I recently heard that the Oregon legislature actually may kill a wasteful, non-productive, and from my perspective, illegitimate government program. I won’t tell you which one, because that could give its supporters time to organize and to pressure legislators to keep squeezing taxpayers for more money to keep their gravy train alive. This program and [...]

Media Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Steve Buckstein Senior Policy Analyst Cascade Policy Institute Phone: (503) 242-0900 steven@cascadepolicy.org February 21, 2012 Requiring a Prescription for Cold Medicine Has Not Reduced Meth Use in Oregon Cascade Study Raises Questions about Real Impact of Oregon’s Prescription-Only Requirement PORTLAND, OR — Cascade Policy Institute released a study today [...]

A 2005 law which requires Oregonians to get a doctor’s prescription to use cold and allergy medicines containing pseudoephedrine has not significantly reduced meth lab incidents, made the illegal drug methamphetamine harder to get or reduced the number of people using it. What it has done is impose a considerable burden on legitimate users of [...]

To say that our public discourse today stands in need of some improvement is undoubtedly an understatement, but perhaps no area of our common life requires more careful consideration than our political speech. All too often we find public discussions of political economy cast in stark terms, such as “socialism” versus “capitalism.” Very often these [...]

President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget includes $310 million for an ongoing energy research program called SunShot. The goal of the program is to use taxpayer subsidies to reduce the total installed cost of solar energy by 75% by the end of this decade, making it cost-competitive with other sources. This is an admirable goal, [...]

WHAT THE LAW DOES The new statewide open enrollment law will take effect in the 2012–2013 school year. The new law allows Oregon parents to enroll their kids in any Oregon public school district, as long as the receiving district is accepting transfers. No longer will the student’s resident school district be able to block [...]

Before the legislature solidifies Governor John Kitzhaber’s revolutionary new reform plan for education, let’s look back at the first big education reform of which he was a part. In 1991, then Senate President Kitzhaber voted for The Oregon Education Act for the 21st Century. It was full of new committees, new high school CIM and [...]

“Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience,” stated Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks [...]

Opposing More Top-Down Control of Oregon Education Chair Hass, Co-Chair Morse, and members of the Committee, my name is Steve Buckstein. I’m Senior Policy Analyst and founder of Cascade Policy Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit public policy research organization based in Portland. Our mission is to promote policies that enhance individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic [...]

The twenty-two states that have not required workers to join a union and pay union dues have enjoyed, as a group, more rapid employment and income growth, better job preservation, and faster recoveries from recession. Oregon is not one of those states, yet. Here, policymakers tried to pull us out of the most recent recession [...]