Incoherence, thy name is government. Example: The Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act produced insurance policies so unaffordable nobody will buy them without a large government subsidy to defray most of the cost. Or take Joe Biden. He declared climate change an existential risk and then piled on tariffs to make it more expensive for Americans to buy solar panels and electric vehicles to fight climate change.
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A couple of things to note: The Georgia bust wasn’t a quickly cooked-up raid. It was the fruit of a months-long investigation by multiple federal and state agencies.
Overseeing matters was the U.S. attorney for Georgia’s Southern District, acting on a court-issued warrant. The targets weren’t asylum scofflaws or MS-13 or Tren de Aragua gangsters. They were business-class victims of America’s failure to provide a basis for orderly legal visitations that are useful for the U.S. to receive.
Mr. Trump himself first noncommittally suggested U.S. enforcement was “just doing its job,” then quickly turned to blaming the inadequacy of U.S. procedures to admit “very smart people, with great technical talent” to support the hundreds of billions of dollars in transplant factories he wants credit for.
You can believe his flummoxing. With prosecutorial power comes the duty of prosecutorial discretion. If every technical violation were prosecuted, all Americans would be in jail for ripping the tags off mattresses.
Health warning: Any mention of the H-1B program invites a temporary reader coma; discussion of the full panoply of U.S. visa types—20-plus for business and professional visitors alone—risks permanent brain damage.
Let’s just say Korean firms have been tearing their hair over the visa morass for workers needed to support investments they’ve been making at both Biden and Trump behest.
Tosin Akintola argues that “the GAIN AI Act looks more like protectionism than national security.”
GMU Econ alum Adam Michel looks at the data and reasonably reaches this conclusion:
The US tax system is highly progressive, with rates rising from single digits for the lowest-income Americans to between 38 and 73 percent for the wealthiest taxpayers. The headline from a recent study that billionaires pay lower tax rates than average Americans makes several errors. After appropriate adjustments, the data show that billionaires pay tax rates significantly higher than those of most, if not all, other Americans.
Also from Adam Michel is this tweet: (HT Scott Lincicome)
I’m biased, but my main takeaway from the Trump administration so far is that libertarians were right all along.
Give the federal government more and more power, and eventually someone will abuse it.
Wherever rent control exists, subsidies all too often flow to the well-off and the well-connected. In the words of a 2022 Johns Hopkins University analysis of New York’s rent caps, the discounts “are not progressively distributed” — i.e., low-income residents don’t get a bigger break on their rent, and “many with high incomes get very sizable discounts.”
Massachusetts learned that lesson three decades ago, when voters approved a ballot question banning rent control statewide. Researchers had found that rent-controlled properties in Cambridge were disproportionately occupied not by the elderly but by tenants in their prime earning years. When tenants were analyzed by occupation, there were many highly skilled professionals and managers among the rent control beneficiaries — including Cambridge’s then-mayor, Ken Reeves; Justice Ruth Abrams of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; and the crown prince of Denmark, who last year acceded to the throne as King Frederik X.
When rent control ended in Cambridge following the 1994 vote, the effect was eye-opening: Of the nearly 6,100 tenants who moved out of their apartments, 21 percent had been earning over $80,000 — more than twice the median household income in Massachusetts at the time. Among Cambridge renters as a whole, by contrast, only 9 percent earned as much. As for those moving into the newly deregulated units, most earned less than $40,000 per year. In short, rent control turned out to be largely a boon for the well-to-do. Once it ended, those beneficiaries finally moved, opening up apartments for those who needed them. Again and again, the pattern recurs.
Kimberlee Josephson draw an important economic lesson from the movie Tommy Boy.
