by Wyoming Liberty Staff It has now been five years since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. Notoriously known as "Obamacare", this highly debated reform - probably the most complicated piece of legislation in U.S. history - is still dispensing unintended consequences. With yet another case related to the ACA being heard...

by Wyoming Liberty Staff This article is not about Wyoming. Not directly, at least. But it is about the values that the people of this great state hold dear: freedom and self determination. Beyond our state borders - in fact, beyond the borders of the United States - a new, aggressive brand of radical socialism is on the rise. It is more radical th...

If the proponents of Medicaid Expansion get what they want, and if the SHARE Plan developed by the Wyoming Department of Health is enacted, we can - the report says - expect approximately 17,600 Wyomingites to enroll at an annual cost of $110 million. That is a cost of $6,250 per enrollee per year, or $520.83 per month. There was a point in time, n...

One of the biggest problems with tax-paid, government-provided entitlements is that government makes promises without a credible source of funding. The universal approach to entitlements is that legislators identify a problem, assume government is the best vehicle for a solution, then craft a bill, pass it into law and go home to their voters and t...

Happy New Year, taxpayers! If you live in Wyoming you are probably very happy not to have to pay income taxes. Make the most of it for now - you never know when the state may find itself at a point where it needs to introduce a personal income tax. Actually, strike that. We can foresee the income tax with fairly good accuracy. Let me first stress t...

The state government's pending revenue problems, which I pointed to recently, are now beginning to make real headlines. On Sunday the Casper Star Tribune made its contribution: Dear rest of the country: Spare a thought for oil country. Your cheap gas comes at a cost. The national average gas price hit $2.75 a gallon last week, the lowest price for ...

On November 26, 2014, the Wyoming Department of Health presented its SHARE report, a 32-page long argument for Medicaid expansion. The report makes a pro-expansion case that appears to sprawl in all directions, but perhaps the biggest selling point is that Medicaid expansion will create hundreds of new jobs and add millions of dollars to the state'...

As I recently explained, about two thirds of state government spending in Wyoming is dedicated to core welfare-state programs within education, health care and human services (broadly known as "welfare"). With a likely revenue crisis on the horizon, and with the causes of that revenue crisis being structural, it is necessary for the Wyoming state l...

The most important – and most challenging – part of public policy research is to create convincing pathways toward more economic freedom. Compared to the efforts going toward criticizing "big government", the reform issue receives only minor attention. That is not to say there are no proposals out there. On the contrary, in some policy areas it is ...

The latest CREG report predicts that General Fund revenue will grow at a crawling 2.1 percent per year on average from 2016 through 2020. Worse, as Figure 1 shows, the trend for most revenue sources is downward: The Wyoming state government has weathered tough times before, which is one reason why the state has, basically, two years of spending sta...