This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 25th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The United States, after a long slide, appears to be making a rebound in the area of economic freedom.

The Cato Institute is the U.S. publisher of the Frazier Institute's Economic Freedom of the

World Index out today.

Cato's Ian Vasquez comments on the new data. In a lot of recent

reports on the economic freedom of the world, the United States had been in

steady decline.

What is different about this report relative in terms of the United States

versus other countries?

For the first time in many years, we report that the United States is back in the top 10

freest economies in the world. This used to be the case for decades. Our data

starts in 1970 and typically the United States was very close to the top,

second, third, or fourth place.

And then that began to change around the year 2000, when under the Bush administration afterwards there was a fairly steady

decline that accelerated with the Obama administration but in the last few

years of the Obama administration, but in the last few years of the Obama administration, there was

then a slow uptick in economic freedom for the United States and given that our data is two years lagged in order to compare

with countries all around the world.

We're measuring 2016, the last year of the Obama administration.

And finally, the United States has improved its

economic freedom rating but I hasten to add that it is still far below or

notably below the high level of economic freedom that the United States

...