Tweet

… is from page 263 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

Whenever there is a proposal for a tax cut, media pundits demand to know how you are going to pay for it. But when there are proposals for more spending on social programs, those same pundits are strangely silent.

Tweet

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, is not impressed with Janet Yellen’s comprehension of some basic facts about trade.

Dan Ikenson shares, in Forbes, some important facts about trade. Two slices:

No single country in the world attracts more foreign direct investment than the United States. And no country’s businesses have invested more in the United States than Japan’s. That should be cause for celebration and flute-clinking in Washington this week, where President Biden is hosting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. But Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel has rendered discussion of cross-border investment a bit uncomfortable.

…..

In fact, a 2022 analysis found that, without the participation of foreign companies in the United States, U.S. manufacturing GDP would have been 8.4% to 20.9% ($177 billion-$463 billion) smaller than it was in 2019.

Let’s hope that George Will is correct that the “intensity of the debate about abortion policy is waning”. A slice:

Robert Nisbet, a philosophically sophisticated sociologist who provided intellectual ballast to conservatism in the second half of the 20th century, considered it incoherent for conservatives to make opposition to abortion a fundamental tenet of their doctrine. He said “the major theme of Western conservatism” is “the preservation, to the extent feasible, of the autonomy of social groups against the state.” And particularly the preservation of “the family’s authority over its own.”

Abortion has been considered an intractably divisive issue because it supposedly was not amenable to the basic business of politics: the splitting of differences. Nisbet noted, however, that “there is no record of any religion, including Christianity, ever pronouncing an accidental miscarriage as a death to be commemorated in prayer and ritual.” This, Nisbet implied, indicates an ancient, durable and widespread cultural tendency to say this: Societies that assert an interest in protecting life before birth are not required, by custom or a settled, articulated logic, to ban all deliberate terminations of pregnancies.

GMU Econ alum Adam Michel reports that “president Biden would make the US a tax rate outlier” – and not in a good way. A slice:

The Biden tax hikes would primarily fall on capital income, leading to less domestic investment, fewer jobs, and slower economic growth. According to estimates from the Tax Foundation, the budget proposal would reduce long‐​run GDP by 2.2 percent, hurt wages, and eliminate 788,000 jobs. This is likely a significant understatement of the negative economic effects. The analysis notes that the budget’s proposals will make America an international outlier on individual and corporate taxes.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal shares news of the dismaying ignorance of many Americans about the ‘distribution’ of the tax burden. A slice:

President Biden and Democratic tax raisers always say the rich don’t pay their “fair share.” Maybe one reason this line works politically is that most voters have no idea who really pays how much in taxes.

“To the best of your knowledge,” asked a new poll, “how much do you think the top 1% of taxpayers by income account for in terms of share of total federal income taxes paid: 1%, 12%, 42%, or 64%?”

The correct answer, as of 2020, is 42%. But less than a quarter of those surveyed guessed right. Twenty-two percent (including more than a third of Democrats) thought the top 1% of taxpayers paid only 1% of income taxes, which is wildly off the mark. Twenty-five percent suggested it was 12% of revenue. Nineteen percent shrugged and said they weren’t sure. As a communications strategy, Republicans could apparently do worse than simply repeat the official IRS data over and over.

The survey, sponsored by the Tax Foundation and conducted by Public Policy Polling, included nearly 2,800 registered voters, and it has other findings in a similar vein. A plurality of respondents, 40%, liked the idea of increasing the child tax credit. But 25% also said that they thought a tax credit and a tax deduction are the same thing. Another 20% incorrectly believed that a deduction is more valuable than a credit, and 19% weren’t sure.

Art Carden explains that “the middleman is a public servant.” A slice:

Is the middleman a devious villain preying on unsuspecting sellers from whom he can buy low and unsuspecting buyers to whom he can sell high? Hardly. The middleman creates wealth even though he doesn’t make anything. He makes his money by helping people who testify that they are better off by the very act of dealing with him. The middleman helps people in two ways that are hard to see but that are not, therefore, unimportant. Someone who buys an antique lamp at a yard sale for $2 helps out someone who wants to clean out the garage or attic or who needs cash now to take care of a medical emergency or cover expenses after losing a job. Even if selling the lamp for $2 is the best among bad options, the person selling the lamp reveals that the alternatives are even worse.

Graham Walker talks with Bill Evers and Phil Magness about Trump’s tariffs, Sacramento’s assault on the California labor market, and more.

My GMU Econ colleague Tyler Cowen discusses his assessment of who are the greatest economists of all time.

“Inflation is so back.”

Dan McLaughlin is correct: “Elizabeth Warren isn’t actually very smart.” A slice:

[Megan] McArdle published a longer critique of Warren’s scholarship in theAtlantic in 2010. Regarding Warren’s book The Two-Income Trap, for example, “some of her evidence doesn’t really support her thesis, and can be made to appear to support her thesis only by making some very weird choices about what metrics to use. . . . These are obvious issues she should have dealt with, . . . but they considerably weaken her thesis, and she doesn’t have a good answer for them. That’s a pattern I see over and over in her work.” In a follow-up on that book, McArdle asked, “Does it matter if we have a regulator who can use data consistently? . . . I don’t know which is worse: the notion that Elizabeth Warren understood what she was doing, or the notion that she didn’t.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The only difference between the tyrannical censorship of social media dissent by that Brazillian judge and the Biden American censorship machine is that the American courts have, so far, ruled Biden’s tyranny tyrannical. I hope the US Supreme Court agrees.

Tweet

… is from page 2 of Douglas Irwin’s excellent 1996 monograph Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy:

Any restraint on imports also acts, in effect, as a restraint on exports. The converse of this proposition is also true: when a government undertakes policies to expand the volume of exports, it cannot help but to expand the volume of imports as well.

DBx: Protectionists are uneasy with this reality – understandably so given that they regard exports as blessings in and of themselves and imports as unfortunate costs to be endured only if and insofar as these better enable the home country to export. In contrast, people who understand economics look with favor upon both exports and imports, the former being a useful means to obtain as many as possible of the latter.

Tweet

Here’s a letter to Politico:

Editor:

Paul McLeary and Lee Hudson report on “younger workers choosing good-paying service industry jobs” over jobs in shipyards and other manufacturing plants (“Navy shipyards compete with fast food, and are losing,” April 9). This fact points to a much-neglected reality – namely, most American manufacturing jobs, far from having been torn away from workers aching to hold them, instead were ‘destroyed’ by workers themselves seizing better employment opportunities in the service sector.

My grandfather and father spent their careers laboring in a shipyard, as did the fathers of many of my childhood friends. The work was monotonous, difficult, dirty, dangerous, and – contrary to a now-prevalent myth – by today’s standards poorly paid. Given the attractive opportunities increasingly available in the service sector to people of my generation, my father would have thought me deranged had I followed his career path. Not being deranged, I – like nearly every one of my friends – gratefully chose a career in the service sector.

The current nostalgia for long-lost American manufacturing jobs is had overwhelmingly by pundits and politicians few of whom, I’ll bet, ever saw up-close the labors of mid-20^th-century manufacturing workers – and none of whom, I’m certain, would want their sons or daughters to hold such jobs.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal (I thank Scott Lincicome for feedback on an earlier version of this letter):

Editor:

Attempting to justify government subsidization of his firm, Intel lobbyist Bruce Andrews writes that “domestic chipmaking capacity has been declining for decades” (Letters, April 10). This claim is a half-truth. What has shrunk is the share of global chip-making capacity located in the U.S. – from 37 percent in 1990 to 12 percent today. But this trend is due to increasing chip production abroad rather than to any absolute decline in U.S. production capacity. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, between 2000 and 2018 America’s capacity to produce wafers domestically rose by more than 50 percent, and that capacity is still rising.

Mr. Andrews will insist nevertheless that the relative fall in U.S. chip-making capacity is reason enough for the government to shower his firm with taxpayer dollars. What he’ll not reveal, however, is that Intel and other US-based chip producers own and operate chip-making facilities in Japan and other foreign countries, resulting in U.S.-based chip-producers’ share of the global semiconductor market being (in 2019) 47 percent – much more than double the sales share of the number two country, Korea, and nearly ten times greater than China’s share of these sales.

Even putting aside the immorality of forcing taxpayers to subsidize producers, the purely utilitarian case for semiconductor subsidies is a sham.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Tweet

Samuel Gregg reviews the new collection, edited by Ryan Bourne, on the importance of market prices.
Two slices:

Once upon a time, price theory and reasoning about prices was core to modern economics. Yet as Bryan P. Cutsinger and Alexander William Salter observe in a recent Free Market Institute paper, “the group that should be most committed to studying and appreciating (warts and all) the price system—professional economists—increasingly regards price theory as unworthy of attention.” To support this claim, they examine a range of datasets, ranging from the content of economics syllabi to the extent to which contemporary books on price theory are incorporated into graduate economics courses. Price theory, they conclude, “is, at best, a marginal part of today’s graduate curricula.”

This “Great Forgetting,” as Cutsinger and Salter call it, has consequences. One is that many young economists “focus on applied research using sophisticated statistical tools without an underlying theoretical framework to guide them.” The effects, however, go beyond formal economics. The marginalization of price theory in the academy is increasingly mirrored in the conduct of public policy—and the results are dire.

This problem constitutes the background to a new book of 28 essays, edited by the Cato Institute’s Ryan A. Bourne, entitled The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy (2024). Its central theme is that deep misconceptions about the workings of prices are driving bad policy. Bourne sees these expressed in the pronouncements on inflation’s causes by Democrat and Republican politicians. This is replicated in phenomena like increasingly favorable public opinion of price controls.

…..

Several themes regularly resurface throughout the book. The first is that a basic hostility to free commerce drives antipathy to free prices. The moment, for example, that inflation started to take off in America in January 2021, and as it became clear that this inflation was not transitory, politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren identified corporate greed as a central cause.

The flip side of this is the second common theme: the implicit confidence of so many policymakers—again, on the left and now some on the right—in the capacity of the state and technocrats to outguess the workings of prices. That often goes together with a moral conviction that such action is needed if vulnerable groups are going to be helped. If market prices get in the way of realizing such objectives, the logic goes, so much the worse for free prices.

Ben Zycher explains that “Biden’s EPA Can Justify His New EV Rules Only by Cooking the Books.” A slice:

It gets worse. EPA claims fuel savings of about $30 billion annually as a benefit of the regulation. This is bizarre. If there are significant fuel savings to be had, why do individuals need regulatory coercion to adopt the vehicle choices preferred by the Biden administration?

The answer is that vehicles consuming fuel must offer benefits in terms of the quality of transportation services greater in value than the cost of fuels. If fuel savings are a benefit of the regulation, then any decline in the quality of transportation services — comfort, reliability, range, safety, resilience in the face of temperature and weather fluctuations, et cetera — must be taken into account as a cost. Yet EPA ignores this, arguing instead that because of fuel savings, people will drive more, thus receiving “drive value benefits” of an additional $2 billion per year. Based on this flawed mode of analysis, we could get even greater benefits from savings on fuel if we banned all cars and went back to horse-drawn stage coaches and carts.

Eric Boehm reports on the economically uninformed effort of Dick Durbin and J.D. Vance to regulate credit-card fees.

Speaking of economically destructive government interventions, here’s the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on a Biden scheme to mandate minimum crew sizes for commercial trains. A slice:

The new rule shows how Democrats continue to rule by executive fiat when it suits their political purposes. Mr. Biden wants to reinforce his Big Labor support this year after angering some in the railroad union by signing a labor agreement into law to prevent a strike in 2022.

All of this reduces the chances that investments in efficiency will reduce the cost of shipping. A bad policy is being willed into force by a combination of labor interests and political opportunism. Your government at work.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino breaks down Biden’s student-debt ‘forgiveness’ schemes.

Jason Sorens and Thomas Savidge offer sound advice about historical preservation.

John Stossel warns of the negative consequences that are destined to arise in the wake of new labor-department diktats.

NPR reporter Uri Berliner describes the descent of NPR. Three slices:

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

…..

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.

…..

Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.

John Tierney talks with Rob Montz about covid’s “chaos coordinators.”

Tweet

… is from page 89 of the 5th edition (2020) of Douglas Irwin’s excellent book Free Trade Under Fire:

Second, protectionist policies distort domestic prices in a way that leads to inefficiency (wasted resources), or in economic jargon, a deadweight loss. As import restrictions push the domestic price of a good above the world price, domestic firms produce more (at a higher cost than the goods would be available on the world market), while consumers buy less than they otherwise would, forgoing some of the benefits of consumption. The inefficiency associated with these distortions of incentives imposes a deadweight loss on the overall economy. Trade barriers are like an income transfer in which ten dollars is taken from consumer while giving only eight dollars to producers, resulting in a two-dollar loss to the economy as a whole.

DBx: Yes.

The lot of the protectionist is a sad and difficult one, for the task that he or she chooses to perform is to demonstrate that the state of reality is such that a wise government can arrange to subtract two from ten and wind up with a sum of 15.

One reason the case for free trade must be repeated over and over again and again is that powerful producer groups are forever attempting to gull the public to believe that 10-2=15. But there’s an additional reason why the case for free trade must repeatedly be repeated: Protectionism is embraced not just by rent-seekers but also by many well-meaning people who mysteriously seem to be intoxicated by the illogic of 10-2=15. It would, after all, be oh so wonderful if we humans could get 15 units of output simply by having the government forcibly take from us two units for every of ten in our possession.

Individuals who embrace and peddle such illogic will not be convinced by logic (or evidence). If an adult passionately insists that 10-2=15, what arguments are at your disposal to convince that person that he or she is mistaken?

Tweet

In my latest column for AIER I argue that the case for treating greenhouse-gas emissions as a positive externality that demands a response by government is as strong as, but no stronger than, the case for treating greenhouse-gas emissions as a negative externally that demands a response by government. Two slices:

Global warming contributes also in an even more-direct manner to human betterment. The reason is that cold weather kills about ten times the number of people who are killed by hot weather, so warmer weather reduces the killer cold to which people are exposed. The benefits to humanity of raising global temperatures are impossible to deny.

Unfortunately, though, the emitting of globe-warming carbon is (as economists call it) a “positive externality.”

For reasons given above, carbon emissions which warm the globe are obviously positive; they promote the improvement of material well-being and even save lives. Yet they are also an externality; carbon emitters, receiving no compensation for their contributions to global warming, have inadequate incentives to emit carbon. Because the social value of the benefits of these emissions is not ‘internalized’ on carbon emitters, when you drive your automobile you take no account of the beneficial effects on ice-cap melting of your driving, so you drive too little. Ditto for your neighbor who operates a factory; being unpaid for the contribution that her carbon emissions make to global warming, she emits less carbon than she would if she were paid for this contribution. An unfortunate result of the fact that the benefits of emitting carbon aren’t fully ‘internalized’ on motorists and factory owners is that too little carbon is emitted. Fortunately, an easy textbook solution is available to motivate individuals and firms to emit more carbon. That solution, of course, is government intervention.

Government could simply command motorists and factory owners to emit more carbon. But the sophisticated and much-preferred economic solution is instead for the government to subsidize carbon emissions. Government need only determine the socially optimal amount by which carbon emissions should be increased and then dispense subsidies in the amounts required to bring about these higher emissions. Problem solved. It’s right there in economics textbooks – in easy-to-grasp graphical form in ECON 101 texts and in pages of difficult and dense equations in ECON 999 texts.

…..

Despite the fact that the melting of Arctic ice caps resulted in the undeniably beneficial opening of shorter, faster trade routes – and despite the fact that cold weather is more lethal than hot weather – I don’t really want to encourage the government to subsidize carbon emissions. For starters, I worry that government officials would abuse the power to subsidize. But a far larger concern is that there is, in fact, no way to know if the benefits of a government-engineered increase in carbon emissions would be worth the costs.

While the evidence mentioned above about the benefits of higher global temperatures is genuine and significant, such evidence isn’t sufficient to carry the day in favor of government subsidization of carbon subsidies. After all, the consequences of successfully arranging for an increase in global temperatures, contrary to what you might infer from ‘the science’ as it appears in textbooks and academic papers, wouldn’t all be positive. Some consequences – and perhaps many – would be negative. So prudence demands that we ask: What might these negative consequences be, and how do they compare to the positive ones? If our obsession with increasing carbon emissions were to cause, say, the melting of another 60,000 square miles of Arctic ice, might the very real benefit that we predict, notice, and celebrate – namely, the further enlargement of ocean shipping lanes – be outweighed by some unpredicted and unnoticed cost elsewhere on earth? Possibly so. This possibility is enough to counsel against leaping too quickly from our textbook learning to the conclusion that the government should subsidize carbon emissions.

Economic Complexity is Vast

The chief problem isn’t the complexity of the natural environment. The chief problem is the complexity of the global economy – a complexity that’s magnitudes greater than that of the natural environment. We simply have no way to trace out more than a minuscule fraction of the economic consequences, positive and negative, of government efforts to alter a phenomenon as massive as the earth’s environment. To subsidize carbon emissions requires resources. From where will these resources come? The global-economy’s complexity makes it practically impossible to answer this question in detail. This lack of knowledge implies that we can’t be certain that whatever benefits arise from our engineered increase in global temperatures will exceed the costs created by the taxation necessary to secure the funds used as subsidies.

Tweet

Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn harshly criticizes the brutes in Beijing for their persecution of the great Jimmy Lai. Three slices:

No one doubts that the government will get its conviction in the end. But what all the testimony against Mr. Lai really shows is a passionate media proprietor who used his wealth and newspaper to advance his principles.

…..

Mark Clifford, a newspaperman who served on Apple Daily’s board, says the trial itself is an example of the trends Mr. Lai worried about. The proceedings resemble more a communist Chinese show trial than the fair judicial proceedings that once gave international investors confidence in Hong Kong as a global financial center.

“First they took his newspaper from him, and then they denied him his choice of lawyer in the most important trial of his life,” says Mr. Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker,” a forthcoming biography of Mr. Lai. “He’s being tried before three national-security judges rather than a jury.

“Foreign investors in Hong Kong now have to worry about something they never did before—could my company be next if we run afoul of the party line?”

…..

One longtime Hong Konger who asks not to be named for security reasons put it this way: “The old narrative that foreign money was behind the whole thing has disappeared. By Hong Kong standards Jimmy Lai is not that rich. Yet he’s funding the whole movement. He was even alleged to be buying influence in America.

“It’s a case of reverse collusion: Evil Americans were not trying to overthrow the dictatorship, it was one man’s desperate effort to save freedom in Hong Kong. The shame is that he was the only one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest business leaders to stand up for the system that made them rich.”

Back in the Fall of 2018, Simon Lester rightly criticized American trade hypocrisy. A slice:

And Trump’s claims about the WTO have no basis in fact. He says, “We lose the lawsuits, almost all of the lawsuits in the WTO—within the WTO. Because we have fewer judges than other countries.” The reality is that the U.S. record in WTO dispute settlement is very similar to that of other countries.

But the cheating narrative is not just wrong, it is dan- gerous. When we accuse foreigners of behaving unfairly, we fan the flames of nativism. Spreading the myth that others are taking advantage of us gives rise to xenophobia, which we have seen intensify in recent years. When politi- cal leaders and commentators continually cast aspersions on foreigners, people start to believe the foreigners are do- ing something wrong. Trump may be an extreme version of this, but people on both sides have been guilty over the years. The result has been a largely mistaken conception of how other governments behave on trade, and growing anti-foreigner sentiment.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries “Biden’s latest lawless student loan forgiveness.” A slice:

Mr. Biden’s new loan forgiveness is still illegal. The High Court stressed that student loan forgiveness is a major question that requires clear authorization from Congress. But Mr. Biden seems to believe he can jam the courts by automatically forgiving debt before a judge has time to stop him.

The White House says most borrowers won’t even have to apply for loan relief. Sometime before the November election, Mr. Biden will simply declare their debt forgiven. That means a future Congress and a President Trump might be unable to undo the lawless act. Where are the press scolds who warn about a President who threatens democracy?

Mr. Biden is setting an awful precedent that Donald Trump will no doubt exploit. If courts say he can’t re-purpose defense money to build a wall on the southern border, he could simply use another means to do so. The right will cheer him on as the left is Mr. Biden. The rule of law and taxpayers are the losers.

Barton Swain has the measure of Biden the man – a measure that is as unflattering as it is accurate. Two slices:

He puts one in mind of Earl Haig’s remark about the Earl of Derby: “A very weak-minded fellow I am afraid, and, like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who sat on him!”

Mr. Biden bears the marks of many a backside. For most of his career he supported the Hyde Amendment barring the use of federal funds for abortion. Running for president in 2020, Mr. Biden announced he favored repealing the amendment. In 2019, during an early Democratic primary debate, Sen. Kamala Harris lashed Mr. Biden for opposing forced busing in the 1970s. He had taken that position a half-century before for the excellent reason that the public overwhelmingly hated busing, but in 2019 he felt obliged to sound as if he half-supported it.

…..

If the left’s avant-garde wants a 32-hour workweek today—Mr. Sanders is pushing it—you’re safe to assume that a second-term Biden administration will make that demand, too. Racial reparations? The criminalization of “misgendering” and other forms of “hate speech”? Denuclearization? Nationalization of industries? Mr. Biden isn’t there yet, but give him time. It’ll only take the right people to sit on him.

Jeff Yass writes that “Biden is the worst president ever for [school] choice.” A slice:

I was wrong to think that Democrats would support school choice to help their constituents out of poverty. Although polling consistently shows that a majority of minority parents want school choice, progressive politicians consistently oppose all such programs.

To understand why, consider who’s funding their campaigns: teachers unions. For unions, choice means competition, and urban public schools with low proficiency ratings can’t compete. Unions know the only way to keep their political power is to keep children trapped in failing schools. Give parents access to other educational options, and they’ll ditch the schools that take them for granted.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle understandably worries about the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence.

Also worrying about the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence is Doug Bandow. A slice:

As the Federal Reserve unwinds its essentially zero interest “quantitative easing” policy, Uncle Sam is now paying higher rates. Moreover, Washington must refinance maturing debt. Explained CBO: “The projected increase in 2024 occurs primarily because the average interest rate that the Treasury pays on its debt is higher this year and is expected to rise further as maturing securities are refinanced at rates that exceed those that prevailed when the securities were issued.” As a result, interest costs are rising faster than any other federal program and have doubled since 2020. This year, interest payments on the debt will exceed the cost of every federal program other than Social Security.

Sally Satel reports that officials at Massachusetts General are sacrificing the health of their patients to the woke god devil.