Daily Policy Digest
| The Home Mortgage Interest Deduction Is Inefficient For a household in the $40,000 to $50,000 income bracket, the average tax savings from the mortgage interest deduction amounted to only $111 in 2011; for households earning above $200,000, the average tax savings amounted to $1,784... |
| Doctors Give in to Patient Demands for Brand-Name Drugs Thirty-seven percent of doctors surveyed admitted to sometimes prescribing a brand-name drug at a patient's request even though a generic version of the medication was available... |
| Improving Economic Mobility through Increased Savings Savings -- and, even more important, the culture of saving -- are critical to long-term and consistent movement up the economic ladder... |
| Grocery Bag Bans and Foodborne Illness Emergency room visits spiked when San Francisco's plastic bag ban went into effect, possibly a result of harmful bacteria found on reusable grocery bags... |
| High Taxes Penalize Working Wives For married upper-income women, the new tax law will create a top tax rate of roughly 42 percent plus state and local taxes for a total tax rate of more than 50 percent... |
| Most Arctic Species Will Benefit From Global Warming Global warming will allow Arctic species to expand their range rather than be confined... |
| Can a "Hybrid" Model Save the Post Office? A new study will analyze the benefits of restoring the U.S. Post Office's financial health by using a "hybrid" model, which would farm out to the private sector postal operations other than the last delivery mile... |
| Social Security: It's Worse Than You Think The Social Security Administration underestimates how long Americans will live and how much the trust funds will need to pay out -- to the tune of $800 billion by 2031... |
| Ten Ways Dodd-Frank Will Hurt the Economy in 2013 Rather than eliminating the market's expectation that certain big financial firms are too big to fail, the Dodd-Frank Act creates an explicit set of too-big-to-fail entities... |
| How a Federal Menu-Labeling Law Will Harm American Pizza The delay in implementing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's menu-labeling rule appears to have resulted in an expansion of Congress' original intent... |
