After President Donald Trump’s first year back in office — marked by battered institutions, executive overreach and contempt for basic constraints on presidential power — Democrats would be wise to unify around an alternative message rooted in competence, restraint, affordability and institutional repair. There is no shortage of voters uneasy with Trump’s behavior and eager for a credible counterweight.
And yet, the party’s loudest message is an aggressive push for confiscation camouflaged by the rhetoric of moral clarity and fiscal responsibility. Democrats may have something to offer to voters caught in the middle, but how many will notice with large states like New York, Virginia and California pushing to punish the wealthy?
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A handful of Democratic state leaders understand that endless soak-the-rich politics undermine growth, revenue stability and long-term affordability. Colorado’s Gov. Jared Polis has pushed income tax cuts and openly argued that lower, broader taxes better serve workers and innovation. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro has focused on regulatory reform and supply-side growth rather than new tax grabs.
If Democrats want voters to believe they are an alternative to political excess, they should elevate voices that champion a return to rule-bound governance, stable tax policy and fiscal restraint. They would advance a national affordability agenda by expanding housing and energy supplies and dismantling the other bottlenecks making everyday life more expensive.
Alas, the party’s message setters seem to hope that voters mistake confiscation for compassion (e.g., Mamdani on the “warmth of collectivism”). Don’t be surprised if they convince fewer people than they hope to.
“Trump’s tariffs cost American households $1,000 last year.” (HT Matt Krogdahl) A slice:
President Donald Trump’s tariffs cost the average American household $1,000 last year, according to new research from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.
The cost is set to go even higher this year to $1,300 per household, assuming the existing tariffs stay in place, the research said.
Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker is correct in this:
What’s happened to the [Washington] Post is, in part, what’s happened to most traditional news organizations in the past 20 years with a glowing exception or two (thank you, dear subscriber): business models upended by the loss of advertising revenue, the proliferation of alternative sources of news, increasing specialization in audience choice. The idea that the market still has room for dozens of large newspapers offering similar soup-to-nuts products in an age of personalized taste and atomized content is as anachronistic as the thud of a thick daily printed paper on a doorstep at 5 a.m.
But the role journalists themselves have played in the collapse of trust among news consumers is most important. Wherever these people gather (believe me, I have been to more such therapy sessions than I can count), the keening is loud and outwardly directed. They lament the factors they say have led to their abandonment: social media “disinformation,” right-wing propagandists, Donald Trump.
Now they warn that the diminishment of the Post—and many other, less famous news sources—is a direct threat to our freedom, another ominous surrender by timorous bosses to Mr. Trump’s menace.
The president’s attacks on the media are indefensible and troubling. But it never seems to occur to his targets that the primary reason he gets away with them is that faith in the honesty of these institutions has already been devastated by their own tendentious work.
The list of recent media distortions—from the Russia-collusion hoax to Covid and Black Lives Matter—is long. But the most important form of bias, more insidious because it is necessarily hard to measure, isn’t what the news reports. It is what it chooses not to report. Investigative reporting is vital for accountability, but for most journalists the people and institutions that need to be held accountable are only those that fit into their selective demonology: corporations and their leaders, the rich, right-wing politicians. Labor unions, bureaucracies, academic institutions? Not so much.
GMU Econ alum Peter Jacobsen takes issue with some of Pope Leo’s statements about the modern economy.
There has been substantial progress in living conditions since the 1840s. We’re much better off than the Cratchits were. In fact, most people today enjoy far greater material comfort than did even Dickens’s rich miser Ebenezer Scrooge.
