The US government has funded agricultural disaster aid programs for nearly a century, mainly on an ad hoc basis between 1970 and 2008. The new Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments (SURE) program for crops is the budgetary and economic-efficiency elephant in the disaster aid policy room.

This volume covers seven major indicators of environmental progress, including air quality, energy, climate change, water quality, toxic chemicals, forests and land, and biodiversity.

Despite this support, renewable electricity has only a small share of the market, and ongoing developments in the market for competitive fuels—in particular, the prospect of declining prices for natural gas—make it likely that renewable electricity will continue to face severe constraints in terms of competitiveness for many years to come.

Improvements seen across key environmental indicators should be cause for celebration this Earth Day, according to Steven F. Hayward, Ph.D., author of the new book "Almanac of Environmental Trends."

Investing in alternative energy sources, such as ethanol, provides a solution as gas prices go up and national security becomes more of an issue.

Base broadening must be approached with caution because some base-broadening measures make the tax system less neutral, impeding economic efficiency. Also, income tax base broadening cannot eliminate, and may even reinforce, the income tax's central flaw--its penalty on saving.

Many analysts have written about the innumerable problems with cap-and-trade, and most of the problems that have been predicted have found their way into the current cap-and-trade law working its way through Congress.

Let entrepreneurs compete vigorously to pump innovations into the marketplace without government's attempting to pick winners and losers. Otherwise we are setting the stage for another bubble.