The American people don’t want the Democrats’ approach to health care generally. The more time the public has to digest ObamaCare, the more they dislike it:

And the Pelosi bill is the most expensive and extreme version of ObamaCare.  Opposition will climb higher when the public learns the bill costs some $1.5 trillion more than Democrats claim.

Even a majority vote would not necessarily indicate majority support for the Pelosi bill. Rep. Jim Cooper (TN) and other Democrats are voting aye only because they want to keep the process moving – i.e., because this isn’t the vote that counts.

Win or lose, tonight’s vote will be the high water mark for the Pelosi bill.

(Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)

“I won’t be like the House Republicans were, where anything they propose is bad,” said Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax), who like many Democrats says the GOP-led House obstructed the agenda of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D). “If there are areas where we can work things out, I’m ready, willing and able, and so is my caucus.”

But not so fast:

But asked about certain key pieces of McDonnell’s agenda, Saslaw demurred. Selling state-run liquor stores to raise money for transportation, for instance, would sacrifice the annual revenue the stores provide to schools and other purposes, Saslaw said. The Senate’s education committee remains opposed to changing state laws to allow more charter schools, another McDonnell proposal, he said.

No to bipartisan cooperation, no to competition, yes to hoary monopolies. Is that really the rock on which the Democrats want to make their stand as the country’s “implicit libertarian synthesis” yields a “libertarian moment”?

Even deer who weren’t born when barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards prevented the natural extension of their happy grazing grounds act as if the Cold War never ended — apparently because they learned their habits from their parents, who learned them from their parents.

Still, as with the new generation of Eastern Europeans who have no memory of Communism, some young deer are starting to break the mold, taking advantage of — and even taking for granted — their newfound freedom.  I wonder if the grass (and ferns, and whatever else deer eat) is any greener on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.

• Below the Beltway’s Doug Mataconis reviews Gene Healy’s book The Cult of the Presidency.
• Matt Yglesias takes aim at Jeffrey Miron’s critique of government health care. Miron responds.
• PoliticalPolicy.net writes about Cato’s commentary on President Obama’s “Pay Czar” Kenneth Feinberg.
• Libertarian blogger Ryan Jaroncyk mentions Cato in a blog post on the war in Afghanistan.
• Attorney.org highlights Cato on their “Featured Organization” series.
• At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux features a new Cato paper on socialism in India.

Email us to let us know if you’re blogging about Cato.

• The health care legislation moving through Congress could increase young adults’ premiums by 100 percent.

• Why raising taxes won’t fix the deficit. Just look at California. And Rhode Island. And New York.

• “What profiteth a political party if it gains congressional seats but loseth its soul?” —Michael D. Tanner (Yes, he’s referring to Republicans.)

• Here we go again: The No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal.

• Podcast: “Ayn Rand’s Affinities and Animosities“

I’ve gotten some interesting email in response to that little notice, one of which I post below, along with my paragraph-by-paragraph responses.

Just read your blog entry on the H-1b visa.  The problem is that this visa has been misused by sponsoring companies, suffering from high rates of fraud.  I find it strange that Cato supports (or appears to support) a labor tool that is anything but free market.  The H-1b visa is more of an indentured servant visa program than anything else – where employees must be sponsored by an employer.  Since employees aren’t free to find new jobs or start their own business, it results in a captive workforce who will do whatever the employee asks, even beyond reason.  They won’t bargain for higher wages, quit if mistreated, join unions, or do anything that might result in their immigration status being jeopardized.

Having myself been on H-1Bs with several employers, including Cato, I agree that the program is seriously flawed, in the ways this correpondent describes and in others.  Ideally, people would be able to apply for a work permit — their application gaining more “points,” say, for language, youth, skills, the needs of the economy, or whatever other criteria the political process determines are important — and then not be tied to an employer and have an opportunity to receive permanent residence and eventual naturalization if they pay their taxes, stay out of jail, etc.  Or, indeed, we could admit all people who want to come here (after screening for security, criminal, and health concerns), and give them the same opportunity.  But until we get to that more perfect world, I see no conflict in advocating for a repeal of the H-1B cap or pointing out how this recession shows that immigrants come for jobs, not to leech off our welfare state (if that’s the concern, then wall off the welfare state, not the country) or commit crimes.

One thing not correct in your blog is that H-1b visa holders cannot get a green-card.  They can, unfortunately most of the workers are from India so it is difficult for those workers to get the green-card because of how, numerically, green-cards are issued.  The H-1b visa is a “dual intent” visa meaning there is a path to permanent residence and after 6 years on the visa holders can extend 1 year until their green-card is processed.  Indian workers call it the “green carrot” and relate it to the picture of where the mule driver holds a carrot on a stick in front of the mule to keep him moving.  No matter how hard the mule tries, the carrot gets no closer.

The H-1B’s “dual intent” provision is categorically not a path to a green card.  All it does is, as the correspondent points out, allow the worker to stay in the country during the green card application process.  That process, however, and the substantive requirements for obtaining a green card, is no different for H-1B holders than it is for anyone else.  Indeed, spending five or six years on an H-1B with one employer can be a detriment, inasmuch as that employer’s sponsorship application cannot take into account the skills gained during that time of employment.  And yes, the nationality-based restrictions are also obnoxious.

The primary sponsors of H-1b workers are Indian outsourcing firms.  In short, the visa is used as a tool to send jobs overseas.  People from Cato may not have a problem with that because of their own views on globalization and free trade, but the majority of Americans do.  You guys are notorious at just looking at one half of the equation when it comes to free market practices unfortunately – which is the corporate side.  Yes, corporations can move people around the world using a variety of immigration programs.  But do the people being moved around control their own destinies or are they at the mercy of the corporations?

Cato is not a corporate shill.  Plenty of what we advocate is counter to the expressed preferences of Big [fill in your preferred Villain] because the business community often prefers stability over liberty-enhancing volatility — smaller, secure profits over potentially larger but not-guaranteed ones — and a place at the government subsidies trough over a truly free market.  Moreover, and with much irony, it is the H-1B’s cap and costly bureaucratic processing that has promoted outsourcing — which in and of itself is not problematic for the American economy as a whole — by preventing American firms from bringing Indian (and other) workers here.  And people on H-1Bs are “at the mercy of corporations” precisely because this visa is tied to one employer, as mentioned in the first quoted paragraph above.

Liberty doesn’t just apply to corporations and the narrow objective of free trade.  I just don’t understand how the Cato Institute and all of your intellectuals don’t see through this visa for what it is.  It deprives people of liberty.  Many American workers don’t care that “an Indian” is being deprived of their liberty, but they should if not for moral reasons than for economic reasons.  If I have a worker that I can exploit and pay less, now I have a bargaining tool against the worker I previously could not.  When one man is deprived of their liberty, in a way we all are.

I couldn’t agree more that our current immigration regime benefits nobody — not big business, not small business, not skilled workers, not unskilled workers, not the American economy as a whole, not certain sectors of it — with the possible exception of populist demagogues of both the left and the right.  The answer to that morass isn’t to attack globalization or free trade — which is not a “narrow objective” but a fundamental mechanism for enhancing peoples’ lives all over the world — but to reform our immigration system.

For more on these and related issues, check out these recent studies put out by my colleague Dan Griswold and his trade and immigration policy team:

• On the fiscal impact of low-skilled immigration
• On the economic benefits of immigration reform
• On the influx of immigrants pushing Americans up the income scale

Today, on page A19 we learn about a Small Business Administration subsidy program that has a 60-percent default rate. On the same page, we learn that the U.S. Postal Service will lose $7 billion this year.

Flipping over to page A20, we learn that former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik is a liar, a tax cheat, and thoroughly corrupt.

Then flip back to A15, and columnist Steve Pearlstein rightly lambastes the latest stimulus scheme from Congress: ”This $10 billion boondoggle is nothing more than a giveaway to the real estate industrial complex.”

Finally, on A14, we’ve got government-owned Fannie Mae losing a colossal $19 billion this year and asking the Treasury for another $15 billion taxpayer hand-out.

The federal government is a mess. Policymakers have no idea what the effects will be when they spend billions on scheme after scheme. Most of them don’t read the legislation, they don’t understand economics, and they never admit mistakes when their schemes almost inevitably fail. Fully 40 percent of the vast federal budget will be debt-fueled this year, but few policymakers seem to care. And public corruption seems never-ending. 

Isn’t it time to give libertarianism a chance?

• Commerce: corporate welfare in Ohio
• Defense: cost overruns in the Pentagon’s space programs
• Energy: central planners gamble with taxpayer money
• HUD: subsidizing private firms to operate public housing isn’t a solution

Also, dubious stimulus projects point to a need to return to fiscal federalism.

Will the House pass healthcare this weekend — or not

My response:

In his post below, my colleague Michael Cannon links to his devastating analysis of the way House Democrats have buried the true cost of their healthcare scheme. This is legerdemain of the first order, but it is business as usual here in Washington. Here we have a Congress that cannot fix Medicare, which will go broke even before Social Security does, a Congress that still hasn’t met the October 1 budget deadline for the ninth year in a row, and it wants to fundamentally reorder healthcare in America with a scheme that no one understands and no one knows how to fund. Any private business that ran its affairs that way would long have been out of business.

Given this record of insanity, therefore, it is impossible to say whether the House this weekend will pass this 1,990-page monstrosity of a bill — whether enough sanity will come to enough members to kill the bill. One datum does loom large, however: Speaker Pelosi can afford to lose no more than 40 members of her caucus. Combine that, after Tuesday’s election results, with another datum — there are 49 House Democrats who sit in districts that John McCain carried — and one has to ask whether the insanity we see before us reaches to political suicide.

Yet whatever happens tomorrow, or in the Senate down the road, this cannot go on, simply because the money isn’t there to allow it to go on. On Tuesday at the polls and yesterday with the huge demonstration in front of the Capitol we are seeing what Charles Krauthammer this morning rightly calls the demolition of “the great realignment myth of 2008.” America is not a suicidal nation. The Founders and Framers gave us institutions that have endured for over two centuries and are the envy of the world. Whatever happens tomorrow, the seeds of sanity are in the American soil and soon will be springing forth.

Six days before the scheduled release of Graydon Comstock — who had been sentenced to 37 months in jail for receiving child pornography — the attorney general certified Comstock as sexually dangerous. Three years later, Comstock thus remains confined in a medium security prison, as do more than 60 other similarly situated men in the Eastern District of North Carolina alone.

Comstock and several others challenged their confinements as going beyond Congress’s constitutional authority and won in both the district and appellate courts. The United States successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case.

Cato, joined by Georgetown law professor (and Cato senior fellow) Randy Barnett, filed a brief opposing the government. We argue that the use of federal power here is unconstitutional because it is not tied to any of Congress’s limited and enumerated powers. The government’s reliance on the Necessary and Proper Clause of Article I, Section 8, is misplaced because that clause grants no independent power but merely “carries into execution” the powers enumerated elsewhere in that section. The commitment of prisoners after their terms simply is not one of the enumerated powers.

While the government justifies its actions by invoking its implied power “to establish a federal penal system” — itself a necessary and proper auxiliary to certain enumerated powers — civil commitment is unrelated to creating or maintaining a penal system (let alone any enumerated power). Nor can the law at issue fall under the Commerce Clause, because civil commitment involves non-economic intrastate activity.

As the Supreme Court recognized almost 150 years ago in Ex Parte Milligan, “[n]o graver question was ever considered by this court, nor one which more nearly concerns the rights of the whole,” than the government’s unconstitutional assertion of power against its own citizens. In this spirit, the Court should affirm the Fourth Circuit’s rejection of this blatant government overreach.

United States v. Comstock will be argued on January 12.  You can read Cato’s brief here.

Meanwhile, those concerned about the cost of climate change regulations may have lost an ally. Often, but not always, one can depend on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to defend free enterprise, or at least free trade. On climate change, however, they are a little more ambiguous. If anything, they appear to be getting more sympathetic to climate change legislation. Nothing to do with membership defections, they assure us, just good business practice. Maybe it is. I’m not a member of the Chamber so their strategy is not really any of my business.

What concerns me is the apparent shift in their position toward so-called carbon tariffs (also called “border adjustment measures,” and often spoken of in terms of “international competitiveness,” “negotiating leverage” and other terms that should raise the alarm). My friend, and former Catoite, Scott Lincicome does an excellent job here of parsing through the Chamber’s recent public letter in support of  the Kerry-Graham “framework” (outlined in this New York Times op-ed) and their strange silence on the framework’s inclusion of the need for carbon tariffs, so I won’t repeat his analysis here. Suffice to say, their non-comment on the issue of carbon tariffs is worrying. As Scott points out, they appear to endorse the concept, if in a coded manner.

Back in June, the Chamber explicitly opposed Waxman-Markey, in part because “It would also impose carbon tariffs on goods imported into the U.S., a move that would almost certainly spur retaliation from global trading partners.” (See here.) I would feel a lot more comfortable if a similarly explicit statement had been repeated in their letter.

Is that 72-hour delay happening? Some say yes. Some say no.

On the “yes” side are some folks at the Sunlight Foundation. John Wonderlich wrote a post last Sunday called “72 Hours is Now.” He hailed the posting of the health care bill well in advance of a vote.

“Public outcry, partisan pressure, and rising expectations are forcing Congress’s hand,” he wrote, ”and it’s now (apparently) taken as a matter of course that this bill is online for a long weekend before its final consideration.”

Paul Blumenthal followed that up mid-week, sounding slightly more cautious notes but hailing the posting of the “final manager’s amendment.” His post restarted the 72-hour clock.

Which brings us to the folks who say no.

On the Weekly Standard blog, John McCormack says that Speaker Pelosi plans to violate the promise to post the health care bill online for 72 hours.

House members are still negotiating important issues in the bill — whether it will provide taxpayer-funding for abortions, for example. Pelosi is pushing for a Saturday House vote, and a number of big changes will be introduced, likely less than 24 hours before the vote takes place (if in fact it does).

Did Pelosi promise to post a bill? Yes — and she did, when it was pretty near final.

Meanwhile, though, the really tricky details — the stuff that matters to a lot of people — are still being hammered out. The spirit of the 72-hour pledge remains unfulfilled.

And this reveals a weakness in H. Res. 554, the preferred reform of the Sunlight-backed ”Read the Bill” effort. It would install a House rule giving bills 72 hours of online airing “before floor consideration.”

Floor consideration can and regularly does include the adoption of a “manager’s amendment” which can revamp a bill wholesale or add and subtract key details — things that matter.

H. Res. 554 has a loophole you can drive a truck through, and Speaker Pelosi is revving her engines.

This episode is a good, if regrettable, illustration that “self-reform” by a branch of government isn’t reliable. “Read the bill” is a good idea, but the genius of President Obama’s parallel “Sunlight Before Signing” pledge to hold bills coming out of Congress for five days before signing them is that it is based on interbranch rivalry. Especially, but not only, when there is partisan division between the president and Congress, competition among branches will promote the practice.

(More on “Read the Bill” and “Sunlight Before Signing” here.)

Getting Congress to hold up its own legislation for 72 hours, giving meaningful access to the public of every detail, is asking Congress to be altruistic. And Congress is anything but altruistic.

Politicians and interest groups that fight any reduction of U.S. tariffs are unwittingly picking the pockets of the poor every day. I discuss how President Obama supports this unfair status quo in a new Cato podcast, in an earlier newspaper column, and in Chapter 9 of Mad about Trade.

And you can bet your imported t-shirt that I will highlight this inconvenient truth during my presentation at today’s Cato book forum. You can watch it live online beginning at noon, eastern time. Commenting on Mad about Trade will be Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post.

For those observations, economist Brad DeLong called me an “utter fool.”

Let me draw your attention to an article in the Washington Post today entitled “Corporate giants sit on piles of cash.” Nucor Steel is sitting on piles of cash that it is unwilling to invest. Nucor’s chief executive Daniel Dimicco explains:

Everything is still on hold because we don’t have a lot of confidence that the right things are being done in Washington to reinvigorate the economy.

To story goes on:

Nucor isn’t alone. The balance sheets of large U.S. corporations are for the most part in good shape. Many big companies have piles of cash on hand and credit markets have thawed so that they can raise new funds… But most U.S. executives lack enough confidence in the economy to expand their businesses.

The article explains how big businesses are “jittery” for various reasons, such as memories of last year’s credit crunch. It doesn’t mention President Obama’s policies, but at this point in the economic cycle when world growth is returning, the lack of excitement by U.S. businesses regarding domestic investment is very curious.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is giving them nothing to get excited about. The President is promising them higher health care costs, higher corporate taxes, more labor regulations, higher energy costs with cap-and-trade, and a lack of interest in further trade agreements.

The Post article says that some U.S. multinationals are using their hoards of cash to invest abroad, allowing them to avoid punitive treatment under the high-rate U.S. corporate income tax.

How do we get U.S. multinationals to start investing their “piles of cash” in the United States? Cut the U.S. corporate rate permanently to 15 percent, as I’ve described in Global Tax Revolution. With just about every other advanced economy having slashed their corporate rate in recent years, we are “utter fools” for not following suit, especially with the unemployment rate now topping 10 percent.

It would be no more audacious (and much more honest) than the way they have gamed the CBO’s rules to hide $1.5 trillion of the cost of their legislation — which has to be the biggest fiscal obfuscation in the history of American politics.

Here’s how they did it.

C/P Politico

President Obama won the presidency with 66 percent of the vote among 18-to-29 year-olds. That’s a larger share than any presidential candidate has won in decades. Yet his health care overhaul could impose its greatest burdens on young adults, says Yelowitz.

Health care proposals moving through Congress would force most or all Americans to purchase health insurance (an “individual mandate”) and would impose price controls on health insurance (“community rating”) that would limit insurers’ ability to offer lower premiums to low-risk enrollees.

Those provisions would drive premiums down for 55-year-olds but would drive them up for 25-year-olds—who are then implicitly subsidizing older adults. According to the Urban Institute, many young people could see their premiums double, whereas premiums for older adults could be cut in half.

Read the entire thing.

Republican Party platform, 2012?

Sad to say, neoconservatism is clearly the dominant foreign-policy ideology of the Republican Party.  George H. Nash apparently has written that “We are all neoconservatives now.”  And after the strategic and political masterstroke the neocons produced in Iraq, who could blame the Republicans for doubling down with them?

So sometimes it’s good to stroll by the Weekly Standard blog, just to see what those folks are thinking about.

Today, for example, it’s war with Russia.  (Now there’s a “stimulus!”)

If the Republicans were smart, they’d get rid of these guys before it’s too late.

Bukovsky, who spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals for his dissenting views, believes an open condemnation of communism will help the former Soviet Union make progress toward civil society.

He recently told his story at the Cato Institute:

Watch the entire speech, here.

Is Tea Party conservatism a help or a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power?

My response:

Let’s start with some clarity:  “Tea Party conservatism” stands for several things, but it is not the caricature one often finds in the mainstream media, to say nothing of the left wing blogs.  It is a movement with deep historical roots, drawing its name and inspiration from the Boston Tea Party of 1773.  As with that event, taxes brought it to the fore — on Tax Day, April 15.  But taxes are simply the most obvious manifestation of modern government run amok, insinuating itself into every corner of life.  Trillions of dollars of debt for our children, out-of-control government budgets, massive interventions in private affairs — the list of wrongs is endless, and under Obama has exploded.  He stands for nothing if not for making us all dependent on the government he has promised us.  That’s not America.  That’s a foreign vision, which over the centuries countless millions have fled, searching for freedom.

To be sure, the Tea Party movement has its fringe elements, as did the revolt against British tyranny, which the establishment of its day disparaged.  So too does the Obama administration, some of whom have already resigned.  The basic question, however, is what does the movement stand for?  What are its principles?  And on that, the contrast with the Obama vision is stark:  However much confusion there might be on specific issues, which is to be expected, the broad principles are clear.  The Tea Party movement stands for limited constitutional government.  At its rallies, on hand-written sign after sign, that was the message repeatedly seen.  These are ordinary Americans – Republicans, Independents, and even Democrats — who want simply to be left alone to plan and live their own lives.  They don’t want “community organizers” to help empower them to get more from government.

But they do need to be organized to bring that about — to get government off their backs.  And the Republican Party should be the natural vehicle toward that end — the party, after all, that was formed to get government off the backs of several million slaves.  But today’s Republican Party is a mixed lot:  Some understand those principles; but others, as in the NY 23 race, are all but indistinguishable from their counterparts in the party of Obama.  The problem in NY 23 was not that a third party entered the race.  Rather, the party establishment botched things from the beginning, by picking a nominee who properly belonged in the Democratic Party, as her pathetic last-minute endorsement indicated, and that’s why a third party entered the race — with a novice of a nominee who nearly won despite the odds against him.

The question, therefore, is not whether Tea Party conservatism is a help or a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power?  To the contrary, it is whether the Republican Party is a help or a hindrance to the Tea Party movement?  It will be a help only if it returns to its roots.  The mainstream media, overwhelmingly of the Democratic persuasion, will continue to push Republicans to be “moderate,” of course – meaning “Democrat Lite” — to which the proper response is:  Why would voters go for that when they can get the real thing on the Democratic line?  If Tuesday’s returns showed anything, it is that Independents, a truly mixed lot, are up for grabs; but at the same time, they are looking for leaders who promise not simply to “solve problems” but to do so in a way that respects our traditions of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government.  When Republican candidates stand clearly and firmly for those principles, they stand a far better chance of being elected than when they temporize.  That is the lesson that Republicans must grasp — and not forget — if they are to return to power.

• After 20 years, Paul Hollander looks back at why the Berlin Wall fell.

• Nazism and Communism: Why you rarely hear about the atrocities of Soviet communism.

• Imposing “paradise” at gunpoint.

• Flashback to 1990: Why the Soviets fell.

• Fear and Loathing in the Soviet Union: Cato president Ed Crane discusses his trip to the other side of the Iron Curtain in 1982.

• Podcast: Why Russia must confront the criminal nature of its communist past.

Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent.  A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old.  In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” – despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured.  He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured.  Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing.  I’ve appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.

Read the whole thing.   Also, the ACLU has put together a short film about the experiences of some prisoners released from Guantanamo.

• John Samples on the national impact of this week’s elections: “The evidence suggests the Obama administration might be on the same path that led the Clinton presidency to the election of 1994. But there is an important difference: In 1994, the public had some faith in the alternative to Clinton and the Democrats in Congress.”

• Afghan election analysis.

• A few things you might not know about Bhutan.
  

• Podcast: “Independents and the GOP Victories“

“[I]t is simply not possible to validate (evaluate) predictive models of rare events that have not occurred, and unvalidated models cannot be relied upon,” says the report.

In December 2006, Jeff Jonas and I published a paper making the case that predictive modeling won’t discover rare events like terrorism. The paper, Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining, was featured prominently in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing early the next year.

Privacy gives way to appropriate security measures, as the Fourth Amendment suggests where it approves “reasonable” searches and seizures. Given the incapacity of data mining to catch terrorism and the massive data collection required to “mine” for terrorism, data mining for terrorism is a wrongful invasion of Americans’ privacy—and a waste of time.

Portugal’s case is important, Greenwald says, because it provides hard evidence that removes the debate from the realm of speculation.

“If you’re the first state to do it, there’s really no way you can point to evidence of what will or will not happen. … It’s just theory and it’s very abstract,” he said. “The more examples that arise and the more that you can prove that the sky doesn’t fall in,” he said, the more politically feasible drug liberalization will become in the U.S.

So far, Portugal has largely flown under the radar, even in drug policy circles. But Greenwald says that, six months after his paper was released, he’s getting more invitations than ever to present it. In August, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof cited it in a column praising Webb’s reform push.

Read the whole thing.  For more Cato scholarship on drug policy, go here.

We encourage you to submit questions once the event has started. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) will participate in the chat alongside Cannon.