Crime

'Three Strikes' is the Wrong Solution:
The Three Strike Rule is failing in my state of Washington. A common-sense solution for repeat offenders

Education

New Support for 'Back to Basics':
American public schools spend the most money for the worst results, of any major industrial nation. Here's why:   Our kids spend the most time sitting in costly classrooms, but the least time on core subjects.

Federal Deficit/Budget

Journalism: What Went Wrong?  
Using detailed documentation, demolishes the myth that the middle class is being ripped off by the rich.

Truth in Budgeting 
At the federal level, Truth in Budgeting means adopting the same discipline we recognize and demand at the state and local levels ... a ''General Fund'' budget. Includes a federal ''General Fund'' for the 1980s, and what REALLY happened to federal revenues after the Reagan tax cuts.

Government of UNdelegated powers.
''Taxpayer Democracy'' was born in the 1970s, the golden age of libertarian solutions. The movement had no think tanks yet. Just thinkers.

Health Care

These articles are dated, but packed with facts and analysis you won't see anywhere else.

Still Time for Common Sense? 
This one is more libertarian than the Libertarian Party, and more free-market than the Cato Institute -- both of which would retain employer-based health insurance.

The Best-Kept Secrets of Healthcare Reform: 
This one, when published as an op-ed, brought phone calls from across the country.

The critics of Medicare were correct. 
Traces runaway costs from 1965, the truth about cost-shifting, and who's REALLY forced to seek treatment in costly emergency rooms.

Skirmishes

Skirmishes:  
Short observations, from the front of each edition.

Taxes

Liberty Issues Tax Plan + Reinventing Federalism.  A 2-part proposal, adapted from a book in progress.
The Liberty Issues Tax Plan closes one trillion dollars in loopholes to slash marginal tax rates, and remove the IRS from the lives of most working Americans.
Reinventing Federalism shows how the Tax Plan can also restore accountability by government at all levels.
Tax Plan2: Consider the alternatives.

Tax quacks. 
Hihn, a supply-sider himself, documents two core fallacies of the GOP's supply-side Robin Hoods. Income tax revenues did not skyrocket after the Reagan tax cuts.  And it's impossible for any single flat tax (on income or consumption) to avoid either (a) exploding the deficit, or (b) increasing middle-class taxes.

Dick Armey's Free Lunch:  Mike Hihn was the first to document massive deficits in Dick Armey's flat tax, shortly after Armey's 1994 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Here's what the Journal declined to publish.

Dick Armey's Revised Free Lunch:  Armey concedes his critics were correct, by significantly revising his original bill ... MUCH smaller tax cuts, a $100 billion tax increase on business, and a return to ''bracket creep'' ... but still increases deficits! Fully documented.

National Retail Sales Tax - HR3039: 
A 70% tax cut for billionaires, but ... hefty tax increases on retirement/disability pensioners, the unemployed and working poor. Sales taxes of 17-26% on home sales, and a quarter-trillion dollars in higher deficits. Fully documented.

Tinkerbelle Economics (Cato's ''MaxTax'') 
Tax cuts of $150-200 billion per year can pay for themselves -- if we believe they can.

What about middle-class tax loopholes?
Tax loopholes targeted at the middle class total one trillion dollars per year. That's 1/3 of all personal income, 1300% greater than Corporate Welfare, and 200% greater than corporate profits. Middle-class loopholes are greater than all reported personal income above $90,000 per year.  Why should we care?