1. POLITICS

Florida’s purchase of a large section
of U.S. Sugar property will benefit US
Sugar far more than it benefits Florida
taxpayers.

CEI Expert Available to Comment:
Adjunct Scholar Fran Smith on
why the deal is
rotten.

“[T]he company will stay in business and sell some land, not
necessarily contiguous, to the state.  But the land was valued at the
height of the real estate boom and has significantly dropped in value, which
would mean a boon for the sugar company, but a bane for Florida taxpayers.”

2. HEALTH

As Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and others show, the
cost of health care reform will far exceed Obama’s estimates.

CEI Expert Available to Comment:
Senior Counsel Hans Bader on the
true economic and social costs of proposed health
care legislation.

“The Obama administration managed to hide $1.4 trillion in
costs generated by the health care reform bill though a series of budgetary ‘gimmicks’ that the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) is required to treat as valid in scoring the bill’s enormous cost.
Although the CBO is low-balling the costs of ObamaCare, even it concedes that
as a whole, ‘President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to
the national debt over the next decade.’”

3. TECHNOLOGY

Ben Kuntz writes in BusinessWeek about the walling off of the internet by individual tech companies.

CEI Expert Available
to Comment:
Director of Technology Studies Wayne Crews on why the splintering of the internet is a
good thing.

“Many claim to worry about the rise of proprietary
services (I, as you can probably tell, often doubt their sincerity) but I’ve
always regarded a ‘Splinternet’ as a good thing that means more not less
communications wealth. I first wrote about this in Forbes in 2000 when
everyone was fighting over spam, privacy, content regulation, porn and
marketing to kids. Increasing wealth means a copy-and-paste world for content
across networks, and it means businesses will benefit from presence across many
of tomorrow’s networks, generating more value for future generations of
consumers and investors.”