In a romantic view of democracy, legislators act with the interests of the general public in mind. They grapple with policy issues, work toward a broad consensus, and pass legislation that has strong support. They frequently reevaluate existing programs and prune the low-value and harmful ones. They put citizens first and limit their actions to those allowable under the U.S. Constitution.
In the real world, Congress often enacts ill-conceived laws that do not have broad public support.
A new DownsizingGovernment.org paper, “Congressional Incentives and Government Failure,” looks at how Congress operates. It examines the incentives that induce members to support policies counter to the general public interest, and concludes that political incentives induce members of Congress to take short-sighted and parochial actions that undermine the overall prosperity of the nation.
During the last part of the previous decade, the average effective minimum wage rose by nearly 30 percent across the United States.
New research from Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Wither analyzes the effects on the employment and income trajectories of low-skilled workers during the Great Recession and subsequent recovery. The authors estimate that the minimum wage increases reduced the employment-to-population ratio of working age adults by 0.7 percentage points, accounting for 14 percent of the total decline. Low-skilled workers in particular were hurt by minimum wage policies, despite being the purported beneficiaries.
For decades, political support for the U.S. sugar program has been underpinned by the general sense that the costs of producing sugar in this country are quite high relative to prices prevailing in world markets. Thus, the elimination of government support would lead to the certain death of the sugar industry. In a new paper, Cato scholar Daniel R. Pearson indicates that this view simply is not correct, and discusses alternatives for ending U.S. sugar protectionism.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
