Fix Social Security the Kiwi Way
In The Wall Street Journal, Boccia responds in a letter to the editor to Samuel Gregg's op-ed on Australia's superannuation system. She echoes the caution against the Australian retirement system, and suggests looking to New Zealand:
A better model is New Zealand, which provides all retirees with a flat retirement benefit coupled with automatic enrollment in the KiwiSaver plan, but, unlike Australia’s compulsory superannuation system, workers are allowed to opt out.
David Ditch joins Cato’s budget team
In CQ Budget, Paul M. Krawzak notes Cato’s newest budget hire:
David Ditch has joined the Cato Institute as a policy analyst following previous stints at the Economic Policy Innovation Center, Heritage Foundation and Senate Budget Committee. Ditch “brings a rare combination of rigorous fiscal analysis, deep policy expertise, and a principled commitment to limited government,” Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at Cato, said. “His scholarship consistently challenges Washington’s culture of overspending while offering practical reforms to restore fiscal responsibility.”
The government’s equity portfolio now spans 30 companies
In Yahoo Finance, Ben Werschkul reports that six more semiconductor companies signed letters of intent to trade minority equity stakes for up to $874 million in CHIPS Act money. He cites Cato’s Tad DeHaven:
These new deals, set to be finalized in the months ahead, would bring the total number of companies in the Trump government portfolio to 30, according to a tally from Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute.
“Perhaps most striking about the announcement is how unremarkable government ownership is becoming,” DeHaven said this week.
Sales and property taxes are less economically damaging than income taxes
In USA Today, Daniel de Visé highlights a new report finding that states have raised sales taxes 68 times since 1990 while cutting top income tax rates 210 times. He quotes Adam Michel on the case for the shift:
Politics aside, a credible academic argument supports cutting income taxes and raising sales taxes, said Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Pro-business and anti-tax groups say high income taxes on corporations and wealthy people are “destructive” because many would-be taxpayers find ways to evade them, whether by reducing their taxable income or just moving away.
Sales and property taxes, by contrast, are considered less destructive, Michel said. It’s harder to avoid them, and the tax streams are more stable.
Fraud crackdowns can’t keep pace with the size of the transfer state
In the Washington Examiner, Vladlena Klymova of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance argues that the administration’s fraud crackdown is only a first step toward reforming the welfare state. She cites Chris Edwards on the scope of the problem:
“The federal government is a vast transfer machine. It spends more than $4 trillion a year on 2,400 aid, benefit, and subsidy programs — from Social Security and Medicare to hundreds of lower-profile programs that members of Congress probably don’t even know they are funding.”
Cost-sharing for SNAP forces states to confront their own error rates
In The Atlantic, Will Gottsegen reports that the September 2026 error-rate deadline may push some states out of SNAP altogether. He points to Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman’s analysis of the program’s improper payments:
States have historically managed SNAP payments on their own; the federal government supplies the money for benefits and for some of the administrative costs. Critics of this arrangement have noted that the post-COVID swell in enrollments has coincided with an uptick in improper payments, most of which have historically been overpayments. In 2019, 7.4 percent of the payments SNAP doled out were made in error, according to the USDA; last year, the national error rate was 10.6 percent. The OBBBA puts states in a tough spot. When it went into effect, it gave most states until the end of September 2026 to get their error rates below 6 percent—a little more than a year. If they fail to do so, they will begin sharing the cost of food-stamp benefits with the White House in 2027 (Alaska and other states with higher error rates will have longer deadlines).
Farm Bill Delay of SNAP Cost-Sharing Requirements Paves the Way for Policy Repeal
According to the Hagstrom Report Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman’s (R-AR) revised farm bill is drawing mixed reactions regarding a one-year delay to SNAP cost-sharing reforms and whether postponing accountability undermines long-term fiscal discipline:
Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, criticized the SNAP delay.
“The Senate’s revised farm bill text continues Congress’s ‘dessert first, spinach later’ approach to budgeting: promise savings later while spending more today,” Boccia said. “Once Congress establishes a precedent for delaying accountability, it becomes easier to delay it again, or for a future Congress to abandon the measure altogether.”
Compulsory saving would crowd out voluntary saving and hit low earners hardest
In FinanceBuzz, Chris Lewis breaks down what an Australian-style savings mandate would mean for American paychecks. He places Cato among the critics:
The idea is taking fire from both directions. The Cato Institute warns of a politicized sovereign wealth fund pulling government deeper into markets, and says forced saving on top of payroll taxes would crowd out saving people already do and hit low earners hardest.
Slush funds normalize treating federal money as personal power
In Vox, Caitlin Dewey reports that Blanche has rescinded Trump’s anti-weaponization fund, then walks through the earlier attempts to build a pot of federal money under White House control. She quotes Tad DeHaven’s earlier piece for Vox:
“The long-term risk is not just that Trump might be doing something illegal,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, wrote for Vox earlier this year. “The long-term risk is that his presidency is normalizing treating the receipt and disbursement of money as instruments of personal power.”
Seniors overwhelmingly back taxing younger workers to protect current benefits
In Moneywise, Vishesh Raisinghani reports on the generational split in Cato’s Social Security polling:
A whopping 89% of seniors over the age of 65 said Social Security benefits should be protected at current levels, even if it means higher taxes on younger Americans, according to a 2025 survey by the Cato Institute.
[…]
“Younger Americans are nearly eight times more likely than seniors are to support benefit cuts to help solve the financial problems in the Social Security system,” Cato noted.