Are Americans better off today than they were before Barack Obama was elected to office? Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist and economist John Lott, Jr. argue in "Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future" that spending increases, mounting debt, new regulations and higher tax rates answer this question with a resounding “no.”

No, the government shouldn’t eliminate tax breaks for private universities.

The first order of business for a Republican president next year should be corporate-tax reform. But even if Republicans win big in the fall, undoing America's largest policy error will be an almost impossible political lift, unless enough people in both parties come to grips with the counterintuitive economics of corporate-tax reform.

Tax reform perpetually tops policymakers' lists for ways to grow the economy, but a generation has passed since the last successful effort, the Tax Reform Act of 1986. This is because of a simple political reality-it's hard. But not, I believe, impossible.

Which politicians do you trust more to micromanage your health care: federal or state? That’s the false choice presented by two versions of “federalism” intended to divide responsibility for health policy between the national government and the states.

Let’s start with the stark reality: Second presidential terms rarely result in major accomplishments. Presidents have few new ideas that have not been posed in their first two years, and already met with success or failure. And second-term presidents face even more obduracy from the opposition, bitter at a second loss of the big prize. 

The problem of coverage for pre-existing conditions remains relatively small and limited to the individual health insurance market, despite exaggerated claims used to advance passage of the Affordable Care Act. Nevertheless, too many people still remained at risk of falling through the cracks of protective measures provided by HIPAA, COBRA, and state-run high risk pools.

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 shifted the U.S. tax burden from households to businesses while raising the overall tax burden facing new investment.