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ADVANCING OUR NATION’S FREE MARKET PUBLIC POLICY
RECENT NEWS


AmazonSmile’s Demise Exposed the Risk of SPLC Gatekeeping
The Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center should force a broader reckoning over how much power corporations gave one activist group to police the nonprofit world. The charges are allegations, and SPLC is entitled to defend itself in court. But the indictment raises a basic question that conservatives have been asking for years: why was SPLC treated as a trusted gatekeeper for charities, platforms, and public debate in the first place? DOJ Alleges
Ryan Ellis


Trump’s Charitable Drug Reform Protects Patients and Taxpayers
The 340B drug discount program was supposed to help low-income patients get cheaper prescription drugs. Instead, it has become a taxpayer-subsidized profit center for large nonprofit hospital networks that buy drugs at steep discounts, bill insurers and government programs at higher rates, and keep the spread. The Washington Post editorial board’s new op-ed calls the program what it has too often become: corporate welfare for hospitals. The Center for a Free Economy and more
Ryan Ellis


CFE Highlights Working Families Tax Cuts Across Video Series
The Center for a Free Economy has been highlighting how the Working Families Tax Cuts are delivering broad relief for workers, families, seniors, small businesses, and family-owned farms. Through a growing series of short videos tied to CFE blog posts, CFE has explained how the law lowers taxes on tips and overtime, strengthens the Child Tax Credit and standard deduction, expands education choice, improves Health Savings Accounts, provides auto loan relief for American-built
Ryan Ellis


Washington Should Not Risk Another Taxpayer Bailout of Bad Mortgages
The 2008 housing collapse showed what happens when mortgage risk is ignored, understated, or pushed onto someone else. A new DC Journal op-ed by Ryan Ellis warns that Washington should not weaken one of the basic safeguards that helps lenders understand borrower risk before a mortgage is approved: tri-merge credit reporting. Tri-merge credit reporting requires lenders to review credit reports from all three national credit bureaus when underwriting a mortgage. That full view
Ryan Ellis


Brookings Charts Show Tax Hikes Cannot Fix Washington’s Spending Problem
A new Brookings Institution chart book by Jessica Riedl delivers a blunt warning for Washington: the federal budget problem is being driven by spending, not a lack of tax revenue. The charts show that even extremely aggressive tax hikes would fall far short of stabilizing the long-term budget, while higher tax rates on work, investment, and business would threaten growth and competitiveness. The Math Does Not Support a Tax-Hike-Only Strategy The most striking chart shows that
Ryan Ellis


Voters Want Congress to Repeal the Homeowner Inflation Tax
A new national poll released by the American Property Owners Alliance shows voters are ready for Congress to fix one of the most outdated parts of the tax code: the capital gains tax on home sales. The survey, conducted by OnMessage Public Strategies, found that 70% of voters oppose the current capital gains tax on home sales, including majorities across the political spectrum. The poll also found that 82% of Americans support adjusting the tax to account for inflation, with
Ryan Ellis


Congress Should End the Phantom Capital Gains Tax
Millions of Americans are paying taxes on gains they never chose to realize, and Congress has a clear opportunity to end this unfair treatment. The “Generating Retirement Ownership Through Long-Term Holding Act,” or “GROWTH Act,” H.R. 2089 and S. 1839, would fix one of the stranger features of the tax code by allowing mutual fund investors to defer taxes on reinvested capital gain distributions until they actually sell their shares. In a recent op-ed in The Hill , CFE Presid
Ryan Ellis


Food Stamp Waste Shows Why SNAP Reform Is Needed
Massachusetts taxpayers just received a costly reminder of why welfare reform cannot stop at writing bigger checks. According to Massachusetts Daily News , a new Fiscal Alliance Foundation study found that Massachusetts paid out more than $1 billion in improper SNAP payments between 2022 and 2024 while as many as 75% of able-bodied recipients were not working. That scale of waste should concern anyone who wants the safety net to work for the people who truly need it. Food sta
Ryan Ellis


Social Security Should Fight Poverty, Not Fund Six-Figure Benefits
Social Security was created in 1935 as a hedge against “poverty-ridden old age.” That mission is hard to square with the system Washington runs now. A couple claiming the maximum benefit at age 70 can receive about $124,000 a year in Social Security, even as younger and generally poorer workers keep paying payroll taxes into a program projected to hit insolvency in 2032. That is not a focused safety net. It is a sign that Social Security has drifted far from its original purp
Ryan Ellis

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