Category: Active

Social Security regrets its sins-of-the-fathers grab at grown kids' tax refunds. The plan would have allowed the government to claw back sometimes decades-old overpayments at the expense of the recipients' children. What comes next?

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The Internal Revenue Service is trying to license tax preparers without approval from Congress. If the scheme is allowed to continue, small tax preparers could be put out of business. That may be just fine with big box providers like H&R Block. Dan Alban represents some of these tax preparers in federal court.

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Nigeria's bureau of statistics has overhauled the way it calculates the country's GDP figures. With GDP now estimated at around $510 billion, it has surpassed South Africa as the continent's largest economy. But just because it has earned this accolade ??? does that make it one of the richest? Plus was the President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, right to say recently that Nigeria is one of just five countries that together are home to two-thirds of the world???s extreme poor? We sift through the statistics to find out if economic development is benefitting everyone in Nigeria. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Change is coming to higher education, but it won't be easy and it won't be popular. Glenn Reynolds argues that decades of federal subsidies and piles of student debt have not given us better outcomes for students.

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An improved standard of living depends on experimentation with new ideas, but politicians always seem to insist that innovators seek permission first. Author Adam Thierer argues they have it precisely backwards.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party emerged victorious in elections there, but the swelling concentration of power into his office has been troubling to more than just his opposition. An ultranationalist, anti-Semitic party also made large gains in the parliament.

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How many people in the world live in freedom? The BBC's Freedom 2014 season got Tim Harford and the More or Less team wondering about this. It's actually pretty hard to put a number on freedom, so Tim begins by looking at something more quantifiable: how many people live in a democracy? And are people in democracies happier? Tim Harford looks at the numbers with Simon Baptist from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Plus, he examines the price of a cup of coffee, and whether Ruth Alexander can be persuaded to pay for his. This programme was first broadcast live on the BBC World Service on 01 April 2014 from the Media Caf? at BBC New Broadcasting House in London.

The Federal Reserve's record over the past century includes the Great Depression, the Great Inflation and the Financial Crisis in 2008. Is it time for a monetary commission to examine the Fed's record in greater detail?Event: The Fed’s 100th Anniversary and the Case for a Centennial Monetary Commission

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Contributions to candidates as individual acts don't corrupt the political process, so what about contributions overall?

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