It's tempting to call the shameful taxpayer subsidy for electric cars - vehicles that are unaffordable for all but a small number of wealthy Americans - this nation's costly little secret.

$25 billion in National Mortgage Settlement and other policy efforts have worked to prevent the real estate market from clearing.  At the same time, these policies have harmed those who have done the right thing.

Let’s say that you were a politican with a GM Volt and turned it into an icon of your administration. And let’s also observe that despite giving people (most of whom are wealthy) a whopping $7,500 subsidy to buy a $40,000 car, your union- and government-controlled car company couldn’t sell enough of them to justify keeping the assembly line open. What would you do?

The SEC now is seeking public comment on how to improve its process for retrospective reviews of existing rules.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at AEI, reviews the budget outlook, the need for tax reform and the benefits of moving to a progressive consumption tax. He also discusses his forthcoming book, Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X Tax Revisited, which he coauthored with Robert Carroll of Ernst & Young. The book will be published by AEI Press in the Spring.

Although the Schumer-Lee plan deserves credit for seeking to promote international capital flows and labor mobility, it would neither make a measurable dent in the housing sector's backlog nor fix a broken immigration system that hampers our economy's long-run prospects.

Once again, the regulators in California have decided to lead the nation in terms of vehicle emission standards, proposing to require that 15.4 percent of all vehicles sold by 2025 must be electric cars, plug-in hybrid cars, or (currently non-existent) fuel cell cars.