As Wyoming and other states consider expanding the reach of campaign finance laws to capture "dark money," some consideration of what's happening in Chicago is helpful. Aggressive campaign finance regulations, touted as combatting corruption, allow for easy manipulation of the law. We learned last week that Rahm Emanuel pulled in $400,000 in campai...

Although not in the news for a while, the efforts to classify internet access as a utility are not nearly as benign as they may first appear. Net Neutrality, the innocuous, misleading name chosen by proponents of internet regulation, remains an ongoing issue. Recently, President Obama called for the FCC to act unilaterally. There is a major push on...

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'...

In mid-November, Wyoming Attorney General Peter Michael joined an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed in a Maryland case that will soon be heard in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The case, Kolbe v. O'Malley, challenges a law recently enacted in Maryland that bans numerous semi-automatic rifles in the state and limit...

Our introductory blog on this topic focused on the premises of graduate criminal justice fellow Brice Hamack's recent article in the Wyoming Law Review. It is important to clarify that while Mr. Hamack's general concerns are well founded, Wyoming's juvenile justice system has uniquely entrenched problems unique from and, in many ways, worse than th...

For Wyoming parents wondering what really happens behind the scenes to push the direction of statewide education policy, they need look no further. A stunning video released this past week by the parent-led group, Wyoming Citizens Opposing Common Core, revealed minutes from an October meeting convened by an education bureaucracy-led group called th...

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 ...

Last week I discussed the potential consequences of the latest CREG report's long-term spending outlook. I pointed to the risk for a structural budget deficit, in other words a deficit that does not go away with an improving business cycle. Part of the reason is the role that minerals-based taxes – primarily severance taxes – play in the Wyoming st...

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...