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Ryan Bourne explains that “burrito-gate reflects inflation’s toxic legacy.”

Brian Albrecht carefully lays out the likely consequences of Mamdani’s government-run grocery stores.

National Review‘s Jim Geraghty is right: “Both parties embrace what’s popular and abandon what’s right.” A slice:

The Republican president keeps taking a government stake in private companies, now up to 30 firms. As the Cato Institute observes, the U.S. government taking an ownership stake in private companies is now routine, and a Republican-controlled House and Senate are ready to make it official federal policy under law, not just some rogue administration’s actions. Zohran Mamdani wants to “seize the means of production”; today’s Republicans want to establish a federal ownership stake in the means of production. A future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or some other progressive Democrat will appreciate Trump-era Republicans establishing the precedent and the legitimacy of the federal government strong-arming many kinds of companies into giving them ownership shares.

Justin Amash tweets:

One of the worst things about Trump is that he’s ushering in more corporate welfare, cronyism, and socialism while parading it under the banner of capitalism, so we end up with all the failings of those ideologies but with a generation of young people blaming the market economy.

Although commonly described as a “non-renewable resource,” petroleum continues to become more abundant. Gale Pooley tells us why.

Although never described as a “non-renewable resource,” elevators in the U.S. are more limited in number than they would be under freer markets. Eric Boehm tells us why.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board warns of the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence. A slice:

The fiscal challenges scheduled to arrive in the 2030s are actually based on optimistic assumptions. They are from the CBO’s baseline estimates, which assume no wars, no recessions, low and stable inflation and no new government programs or tax changes.

Imagine how much worse the debt will look when there is a recession. If, heaven forbid, the U.S. needs to boost defense spending for a protracted war, it doesn’t have much room to grow.

Starting with World War II levels of debt and exceeding Great Depression levels of annual deficits, the U.S. is not prepared to face the demographic-induced challenges that loom, let alone world events nobody can predict.

Budget hawks have been talking for years about many of these problems, and it may have felt like not much has happened. The federal budget has been able to withstand more than many expected. But the 2030s is when the bill comes due.