The Environmental Law Institute is a tax-exempt organization active in the field of public policy. Among its claims to fame is the legal rationale that allowed Exxon to be held criminally responsible for the Valdez oil spill off Alaska. Every year, astonishingly, the Environmental Law Institute receives a grant – generally around $5,000 – from […]
Consider the following hypothetical situations: One, you are an honest, law-abiding, tax-paying citizen who has never had an interest in professional sports. Your state and local government representatives decide to incur debt and spend millions of dollars to persuade the wealthy owner of a professional sports team to locate in the city where you live. […]
As the victors of the Great Stadium Debate of ’96 now find that the whopping $200 million set aside for a new Baltimore bowl will not even buy one they find attractive, advocates of small government must surely be suppressing a smile. Or at least they would be, had not so much taxpayer money gone […]
To understand the effort to revitalize Baltimore City, one needs an analogy – perhaps the Allied landing on D-Day. About 15 years ago, the yuppies landed on the beaches of Baltimore. On that thin strip of land called the Inner Harbor, they built their camp, and the fashionable and gleaming Brooks Brothers, Williams-Sonoma, and Crabtree […]
“You get what you pay for” is a saying no truer than when applied to welfare programs. A study by my Cato Institute colleagues Michael Tanner and Stephen Moore, with David Hartman of Austin’s Hartland Bank, examined the amount of assistance from major federal and federal/state programs that a typical welfare family – a mother […]
Maryland’s so-far successful attempt to attract Art Modell’s Cleveland-based NFL franchise to Baltimore is a spectacular example of corporate welfare, regardless of Modell’s February 21 consent to contribute $24 million himself. The deal still involves involves a 30-year, no-rent lease on an estimated $200 million stadium to be built almost entirely at state expense, and […]