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July 31, 2019
Top Features
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Washington Gives up on Spending Cuts
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Veronique de Rugy | The Hill
Last week, the White House and congressional Democrats struck a deal on the budget. While many Republicans looked at the deal as a worthwhile compromise, the absence of calls for spending cuts is deafening. The deficit is poised to hit $1 trillion several years earlier than projected, and spending under Trump will have also increased by 22 percent in a booming economy. Spending caps agreed upon in 2011 have never been fully followed. To tackle spending, Congress should be willing to look at every department and every program for significant savings, then it must address the drivers of our future debt: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Additionally, functions that don't belong at the federal level should be returned to the private sector and states, and subsidies to private companies should be cut.
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The FTC's $5 Billion Fine for Facebook Shows That the Government Can Crack down on Tech Companies without Crushing Them
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Jennifer Huddleston | Business Insider
While there's no one-size-fits-all solution to data privacy, the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) $5 billion fine on Facebook balances the need to punish Facebook while not imposing onerous regulations on the whole industry. Some have criticized the fine for being too small, but at more than the cost of an NFL team, about the current value of Reddit, and more than 200 times as large as any previous data-privacy settlement, $5 billion is far from a drop in the bucket. It's also more than the maximum fine of 4 percent of global annual turnover, about $2.2 billion, that the company would face under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. This decision sets a precedent for future FTC enforcement, and should be a model how the FTC can regulate tech companies moving forward.
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The New Conservative Housing Push
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Salim Furth | National Review
After home prices surged and then crashed between 2003 and 2011, many of us hoped the housing crisis was over. The relentless rise in rent, however, has revealed a bigger underlying problem. Conservatives in Washington have taken the lead in the search for policy solutions that ease the housing crisis while maintaining local self-government. In National Review, Salim Furth explains how President Donald Trump, Senator Todd Young, and Housing and Urban Development secretary Ben Carson have taken national leadership roles in calling for less regulation of housing markets.
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Pictures of the World
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Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tyler Cowen | Conversations with Tyler
Born to a Ghanaian father and British mother, Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up splitting time between both countries — and lecturing in many more — before eventually settling in America, where he now teaches philosophy and law at New York University. He joins Tyler this week to discuss whether Africa will secularize, the experience of reading 173 novels to judge the Man Booker prize, what he learned farming sheep in New Jersey, the link between cosmopolitanism and national identity, what it was like teaching Jodie Foster, whether museums should repatriate collections, and much more.
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Additional Links
Blockchain Could Replace Mounds of Paper at the Border
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Christine McDaniel | TradeVistas
Trump Is Wrong: A Weak Dollar Is Bad for America
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Daniel Griswold | The National Interest
Bring Back John Q. Public's Voice in Federal Rulemaking
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James Broughel | The Hill
Anti-Tech Wave Grows with New Justice Department Antitrust Efforts
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Andrea O'Sullivan | Reason
Political Dissent: Exit or Voice?
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Bruce Yandle | American Institute for Economic Research
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