Media Hit

The repeated congressional attempts to repeal the ACA reflect the law's unpopularity, said IPI's Merrill Matthews. About 40% approve and 52% disapprove of the ACA, according to a December CBS News poll. "It's about premiums and high deductibles. If people had seen premiums going down, you would see widespread support for Obamacare. But, what you do have is something that has created turmoil in the market and a huge amount of frustration with people trying to get affordable coverage."

As IPI’s Merrill Matthews wrote for the Wall Street Journal, ethanol mandates increase the cost of driving, adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than do fossil fuels, and was crafted at a time when the junk science of “peak oil” was scaring entrepreneurial Americans into developing hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology that has transformed the U.S. into one of the world’s largest energy producers. That Cruz could back this policy and remain at the top of the polls in the Hawkeye State suggested that the fever associated with addiction to federal subsidies was breaking.

The Environmental Protection Agency is mandating that more ethanol be blended into gasoline, but Merrill Matthews notes in our pages the inconvenient truth that “ethanol adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than it eliminates by replacing fossil fuels.”

There's no denying Trump has done a good job of making himself rich -- he's worth somewhere between $4.5 billion and $10 billion, depending who you ask . Can he make the rest of America rich, too?

Since 1998, the federal government has prohibited states and localities from imposing such taxes. This has helped Americans from all backgrounds gain access to the Internet. The economic and educational benefits of this policy are vast and immeasurable. It is long past time for Congress to make permanent the ban on Internet access taxes.

The governors of 31 states, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, say they won’t take Syrian refugees. Merrill Matthews lays the blame for the refugee stalemate with the White House, not the nation’s governors; they have legitimate safety concerns, he wrote.

For the Loyola community, illegal downloading is a problem among students and faculty alike. About $12.5 billion is lost in the U.S. economy each year because of music piracy, according to a study by the Institute for Policy Innovation. 

The insurer UnitedHealthcare has recently announced that it would consider moving away from the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges due to significant profit losses. If there are significant losses and little financial gains, more payers may consider leaving the health insurance exchanges as well.

Institute for Policy Innovation research fellow Bartlett Cleland slammed the FCC's "mission creep," discussing the Tuesday FCC oversight hearing before the House Communications Subcommittee.

But free-market-oriented IPI said Charter/TWC/BHN should go ahead "with the addition of conditions and concessions." Given the heavy competition in the video marketplace, IPI said, "fears that a post-merger Charter will wield overwhelming market power such that it will be able to quash such competition seems more based in Progressive Era general distrust of corporations than any informed understanding of the current video marketplace and the obvious current trends."