Articles

While there is good evidence that SNAP reduces hunger and food insecurity among poor households, there are also legitimate concerns about the program fostering government dependency, reducing the incentive to work, and increasing the government deficit.

OCPA executive vice president Brian Bush recently sat down with economist Jayson Lusk, OCPA’s Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow, to discuss agricultural subsidies, crop and livestock insurance, and more.

Surveys suggest that more than 80% of professional economists believe that the United States should eliminate agricultural subsidies. However, only 34 percent of the general public agrees.

With today’s farm bill hanging in the balance, it is instructive to take a brief look back at our nation’s long and complicated history with farm policy.

If indeed “the goal is student achievement,” as Mr. Edelman says—if the goal is to do what works—activists and policymakers should not be clamoring for something that doesn’t work: increased government spending on the monopoly system (see page 4).

The “old” is the idea that the American government has limited powers, and that those powers are mostly reserved to the states, where “the people” can put strict limits on their exercise.

Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie “didn’t like his own country and wanted to fundamentally transform it along the lines of his heroes, Marx and Lenin.”

Oklahoma is the sixth-fattest state in the nation. If that weren’t bad enough, a 2012 report entitled "F as in Fat" projected the percentage of Oklahomans as being obese to rise from 31 percent to 66 percent, placing us only behind Mississippi on the bathroom scales.

Conversations on how to make college affordable are endless. Technically, we know how to significantly lower costs and improve quality, but little appears to be happening. Existing institutions are intransigent, and tuition keeps going up. Providing affordable education is simply not a goal of today’s leading colleges and universities. Most could cut tuition in half by simply returning to their business models of 25 years ago, but they have no incentive to do so.

Hope, Advent reminds us, often comes from unlikely protagonists and places, such as a peasant girl in a no-name village. In the less earth-shattering but still consequential case of constitutional federalism, hope comes from frightened state politicians: they can, should, and very likely will interpose their authority against the national government, in protection of their citizens.