by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff Criminal justice reform legislation will be on the agenda in the upcoming 2017 Wyoming Legislative General Session. Much has been said about criminal justice reform and its potential to save taxpayer dollars. The conversation typically revolves around lowering administrative costs, downsizing staff, and avoiding futur...

by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff Wyoming's disturbing rate of alcohol-related calamity is no secret. Two ways to measure alcohol abuse among adults are to look at DUI arrests per capita and binge drinking rate. These measures show Wyoming leads the nation in DUI arrests per capita and is in the CDC's second tier of states (out of three tiers) for bin...

Wyoming's Joint Interim Education Committee and Select Committee on Education Accountability both met on November 14th and 15th. The Legislative Service Office opened the agenda on the 14th with a fiscal update including a forecast out to 2021-22 which was grim, to say the least. After that reminder, the committees continued conversations on topics...

by Charles Katebi Last week marked the fourth and most likely the last year that the federal healthcare exchanges will sell insurance under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. That's because Republican Presidential-elect Donald Trump vows to repeal Obamacare during his first hundred days in office and jumpstart real healthcare reform. At a spee...

by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff Tuesday of this week, the Cheyenne City Council voted to replace an overreaching ordinance that criminalized skateboarding downtown. One of many ordinances that lead to overcriminalization. Overcriminalization is the result of thousands of petty, reactionary and mostly unnecessary laws interlaced with laws that make s...

NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and standardized reading and math test scores are often referred to by Wyoming Liberty Group in its articles about Wyoming K-12 education. Since WLG is not enthusiastic about federal involvement in education, people may reasonably ask why WLG seems to harp on them. To begin with, reading and math a...

by Charles Katebi The Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as "Obamacare," will begin selling insurance plans for the fourth year in a row this week. The big question on everyone's mind is: do people want Obamacare insurance? After all, the primary purpose of Obamacare is to provide affordable coverage to the uninsured. As President Obama said:...

by Wyoming Liberty Group Staff Comprehensive criminal justice reform could increase public safety, save millions of dollars, and give each non-violent offender a second chance. Over 95% of those incarcerated in Wyoming will eventually be released from prison, so we must consider what to do with these individuals while they are in the state's custod...

Who ever heard of a football team not improving by competing? Practice makes perfect, but perfect gets better through competition. Competition reveals unknown flaws, generates new ideas and improves execution of old methods. Our K-12 education system needs improvement as Wyoming Liberty Group has written previously. Assuming our schools want to get...

What do we do when we encounter a luxurious buffet but are on a diet? We carefully take only the permitted amount of each allowed item, right? And then we consciously take a smidgen more of each. Soon the plate is overloaded (and maybe we go back for seconds – or thirds!) Is that what's happened in Wyoming K-12 education over the last decade? Take ...

Charlie Katebi and KGAB's Gary Freeman discuss a new poll by the Wyoming Liberty Group that finds a large majority of Wyoming voters oppose expanding Medicaid under Obamacare.  

Bob Nelson talks with Glenn Woods on BoldRepublic about how little K-12 spending goes to classroom instruction. 

Robert Nelson explains how Wyoming spends more on education than its neighbors but shows no improvement in student test scores.  

Wyoming's constitution mandates K-12 education be universal, free of charge and efficient 1. However, the concept of efficiency is so inconvenient it was scarcely mentioned in the course of more than twenty years of litigation about K-12 funding. The result is the mammoth and terrifically expensive education system we now have. Efficiency often sim...

Charlie Katebi joined Glenn Woods on Bold Republic to discuss a new poll that shows most Wyoming voters oppose Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid.  

by Charles Katebi Every 8 weeks, Paula Bennet visits a primary care clinic to receive Remicaid infusions to treat her Crohn's disease. Normally, an appointment like this would cost $30 in copays. But in Paula's case, her health plan pays her. That's because her employer, Health Trust, works with a company called Vitols SmartShopper that rewards wor...

In a recent poll conducted on behalf of the Wyoming Liberty Group, Wyoming taxpayers overwhelmingly supported our Taxpayer Protection Pledge by saying they would be much more likely to vote for a candidate who had signed the pledge. In the same poll, voters said they believed Wyoming could get it's deficit spending under control through cuts in sta...

Several states have been moving their health care systems in a more patient centered direction. Reforms that empower patients to find better value in their health care systems is a win-win scenario for both the patient and taxpayers. Their patients now have both the right information and incentives to find the best health care at the lowest price. ...

by Charles Katebi Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton signed welfare reforms into law that revolutionized American anti-poverty policy. Critics warned these changes would cruelly condemn vulnerable families to extreme hardship. But new evidence shows these reforms lifted millions of families out of poverty. According to a new study by the non-...

by Stephen Klein Wyoming's reform of civil asset forfeiture, which passed unanimously in the 2016 Budget Session, went into effect on July 1. Already, the reform has lived up to its name, which is illustrated by comparing two cash seizure cases—one that began before the reform, and one after. Asset forfeiture is a process by which law enforcement s...