Media Hit

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is planning to inspect Hurricane Harvey damage in Texas starting on Sept. 5, wrapped into a visit to the state that he already had planned for early September. He also is scheduled to speak on net neutrality at an event on Sept. 7 in Irving, Texas, hosted by the Institute for Policy Innovation.

As the downward spiral quickens, the White House announces it will continue to pay the subsidies and keep Obamacare from crashing until later. Weighing the likely outcome, Merrill Matthews disagrees: “If you’re going to lose anyway, probably best to lose on the side of good policy — and the Constitution — and reject the [subsidy payments].”

One savings vehicle that just didn't get the job done was the government-sponsored myRA account. Existing alternatives to the myRA were superior because they allowed workers to invest in a variety of securities, while the myRA restricted investments to U.S. Treasuries," noted IPI in a commentary. "Treasuries are lousy retirement investments." 

What is piracy’s cost to the content community? Estimates vary widely but in the US they’ve seen numbers ranging from the $6.1 billion a year suggested by the MPAA and LEK Consulting to $20.5 billion annually in costs to the broader US economy, per a MPAA-commissioned study by the Institute for Policy Innovation in 2006.

Two weeks after efforts in the Senate to repeal Obamacare were thwarted by a few Republican senators, there is talk of another attempt at taking aim at what is officially called the Affordable Care Act.

While the Republican Party's healthcare proposals languish on Capitol Hill, Matthews says the Trump administration has a golden opportunity to broker a historic healthcare deal with Democratic lawmakers, as long as Donald Trump sits on the sidelines. "If Trump assigns cutting a deal to Mike Pence, he may be able to get it done. Trump seems too volatile."

Merrill Matthews Jr., Ph.D., a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, credits two factors with driving U.S. energy dominance: property rights and technology.

"Probably the best way to stabilize the markets is for states to shift to an invisible high-risk pool, as Alaska and Maine have done," Matthews said. "But it isn't entirely clear how well that works for larger states with multiple carriers. And it isn't clear Republicans will provide any money for that."

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece Sunday, Merrill Matthews of the conservative think tank Institute for Policy Innovation highlighted the differences in production and royalty rats between federal and state lands.

Prescription drug costs are a hot political issue, not as much because of the share of the U.S. health care dollar they consume but because consumers pay a larger share of their drug costs out of pocket than they do for other health care.