Indexing Economic Freedom
I'm not a big fan of these surveys, but this still seems notable:
For the first time in the 11 years that the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal have been publishing the Index of Economic Freedom, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 freest economies in the world.
The slide is partly a matter of other countries getting better, as opposed to the United States getting worse. But "Sarbanes-Oxley in the category of regulation and aggressive use of antidumping law in trade policy have kept [America] from keeping pace with the best performers in economic freedom. Most alarming is the U.S.'s fiscal burden, which imposes high marginal tax rates for individuals and very high marginal corporate tax rates."