FREEDOMWORKS 08/18/2015

1. Hillary Clinton's College Tuition Plan Flunks Econ 101 - by Adam Brandon via Investor's Busines Daily "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch," economist Milton Friedman was fond of saying. What he meant was that every policy has a cost, and that cost should be carefully considered. It is easy to be deceived by lofty promises while disregarding what it takes to fulfill them. With her latest proposal for higher education changes, Hillary Clinton is employing the Santa Claus strategy of promising Americans free money in exchange for their votes. Read more here... 2. House Subcommittee to IRS: Give Innocent People Their Money Back - by Micheal Greibrok  A bipartisan group of members on the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee have come together to call for repayments to victims of civil asset forfeiture. Earlier this week, nine of the eleven members of the Subcommittee signed onto a letter to Jack Lew, Secretary of the Treasury, calling for repayments to a family of dairy farmers and others similarly situated. Randy and Karen Sowers, dairy farmers in Maryland, had $67,000 seized from their farm’s account by the IRS. The IRS accused them of structuring their bank deposits to avoid extra paperwork, although they never charged the couple with a crime. Structuring is a term used when an individual makes a number of deposits to the bank under the $10,000 threshold that triggers reporting requirements. Read more here... 3. You've Probably Broken the Law, and You Don't Even Know It - by Jason Pye In April 1790, the first Congress passed the Crimes Act, a law that established a criminal code in the United States. The Constitution listed only three crimes -- counterfeiting, piracy, and treason. The Crimes Act codified those crimes and added a little more than a dozen others, including murder, larceny, and perjury. The list of federal offenses was short and easily defined. Today, however, there are more than 4,500 federal statutes that carry criminal penalties. That is, at least, the best estimate. There has not been a full accounting of the number of criminal penalties since 2008. In 2013, the House Over-Criminalization Task Force asked the Congressional Research Service to, once again, take on this task. "CRS’ initial response to our request was that they lack the manpower and resources to accomplish this task," Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), co-chair of the task force, said at a June 2013 hearing. "And I think this confirms the point that all of us have been making on this issue and demonstrates the breadth of over-criminalization." This onslaught of federal criminal offenses is relatively recent in the United States' history. The American Bar Association, in a 1998 report, noted that "[m]ore than 40% of the federal provisions enacted since the Civil War have been enacted since 1970." If this explosive growth in the federal criminal code was not jaw-dropping enough, it pales in comparison to the number of federal regulatory crimes. Read more here... 4. It's Time For Jusice Reform 5. Physicians for Reform and FreedomWorks Team Up to Advance Free-Market Health Care Solutions - by Josh Withrow As ObamaCare continues to increase health care costs and wreak havoc upon the infrastructure of our health care system, physicians are at the front lines watching the damage first-hand. It is more important than ever that medical professionals who recognize the damage that government control is doing to their profession speak up and be among the loudest voices calling for reforms that re-center the practice of medicine where it belongs – at the relationship between individual doctors and patients. To that end, FreedomWorks is excited to announce a formal partnership project with Dr. Clare Gray and his group Physicians for Reform. Dr. Gray brings a unique voice to the health care debate – both as a practicing physician and as a student of the philosophy and policies underlying the practice of medicine. Read more here... Iris Somberg Press Secretary, FreedomWorks