tax
tab.

That payroll tax taken out of everybody’s check? It’s buying you
Medicare and Social Security, which means a more secure retirement
free of crippling medical bills. Your federal income tax? Its
effects are a lot more diffuse. But chances are pretty good that
you’ve already used some infrastructure today—whether it was a road
or railway you took to work, or maybe the information technology
connections you’re using to read this article. Federal, state, and
local taxes helped pay for that. Is your water and air clean? Are
you safe from threats, domestic and foreign? Then you’re getting
something valuable from the Environment Protection Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Defense.
Your tax dollars paid for those, too.

He has a tough sales job ahead of him, though. Seventy-six
percent of respondents to our recent Reason-Rupe poll say that

private charity does as well or better than government in getting
mileage from their tax dollars. That means Americans are
unlikely to knuckle down and submit to a bigger bill without
protest. That’s no small concern when you consider that the U.S.
has traditionally had the
highest income tax compliance rate in the world, and the smallest
shadow economy—that is, people engaging in otherwise legal
economic activity, but out of sight of the tax man and
regulators.

But that’s changing.

In recent years, the income tax compliance rate in the United
States dipped to 83.1
percent. That’s still high, compared to the United Kingdom at
77.97 percent or Switzerland at 77.7 percent, but the gap is
closing.

The U.S. shadow economy has also traditionally been smaller than
that of other countries. But last year, estimates that it had
reached $2 trillion and might account for the country avoiding a
return to recession made
headlines.

“You normally see underground economies in places like Brazil or
in southern Europe,” said Laura Gonzalez, professor of personal
finance at Fordham University. “But with the job situation and the
uncertainty in the economy, it’s not all that surprising to have it
growing here in the United States.”

Estimates are that underground activity last year totaled as
much as $2 trillion, according to a study by Edgar Feige, an
economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That’s double the amount in 2009, according to a study by
Friedrich Schneider, a professor at Johannes Kepler University in
Linz, Austria. The study said the shadow economy amounts to nearly
8 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.

Why the sudden growth?

Schneider, the shadow economy expert mentioned in that CNBC
story quoted above, remarks,
“In almost all studies it has been found out, that the tax and
social security contribution burdens are one of the main causes for
the existence of the shadow economy.” He adds, “The bigger the
difference between the total cost of labor in the official economy
and the after-tax earnings (from work), the greater is the
incentive to avoid this difference and to work in the shadow
economy.”

Which is to say, if you raise taxes, many people stop paying
part or all of them. They hide their efforts, and their income,
from the government. In fact, a lot of countries have much bigger
economies than official figures suggest, since so much of it
happens off the books. If underground activity is equivalent to 8
percent of the U.S. economy, it might be 15 percent of Sweden’s,
and 20 percent of Spain’s.

So, that larger government take that Cohn likes so much becomes
nominal, since it’s only a share of the official portion of the
economy. In fact, once you adjust for the size of the shadow
economy,
the government’s share in the U.S., at roughly (my estimates) 39
percent, is nearly identical to the German state’s 40
percent.

Cohn and his friends may not like to hear it, but the tax
scofflaws who flee the high taxes he favors have already been
credited with keeping America out of recession,
and
Spain functioning
at all. Let’s hear it for their scofflaw efforts.

James Gimpel, a professor of government at the
University of Maryland, has written a report
for the Center for Immigration Studies, the restrictionist think
tank, on the impact immigrants had on politics from 1980 to 2012.
Among Gimpel’s findings are the following:

…the enormous flow of legal immigrants in to the country —
29.5 million 1980 to 2012 — has remade and continues to remake the
nation’s electorate in favor of the Democratic Party.

and,

…if legal immigration levels remain at the current levels of
over one million a year, it will likely continue to undermine
Republicans’ political prospects moving forward. Further, if the
substantial increases in legal immigration in Senate’s Gang of
Eight bill (S.744) were to become law it would accelerate this
process.

Gimpel says the following in the conclusion of the report:

Republican reservations about higher immigration levels can be
too easily typecast as racist and xenophobic. This is because the
party’s elites have failed to deliver a clear message that they
want a pro-immigrant policy of reduced immigration…

I’m not sure how a “policy of reduced immigration” can be
“pro-immigrant,” but it is certainly true that the GOP has failed
to convey a clear message on immigration policy. This is in part
due to the fact that a broad range of opinions on immigration are
represented among Republican Party members and lawmakers, some of
whom are
hesitant to take up immigration reform despite the fact that
polling shows that passing immigration reform would
not hurt Republicans in this fall’s midterms.

Some conservatives might think that the political implication of
increased immigration is a good reason to restrict the movement of
people into the U.S. I think opposing immigration for fear of
immigrants’ political opinions is one of the laziest and most
selfish reasons to back restrictionist policies, especially
considering that it takes years for legal immigrants to become
eligible to vote.

I know from personal experience that becoming a U.S. citizen
after holding a green card is an absurdly long process. Those who
oppose increased immigration because of the political implications
should keep in mind that immigrants must have a green card for

at least five years before applying for naturalization.
Immigrants can become U.S. citizens by marrying an American,
although even then they need to have been a green card holder for
at least three
years. However, according to
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, naturalization is
the most common path to U.S. citizenship. I think five years is
more than enough time to make a political argument to immigrants
that they should back team red instead of team blue. Personally,
I’d rather they not vote for either, but I digress. 

As the Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia has pointed out, there
are things the GOP
could do to win immigrant voters if they looked north and
learned from the lessons of Jason Kenney, Canada’s former Minister
of Citizenship and Immigration, who not only crafted what Dalmia
describes as “the conservative charm offensive toward immigrants”
but who also “persuaded conservatives that immigrants’ attachment
to their native religions, customs and tongues enrich — not
threaten — broader Canadian culture. Strong patriotism in Canada
now correlates with strong pro-immigrant attitudes, according to
the Migration Policy Institute.”

Dalmia goes on to outline changes the Harper administration made
in Canada, such as the lowering of arrival fees and cutting taxes
for small businesses, which allowed the Conservative government to
appeal to immigrants without sacrificing conservative principles.
Perhaps Republicans should consider arguing for doing the
same. 

As a fan of Ayn Rand who occasionally likes to defend her
against the charges that her villains—the figures in culture,
business, and government who in her novels embody what she
considers hateful ideas—are absurd caricatures with no connection
to lived reality, I invite you to
read today’s David Brooks column. I know it’s a hard thing to
ask, but do it for Ms. Rand, I implore you.

Brooks, one of the most prominent columnists in the newspaper
that supposedly defines our media culture, the New York
Times, riffs like a
Linus with a guillotine on the “true meaning of Passover.”
Outdoing Ayn Rand’s villainous Fountainhead columnist

Ellsworth Toohey in his mission to redefine the human spirit as
one best expressed in servitude.

It’s not even that he’s doing the usual “we need big government”
argument of pointing out all the actual miseries and troubles it
supposedly is uniquely able to solve. Brooks is arguing on a deeper
level: we need big government because we need authority to tell
us what to do; it is positively good for us on a metaphysical
level, never mind its practical effects.

Like Loki, clearly the guy who Brooks mistook for the hero in
the Avengers movie, Brooks tells us we were born to be
ruled.

Excerpts: 

Monday night was the start of Passover, the period when Jews
celebrate the liberation of the Israelites from slavery into
freedom.

Sure, escaping from slavery to freedom is cool—I
guess!—but isn’t there another side to this story,
Isralites?

But that’s not all the Exodus story is, or not even mainly
what it is. When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin
wanted to put Moses as a central figure on the Great Seal of the
United States, they were not celebrating him as a liberator, but as
a re-binder. It wasn’t just that he led the Israelites out of one
set of unjust laws. It was that he re-bound them with another set
of laws. Liberating to freedom is the easy part. Re-binding with
just order and accepted compulsion is the hard part….

Brooks then gives lip service to the notion that, sure,
the story of Moses also shows that leaders need to be bound by
rules as well, being sometimes imperfect and impetuous. (The even
larger meaning one can glean from the whole “contract with God”
story is that God himself needs to be, or wants to be, bound by
rules and agreements freely entered into.)

But back to Brooks’ more vital point: you need someone to tell
you what to do, at all times!

Just as leaders need binding, so do regular people. The
Israelites in Exodus whine; they groan; they rebel for petty
reasons. When they are lost in a moral wilderness, they immediately
construct an idol to worship and give meaning to their lives.

But Exodus is a reminder that statecraft is soulcraft, that good
laws can nurture better people. Even Jews have different takes on
how exactly one must observe the 613 commandments, but the general
vision is that the laws serve many practical and spiritual
purposes. For example, they provide a comforting structure for
daily life. If you are nervous about the transitions in your life,
the moments when you go through a door post, literally or
metaphorically, the laws will give you something to do in those
moments and ease you on your way.

Oh, for a world—one being built more solidly by bureaucracy
every day—in which you can’t even walk through a door without a set
of rules to control you, er, “ease you on your way.”

And if you choose not to be thusly eased, someone with a gun
will come by to ask you why. Maybe in the middle of the night and
bashing in your door. After shouting a warning, of course. We are a
nation of laws!

The laws tame the ego and create habits of deference by
reminding you of your subordination to something permanent….The
laws moderate the pleasures; they create guardrails that are meant
to restrain people from going off to emotional or sensual
extremes.

The 20th-century philosopher Eliyahu Dessler wrote, “the
ultimate aim of all our service is to graduate from freedom to
compulsion.” 

Bam! Let us not forget the wisdom of America’s great
Judeo-Christian tradition: freedom is for the unformed, compulsion
is for the Real Adults, the kind of real adults who tell us what to
think from their perch at the world’s mightiest newspaper.

Last month Jesse Walker noted Brooks’s upset tummy over
our lack of respect and obeisance to Great Leaders.

“If you see something, send
something.” That’s the slogan for Ohio Homeland Security officials’
spiffy new “Safer Ohio” smartphone app, whose release coincides
with the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings. It’s
“Ohio’s multi-function mobile public safety tool,” the department
brags; concerned citizens can use it to snap and submit camera
phone pics of anything that raises their hackles, thereby
“report[ing] suspicious activity directly to the state’s round the
clock public safety intelligence analysts.” Gene Healy argues that
campaigns like this one for citizen vigilance that began in the
subways and is now migrating to our iPhones seems to have done
little besides generate an atmosphere of perpetual, low-level
anxiety and excuses for official harassment. That’s the sort of
threat we could stand to be more vigilant about.

View this article.

As you baseball fans know, today is

Jackie Robinson Day, in which the pioneering Brooklyn Dodger
who heroically broke the sport’s color line in 1947 is honored
throughout Major League Baseball by having every player wear his
otherwise retired jersey number of 42.

Combined with the April 8
anniversary of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record
in 1974, Jackie Robinson Day has become an occasion to make
sweeping pronouncements about baseball, race, and society. The
results are often bizarre.

For instance, Jon Friedman at Time last week made the
gobsmacking argument that “Hank
Aaron Would Have Faced Worse Racism Today,” because of social
media. (You know, Jon, you don’t have to read the
comments.) And in a widely reprinted column this week, USA
Today’s Bob Nightengale frets that “On
Jackie Robinson day, MLB diversity still behind.” Excerpt from

that:

Major League Baseball…has the
lowest percentage of African-Americans in uniform since 1958.

The African-American population in baseball is virtually
unchanged from a year ago at 7.8%, according to USA TODAY Sport’s
survey of opening-day rosters and disabled lists. […]

It’s a dramatic change from 1972-1996, when African Americans
represented at least 16% of the game’s players, according to Mark
Armour of the Society of Baseball Research (SABR) – with a high of
18.7% in 1981. […]

“When I first started playing, you had a lot of black players in
the major leagues,” Aaron said last month. “Now, you don’t have
any. So what progress have we made? You try to understand, but
we’re going backward.”

Is “progress” chiefly measurable here by a head-count of
American black men playing professional baseball? I think there’s
reason to question that, starting with the words of Jackie Robinson
himself.

In
Robinson’s terrific and criminally under-appreciated 1964 oral
history
Baseball Has Done It (which I wrote about
one year ago today), #42 writes rationally—and bitterly—about
his early choice to eschew academics for the more openly integrated
fields of athletic competition:

My brothers, their friends and adquaintances, all older than me,
had studied hard and wound up as porters, elevator operators, taxi
drivers, bellhops. I came to the conclusion that long hours over
books were a waste of time. Considering my situation, I was not far
wrong. […]

[U]nless Negroes can use their education to the fullest extent
in competition with whites, the crisis will continue unabated.

Baseball, ahead of other professions, and ahead of other sports,
allowed people with black skin to compete. Combined with the deep
bench of talent that had been nurtured in the Negro Leagues, this
opening led to black participation rates that quickly zoomed north
of U.S. Census figures (which these days put the African-American
population at 12.6 percent). But as other professional sports
opened up and—importantly—became popular, black Americans started
picking up the shoulder pads and lacing up the high-tops. Happiest
of all, black kids in school nowadays know they
are not doomed to max out as porters or bellhops. That doesn’t mean
racism is behind us in the workplace, but it does mean that fields
of competition in all walks of life have opened up in ways that
even optimists would have found difficult to believe in 1964.

Meanwhile, actual “diversity” in baseball has never been higher.
More than
26 percent of big-league baseball players were born outside of
the United States, across 16 different countries. The population
over-representation now comes not from American-born players with
black skin, but Caribbean-born players with black skin: According
to the Census, just 0.4 percent of U.S. residents are “Black
or African American Hispanic,” yet fully 9.6 percent of MLB
players hail from the (comparatively impoverished) Dominican
Republic alone. At some point obsessing over skin pigment in the
context of baseball becomes a pretty weird exercise.

After the jump you can find an excerpt from my 2013 piece,
“When
Jackie Robinson Fought Back”:

There is something irresistibly heroic about successful
nonviolent campaigns against majoritarian tyranny, whether at the
ballpark or lunch counter. By publicly absorbing violence, martyrs
simultaneously hold up a mirror to society while embodying the
ideal of an “acceptable” minority: noble, intelligent, and
physically non-threatening.

But in our zeal to turn Jackie Robinson into Martin Luther King
Jr., we are scrubbing from history his much longer career as
baseball’s Malcolm X—a righteously angry, relentlessly self-reliant
activist and social critic. Robinson played with pacifist handcuffs
for only his first two years in the big leagues. From 1949 to his
retirement after the 1956 season—and then after his playing career
was over—Jackie Robinson fought back.

The fighting version of number 42 was not remotely as popular as
the saint. But it’s a much more accurate picture of a complicated
and interesting man. If baseball, let alone society, wishes to
confront head-on the pathologies behind segregation and the
fortitude required to overcome institutional racism, then it needs
to grapple with the whole, thorny competitive spirit of Jackie
Robinson, not the easy-to-digest, sepia-toned myth. […]

Who the hell are you, Jackie was always demanding
to know, to think you are better than me?

About half of the cost of
paying for Obamacare comes from new taxes. Some of those were
already in effect before this year, but some of them are kick in
for the first time this tax season. 

The latest and greatest Affordable Care Act revenue raisers
include an excise tax on medical devices, an increase in the
Medicare payroll tax from 2.8 to 3.8 percent for couples earning
more than $250,000 annually, and limits on flexible spending
accounts.

This chart
from the Heritage Foundation is slightly older, so its totals
aren’t quite up to the minute, but it gives you an idea of the tax
hikes included in the law, the dates they go into effect, and the
amount of revenue they are expected to raise. 

As you can see, the new taxes don’t end this year. There’s still
the “Cadillac tax” off in 2018, and the individual mandate penalty
which the Internal Revenue Service will start assessing in 2014. As
Sam Baker
reports in National Journal, next year is when things
really start to get interesting:

Next year’s filing will be the first time the Internal Revenue
Service enforces the law’s individual mandate, which requires most
taxpayers to either buy insurance or pay a penalty. There are
several exemptions, including a waiver for people who can’t afford
insurance.

Once the next filing season rolls around, most Americans will
have to do one of three things: prove they had insurance; prove
they qualified for an exemption; or pay a penalty—$95 or 1 percent
of their income, whichever is higher.

People who received tax credits to cover part of their premiums
will need to make sure the amount they received lines up with how
much they should have gotten based on their actual income.

“Right now [the subsidy] is based on a forecast of their income;
next year will be checking the forecast against reality,” said
Mitchell Fox, director of product management at TurboTax. “That
refund could go up or it could go down.”

President Obama is already getting in on the fun. He paid $2,310
in
Obamacare-related taxes for 2013. 

A California paramedics instructor deemed insufficiently
“sensitive to diversity” will be allowed to return to his position
at Antelope Valley College (AVC). The
college settled with the instructor, Lance Hodge, after a
federal judge deemed his lecture about unusual cultural practices
paramedics might encounter a matter “of public concern” and allowed
Hodge’s first amendment claim against AVC to proceed.

In 2010, Hodge—a long-time paramedic and tenured AVC
instructor—gave a lecture about “weird” cultural practices his
students might encounter in the field. In his career as an
emergency medical technician (EMT), Hodge said he’d been exposed to
“witch stuff,” people using heated coins for healing, and women
eating placenta after childbirth.

Now it’s certainly not polite or “politically correct” to
describe cultural practices foreign to you as “weird.” But as far
as “insensitivity to diversity” goes, it’s pretty mild. Perhaps AVC
Dean of Health Sciences Karen Cowell, who was attending Hodge’s
lecture that day, could have pulled him aside after class and
suggested he reconsider his phrasing, and Hodge would have, and
everybody could have moved on. 

Cowell’s main objections to Hodge lecture were his use of the
word “burning” to describe a healing method more properly referred
to as “coining” and his use of the word “weird.” Deeming
Hodge’s statements as “inappropriate and disrespectful,” the school
required Hodge to improve his “sensitivity to diversity” by writing
a paper on discrimination and delivering a one-hour class lesson on
cultural diversity.

Hodge fulfilled both requirements, submitting a 27-page paper
and a lesson plan titled “Political correctness vs. the real world:
The EMT and professionalism in the face of offensive language or
behavior and our understanding of stereotyping and prejudice.” The
paper was accepted, but not the lesson plan, and Hodge was
threatened by human resources with disciplinary action if he
delivered it. He was also expected to submit another proposed
diversity lesson plan. 

Hodge filed a grievance, saying the punishment would violate

school policy, which grants that “academic freedom in the
pursuit and dissemination of knowledge in an educational
environment shall be ensured and maintained” and states that
faculty “shall not be subjected to censorship or discipline” for
expressing “controversial or unpopular” views. The school responded
by saying that Hodge had violated AVC’s ethics policy, which
requires employees to be “fair and respectful in all interactions”
with students, “work with people without prejudice,” and “respect
the personal values, beliefs, and behaviors of others.” 

While those are fine norms for workplaces and academia, they’re
also incredibly open to interpretation. “Respect” relies on intent,
and that’s hard to verify (we’re also in an era of increasing
progressive
scorn for intent). For his part, Hodge says the point of the
original lecture was teaching his students to respect
diversity.

With the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education (FIRE), Hodge challenged the university’s assessement in
a
letter, asking the school to “rescind its requirement that
Hodge present a lecture on ‘cultural diversity’ because of his
protected classroom expression.” When AVC refused, Hodge and FIRE
filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Central
District of California.

In the complaint, Hodge alleged First Amendment retaliation and
infringement of academic freedom under the First Amendment. In
February, District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez allowed Hodge’s First
Amendment retaliation claim to proceed. From Gutierrez’s
decision: 

“Until a few weeks ago, Plaintiff’s First Amendment retaliation
claim presented a novel question of law in this Circuit: To what
degree are a public university professor’s teaching and writing
protected by the First Amendment?

The Supreme Court explained in (Garcetti v. Ceballos)
that ‘when public employees make statements pursuant to their
official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for
First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate
their communications from employer discipline.’ However, the
Supreme Court did note a possible exception to this far reaching
rule, reserving the question of whether its holding applied to
‘speech related to scholarship or teaching.'”

Seizing upon this exception, the Ninth Circuit recently held (in

Demers v. Austin, 2014) that teaching and
academic writing must receive greater protection under the First
Amendment than what Garcetti currently provides. It
concluded tha a public university professor’s academic speech is
protected by the First Amendment under two conditions: it addresses
“matters of public concern” and the employee’s interest in
commenting on these matters outweighs the state’s interest in
“promoting the efficiency of the public services.”

Guiterrez decided that both Hodge’s situation fulfilled both
conditions. He chastised AVC for “consider(ing) the form of
(Hodge’s) speech to the exclusion of its context and content.”

Earlier this month, AVC and Hodge settled the case out of court.
The school will pay half of Hodge’s legal fees, he will retain
tenure, and he will not face disciplinary action nor be required to
offer an approved diversity lecture.

“After two years of litigation, I am very pleased with the
court’s determination that Mr. Hodge’s classroom speech on matters
related to public safety and the performance and training of first
responders is protected by the First Amendment,” said Hodge’s
lawyer, FIRE Legal Network attorney Arthur Willner. “It is in the
interests of the students, faculty, and the community at large to
foster the free and open discussion of these issues.”

The latest
Reason-Rupe poll finds that only 17 percent of Americans
think their tax dollars improved society more than had they given
that same amount of money to charity or invested it in private
businesses. A third say their tax money improved society less than
had private charities or businesses spent it, while 4 in 10 say it
really makes no difference. In sum, over 70 percent of Americans
say private charities or businesses would spend their tax dollars
as well as or better than government.

While these were asked as two separate questions, respondents
gave generally the same responses regardless of whether it were a
private charity or a private business.

Part of the reason so few Americans think their tax bill
improved society more than had they given that money to charity or
private business, is that they believe
government wastes 50 percent of its tax revenue.

Republicans (45 percent) were nearly twice as likely as
Democrats (23 percent) to say government spending their tax dollars
had less of a positive effect than had private charities spent the
money, with similar percentages if private businesses were spending
the money.

Those with higher levels of
education and income were considerably more likely to say charities
would improve society more with their tax dollars than government.
For instance, those with college degrees (44 percent) were nearly
twice as likely as those with high school diplomas (25 percent) to
say charities would have better spent the amount they paid in taxes
in 2013. A majority (53 percent) of households making more than
$110,000 a year said their tax money improved society less than had
they given the money to charity compared to 26 percent of those
making less than $45,000 a year.

Younger people are also more likely than older people to say
private charities would have improved society more with their tax
money: for instance, 40 percent of 18-24 year olds say it improved
society less compared to 22 percent of seniors (over age 65).

Even though few say government spending of tax dollars improves
society more than charities or private businesses, few
endorse “bending the rules” at tax time to reduce ones own tax
bill. Instead, most
(62 percent) would prefer changing the federal tax system to a flat
tax where everyone paid the same percentage of his or her
income, and of course government
to reduce its spending. 

Nationwide telephone poll conducted March 26-30 2014 interviewed
1003 adults on both mobile (503) and landline (500) phones, with a
margin of error +/- 3.6%. Princeton Survey Research Associates
International executed the nationwide Reason-Rupe survey. Columns
may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Full poll results,
detailed tables, and methodology found here. Sign
up for notifications of new releases of the
Reason-Rupe poll here.

Attorney General Eric Holder said he smoked pot in
college during
an interview with HuffPost published Tuesday.

Read the whole article
here.

Friday night’s theme episode of The
Independents—which, shamefully, did not come complete with
an open Hit & Run thread—was entitled “Here’s the Plan,” and
included Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on taxes,
Glenn Reynolds on higher education, Michael Cannon on health
care, and so on.

The co-hosts took their own swings at two sets of plans: How to
usher in the future of cleaner energy production, and how to become
an independent…in your mind. Watch those segments
below: