Green policies are increasingly a luxury that only the rich can afford, yet seem to be living halcyon days in places like Europe and California. The ever-insightful Joel Kotkin writes of the ascendancy of the green gentry pushing these ideas, and the class warfare they’re currently waging in his home state of California: The environmental movement […]

Over at Forbes, Tomas Philipson notes that with or without Obamacare, US health care costs will still skyrocket over the coming decades. Health care liabilities will continue to push federal deficits far over tax revenues, and private spending will rise similarly. What’s causing this? Philipson has an answer: Surprisingly, the health policy community largely agrees […]

Saving for retirement is probably the last thing debt-burdened college grads want to think about, but unfortunately they may have to start sooner than they think. According to a new study, many Millennials may not be able to retire comfortably until age 73 due to their college debt. Essentially, the problem is that while students are […]

A recent lawsuit settlement in Northern California could be a major turning point in the fight for price transparency in health care. Sutter Health is a hospital chain that runs 24 hospitals throughout the region. As the LA Times reports, a billing auditing company sued the chain for double-charging patients for anesthesia, and now, right before the […]

Heavy fighting between warring militias and the government has erupted in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. The country is slowly slipping back into civil war. Assassinations and bombings occur on an almost daily basis in Benghazi, the coastal city in eastern Libya, and now Tripoli, which for a while hadn’t seen the worst of the […]

In an astounding feat of government sclerosis, the legislature facing the deepest deficit and lowest credit rating of any US state is set to punt yet again on the source of its misery: public pensions. Governor Pat Quinn began the year with a demand that the legislature do something, anything, about the state’s $173 billion pension […]

So many European countries are getting energy policy wrong that even the green-minded EU is calling for change. The European Commission urged the EU’s member countries to be more judicious when intervening in energy markets, after overzealous green subsidies have sent energy prices into the stratosphere.Germany is often held up by environmentalists as proof that renewable […]

As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, schools that offer MOOCs are getting nervous about how much power they’ve handed over to the private companies that host their courses. Stanford is among them: Why? “There are people who are uncomfortable for a range of reasons,” says Jane Manning, director of platforms for Stanford Online, the university’s new […]

Obamacare supporters have always feared that the young and the healthy won’t sign up for insurance in large enough numbers to make Obamacare work. Without enough enrollees in the that demographic, the system would experience an “adverse selection” death spiral in which only the sick and the old sign up, pushing premiums higher. In a […]

Outsiders might shake their heads in consternation as Pakistanis overwhelmingly turn their anger on the US in the aftermath of a drone strike that killed Pakistan’s former Enemy Number One. Hakimullah Mehsud, the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, was one of the country’s most prolific mass murderers. But there was very little relief and almost […]