OpenMarket

Under the letter of the law, banks can now reenter the small-dollar lending space. On Wednesday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued new guidance encouraging banks to offer small-dollar installment loans. This follows the OCC rescinding prior guidance governing “deposit advance” products last year, which effectively enabled banks to offer a payday loan-type products again.

Our friends over at Reason TV have a new video asking the attention-grabbing headline “Will coffee give you cancer?” As it turns out, no (unless you’re drinking several thousand cups of coffee a day). But the news earlier this year that the state of California was going to require every coffee shop in the state to post signs warning customers about a cancer risk is, itself, a serious issue.

Today the House Subcommittee on Government Operations held a hearing entitled “Union Time on the People’s Dime: A Closer Look at Official Time.” The purpose of the hearing was to review problems with the practice of official time, which grants federal employees paid time off to perform union business at the taxpayers’ expense. In addition, to discuss potential legislative reforms to official time.

Today’s E&E News has an interesting article about Richard Yamada, a Ph.D. mathematician who is the key official helping Administrator Scott Pruitt reshape science policy at the Environmental Protection Agency. 

In September 2017, the House of Representatives passed the SELF DRIVE Act by unanimous voice vote. The bill would for the first time establish a national regulatory program for highly automated vehicles (HAVs), defined technically as vehicles equipped with SAE International Levels 3-5 automated driving systems (ADS)—or, in plain English, vehicles that offer limited- to full-self-driving functions. See SAE’s Recommended Practice J3016 for more detail.

How many deregulatory actions have been taken so far in the Trump administration? Along with 16 congressional “resolutions of disapproval” of existing Obama-era regulations—another 142.

Let’s look at it.

More state revenue but less money for public services?

That’s the situation in which states with large unfunded pension obligations can find themselves if they don’t take significant steps to address those shortfalls. And that situation, bad as it is, could quickly get worse.

This week President Trump signed a resolution of disapproval overturning one of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s most controversial regulatory actions—the inappropriate application of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) to auto-lenders. Axing the rule is both a great day for consumers’ access to credit and the rule of law, as I have detailed previously.

It’s hard to believe it was just last Monday the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal law that, for 25 years, prevented the states (except Nevada) from legalizing sports gambling. The question at issue for the Court in Murphy v. NCAA, et al. was whether the law could prevent states like New Jersey from decriminalizing the activity, as well. In the end, six of the Justices deemed the law unconstitutional (with another, Breyer, partially agreeing and partially dissenting).

The House of Representatives will soon vote on a companion bill to S. 204, the Right to Try Act. This bill would prevent the federal government from impeding patients’ access to treatments that have successfully completed the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) first phase of trials. For terminally-ill patients, these treatments are their last hope when nothing else works.