Blog
Road Overkill looks at the experience of seven recently built Wisconsin highways. It finds that, in each case, traffic is failing to materialize on those roads to the degree transportation planners projected a decade or more ago.
Our new report, A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America’s Future, makes the case that America has come to the end of a road, if you will – that the rapid increase in vehicle travel that took place between 1946 and 2004 in the United States is unlikely to be repeated any time soon.
New data released by Medicare reveal immense variation in the amount charged by hospitals for treatment of the 100 most common inpatient stays. Information from more than 3,000 hospitals around the country shows that, for the same procedure, charges vary as much as 42-fold—from $5,300 to $223,000 for joint replacement. The variation in charges is greater than the variation we observed in our recent analysis of charges by California hospitals for the 12 most common surgeries.
Science tells us that global warming contributes to more extended dry spells between rain events, and research shows us that in the Southwest, prolonged dry spells are becoming more frequent. This year, a record dry January and February in California has started fire season early.
If you care about transportation policy, you really need to pay attention to the multiplicity of new mobile technology-enhanced transportation options coming onto the scene, seemingly on a weekly basis. If you can look behind the pink mustaches and rented Vespas, there are some powerful and profound things happening.
The Washington Post recently offered a profile of the success of Health Quality Partners, a Pennsylvania-based organization that has demonstrated how focusing additional medical resources on particularly vulnerable Medicare patients can reduce costs and improve patient health.
This winter, Frontier Group’s research helped spur debate on public interest issues that have gained new resonance in today’s high-stakes discussions about reforming our tax system and holding our government accountable for its spending. In particular, our work around the impact of offshore tax haven abuse on state budgets, and on states’ efforts to increase the transparency of their spending online not only received widespread media coverage, but also prompted action by public officials. Our analysis of successful clean energy programs across the country also allowed us to offer policy guidance to state and local governments seeking to tap into the benefits of clean energy.
A new analysis from the Washington Post reveals that most of the 30 companies listed in the Dow industrial average have seen their U.S. tax burdens as a share of corporate profits drop by half since the 1960s and 1970s. One major reason for this is that many of these companies have become extremely adept at exploiting loopholes in the federal tax code that allow them to avoid paying U.S. taxes by shifting income—even income earned within our borders—to financial institutions in offshore tax havens.
With tax breaks to corporations unlikely to diminish anytime soon, we should make sure that future breaks follow a set of best practices to ensure the government expenses are a smart use of taxpayer dollars.
If you’re looking for a good example of the power of smart policy changes to grow clean energy markets, look no further than New Jersey, which has just installed 1 gigawatt (GW) of solar PV capacity, ensuring its continued reputation as one of the nation’s solar leaders. New Jersey reached this milestone despite fears that the state’s solar market was collapsing in early 2012 – but smart policy changes in the middle of last year helped give the market the course correction it needed to get back on its feet.
Not only did the National Academy of Sciences panel fail to recognize the potential for systems-level changes in the future, but it also failed to account for a seismic change that is going on right now: the unprecedented decline in per-capita vehicle travel in the United States.
Late last month, utilities responsible for constructing the first new nuclear power reactors in more than two decades announced that the project is now $787 million over budget and more than a year behind schedule. Industry leaders had hoped that the new reactors at Plant Vogtle would prove that new nuclear power plants could be built without the huge cost overruns and delays that notoriously plagued the last round of construction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, the situation in Georgia is just another case of history repeating itself.
That youth driving should be on the decline now is remarkable since there are now more teenagers and young adults in America than there have been in years. Since 1992, America has gained more than 7.3 million 16-to-24 year olds – an increase of 22 percent – but has added only 1.2 million 16-to-24 year old drivers.
Harmful chemicals are ubiquitous in the products we use every day, from furniture to personal care products. Gaps in our chemicals policy allow manufacturers to bring these harmful substances to market without proving they are safe for human health and the environment; this places the burden on recognizing the presence of these chemicals and understanding their risks on consumers. A new study from researchers at the University of Washington revealing how some of these harmful chemicals can creep into our diets—even if we try to avoid them—underscores the urgency of stopping production of these chemicals altogether.
Before Massachusetts approves yet another special business tax subsidy, lawmakers should adopt common-sense reforms to increase transparency and accountability for those subsidies already on the books.
In general, I know that health care is expensive, but I don’t usually think about what that means for my family. That changed this week with the annual open enrollment period for my health insurance plan.
While it’s great to celebrate a single month in which renewable energy dominated, the reality is that, to achieve a clean energy future and address the threat of global warming, we need to make sure that virtually all our new energy, every single month, is coming from renewable sources.
Earlier this week, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston took to the op-ed page of the Sacramento Bee to highlight a powerful new argument for closing offshore tax havens: the impact on state budgets. Johnston pointed to our recent report, which found that state budgets lose a combined $39.8 billion in tax revenues each year to offshore tax haven abuse.
Knock on wood, I won’t need significant medical care any time soon. But if I do, I think that the coordination between my doctor, hospital and other care providers might be better than the last time I needed much care.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama announced a suite of policies and programs designed to combat climate change. The President’s discussion of energy efficiency as a key emissions reduction strategy was spot-on. Energy efficiency is a severely underappreciated and underdeveloped resource that can help make huge reductions in our global warming emissions—all while creating jobs and saving consumers money, to boot.
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