Section 913 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gives the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) broad powers to establish wide-ranging rules to regulate the standard of conduct of broker-dealers in relationship to retail customers.

Make the Treasury Department truly responsible for managing all the government's debt. Managing only Treasury securities deals with only about half, and sometimes less than half, of the effective government debt.

The expansion of agency debt not only imposes risk and realized losses on taxpayers, it also increases the cost of Treasury's direct financing, by creating a huge pool of alternate government-backed securities to compete with Treasury securities, and thus increases the interest cost to taxpayers.

As bad as the news has been this year, for taxpayers there is much worse news to come.

The Chinese overlooked the possibility that the Olympics would arrive at the same time as its economy braked to a stop.

Roe v. Wade blocked democratic channels that could have made the abortion fight a productive struggle.

Today's official poverty rate is hardly lower than the 1968 rate, but a closer look at forty years of poverty data tells a more mixed story.

This is the first of an occasional series of reading lists tied to issues in the news.