Brian posted yesterday about the House hearing. For those who don't want to listen to the recording, you can find reports in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Rep. Ann Wagner takes aim at consumer protection chief), Housing Wire (Tensions escalate at House hearing on constitutionality of the CFPB), Money (This Lawmaker Just Gave the Perfect Defense […]
An Urban Institute report issued today on the "American Health Care Act" finds that, "taking both tax reductions and benefit reductions into account, the average high-income family would be significantly better off and the average low-income family would be significantly worse off under the AHCA." Specifically, under the bill, "[t]he average family with less than […]
Law prof Lawrence Gostin says preliminary evidence suggests that they will in 2016: The Year of the Soda Tax. Here's the abstract: The year 2016 was pivotal in the history of the “soda wars” – the politically divisive conflict between soda as a joy of life or as a uniquely harmful food. This past year, the […]
Consumerist reports that a hacker group claims to unprecedented access to iPhones and is threatening to remotely wipe them clean if Apple doesn’t pay a ransom. Motherboard reports that the group of hackers — known as the Turkish Crime Family — allegedly gained access to a list of between 300 million and 559 million iCloud […]
Go here to view the witnesses' written testimony. (The witnesses were Ted Olson, Saikrishna Prakash, Adam White, and Brianne Gorod.) To watch the hearing, click here or on the embedded video below.
Law prof George Yin has written a brief and timely paper called Congressional Authority to Obtain and Release Tax Returns. Yin is the former chief of staff of Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. In his paper, Yin explains that particular congressional committees possess the power to obtain, review, and disclose filers' tax returns in limited circumstances and […]
That's the topic of Moral Commitments in Cost-Benefit Analysis by law profs Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein. Here is the abstract: The regulatory state has become a cost-benefit state, in the sense that under prevailing executive orders, agencies must catalogue the costs and benefits of regulations before issuing them, and in general, must show that their benefits […]
by Paul Alan Levy With the signature of Governor Terry McAuliffe having been added last week, Virginia has adopted a modest improvement to its very narrow anti-SLAPP statute. The new law, SB 1413, is not nearly as strong as in the anti-SLAPP laws in California and other model states, but it has something that we […]
The book is Meltdown: The Financial Crisis, Consumer Protection, and the Road Forward (Praeger 2017), by research economist Larry Kirsch and sociologist Greg Squires (George Washington University Sociology Department). Here's an abstract: Meltdown is the first book length account of the CFPB from its inception through 2015. With a foreword based on an interview with […]
That's the name of this article by Danielle Douglas-Gabriel. Some background: In mid-2015, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that student-loan guaranty agencies may not assess collection costs against borrowers who enter the federal government’s loan rehabilitation program within 60 days of defaulting on their loans. One of the two judges in the Seventh Circuit […]