The Buffalo Chronicle
The Buffalo Chronicle
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SCISSORS: India clings to a failed status quo
BY DEREK SCISSORS Earlier this week, India’s Supreme Court indefinitely stayed new, important farm laws, creating a court-appointed committee to . . . do something, maybe. This has been hailed as prudent and…
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Marijuana legalization won’t curb Mexico’s drug cartels
BY RYAN C. BERG Mexico is poised to become just the third country in the world to fully legalize marijuana (after Uruguay and Canada). If legalized, the size of the country would make it…
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VIARD: Payroll tax deferral ends with a whimper
BY ALAN D. VIARD In previous posts (here and here), I discussed the Trump administration’s decision last August to allow employers to defer the Social Security payroll taxes that they would otherwise have withheld from their…
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PETHOKOUKIS: Why pro-progress policymaking should inform almost everything Washington does
BY JAMES PETHOKOUKIS Economic optimists (like me) who are hoping for a second Roaring Twenties have to concede version 2.0 isn’t starting off so good. Not only is the COVID-19 pandemic getting worse —…
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POMERLEAU: Biden should improve his corporate tax proposal
BY KYLE POMERLEAU Last week, Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their Senate races in Georgia. Joe Biden will enter the White House on January 20 with a large Democratic…
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What happens when the EU and Biden redesign Big Tech?
BY MARK JAMISON Some politicians, academics, and regulatory practitioners are increasingly confident that there is something wrong with the structure of Big Tech. They are equally confident that smart regulators can remold…
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Federal dollars keep California ‘swimming in money’
BY MATT WEIDINGER California Governor Gavin Newsom’s latest budget proposal released last week suggests, as one article summarized, the state is currently “swimming in money,” including “a $15 billion one-time surplus.” That’s a massive turnaround from…
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December’s jobs report and where we go from here
BY BRENT ORELL Last week, the Department of Labor released the final employment report of the Trump administration, and the news there, much like all the news these days, was not good. For…
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Will Biden’s embrace of industrial policy pay off?
BY JAMES PETHOKOUKIS Joe Biden wants more government intervention in the American economy. And not just cutting checks to people. Biden favors a national industrial policy, what his “build back better” campaign agenda describes as a…
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China’s economy probably shrank in 2020
BY DEREK SCISSORS The Chinese Communist Party appreciates American media praise. Yes, China halted COVID-19 and engineered a clear economic recovery. But the party has always denied or distorted major mistakes. Last…
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After Cienfuegos release, the US-Mexico security relationship enters a deep freeze
BY RYAN C. BERG Mexico’s attorney general has declined to prosecute General Salvador Cienfuegos, accused of cooperating with drug traffickers from the shadowy H-2 cartel. The widely predicted development brings Mexican President Andrés Manuel…
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Alexei Navalny’s calculated risk
BY LEON ARON On his return from Germany, where he recuperated from an attempt on his life by Russian secret services, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested at the airport and…
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Vaccine appointment system was not ready for primetime
BY E.J. McMAHON The two top priorities Governor Cuomo identified in his State of the State speech Monday morning were “Defeat COVID” and “Vaccinate New York.” Judging by my personal experience of…
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Cuomo delays releasing nursing home data for two more months
The Cuomo administration is refusing to release a full count of coronavirus deaths in New York nursing homes for another two months, until March 22. In a letter to the Empire Center on Wednesday,…
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Amid Cuomo’s fulminations, New York’s budget gap keeps shrinking
BY E.J. McMAHON State tax receipts in the month of December came in $1.4 billion above the latest projection by Governor Cuomo’s Division of the Budget (DOB), according to a cash report…
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Seeking bigger federal handout, Cuomo proposes record budget
BY E.J. McMAHON Somewhere within that vast fog bank of a FY 2022 Executive Budget that Governor Cuomo began to roll out today is a structural budget gap, opened during the pandemic recession and…
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Pay freeze for State workers extended again—temporarily
BY E.J. McMAHON The Cuomo administration is quietly extending a temporary freeze on scheduled pay hikes for about 135,000 unionized state government employees and public college faculty members—although the largest affected labor…
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Cuomo administration resists sharing records of its vaccine review
BY BILL HAMMOND After second-guessing the FDA with its own vaccine task force, the Cuomo administration is declining to share even basic information about that panel’s approval process until mid-February. Replying to…
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Pending pharmacy ‘carve-out’ could increase Medicaid costs rather than controlling them
BY BILL HAMMOND A pending change to New York’s Medicaid program known as the pharmacy “carve-out” is drawing opposition from a range of interests, including insurers, AIDS clinics and the health-care labor…
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New York had largest 2019-20 population decline of any State
BY E.J. McMAHON New York could be on the way to its first population decline in any decade since the 1970s, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Empire State’s…
