CEI Weekly: Lessons from the Supercommittee’s Failure

CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.

CEI Weekly

December 2, 2011

>>Featured Story

The Supercommittee was charged with crafting real solutions for our nation’s budget problems—and they failed. CEI Adjunct Associate Matthew Melchiorre reports from his current home in Italy that the Supercommittee’s failure may bring the same economic woes to America that are now plaguing Italy. Read his op-ed on the issue here.

>> Shaping the Debate

 Fairness in Union Elections (VIDEO)
Vincent Vernuccio’s interview on Fox News

Cut a Cabinet Department? You Must Be Joking
Matt Patterson’s op-ed in The Baltimore Sun

CEI Condemns Agency Plan to Restrict Salt Availability
Gregory Conko’s submitted comments

Ambush Election Prevention
Ivan Osorio and Vincent Vernuccio’s op-ed in The American Spectator

Watching the Wheels Come Off the Green Machine
Bill Frezza’s column in Forbes

Manhattan Moment: Here’s the Right Way to Do Regulatory Relief
Iain Murray’s op-ed in The Washington Examiner

Republicans for Sarbanes-Oxley
John Berlau’s op-ed in National Review

A Federal Black Friday
Iain Murray’s op-ed in The American Spectator

>> Best of the Blogs

Barney Frank’s Cognitive Dissonance on Liberties and Risk-Taking
By John Berlau

EPA Waste Water Regulation–What a Waste!
By Jackie Moreau

Farm Bill: Bailouts,Special Interests, and Pheasants
By Daniel Rivera Greenwood

Do Biofuel Mandates and Subsidies Imperil Food Security?
By Marlo Lewis

>> CEI Podcast

December 1, 2011: The More Numerous the Laws

The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that “Laws were most numerous when the state was most corrupt.” Today, the U.S. Code is over 47,000 pages long. The Code of Federal Regulations runs over 165,000 pages. Matt Patterson, CEI’s 2011-12 Warren Brookes Fellow, applies Tacitus’ insight to U.S. politics and discusses what it will take for substantive reforms to become politically possible.