In his January 1999 State of the Union address, President Clinton proposed “a new pension initiative for retirement security in the 21st century” – specifically, personal retirement accounts – inspired by the Chilean pension reform twenty years earlier.  In the new issue of Cato Policy Report, Cato scholar and architect of the Chilean model José Piñera recounts the remarkable story of the Clinton administration’s plans to add individual investment accounts to Social Security, and how those plans were derailed by the Lewinsky scandal.

• January/February 2016 issue of Cato Policy Report

Dramatic improvements in robotics, artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing (also known as 3D printing), and nanoenergetics are dramatically changing the character of conflict in all domains. The convergence of these new and improving technologies is creating a massive increase in capabilities available to smaller and smaller political entities — extending even to the individual. In a new study, T. X. Hammes argues that this new diffusion of power has major implications for the conduct of warfare and national strategy.

• “Technologies Converge and Power Diffuses: The Evolution of Small, Smart, and Cheap Weapons,” by T. X. Hammes

The U.S. fiscal imbalance—the excess of what we expect to spend, including repayment of our debt, over what government expects to receive in revenue—is large and growing. And with politicians proposing large new expenditures, little is being done to rectify the country’s fiscal health. In a new paper, Cato scholar Jeffrey Miron shows that the United States has faced a growing fiscal imbalance since the early 1970s, largely as a consequence of continuous growth in mandatory spending.

• “U.S. Fiscal Imbalance over Time: This Time Is Different,” by Jeffrey Miron