That didn’t take long. Fresh off their statehouse victories around the country, Democrats are promising to use their power to eviscerate school voucher and education scholarship programs.
“We will work tirelessly to repair the damage of the Texas voucher scam,” the state’s Democratic Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa declared after her victory last week. She’s referring to the education savings accounts that GOP Gov. Greg Abbott tirelessly championed.
The program provides parents an average of roughly $10,500 for private school tuition—roughly half as much as the state spends per pupil on public schools. Parents can also receive as much as $2,000 to home school their child. ESA spending is capped at $1 billion, which is less than 1% of K-12 public school spending in the state.
Democrats oppose the program because it offers parents a choice other than a failing neighborhood public school. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democratic state senator who was elected comptroller, voted against the ESAs and will oversee the program. She has called for more accountability and transparency, which is union code for using regulation to strangle the program.
Democrats also gained control of the Texas state house, which will give them more leverage to squeeze ESAs. Diego Bernal, the Democratic vice chair of the House education committee, told the progressive website ProPublica that “I guarantee that program is not going to be untouched, and it will be probably unrecognizable, if not extinct, by the time we’re done with it.” Is obliterating ESAs really what Texans voted for on Election Day?
Mr. Bernal also said that some Republicans who showed lukewarm support for ESAs may be willing to join Democrats and kill the program. Let’s hope not. Mr. Abbott backed primary challenges in 2024 to GOP lawmakers who opposed ESAs. Most of the challengers won, which suggests high levels of support among rank-and-file Republicans.
A Texas Southern University poll from February 2025 also showed broad electoral support for ESAs, including among 57% of black Democrats. But elected Democrats answer first to the teachers union that funds their campaigns than to black parents.
After the shellacking Republicans just took in the midterm elections, a common refrain among conservatives is that we should all be terrified of what comes next. Whether you get your commentary from X, Instagram, or friends on Facebook, you may have heard fear that the Democrats will vastly expand the size and scope of government, usher in socialism, or destroy Western civilization.
There is no doubt that a lot of bad, big-government policies are in store. But if the prospect of Democrats returning to power is so terrifying, why on earth did Republicans elect a president and vice president as controversial as Donald Trump and J.D. Vance? Why did they support so many policies in clear opposition to the promotion of a free and virtuous society? Did they think a majority of voters would enjoy the result?
You cannot spend years governing this way, adopting tariffs and other policies that raise the cost of living, defying a clear directive to lower prices from voters in the previous election, and then expect the fear of what Democrats might do to spare your party from accountability.
Start with the moment Trump’s 2024 voters began drifting away: April 2, 2025. On “Liberation Day,” the president displayed a chart in the White House Rose Garden featuring tariff rates calculated with laughably incompetent mathematics. He then proceeded to raise taxes on nearly everything we buy from abroad, including from allies and uninhabited islands.
It’s true that voters were told there would be tariffs. In fact, they were sold the theory that tariffs could solve every problem. What they got was a president who taxed importers at his whim based on how he felt on any given day. Americans quickly realized they were the ones footing the bill, not foreigners.
Everything was more expensive, from steel to food to luxury products and basic necessities. When a conservative Supreme Court ruled last February that Trump’s tariffs were not authorized by the statute he relied on, the president quickly doubled down by turning to another faulty statute.
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Vance now implies that the electoral drubbing happened only because of the war. That’s convenient. If the war explains everything, nobody has to ask about the failing populist promise that moving away from free-market policies will make America great again, or about how such a top-down system feeds corruption. Both are trademark policies of a MAGA movement that will presumably soon be led by Vance himself.
So yes, fear the Democrats. I certainly do. They’ll keep most of the tariffs, expand industrial policy, cheer the equity stakes, and run even bigger budget deficits—or worse. That fear should have mattered before so many Republicans chose to tolerate intolerable MAGA policies and behaviors.
Jeffrey Miron explains that “limits on high-skilled visas harm domestic, non-STEM workers.”
George Will is no fan of the new PBS documentary on crime in America. A slice:
The PBS series is silent about something known. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York senator, on the post-1960s epidemic of births to unmarried women:
“There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder — most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.”
This might make a riveting PBS series. But do not expect one.
Scott Lincicome, in 2023, pondered U.S. air-traffic control.
David Henderson shares his 2017 review of William Domnarski biography of Judge Richard Posner.
