Research shows high excise taxes invite scofflaws to traffic in illicit cigarettes, encourage corruption among public officials and trigger violence against people, property and police.
READ MOREby Ari Armstrong Prescription drug abuse is a serious problem, sometimes a fatal one. But the answer is not for the government to monitor and harass people who suffer from devastating pain — and make it harder for them to manage their pain — in a misguided attempt to save drug abusers from themselves. Unfortunately,
READ MORELet’s not allow a tragedy to undo years of careful work toward sound policy reforms.
READ MOREby Harris Kenny and Leonard Gilroy Last month Colorado voters resoundingly passed Amendment 64 into the state constitution, legalizing both recreational marijuana and industrial hemp. So far, realizing the will of the voters is on track, but implementation risks threaten to undermine the intentions behind Amendment 64. Policy makers are contending with thriving black markets
READ MORENone of these projects make sense because — in case you haven’t noticed — we have this new-fangled technology called airplanes that go twice as fast as the fastest trains in the world and require almost no infrastructure, which means their costs are much lower than trains. So why are Americans so bedazzled by trains?
READ MOREIn 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) persuaded voters to pay billions of dollars in taxes to build a 19th century rail transit system for a 21st century urban area. Thirteen years later, this experiment is increasingly proving to be a failure.
Ridership on Denver’s new R and W light-rail lines is so low that RTD is reducing train frequencies. After more than a year of operating a rail line to the airport, the agency still hasn’t figured out how to make its automatic crossing gates work reliably, a problem private railroads solved more than 80 years ago.
READ MOREBoulder residents would bristle at claims they are racist, but the nation’s most progressive cities tend to be the ones that have adopted policies that make housing unaffordable and push low-income people out. Since black per capita incomes remain about 60 percent of whites, they are some of the first to leave such cities.
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