Ian Vásquez According to the polls, Venezuelans will overwhelmingly vote against President Nicolas Maduro in Sunday’s presidential election, posing the biggest threat his regime has so far seen to its survival. Nobody expects Maduro to accept the results, but neither does anybody know how things will turn out. After many years of ineffective and internally divisive opposition, the person who has managed to unite Venezuelans under a single ballot is Maria Corina Machado, one of the world’s most admirable political leaders. Although she won the opposition primary by more than 90 percent of the ..read more

Benjamin Giltner and Jonathan Ellis Allen On Wednesday, July 24, President Joe Biden delivered a speech in which he claimed he is the “first president of this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” Anyone following current events knows that this is, as Biden likes to say, pure “malarky.” The current president may not have initiated any new wars, but he ended only one of the many unnecessary conflicts he inherited and continues to support many others. To Biden’s credit, he completed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and he has not st ..read more

Daniel Raisbeck The outcome of Sunday’s election in Venezuela is anyone’s guess. For one thing, referring to the exercise as an “election” is hardly precise because most voters will not be allowed to elect their candidate of choice. In 2023, the Chavista regime banned opposition leader María Corina Machado from running for office for fifteen years. Last October, Machado won an opposition primary with over 90 percent of the vote. The regime even prevented Machado’s chosen successor, octogenarian academic Corina Yoris, from registering as a candidate before the official deadline. The opposition ..read more

Vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak to the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teacher union. She will almost certainly talk about raising teacher pay ..read more

Jeffrey A. Singer Last evening, the US premiere of the documentary “COVID Collateral: Where Do We Go For Truth?” was screened at the Cato Institute’s Hayek Auditorium. The film was produced and directed by Canadian filmmaker Vanessa Dylyn and premiered in Toronto, Canada in May. While the film wasn’t live streamed, I moderated a roundtable discussion following it that was live streamed and recorded. The roundtable participants included Vanessa Dylyn, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2018–2021) Robert Redfield, and Cato economist Ryan Bou ..read more

Chris Edwards Media outlets are identifying vice-presidential options for likely presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Many of the VP options are state governors. Cato grades the governors from “A” to “F” every two years on their tax and spending policies. The “A” governors push for lower taxes and spending, the “F” governors push for higher taxes and spending, and there are many governors in between. Potential VP picks are listed below with their past Cato grades and a few notes on recent tax policy actions. Past Cato reports are here. The 2024 report will be released in October. Progressive ..read more

Nicholas Anthony More people are taking notice each day of the risks of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). These concerns have been voiced in the media, in testimonies before Congress, and elsewhere. However, the officials driving the charge for CBDCs appear undeterred. Instead, some of these officials have taken up a marketing effort to rebrand CBDCs as “digital cash.” Consider just a few examples. The European Central Bank has said, “A digital euro would be an electronic form of cash for the digitalised world.” The Norges Bank has said a CBDC would be a “digital version of cash.” Simi ..read more

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett The Senate is ready to raid the figurative emergency rainy day fund again. As we highlighted in a recent Debt Digest, Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D‑WA) and Vice Chair Susan Collins (R‑ME) have reportedly struck a deal to increase fiscal year (FY) 2025 discretionary spending by $34.5 billion by designating some ordinary spending as emergency funding. This is a common trick legislators employ to get around spending limits when sticking to a budget seems too politically difficult. Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Jim Capretta has pointed out ..read more

Jeffrey A. Singer (Source: Google.) The German edition of Medscape Medical News reported on July 19 that Europe is beginning to experience a surge in black-market synthetic opioids. Professor Heino Stöver of the Institute for Addiction Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, told Medscape Medical News reporter Ute Eppinger that fentanyl might “flood the German market as early as next year.” This is due to the Taliban crackdown on opium cultivation in Afghanistan, a major opium source. Morphine and codeine are natural derivatives of the opium poppy, and drug trafficking organizations use aceti ..read more

Neal McCluskey If you ran a corporation, and a division you did not need suffered massive losses while proving either ineffective or downright incompetent at its job, you would seriously consider dissolving it, right? After all, not only is it not helping, it is an albatross around your neck. That’s largely what the US Department of Education appears to be for American education. Yet if you propose eliminating it the first reaction from some people is shock and lament: “But it’s about education, so it must be good.” That seems to be the presumption of former Republican Maryland governor, and ..read more