Donate

ISSUES

GOP Tax Reform is Worth $39,000 to Georgia Families

GOP Tax Reform is Worth $39,000 to Georgia Families

Because of lower taxes and higher wages, the average Georgia household will enjoy more than $39,000 in economic benefits over their lifetime thanks to the 2017 federal tax cuts. That’s the conclusion of a Goodman Institute study by Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff. An earlier study by Kotlikoff and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta , also partly funded  by the Goodman Institute, estimated the gain at $22,676 because of personal income tax cuts. The new study adds the impact of lower corporate taxes. 

read more
Biden tax plan hurts workers

Biden tax plan hurts workers

One of the intellectual architects of the 2017 tax cut legislation says the Joe Biden proposal to reimpose higher tax rates will be harmful to the economy and to working families. Earlier studies by Boston University professor Lawrence Kotlikoff and his colleagues found that “the United states had one for the highest corporate tax rates in the world.” As a result of lowering the top corporate rate from 35% to 21%, the US became competitive and more than $1 trillion has been repatriated by US firms. In a new study, Kotlikoff finds that the Biden proposal to undo half the cut in the corporate income tax rate will lower wages and cost jobs. 

read more
Economic Analysis of the Biden Tax Plan

Economic Analysis of the Biden Tax Plan

Like other economic estimates of the Biden economic plan, the Kotlikoff analysis finds that the impact on 80 percent of the population is a small, positive number, averaging only a few hundred dollars a year.

read more
Going Against the Grain

Going Against the Grain

In 1973, John Baden and Richard Stroup proposed selling off the U. S. Forest Service to private owners, some nonprofit and some for-profit. In an article in the Journal of Law and Economics, they argued that commercial timber would be better managed by private companies, and non-profit organizations like the Sierra Club could protect the important environmental areas.

read more
New Partnership: Health Care News

New Partnership: Health Care News

Because of budget shortfalls, the Heartland Institute suspended publication of Health Care News in March. Fortunately, the Goodman Institute for Public Policy has agreed to partner with Heartland to ensure the newspaper’s survival going forward.

read more
Kotlikoff: Beating COVID-19 with Math

Kotlikoff: Beating COVID-19 with Math

A strategy for extinguishing the novel coronavirus has been outlined by Cornell University’s Operations Research Professor Peter Frazier and colleagues. They developed a group testing protocol that could release 96 percent of the U.S. population back to society within four weeks, with this percentage rising even higher thereafter. Frazier envisions initially testing 62 households at a time, and assumes, to be conservative, a very high (30 percent false negative) test rate that would require some degree of redundancy to work efficiently. All told, though, the job could be done for the entire United States with only 6 million tests per week. That’s a large number, but just three to four times the test rate we’ve already reached.

read more
Barry Asmus, RIP

Barry Asmus, RIP

Barry Asmus, who died March 30, 2020, studied at Montana State University, where he was mentored by economists at PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center. He picked up his appreciation of the free market from them (Richard Stroup was his thesis adviser). While Barry didn’t enter the environmental field, he became an advocate for the free market.

read more
Study: Liberate Prescription Drugs

Study: Liberate Prescription Drugs

The mainstream media had a field day condemning Donald Trump for promoting off-label uses of prescription drugs to treat the coronavirus. So what do you expect to happen when a drug is “proven”? Did you know that “approved” drugs work only half the time? What about “unproven” drugs? Did you know that as many as one in five drugs in use in the United States has been prescribed for an off-label purpose? Roughly one-half of all cancer patients are relying on off-label prescriptions. Much of what doctors know they learn by trial and error – outside of FDA tests.

read more