Latest news with #CatoInstitute
New York Post
a day ago
- Politics
- New York Post
6 in 10 Gen Zers like ‘socialism' — no wonder they're hoodwinked by Zohran Mamdani
Zohran Mamdani owes his primary victory to young New Yorkers' fiscal anxiety — paired with their economic illiteracy. The majority of my generation is warm to socialism, thanks to our education system's failure to equip us with the knowledge of history and economics required to debunk the shiny promise of 'free things.' That's why, as a Gen Z New Yorker, I wasn't actually all that surprised by Mamdani's primary win. As disappointed as I am by the outcome, I saw the writing on the wall. Advertisement 5 Zohran Mamdani's democratic primary win took many New Yorkers by surprise. Laura Brett/ZUMA Press Wire / A March 2025 survey conducted by the Cato Institute in partnership with YouGov found that fully 6 in 10 New Yorkers between ages 18 and 29 had a favorable view of socialism. This is something I've long noticed among my peers. Worse yet, a staggering 34% had a positive view of communism. Compare that with just 2% of senior citizens, who are old enough to remember some of the ideology's atrocities. Advertisement Young Americans are so cozy with destructive ideologies because they're woefully uninformed. Less than 1 in 5 Zoomers were proficient in history when they were in the 8th grade, according to NAEP reports. If they had even a basic understanding of history, surely they'd know of the 100 million plus lives communism claimed in the 20th century through unimaginable hardships in Soviet gulags, Chinese repression and famine and genocidal regimes such as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. 5 37,000 new voters registered in the two weeks leading up to the primary election. Getty Images Add to that the fact that 60 to 75% of American college students never take an economics class in college, according to the Journal of Economic Education. Meanwhile, just 28 states require high school students to take any course in economics to graduate. Advertisement The majority of Gen Z is fiscally illiterate, and their 'functional knowledge is substantially lower for each area compared with older generations,' according to the 2025 TIAA Institute-GFLEC finance and retirement report. Is it any wonder they're seduced by socialism? When you don't know the first thing about the past or how the economy actually functions, then frozen rent, free bus tickets, government run supermarkets, backbreaking corporate taxes, and a $30 minimum wage all sound like a totally cool idea. 5 Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has joined Mamdani on his campaign for mayor. LP Media Mamdani's promise seems quite simple, on its face: 'New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier.' Advertisement Thanks in no small part to his social media savvy, Mamdani was able to capitalize on youthful angst and ignorance — and actually motivate young people to get out of their houses and down to the polls. He brought out an unprecedented number of first-time voters. In the two weeks ahead of the primary, 37,000 people registered to vote, compared with just 3,000 in the lead-up to the 2021 election, according to the New York Times. 5 Mamdani has floated government run grocery stores and free bus tickets. William Miller 5 Young New Yorkers made up the largest share of early voters in the Democratic primary. In fact, nearly a quarter of Democratic primary voters were first-time participants — and voters between the ages of 25 and 34 made up the largest share of early voters. The bottom line: young New Yorkers delivered Mamdani his victory. While I think my peers' flirtation with socialism is wholly misguided, I understand why some of them have fallen into the trap. Firstly, local Democrats didn't exactly give them an alluring alternative. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo has a lot of baggage, to say the least. Advertisement But I also am sympathetic to my peers who came of age being told constantly by politicians that they simply can't get ahead — whether it's artificial intelligence coming for their jobs, student loans promising to drown them, a housing market they'll never break into, or climate change always lingering in the background. This is a generation who had the rug pulled out from under their feet at a formative age with the pandemic, and they've been fiscally anxious ever since. Along comes a fresh new face with TikTok videos and Instagram reels offering free goodies and an affordable life in New York City. The education system hasn't taught them any better, so how can we expect them to be able to resist?
The Star
3 days ago
- Business
- The Star
Asian investors trim US assets amid weak dollar, but full pullback ‘difficult'
Asian investors have trimmed their incremental allocations to US equities as the dollar weakened, but reducing their overall exposure to US assets remains difficult, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report. The proportion of US assets in Asia's securities portfolios fell by 0.7 percentage points, to 40.8 per cent in the first quarter from a peak of 41.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024, the highest level since late 2017, the report said. The pullback was pronounced in China, where the share of US assets in portfolio investments declined by about 16 percentage points to 28 per cent in March this year from December 2017. However, the report said reducing Asia's overall stockpile of US assets was not easy given the current account surpluses of the region's economies, which were at a record high of US$1.1 trillion in the first quarter. Economies with surplus capital often invest in US financial markets, which are the world's largest and most liquid, according to the Cato Institute, a US-based think tank. 'Asia's gross international investment position [in US stocks] will continue to grow,' Morgan Stanley analysts wrote. 'The lack of large and liquid alternatives means that it would be difficult for Asia to reduce its holdings of US assets.' While China's holdings of US assets dropped to US$1.3 trillion this year from their 2013 peak of US$1.8 trillion, the rest of Asia continued to increase its exposure to US assets to a new high of US$7.2 trillion in the first quarter. The weakening of the US dollar was one reason Asian investors were reconsidering their allocations to US assets. Analysts remain bearish on the greenback, expecting further weakening amid high US fiscal deficits, a widening current account gap, and the drag from tariffs on the US economic outlook. The US dollar index, a benchmark gauging the value of the dollar against a basket of six foreign currencies, dropped to 98 on Tuesday, down nearly 6 per cent over the past 12 months, according to Trading Economics, an online financial data provider. In April, the Trump administration imposed a minimum 10 per cent tariff on imports from many countries. China was among those most affected, with Beijing's retaliatory tariffs reaching as high as 125 per cent before both sides agreed to ease tensions. In May, Beijing and Washington reached an agreement to implement a 90-day pause on tariffs on each other's goods, which was expected to end in August. Both countries' leaders were expected to re-enter tariff negotiations next month. - South China Morning Post
Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Good riddance to those green-energy tax breaks. Now keep closing other loopholes
The 'Big Beautiful Bill' did a lot of things, not all of them good. One positive step was to repeal many of the Inflation Reduction Act's green-energy subsidies. It's a little disappointing that Congress didn't repeal all of them, as President Trump promised during the campaign. Yet it's also somewhat amazing to witness a genuine rollback, something that was never a given for this bill and which typically loses out to special-interest politics. To be clear, I want more green energy from more sources, including wind, solar, geothermal and whatever other promising avenues innovation makes possible. But subsidies like those of the Inflation Reduction Act are the wrong way to get there. They distort the tax code, misallocate capital and favor companies already in the game, to the detriment of new entrants that might bring something more transformative. The result isn't more abundance; it's cronyism masquerading as climate policy. The promise to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act's sprawling tax credits and handouts was once a central part of the GOP's economic platform. According to a Cato Institute analysis, these at one point were going to amount to $1.2 trillion over 10 years, many times the originally projected cost. The House version of the budget took a meaningful swing at it, with hard deadlines for wind and solar tax credits and tighter eligibility geared toward projects that could begin construction within 60 days of enactment and be in service before 2029. It wasn't perfect, but it was a real attempt to inject discipline into a policy that had run off the rails. Senators, however, had other plans and diluted the reform. New carveouts were added. Key provisions were extended, and the effective phaseout was punted years into the future. Thanks to generous grandfathering language, projects that start construction within a year of the budget bill's enactment can lock in 10 more years of production or investment tax credits. And what, by the way, counts as starting construction? Spending just 5% of expected costs on solar panels or booking a consulting firm. In Washington, that's good enough. The good news is that even this watered-down reform is expected to cut green subsidies by about $500 billion over 10 years. That's no small feat, especially in a town where 'cutting' usually means 'slightly slowing the growth of programs we already can't afford.' It's doubly impressive given that the forces fighting to maintain the subsidies outspent reformers by orders of magnitude. Now, we're hearing the usual refrain — 'But fossil fuels are subsidized too!' — as evidence of the outrage and unfairness that it is to trim green energy subsidies down. I sympathize with the desire to end fossil-fuel subsidies. I want an end to all private-sector subsidies. If your business model depends on special treatment in the tax code, then, as economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin once put it, you don't have a business. You have a tax shelter. Yes, there are some lingering fossil-fuel subsidies on the books. Cato's Adam Michel helpfully identifies them: credits for enhanced oil recovery, for marginal wells and for carbon capture and sequestration. These are targeted giveaways, and they should also go. However, what most people clamoring for the end of fossil-fuel subsidies are pointing to aren't subsidies at all, but simply neutral tax treatments — like expensing and percentage depletion — that apply across many industries. They might distort investment decisions in general, but they are not special favors for oil and gas. In addition, when you compare the size of green versus fossil-fuel subsidies, the difference is staggering. Scaled by energy output, green energy receives subsidies at rates 19 to 30 times those of coal, oil and natural gas. According to Michel's analysis, 94% of the fiscal cost of energy-related tax provisions over the next decade — $1.2 trillion — would have gone to renewables. Only 6% — about $70 billion — would benefit fossil fuels. And again, much of that 6% isn't tailored to fossil fuel companies; it just happens to benefit them. In other words, the idea that green subsidies got eviscerated while fossil subsidies thrive isn't correct. That's not an argument for maintaining fossil-fuel subsidies; that's an argument for taming the outrage. If we've learned anything here, it's that cutting subsidies is hard. Once they're in place, armies of rent-seekers mobilize to preserve them. Renewable-energy developers, financial firms and politically connected manufacturers descend on Capitol Hill to keep the money flowing. But we've learned something else: Fighting back can work. Even this partial rollback shows that reformers aren't powerless. The next time someone says eliminating tax preferences is impossible, point to $500 billion in savings. We got that rollback not because the politics were easy, but because some people stood firm. Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.
Fox News
7 days ago
- Politics
- Fox News
Big government, big problems: Public corruption highest in places with large bureaucracies, report says
Print Close By Stephen Sorace Published July 17, 2025 A new think tank analysis finds that public corruption is a significant problem in the U.S., and is most prevalent in state and local governments that have larger bureaucracies and higher regulations. The libertarian Cato Institute said it analyzed Department of Justice data on public corruption convictions in the nation's 94 federal judicial districts and measured the annual average number of convictions per 100,000 population over the 2004–2023 period. "The data show that some of the most corrupt places by this measure match their reputations," the authors of the Cato analysis wrote. Washington, D.C., topped the rankings with 469 total convictions during the nearly 20-year period and an annual conviction rate of 3.49, according to Cato's report. DEMOCRAT DA IN HOT SEAT AFTER RETAIL THEFT SURGES IN MAJOR AMERICAN CITIES "It has a huge number of legislative and executive branch federal employees, and there are many opportunities for graft," the report says. Louisiana's eastern district, which includes New Orleans, ranks at number four on Cato's list with 430 total convictions during this period and an annual conviction rate of 1.29. "New Orleans has long been infamous for state and local corruption," the report says. TARIFF CASE PITS CATO INSTITUTE AGAINST TRUMP OVER 'UNLIMITED' EXECUTIVE POWER UNDER EMERGENCY LAW The Cato analysis found that New Hampshire had the lowest public corruption by this metric, with 13 convictions over the period and an annual conviction rate of .05. Cato called it "the freest state in the nation with one of the smallest governments." Cato said it appeared that "larger governments with more spending and regulations create more opportunities for bribery and embezzlement." CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP The think tank, however, noted that some academic studies have suggested other reasons for corruption differences between states and cities, including varying cultures, education levels, and poverty rates. Print Close URL
South China Morning Post
15-07-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Asian investors trim US assets amid dollar weakness, but full pullback proves difficult
Asian investors have trimmed their incremental allocations to US equities as the dollar weakened, but reducing their overall exposure to US assets remains difficult, according to a Morgan Stanley report on Tuesday. The proportion of US assets in Asia's securities portfolios fell by 0.7 percentage points, to 40.8 per cent in the first quarter from a peak of 41.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024, the highest level since late 2017, the report said. The pullback was pronounced in China, where the share of US assets in portfolio investments declined by about 16 percentage points to 28 per cent in March this year from December 2017. The New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan, New York City, on July 11, 2025. via AFP However, the report said reducing Asia's overall stockpile of US assets was not easy given the current account surpluses of the region's economies, which were at a record high of US$1.1 trillion in the first quarter, the report said. Economies with surplus capital often invest in US financial markets, which are the world's largest and most liquid, according to the Cato Institute, a US-based think tank. 'Asia's gross international investment position [in US stocks] will continue to grow,' Morgan Stanley analysts wrote. 'The lack of large and liquid alternatives means that it would be difficult for Asia to reduce its holdings of US assets.' While China's holdings of US assets dropped to US$1.3 trillion this year from their 2013 peak of US$1.8 trillion, the rest of Asia continued to increase its exposure to US assets to a new high of US$7.2 trillion in the first quarter.
