In the dashboard's final ranking order, graded by the middle result per dollar spent: Excellent $10 or more back per $1 · Good $2 to $10 · Mid $1 to $2 · Bad under $1 (costs exceed benefits) · Worst below zero (destroys value). The dashboard does the math; this is the why, three sentences each.
| Rank | Policy | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free Trade | Excellent | Dropping every tariff and quota on your own, without waiting for anyone else, returns about $90 to $2,800 per dollar of adjustment cost. Countries that liberalise grow about 1.5 percentage points a year faster. The tariffs still in place in 2026 cost US households $760 to $940 a year each. |
| 2 | Innovation Prizes | Excellent | Prizes and advance market commitments pay only when someone delivers a defined result, so donors buy outcomes rather than promises. The research they would fund has some of the best returns anywhere, about $11.80 to $348 per dollar when clean energy, farm and geoengineering research are weighted equally. It costs taxpayers nothing, which is the best price of all. |
| 3 | Maternal and Newborn Care | Excellent | Trained staff, clean delivery, drugs to stop bleeding, antibiotics and newborn resuscitation could prevent most newborn deaths in poor countries. Basic hospital upgrades return $62 to $80 per dollar on a full cost of about $4.7 billion a year, or $28.50 to $66.50 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund them is counted. Few things on this list save lives so cheaply, and private funders could carry much of the bill. |
| 4 | End the Fed & Implement Neutral Reserve Currency | Excellent | Before 1914 most of the world ran on gold, prices held steady for decades, and countries sharing the standard traded 18 to 60% more with each other. Ending the Fed and backing money with gold, bitcoin or a commodity basket removes the inflation tax and halves the rate of banking crises, at a small cost for holding the reserve. It returns about $6.40 to $144 per dollar, and the main risk is a rigid money supply in a deep slump. |
| 5 | Contraception & Family Planning | Excellent | About 214 million women in poor countries want to avoid pregnancy and lack modern contraception, and reaching them costs about $3.6 billion a year. The return is about $20 to $112 per dollar, or $6.79 to $84 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund it is counted, with health benefits alone worth about $40. A 15-year trial in Ghana adds that paying for girls to finish secondary school delayed childbearing, raised their earnings and halved infant deaths among their children. |
| 6 | Tuberculosis Treatment | Excellent | Tuberculosis is curable, yet it still kills on a huge scale in poor countries. Rapid tests, screening and full treatment courses would save close to a million lives a year at roughly $2,000 per death averted. The return is $26 to $79 per dollar on about $6.7 billion a year, or $9.54 to $62 after the cost of raising the taxes that fund it, one of the best places on the list for a philanthropist's money. |
| 7 | Childhood Immunization | Excellent | Routine childhood vaccines in poor countries return about $14 to $94 per dollar on full cost, or $4.81 to $72 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund them is counted, still one of the best-documented bargains in health. The core package costs about $1.5 billion a year in programme spending and saves about 523,000 lives a year. The hard part is reaching the last 10 to 15% of children, and private donors are well placed to pay for it. |
| 8 | Malaria Prevention | Excellent | Malaria still kills about 610,000 people a year, mostly African children, and bed nets, seasonal preventive drugs and cheap treatment return $17 to $45 per dollar on full cost, or $5.81 to $33.60 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund them is counted. GiveWell puts the price of a life saved at $4,000 to $5,500. The global funding gap is about $5.4 billion a year, an easy target for private philanthropy. |
| 9 | Tobacco and Alcohol Taxes | Excellent | Higher prices cut smoking and heavy drinking, especially among the young and poor, and doubling real cigarette prices could cut smoking by about a third. Estimates run from about $3 to $100 per dollar of social cost, after counting tax collection, smuggling enforcement and a 10% loss to illicit cigarettes, and from $1.47 to $98 once the cost of raising the taxes that pay for collection and enforcement is counted. Of all the taxes a government can levy, one on a product that kills its users is among the easiest to defend. |
| 10 | School Deworming | Excellent | A pill once or twice a year clears worms that sap children's nutrition and school attendance, at about 30 cents a child. A 20-year randomized follow-up in Kenya found treated children earned and consumed more as adults, a 37% annual social return. The wider evidence is disputed, so the range runs from $6 to $100 per dollar, or $2 to $75 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund it is counted, on a programme costing under $0.3 billion a year. |
| 11 | HIV Prevention | Good | Three randomized trials found voluntary medical circumcision cuts men's risk of acquiring HIV by about 60%, for a one-off procedure costing under $100. The programme in the hardest-hit Southern African countries costs only $30 to $35 million a year and saves more in future HIV treatment than it costs. Returns of $6.80 to $53 per dollar, or $2.26 to $39 after the cost of raising the taxes that fund it, are falling where HIV is declining, which is a nice problem to have. |
| 12 | Blood Pressure and Heart Drugs | Good | Aspirin at the time of a heart attack returns about $63 per dollar and blood-pressure pills about $47, and both are cheap generics. Heart attacks and strokes are now the leading killers in many poor countries, and a primary-care scale-up costs roughly $2.4 billion a year. Estimates run from about $3 to $59 per dollar, or $1.02 to $44 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund it is counted. |
| 13 | Micronutrient Supplementation | Good | Iron, zinc and vitamin A in flour, salt and oil, plus prenatal tablets and vitamin A capsules for young children, cost cents to a few dollars per person a year. Vitamin A capsules cut child deaths by about 12% in trials, and iodized salt alone returns about $30 per dollar. The whole package costs about half a billion dollars a year for $5.60 to $35 back per dollar, or $1.85 to $26 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund it is counted. |
| 14 | Secure Property Rights | Good | About 1.1 billion adults say their rights to their land or home are insecure, which makes it hard to borrow against, sell or safely improve what they hold. Titling costs $5 to $25 a parcel, and titled families in Peru and Argentina worked more, built more and kept their kids in school longer. It returns about $6 to $23 per dollar, or $1.97 to $17.50 once the cost of raising the taxes that pay for titling is counted, a cheap way to turn dead capital into wealth. |
| 15 | Deregulate the Economy (Top Ten) | Good | Ten rules come off the books at once: occupational licensing, minimum wages, restrictive zoning, slow FDA approvals, the sugar program, community-bank compliance, the Jones Act, EPA rules that fail their own cost test, compulsory collective bargaining and antitrust enforcement. Licensing alone costs consumers up to $203 billion a year, and the most favourable published estimate puts the growth cost of federal regulation since 1980 at nearly a quarter of GDP. Net of the health and environmental benefits those rules buy, the package returns about $1.28 to $26.37 per dollar, with zoning's true size and that growth estimate the big unknowns. |
| 16 | Privatize Government Land | Good | Four western states earn $14.51 per dollar of management cost on their trust lands, while the Forest Service and BLM earn 73 cents. Selling federal land and giving radio spectrum full, tradable property rights returns about $1.66 to $10 per dollar, and 60 MHz more mobile spectrum alone is worth about $8.8 billion a year to consumers. The open question is recreation and conservation value, which for the national parks alone is put at about $92 billion a year. |
| 17 | Tradable Fishing Quotas | Good | Tradable quotas give fishers a secure, sellable share of the catch and end the race to empty the sea. Across more than 11,000 fisheries, those with catch shares were about half as likely to collapse. Each dollar of cost, including temporary catch cuts, returns about $2.80 to $16, or 93 cents to $15.60 when governments pay the management bill from taxes instead of charging fishers. |
| 18 | Open Borders | Good | Letting people live and work in any country moves workers to where they are several times more productive; identical low-skill workers earn about four times as much in the US as at home. Published models put the gain at 35 to 57% of world output before moving costs, the biggest total gain of any policy on this list. Moving billions of people costs about $18 to $19 trillion a year, so each dollar returns about $2.14 to $3.34, with most of the gain going to migrants and poor countries. |
| 19 | Climate Adaptation | Good | Early-warning systems, flood defences, mangroves and marshes protect people from storms and floods, and official reviews find about $1.70 to $10 back per dollar, or 58 cents to $7.46 once the cost of raising the taxes that fund them is counted. Early warnings alone return $4 to $36 per dollar, and covering every developing country costs about $1 billion a year. Helping people cope with the weather they already get is the most practical climate spending there is. |
| 20 | Abolish the Income Tax | Good | Each dollar of income tax costs somewhere between 13 cents and $2 extra in lost work, saving and investment, and filing adds another $329 to $501 billion a year. Repeal means replacing about $3.1 trillion a year, mostly by shrinking government. The return is about $1.24 to $3.20 per dollar of revenue given up, and nobody will miss tax day. |
| 21 | End Bailouts and Deposit Insurance | Mid | Deposit insurance and bailouts let banks take risks with someone else's money, and explicit insurance makes crises more likely where institutions are weak. Bank-run models still value the first dollars of cover highly, so the range is wide, at about 50 cents to $5.50 per dollar. Private replacement insurance would cost about $2.9 billion a year, and depositors would finally know who carries the risk. |
| 22 | Privatize Social Security | Mid | Funded personal accounts let workers own their retirement savings, and about 2% of payroll eventually replaces the 12.4% payroll tax. Capital and wages rise, though today's workers must also keep paying for the benefits already promised. Counting both sides, each dollar of transition cost returns about $1 to $2. |
| 23 | Energy Without Subsidies | Mid | Governments spend $634 billion to $1.4 trillion a year subsidising energy, mostly fossil fuels, and those subsidies waste about 40 cents of every dollar while raising emissions. Ending all of them, renewables and nuclear included, and clearing the way to license reactors, drill, build pipelines and export gas returns about 78 cents to $2.16 per dollar, counting every subsidy removed as money moved from recipients back to taxpayers. The low end reflects losing the emission cuts that renewable subsidies buy; faster nuclear licensing and letting development banks fund gas plants in poor countries add gains no study has yet priced. |
| 24 | Medicare Drug Price Negotiation | Mid | Medicare is a buyer, and haggling over price is what buyers do; enrollees save about $2.2 billion a year out of pocket on the first 25 drugs. Patients who pay less for medicines take more of them, which on these savings means about 3,583 deaths averted a year. The cost is a small loss of new drugs, about 13 of 1,300 over 30 years, so each dollar returns between 54 cents and $2.79 once the cost of raising the taxes for running the programme is counted. |
| 25 | Ocean Protection | Bad | Marine protected areas look good on paper, with the most complete global model finding $1.40 to $2.70 back per dollar, or up to $2.61 once the cost of raising the taxes for managing the areas is counted. That model assumes they work, and a Nature study of 87 of them found only 9 had the features that make protection effective. Counting benefits only where protection works gives about 10 to 12 cents per dollar, and fishers carry most of the cost through lost access. |
| 26 | Global Carbon Tax | Bad | A $135-per-tonne global tax is about twice the price the leading climate-economy model calls optimal, and published studies put its cost at 5.6% of world output, roughly $5.9 trillion a year. Its climate benefits come to 2.2 to 3.1% of world output, so each dollar returns about 16 to 55 cents. A world economy 5 to 11% smaller also means an estimated 152,000 to 505,000 more infant deaths a year in poor countries. |
| 27 | Conserve Forests | Bad | Paying people to keep tropical forests standing sounds cheap, and a randomized trial in Uganda did find $2.40 of climate benefit per dollar while the payments lasted. Most of the money ends up buying carbon credits, though, and only about 6% of those reflected real reductions, while 42 to 95% of protection in one place is offset by clearing somewhere else. That leaves about 9 cents back per dollar on a bill of roughly $33 billion a year, and once the cost of raising the taxes that fund it is counted, each dollar returns between 3 cents and $1.79. |
| 28 | Rent Control | Bad | Over 85% of voters in one large survey support capping rents, while 80 to 89% of the economists on a leading expert panel say caps don't help. In San Francisco and Saint Paul, covered tenants gained but landlords pulled 15% of units off the rental market, which raised rents for everyone else. Add rent boards, apartments held by the wrong households and faster decay, and each dollar moved returns only 4 to 62 cents. |
| 29 | Renewable Energy Subsidies | Worst | Wind and solar subsidies do cut emissions, but at wildly different prices, up to about $2,100 per tonne of CO2 for solar in Germany and Spain. Counting the federal credits and the higher power bills from state mandates, the cost is around $238 billion a year, and once the cost of raising the taxes behind the credits is counted, each dollar returns only about 1 to 58 cents. Where wind and solar are already cheapest they need no help, and where they aren't, the subsidy buys very expensive tonnes. |
| 30 | Combustion Car Ban | Worst | On coal-heavy grids like most of Asia's, an electric car can do more pollution damage than the gasoline car it replaces, and an analysis of the UK's 2030 ban puts costs at five times the benefits. Battery trucks cost more than twice as much as diesel and carry about 13,800 lb less, and batteries, grid upgrades and chargers for cars run about $535 to $985 billion a year. If electric vehicles are better, people will buy them without being ordered to. |
| 31 | Global Plastic Ban | Worst | Canada's single-use plastics ban returns about 31 cents per dollar and England's straw ban as little as 3 cents. The paper, glass, metal and cotton substitutes usually weigh more and emit more greenhouse gas, adding an estimated $394 billion a year in environmental damage. Add a GDP cost of about $870 billion a year and a global ban returns somewhere between minus 42 and plus 30 cents per dollar. |
| 32 | Billionaire Wealth Tax | Worst | A 2% yearly minimum tax on the world's roughly 2,800 billionaires would raise $242 billion a year if perfectly enforced, and that money is a transfer, not a gain. Raising it costs from 34 cents to nearly $2 per dollar, as wealth is hidden, moved or valued down and less capital is built, and valuation and collection add $28.5 billion a year. Counting the cost of raising other taxes to run it, each dollar collected yields between a $1.20 loss and a 59-cent net gain, and once lost-income deaths are counted the middle result is a loss. |
| 33 | Block Social Security and Medicare Changes | Worst | Shielding Social Security and Medicare from any change polls at net +72, but the Trustees put the gap at about $535 billion a year on average over 75 years. Blocking higher retirement ages means that gap gets filled with taxes or borrowing, and it forgoes the extra work and tax revenue of longer careers. Each dollar returns between minus $1.27 and plus 66 cents, and younger workers get the bill. |
| 34 | Student Loan Forgiveness | Worst | The 2022 forgiveness plan would have cost about $400 billion, roughly $40 billion a year over a decade, and the benefits tilt toward higher earners. Expected future forgiveness encourages more borrowing, which one model says adds 39 to 63% to the cost, and much of the extra student lending ends up as higher tuition. Each dollar is worth a dollar to borrowers but costs taxpayers more, so the return runs from about minus $1.39 to plus 67 cents. |
| 35 | Digital ID Mandate | Worst | Only 42% of Britons back the UK plan, and the best evidence comes from two randomized trials in India. When biometric checks became compulsory for food rations, corruption did not fall, costs rose about 8% and hundreds of thousands of legitimate recipients lost benefits, about minus $1 per dollar, or minus $1.94 once the cost of raising the taxes for the new card readers is counted. A carefully managed biometric payment system in Andhra Pradesh roughly paid for itself at about $1.05 per dollar, or 78 cents after the cost of raising taxes, and that is before counting privacy and surveillance risks. |
| 36 | Medicare for All | Worst | Medicare for All has 66% support and would add $1.5 to $3.0 trillion a year in federal spending. Taxes on that scale could shrink GDP by as much as 9%, and Canadian-length waits of 30 weeks would cost patients about $67 billion a year in lost time. Even counting lives saved, each dollar destroys 57 to 77 cents of value. |
| 37 | Price Controls | Worst | Price caps poll well, with 65% of likely voters backing a crackdown on grocery price gouging, but 88% of surveyed economists agree widespread controls create substantial distortions. High prices in an emergency are the signal that pulls supplies toward the people who need them most. Under the 1970s gasoline controls, queues alone burned about 116% of the money moved from sellers to buyers, and each dollar shifted destroys 44 cents to $1.29 of value. |
| 38 | Global Universal Basic Income | Worst | A randomized US trial found every dollar paid out cut household earnings by 28 to 37 cents, with partners cutting work as much as recipients. A global version would cost roughly a third of world GDP, far more than taxes can raise without heavy losses, and one model finds it would shrink GDP by about 13%. Each dollar returns between minus $1.26 and minus $1.09, while donor-funded cash in poor Kenyan villages shows the same idea working well as charity. |
| 39 | Green New Deal | Worst | Here every Western nation adopts the Green New Deal, and its outlays alone come to about a third of Western GDP, more than four times the most extra revenue US taxes could ever raise. Because only the West cuts, 12% to 130% of the reduction leaks abroad, and at the top of that range world emissions actually rise. Each dollar destroys about $1.19 to $1.38 of value, and the slower growth costs an estimated 42,000 to 164,000 infant lives a year in poor countries. |
| 40 | 15-Minute Cities | Worst | Daily needs within a short walk is a fine planning idea, but this version turns C40's 'ambitious' consumption targets into mandates: no meat or dairy, three new clothing items a year, no private cars and one short-haul return flight every three years. The cost runs from about $1.9 to $8.0 trillion a year, including up to $1.9 trillion of lost productivity as 24-minute car commutes become 48 minutes by transit, against $0.3 to $0.8 trillion of benefits. Every dollar spent destroys between 92 cents and $12 of value, which makes this the worst policy on the list. |