Matt Weidinger reports on the success of the 1996 welfare-reform legislation in the U.S.
More and more billionaires derive their wealth not from accidents of birth or from gaming the system, but by providing useful goods and services and by employing thousands of people.
Bond investors are not attached to customs duties as a line item revenue source. They care about the government’s overall fiscal position and about how policy affects economic growth, inflation, interest rates, and the cost of servicing the debt. Once those broader effects are considered, the market’s behavior over the past 18 months looks less like an addiction to tariffs than a response to the ever-changing size of the tariffs themselves.
Collecting tariffs from the pockets of US consumers and businesses has real, negative economic effects. It does raise some money, but relative to the government’s underlying fiscal outlook, tariff revenue is a side hustle. And the Trump administration has already promised to dole out the funds through schemes like tariff dividend rebates, farm subsidies, and pay-fors on tax cuts or other spending. The new tariff money, in other words, has already been spent several times over, not put towards deficit reduction.
Bad ideas are everywhere in Washington, but here’s one that belongs in a hall of fame: President Trump is again pressing Republicans to nuke the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule to pass the SAVE America Act. Or in other words, hand progressives the tools to pack the Supreme Court and create new states, in exchange for a voting bill that isn’t a clear political winner for the GOP.
“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of,” Mr. Trump wrote Monday online.
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One now daring to step up is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. He campaigned on killing the filibuster in 2022, but subsequent events have “vindicated” Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, he wrote Monday in the Washington Post. Mr. Fetterman praised the filibuster for forcing compromise and urged voters who dislike Mr. Trump’s agenda to imagine a world without the 60-vote rule: “Republicans could fundamentally change the entire government and country with a simple majority vote.”
The same mental exercise, in the other direction, could benefit frustrated Republicans. If the filibuster went away, Democrats with a mere 50 votes, plus a Vice Presidential tie breaker, could wreck the Supreme Court, add new states, pass Medicare for All, prohibit right-to-work laws, codify Roe v. Wade, create a national gun registry, raise the minimum wage to $25 an hour, and so much more.
The GOP might hope to undo such policies while passing a wish list of its own when it next controls Congress and the White House. Yet the effect would be highly destabilizing, and progressives would have the clear advantage. If Democrats packed the Supreme Court with four new Justices who have life tenure, would Republicans unpack it later? Doubtful.
After Democrats passed new entitlements, year after year, would Republicans marshal the votes for repeal? They can’t even repeal the taxes in ObamaCare. Think how hard it was for Republicans to pass even modest Medicaid reform last year.
The filibuster benefits the country by ensuring stability, so national policy isn’t constantly flipping between polar extremes. This also happens to help the conservative party, because it makes radical change hard to enact. Breaking the filibuster would remove a structural check on the ability of temporary majorities to fundamentally reshape American society, which is what progressives want to do. Even if Republicans moved first, as Mr. Trump wants, the result in the long run would be a ratchet clicking steadily to the left.
Also writing wisely about the filibuster is U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA). A slice:
It’s not often you hear someone in D.C. admit they were wrong, let alone horribly wrong — and the entire Democratic Party was, including me.
When Democrats had the presidency and a majority in both chambers, they were frustrated with the 60-vote threshold needed to advance legislation. Senate Democrats attempted to end the filibuster to push through President Joe Biden’s agenda — an effort I fully supported during my 2022 campaign.
Halfway through my first term, I now recognize how important the filibuster is and the state our country would be in without it.
I thought ending the filibuster was necessary to deliver results for working families. I thought it was unlikely for Republicans in the minority to find common ground on legislation Democrats were proposing. I thought Democrats were not being ruthless the way Republicans were, and we needed to be on that level if we were going to relieve the anger that voters were feeling.
Upon reflection, the pursuit of those short-term wins clouded the bigger picture and lasting impact of a Senate without the filibuster — a Senate that ignored the voices of the minority and everyday people.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reflects on Anthony Fauci’s diaries. A slice:
Anthony Fauci made himself the public face of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, and now we have a glimpse of what was going on behind his eyes. Newly released diaries paint an unflattering portrait of a self-obsessed and not entirely honest bureaucrat, in contrast to the image of the careful scientist he cultivated in public.
The documents were released by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who for years has dug into the Covid story to understand why the government response to the health crisis was so destructive. The excerpts Sen. Paul has published, which run to more than 1,100 pages, cover December 2019 just before the first reports of an outbreak in Wuhan, China, through Dr. Fauci’s retirement from government in December 2022.
The diary reads as if it was intended to be an aide-mémoire for an autobiography Dr. Fauci might write one day, so it pays to read with care. He might have shaded the truth with an eye (or two) on history. Yet that possibility makes what’s in it all the more remarkable.
One conclusion is that on important points Dr. Fauci was both wrong and dishonest. For instance, he and allies in the government-science industrial complex still cling to the theory that Covid-19 evolved naturally in animal populations before spreading to humans.
Yet on Feb. 1, 2020, his diary records a meeting with a dozen prominent virologists in which only two credited this “natural origins” theory. The rest suspected the virus might have been created artificially, not least because a leading scientist in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli, was known to engage in the sort of gain-of-function research that could produce such a result.
The diary suggests that by Jan. 26, 2020, Dr. Fauci believed the virus hadn’t originated in the Wuhan wet market, often identified as the source by natural-origin advocates. This didn’t stop him and allies from painting skeptics of the natural-origin theory as politicized cranks and conspiracy theorists. Previously released documents shed light on how Dr. Fauci orchestrated publication of a scientific paper to suppress the theory that Covid leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The diary also brags on Dr. Fauci’s influence persuading the likes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut schools and lock down large parts of the economy. Yet he later claimed in public that he never argued for locking anything down.
