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The White House on Friday announced a compromise on a controversial rule requiring religiously affiliated employers to provide full contraception coverage to women. But Cato scholar Roger Pilon says that the "compromise" is illusory: "We're right back where we started from. ...It's just another example of the something-for-nothing mindset that drives [the administration's] agenda.
A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that California's ban on same-sex marriage — enacted in 2008 in a popular vote on Proposition 8 — violates the constitutional right to equal protection. Cato's chairman Robert A. Levy, also co-chair of the advisory board to the American Foundation for Equal Rights (which sponsored the suit) comments: "[It's] a narrow but important step in the right direction. But it does not settle the more significant question whether states may grant benefits to heterosexual couples while granting less or no benefits to homosexual couples."
While Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and private subprime lenders have deservedly garnered the bulk of attention and blame for the mortgage crisis, other federal programs also distort our mortgage market and put taxpayers at risk of having to finance massive financial bailouts. In a new paper, Cato scholar Mark A. Calabria argues that one such agency, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), should be scaled back immediately, and an emphasis should be placed on improving its credit quality. "At the same time," says Calabria, "the agency should be placed on a path to ultimately be eliminated, with its risk-taking being transferred back to the private sector."
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