The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership for 2025 on Wednesday, allowing for a complete appraisal of the Biden years. It shows that the union membership rate for all U.S. workers is 10 percent — down from when Biden took office in 2021. For private-sector workers, the rate is 5.9 percent, tied with 2024 for the record low.
It’s the continuation of a long-running downward trend in union membership. It has little to do with which party controls the White House or which labor policies a president pursues. The union membership rate has fallen during every presidential term since the 1980s. It fell by 0.4 percentage points during Donald Trump’s first term and by 0.3 percentage points during Biden’s term.
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The best proof, though, is that if joining a union got workers a big pay bump, the union membership rate wouldn’t be declining for as long as it has been, even when pro-union politicians are in office. Union membership rates have been falling across the developed world as the global economy becomes more competitive and outdated forms of organization no longer apply. Unions stick around in government, where there is no competition and outdated forms of organization are the rule.
George Will tells of the final stages of a case study of the warmth of collectivism: Cuba. Two slices:
The Museum of Socialism, a.k.a. Cuba, is plummeting in a tightening gyre. The 67-year-old Communist regime, which has existed during 14 U.S. presidencies (counting Donald Trump twice), might not survive into a 15th.
Its iron fist grips an island prison that has fewer than 11 million — perhaps under 9 million — inmates. In this decade, more than a million have escaped; the regime considers this partly a safety valve, exporting dissidents. Most have gone into America’s Cuban diaspora. “Cuban society is a rudderless, drifting hulk,” writes Juan Antonio Blanco, president of a Madrid-based think tank, in the Journal of Democracy. “Amid the institutional anomie, ordinary citizens endure a daily hell of ever-increasing hardships.”
Fidel Castro, who perhaps was a billionaire when he died in 2016, was proudly anti-bourgeois, telling Cubans: “We are not a consumer society.” He got that right. Cuba, a threadbare geopolitical irrelevancy, was once famous for cigars and sugar. It has had to import tobacco from Spain and sugar from Brazil.
The Financial Times reports that drivers wait hours to fill their gas tanks. Garbage accumulates in streets because refuse trucks lack fuel. Airlines avoid Havana because fuel is unavailable. Abandoned hotels, built for tourism that never materialized, line Havana’s waterfront. Soviet-era oil-fired electricity generators fail from lack of maintenance. People trek from the provinces to Havana to buy expensive candles that burn for about an hour.
Patients who need operations are told to bring to the hospital their own sheets, gauze, bandages, even scalpels. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Michael J. Bustamante, chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, says “an outbreak of dengue and other mosquito-borne viruses has reached epidemic proportions.”
In the 1930s, apologists for Joseph Stalin’s use of terror and engineered famine to produce socialism, complacently said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” George Orwell’s acid reply: “Where’s the omelet?” Mendicant Marxism, dependent for decades on Soviet subsidies, then on Venezuelan oil from the Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro regimes, is discredited everywhere outside Western universities’ humanities departments.
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Eleven months before he was murdered by a Castro admirer, President John F. Kennedy, author of the feckless 1961 Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Castro’s regime, spoke in Miami to survivors of this fiasco. They gave him a Cuban flag. He vowed: “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.” Planting that flag there will be easier than planting the institutional structures of freedom.
Speaking of socialism, David Henderson recently gave a lecture on it.
In his pique after the Court’s correct and easily foreseeable 6-3 decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, invalidating the tariffs he unilaterally, haphazardly imposed in purported reliance on the 1977 International Emergency Economics Act (IEEPA), the president announced that he is imposing tariffs in purported reliance on the 1974 Trade Act. Specifically, he is decreeing what are called “Section 122” tariffs, a provision of the Trade Act codified at Section 2132 of Title 19, U.S. Code. They are to take effect come Tuesday.
These new tariffs are even more clearly illegal than Trump’s IEEPA tariffs.
I can’t improve on our editorial’s explication of Learning Resources, in particular of the bedrock separation of powers principles by which the Constitution vests in Congress, not the president, the power to tax — and tariffs are taxes (in this instance, massive taxes, overwhelmingly paid by Americans, not foreign regimes). The president has no inherent tariff authority; he has only the statutory authority Congress gives him.
In Section 122, Congress endowed the president with narrow, temporary authority to impose tariffs “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits” (emphasis added). What Trump is complaining about — something he insists is a crisis but is not — is the balance of trade, not of payments. The United States does not have an overall balance of payments deficit, much less a large and serious one.
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There is no rationale under Section 122 to impose tariffs. Because President Trump has no unilateral authority to order tariffs, he must meet the preconditions of Section 122 to justify levying them. He cannot. Not even close.
Here’s the Cato Institute’s Clark Packard on the SCOTUS ruling against Trump’s IEEPA tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports. Here’s his conclusion:
Unfettered use of Sections 122 and 338—along with better-known statutes like Sections 301 and 232—could essentially recreate the IEEPA predicament. In practice, this means the president can continue reshaping tax policy and the business environment on a whim, redistributing hundreds of billions of dollars and imposing pervasive uncertainty, without express congressional authorization.
The Court did important work by reining in the misuse of IEEPA. But judicial intervention can only go so far. Congress spent decades handing off its constitutional trade authority to the executive branch, and these delegations remain largely intact. Until lawmakers reclaim some of that authority and add serious procedural safeguards, the risk of arbitrary tariffs will continue.
The Court did its job. Now Congress needs to do its own.
Dave Keating tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
New data shows US is the only major destination in the world to see a decline in international travellers in 2025. So far 2026 getting worse.
Foreign airlines cutting the number of US-bound flights. Disney warning of “international visitation headwinds”
Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim on immigration enforcement:
I have no sage counsel, other than to say this: If illegal migrants are performing lawful, remunerative labor, they are, at that moment, contributing to the welfare of mankind and ought to be left alone. Work is a sacred activity. Nabbing people as they wait for jobs as roofers or drywallers, or raiding hotels and farms as they do useful things and earn money for themselves and their families, offends natural sensibilities. A great many natural-born citizens won’t work. Many more won’t do their best while on the clock. To punish noncitizens for engaging in productive behavior is to persecute the righteous. No good will come of it.
