Good Night to a Biden Overdraft Rule

The Senate nixes a price control on credit. Will the House follow?

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The rule effectively caps what banks can charge when consumers overdraft their checking accounts, at $5 per transaction, down from today’s $35 average. The agency dubiously styled such fees as loans, which are subject to more regulations."

"a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study that found such caps “hinder financial inclusion” because “banks reduce overdraft coverage and deposit supply.” The rule would cause banks to drop overdraft protection and raise other fees, including on checking accounts. Lower-income folks would lose access to the banking system and perhaps have to pay more to get payday loans." 

"Many banks have already slashed overdraft fees to compete with fintech firms."

Taxpayers Spent Billions Covering the Same Medicaid Patients Twice

When recipients signed up in two states at once, insurers often got paid by both; ‘it definitely is wasteful’

By Christopher Weaver, Anna Wilde Mathews and Tom McGinty of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Health insurers got double-paid by the Medicaid system for the coverage of hundreds of thousands of patients across the country, costing taxpayers billions of dollars in extra payments.

The insurers, which are paid by state and federal governments to cover low-income Medicaid recipients, collected at least $4.3 billion over three years for patients who were enrolled—and paid for—in other states"

"The biggest Medicaid insurer, Centene, received $620 million in duplicative payments between 2019 and 2021"

"Insurers said it is up to states to verify people’s eligibility, and to disenroll them if necessary."

"The Medicare and Medicaid agency doesn’t screen for the double payments, leaving that to the states. State officials said identifying people who moved is difficult, and that recoveries of improper payments from managed-care companies are limited."

"The federal government’s emergency pandemic rules made it much harder for states to disenroll beneficiaries."

"double payments nationwide increased from $814 million in 2019 to $2.1 billion in 2021."

"When an enrollee leaves one state and signs up in a different one, though, the first state isn’t automatically informed." 

"it is difficult for states to claw back payments from managed-care companies for covering relocated enrollees, largely because it can be unclear exactly when they left."

"taxpayers were wasting about $1 billion a year"

"it can be difficult to verify where people are living" [this reminds me of Hayek saying that the central planners don't have local knowledge so they can't run the economy very well] 

The Teachers Unions Sue Trump for Control: The guardians of the status quo seek judicial intervention to save the Education Department

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"In exchange for a presidential endorsement in 1976, Jimmy Carter promised the National Education Association a stand-alone cabinet department. Joseph Califano, Carter’s HEW secretary, opposed the move, predicting in his memoir that it would be “virtually impossible for the Education Secretary to run the new department efficiently.”"

"Mr. Califano noted that his skepticism was shared by others at the time, including the press. “The editorial content across the nation was scathing,” he wrote, “and even included the liberal New York Times and Washington Post which said, ‘The bill is the inspiration of the NEA, an organization that has much the same relation to the public schools as the plumbers union has to the plumbing business.’ ”"

"why is the government’s $1.6 trillion student-loan portfolio being managed by the Education Department instead of by the Small Business Administration or the Treasury? And isn’t it redundant to have a separate Office for Civil Rights inside the Education Department when we already have a Justice Department responsible for protecting civil rights?"

"money that has been appropriated by Congress, mainly to low-income school districts through the so-called Title I program. These federal funds amount to only about 10% of all education spending"

"a lot of the funding that goes into states now goes with a lot of red tape, a lot of strings attached to it"

"federal funding program for disadvantaged students has a near-perfect record of being ineffective in improving outcomes"

"In 1966, a year after the Title I program was created, a frustrated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy exclaimed: “What happened to the children? Do you mean you spent a billion dollars, and you don’t know whether they can read or not?”"

"Spending has risen while test scores have stagnated, and U.S. performance on international assessments has worsened. Meanwhile, union-allied lawmakers have blocked reforms—charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits—that have proved both popular and effective, especially among low-income minorities."

" The money continues to flow with little or no accounting whether it’s being used responsibly, let alone effectively."

Columbia Learns a Hard Lesson

The university betrayed its Jewish students—and its core mission—and is now paying the price

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Many of the steps Columbia is now promising should have been made long ago in its own best interest. Restricting masks means rule-breakers have to take responsibility for their actions. Clear rules—clearly enforced—about time, place and manner restrictions on campus speech will raise the cost for those who want to block speakers they dislike. 

The school will also incorporate into formal policy the definition of antisemitism recommended by Columbia’s own Antisemitism Taskforce last year, which makes you wonder why it hasn’t already."

"The school has agreed to appoint a new senior vice provost to “conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting immediately with the Middle East.”"

"“hiring of non-tenured faculty.” These instructors have been among the leading agitators of anti-Jewish protests."

"American universities were once widely respected as citadels of learning that were the best in the world. Taxpayers were content to leave them alone, even as the schools became ever more dependent on federal dollars."

"The public saw conservative speakers shouted down on campus, if they were invited at all. Leftist critical theory and anti-Western, anti-American views often dominate curricula."

"Americans can’t be expected to hand a blank financial check to schools that promote values that are inimical to their own."

Why Airline Pilots Feel Pushed to Hide Their Mental Illness

Is the F.A.A. really ensuring safety by disqualifying pilots who receive a diagnosis or treatment?

By Helen Ouyang. She is a physician and associate professor at Columbia University. From The New York Times. Excerpt:

"Every airline pilot and controller must go through the F.A.A.’s medical-certification process at least once a year. This requires that an aviation medical examiner — a physician who has completed a four-and-a-half-day training seminar with the F.A.A. — reviews a pilot’s medical history and performs a physical. Pilots age 40 and over undergo this process every six months, as do those with certain health conditions that also require additional tests and clearance from specialists. But few certification pathways, if any, are considered more complex or take longer than the one for mental illness.

Pilots are taught early — by those who went before them, by those around them — that being honest with the F.A.A. about any aspect of their medical history can jeopardize their careers. Several years ago, an investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs that cross-checked V.A. and F.A.A. databases revealed a wide discrepancy: Around 4,800 commercial and airline pilots were receiving V.A. disability benefits without reporting these medical issues to the F.A.A. While some of those pilots may have been fraudulently collecting benefits for nonexistent or exaggerated problems, others were found to have conditions that should have grounded them. Unreported health disorders can be deadly: A study of 202 fatal aviation accidents that occurred in the United States in 2015 found that in 5 percent of the cases, pilots had not disclosed the diagnoses or medications that were later implicated in the crash, most commonly including psychiatric drugs of some sort, whether taken by prescription or recreationally.

Every pilot I interviewed for this article knew of colleagues who had hidden their medical issues from the F.A.A.; some admitted to doing so themselves — several of whom told me that their supervisors had urged them not to report a health problem. And then there are the pilots who simply do not seek medical attention: A 2022 survey of pilots in the United States found that 56 percent of them reported having avoided health care in some way.

Because pilots are often reluctant to seek medical care or disclose health concerns, the number of those who are struggling with mental illness — a condition that is often easier to hide and harder to be open about than many other ailments — remains unknown. A 2016 survey of airline pilots found that nearly 13 percent of them met the criteria for a diagnosis of depression and more than 4 percent had suicidal thoughts in the preceding two weeks. The pandemic, which forced pilots into furloughs and, upon return, into facing more unruly passengers, probably made things worse, as it has for the general population. Almost half of Americans will experience mental illness at some point in their lifetime. There’s no reason to think pilots are spared. If anything, given their schedules, their irregular sleep and all the time they spend away from home and family, it would be little surprise if they don’t fare worse."

"The worry, though, is that the F.A.A. has inadvertently created a mental-health process so burdensome and restrictive that it deters pilots like Emerson from being honest with authorities and seeking help when they need it. Homendy, the N.T.S.B. chair, told me that a system that drives pilots to hide any symptoms of mental illness is “a detriment to safety.”"

Limits on Japanese car imports in the 1980s actually allowed them to compete better against the larger cars made by U.S. companies

See China Explores Limiting Its Own Exports to Mollify Trump: Chinese officials weigh Japan’s 1980s strategy—restraining exports while charging more—for products such as electric vehicles or batteries by Lingling Wei of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Japan first agreed to limit exports of cars in 1981. Exports fell by about 8% from the previous year as a result. Doug Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and author of “Clashing over Commerce,” notes that the restraints were particularly binding in the mid-1980s. But by the early 1990s, the VER was no longer needed, in part because by then Japanese companies were building cars for the U.S. market at local transplant operations.

One reason Japan was willing to limit exports was that its companies could charge a higher price per car on a smaller number of cars sold, Irwin says. The price of an average Japanese car rose by about $1,000, roughly $3,500 in today’s dollars, and Japan also began to export larger, higher quality cars as a result of the restraints." 

"As Irwin points out, the premium charged by Toyota and other Japanese exporters back then gave them the profits to finance an upgrade from smaller, cheaper vehicles to larger, more profitable cars that competed more directly with their American counterparts."

Trump’s Giant New Car and Truck Tax

He’s dead set on remaking the economy on his import substitution model

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"While sales of U.S.-made cars are lower than before the pandemic, that’s because inflation made many unaffordable to middle-class Americans. 

Tariffs will raise car prices even more—as much as $10,000 per car according to Wedbush Securities."

"Mr. Trump’s tariffs seem designed to blow up the USMCA and other trade agreements."

"the average U.S. tariff rate (2.7%) on foreign goods is higher than the average rate in Canada (1.8%), Japan (2%) and Europe (2%), and roughly the same as in Mexico"

"While other countries impose non-tariff barriers, so does the U.S." 

"Mr. Trump wants every car sold in America to be made in America, all 16 million a year. Even if this goal were economically rational, it would take many years and hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment."

"Mr. Trump has an economic development model based on the fantasy of “import substitution.” That model kept India poor for decades."

California’s Memory Loss

Over DEI, taxes, and the ongoing exodus to states with more economic freedom

By K. Lloyd Billingsley. 

"The University of California is “ending the requirement that diversity statements be used in hiring,” the California Globe reports, “the latest move away from diversity-based hiring and applying measures at the UC system.” Lost in the shuffle is California’s previous move to end “diversity-based” hiring, code for racial and ethnic hiring banned by state law.

In 1996, state voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the ballot, that banned racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. Contrary to popular belief, the measure did not ban “affirmative action.” The state could still lend students a hand on an economic basis but could no longer admit and hire on the basis of race and ethnicity. At the time, state officials had forgotten a lesson from 1978.

The University of California at Davis medical school rejected Allan Bakke not because the Vietnam veteran was unqualified but on account of his race. The person of pallor sued and won, but California continued to reject and admit students on the basis of race and the proportionality doctrine.

State education, employment, and contracting, this view contends, must reflect the racial and ethnic proportions of society. If they don’t, the cause can only be deliberate discrimination, and the remedy must be some sort of quota system now passed off as “diversity” or DEI. This doctrine ignores realities such as personal differences, effort, and choice.

CCRI put an end to diversity dogma, and the disaster opponents predicted never occurred. As Thomas Sowell noted in Intellectuals and Race, after Prop 209, blacks and Hispanics graduated from UC schools in greater numbers. State educrats fought the measure from the start and in recent years built a vast DEI establishment that burdened taxpayers while serving no educational purpose.

In 2020, Californians rejected Proposition 16, which would have overturned CCRI. UC bosses ignored the voice of the people and continued to deploy ruses such as diversity statements. Another dubious standard for hiring was previous employment at a federal bureaucracy.

In 2013, the University of California hired former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) director Janet Napolitano as president of the UC system. As state auditor Elaine Howle discovered, while hiking tuition and fees, Napolitano maintained a secret slush fund of $175 million. So, instead of diversity statements, better background checks could improve accountability.

DEI policies are an expensive proposition, but hardly the only evidence of California’s memory loss. In the 1990s, Spanish-only instruction, disguised as bilingual classes, was hurting the educational and employment prospects of immigrant children. The 1998 Proposition 227 required public school instruction to be conducted in English. The measure passed 61.28 to 38.72 percent, and the vote should not have been necessary.

In 1986, California voters passed Proposition 63, the Official Language of California Initiative. This measure directed the state legislature to “preserve the role of English as the state’s common language” and refrain from “passing laws which diminish or ignore the role of English as the state’s common language.” The measure passed 73.25 to 26.75, but state legislators and public officials acted as if it never existed.

Proposition 13, the 1978 People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation, passed by a margin of 64.79 to 35.21. The measure required no new state spending or state hires, but politicians blamed it for a host of fiscal woes, while they hiked income and sales taxes to record levels.

Last year a measure similar to Proposition 13, the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, qualified for the November ballot. Gov. Gavin Newsom and recurring governor Jerry Brown prevailed on a compliant state supreme court to take the measure off the ballot. Cutting out the voters on taxes is bound to have consequences.

Newsom and Brown seem to have forgotten that people once streamed into California from far and wide. And they don’t seem to care that most of the traffic is now on the way out, to states with lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more economic freedom."

Yes, women had access to credit before 1974

By Patricia Patnode of CEI.

"March is Women’s History Month, a time to acknowledge and celebrate many “firsts” for women in public life. One of those “firsts” is the ability for American women to open a credit card independently, without a husband or father’s cosignatory, following the passage of The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) by Congress in 1974. This bill prohibited discrimination in credit transactions based on sex or marital status and is generally considered a landmark for women’s financial independence. However, this is only partly true.

The ECOA made it illegal for banks to discriminate based on sex or marital status. The law didn’t grant women access to credit but, rather, formalized their ability to sue for discrimination. Much like women had been voting in American elections since the 1700s, before passage of the 19^th Amendment to the US Constitution, women had also been navigating loans, credit, and the financial system long before the 1974 law.

In the 19^th century, both single and married American women relied on local stores and small businesses for credit. These businesses often granted credit based on personal trust and reputation, allowing women to purchase necessary items even without ready cash. A charge account at a general store, restaurant, or similar establishment could be settled at the end of the week or paid periodically. Like in the TV show Cheers, at a place “where everybody knows your name,” it’s harder to skip out on a bill and easier for businesses to give grace to customers who need it. This non-mandated, localized credit access was particularly important to women.

Prior to the 1970s, marriage too often dictated the terms by which women accessed credit. Since married women’s property was also owned by their husbands, “only unmarried women could independently form contracts and engage in litigation…” the author of To Her Credit writes in her book examining the finances of women during America’s 18^th century Revolutionary period. She found that“[women in Boston and Newport] appeared in debt litigation as creditors and debtors in roughly equal proportions,” however, “women’s credit networks were predominantly local.” Women routinely made purchases on credit, signed contracts, participated in court cases, and settled debts. At that time, married women also commonly extended lines of credit to their unmarried friends.

A hallmark example of a Revolutionary-era woman navigating the financial system is Abigail Stoneman, a widow who opened and operated inns and teashops in New England in the 1700s. She also extended lines of credit to other business owners and her own customers. In fact, there are many documented appeals in local newspapers by creditors like Stoneman requesting repayment from debtors.

But credit access differed from state to state. For example, in 1848, the Married Woman’s Property Act passed in New York, and established that a woman was no longer liable for her husband’s debts, could enter contracts on her own, was able to collect rents or receive an inheritance in her own right, and could file a lawsuit on her own behalf. The act became a model for other states.

The rise of department stores and catalogs

By the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries came the emergence of department stores and mail-order clothing catalogs. Larger businesses were able to offer more formalized credit options, catering to women’s shopping experiences. The “charge plate,” akin to an in-store card, was somewhat of a predecessor to modern credit cards. Although single women faced more challenges in securing credit, they could still apply and receive credit by providing proof of financial stability. Over time, these store accounts, costly to maintain and collect on, gave way to portable credit cards managed by banks that could be used at other stores.

Leading up to the ECOA

In the early 1970s, women’s organizations gathered testimony from women nationwide describing their hassles receiving letters of credit and financial services from local banks. These letters were presented in a hearing before the National Commission on Consumer Finance in May 1972. This and subsequent hearings helped inform the 1974 bill.

Although the bill was passed, it did not guarantee that women or women-owned businesses would be considered creditworthy by banks. It merely allowed them to pursue legal recourse for discrimination based on sex.

Women’s banks

Still, in response to the need for women’s creditors, bank entrepreneurs opened a small number of women’s banks following the bill’s passage. The First Women’s Bank in New York City opened in 1975. Principal advocates for the ECOA Stephanie Lipscomb and Jeanne Hubbard were instrumental in its founding. Similarly, The Abigail Adams National Bank, originally known as the Women’s National Bank, was founded in 1977 in Washington, D.C.

Although both banks have since changed their names and pivoted their financial services away from primarily serving women, these banks helped challenge societal perceptions about women’s roles in the economy, enabling women to take control of their economic destinies and contribute more fully to the economy.

Women in finance

During Women’s History Month, it is important to recognize that women had been creatively and successfully navigating the financial system in the United States long before Congress intervened in the 1970s. This historical context underscores the resilience and ingenuity of generations of women who forged a path to success that included access to credit. The passage of the ECOA was a significant milestone, but it built upon a foundation of determined women who had already made substantial strides in business and entrepreneurship."

How the Green Energy Transition Makes You Poorer

Crony capitalism at work

By Matt Ridley. 

"A leaked government analysis has found that Net Zero could crash the economy, reducing GDP by a massive 10% by 2030. Yet the spectacular thing about this analysis is that it expects this to happen not if Net Zero fails—but if it succeeds. In effect, it is saying that if the government really does force us to give up petrol cars, gas boilers, foreign holidays, and beef, then there would be perfectly workable things left idle, such as cars, boilers, planes, and cows. Idling—or stranding—your assets in this way is an expensive economic disaster.

Even more intriguing was the government’s economically illiterate response to the leak. A spokesman said: “Net zero is the economic opportunity of the twenty-first century, and will deliver good jobs, economic growth and energy security as part of our Plan for Change.” Do they really think that economic growth is the same thing as spending money? Because it isn’t.

Imagine the government saying that it is going to require the entire population to throw out all their socks and buy new ones by next Thursday. Under the logic it espouses for Net Zero, this would result in a tremendous burst of economic growth. Think of all the jobs created in the sock industry and the shops! They would be better off. Ah, but you, the consumer, would be poorer. You would have as many socks as before but less money. This is the broken window fallacy, explained by Frédéric Bastiat nearly 200 years ago: going around breaking windows makes work for glaziers but does not create growth.

Net Zero is a project to replace an existing set of technologies with another set of technologies: power stations with wind farms, petrol cars with electric cars, gas boilers with heat pumps, plane trips in the sun with caravan trips in the rain, cows with lentils. The output from these technologies is intended to be the same: electricity, transport, holidays, food.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these new technologies and activities require exactly as much money to build and run as the old ones. What have you gained? Less than nothing because you have retired existing devices early, losing the latter half of their lives. It would be like replacing all the socks in your drawers long before they needed replacing but with identical socks. Does that make you richer? No, poorer.

If the new technologies are more efficient than the old ones, fine. LED light bulbs use about 90% less electricity than incandescent bulbs did. So yes, it does make sense to throw out your old bulbs before they expire, stranding those assets, to save electricity and money. Is the same true of a wind farm or a heat pump? No, they are demonstrably more expensive and less reliable at producing the same electricity than the devices they are replacing. They are worse, not better.

That’s why they need subsidies. We have spent £100 billion so far subsidising “green” energy in the past few decades, money we could have spent on something else: tax cuts, for example. So, the green energy transition has made us poorer, not richer. It has given us the most expensive electricity in the entire developed world.

It has made some people richer, for sure. Dale Vince, an eco-tycoon, has made a fortune out of building unreliable energy. So have lots of fat cats in the City of London, lots of big landowners in the Highlands of Scotland, and lots of manufacturers in China. I have lost count of the number of times wealthy people have told me I am wrong to criticise the unreliable energy industry because “my son Torquil’s fund has done rather well.” Net Zero crony capitalism is efficient at one thing: transferring money from poor people to rich people.

This government has forgotten that its job is not to champion the interests of producers, but consumers. So did the last government, though Kemi Badenoch’s speech on Tuesday showed a welcome return to thinking about consumers. Electricity is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end, an essential input allowing us to do the one and only thing that does, really does, represent growth—achieving more output with less input. Right now, the Net Zero transition is doing the very opposite."

Repealing Only Two Biden-Era Tax Credits Could Cement Permanent Pro-Growth Tax Cuts

By Adam N. Michel and Joshua Loucks of Cato.

"When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), it was told the new energy tax credits would cost about $270 billion over a decade. Revised official estimates put the cost at multiple times that amount, as much as $786 billion. But congressional scorekeepers may still be getting the long-term cost of the IRA energy subsidies wrong, and fixing this mistake is key to unlocking permanent pro-growth tax cuts.

A new Cato report by Travis Fisher and Joshua Loucks (one of the authors here) argues that two of the most expensive IRA tax credits could be functionally unlimited subsidies, costing as much as $180 billion annually by 2050. With no expiration in sight, the total cost of the IRA green energy subsidies could accumulate to as much as $4.7 trillion by the middle of the century.

These infinite tax credits can offset permanent extensions to the most pro-growth features of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which largely expires at the end of the year. Without bending long-standing budget rules, Congress must ensure that any permanent tax cuts outside the 10-year budget window are offset with spending cuts or higher revenue. This rule is why tax cuts are often temporary.

Repealing two of the IRA’s open-ended tax credits could more than offset the revenue loss from cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, restoring R&D expensing, fixing the interest deduction limit, and enacting full expensing.

Budget Scorekeepers Blew It; Fixing Their Mistake Is Critical

The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) badly underestimated the cost of the IRA energy tax subsidies. It has since revised many of the original estimates to more accurately reflect the consensus estimates that put the 10-year cost of the IRA at roughly $1 trillion. Government scorekeepers are very likely still not fully incorporating the long-run, uncapped costs of the production tax credit (PTC) and the investment tax credit (ITC). 

As Fisher has repeatedly pointed out, the ITC and PTC are functionally uncapped because they are not time-limited, like most other temporary tax credits. The ITC and PTC only phase down when the level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the electricity sector is reduced by 75 percent of the 2022 baseline. 

Figure 1 is adapted from Fisher and Loucks’ recent report. It shows GHG projections from the Energy Information Administration, which show that electricity-sector emissions will remain far above the IRA’s target of a 75 percent reduction in the 2022 level through 2050. The GHG phasedown trigger is not met even in the scenario with a high uptake of IRA subsidies.

The Treasury Department’s most recent tax expenditure estimates explicitly state they assume the subsidies will begin to phase out as early as 2034. The JCT could have made a similar mistake in its original score of the IRA. Had the cost estimates appropriately accounted for both the magnitude and the open-ended credits, the bill could not have passed using the budget reconciliation process, which requires that legislation not increase the deficit beyond a 10-year window.

A Golden Opportunity for Pro-Growth Reform

As Republicans work to repeal or revise the IRA credits in reconciliation, it is critical that the JCT properly accounts for the full cost of the credits outside the budget window. By 2034, the ITC and PTC alone will cost about $130 billion per year—enough to permanently finance four of the most pro-growth tax cuts under consideration. 

Figure 2 compares Cato’s $130 billion cost estimate for the uncapped energy credits with the Tax Foundation’s static estimates of four pro-growth tax cuts that reduce revenue by approximately $113 billion in 2034. The four changes are (1) cutting the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent, (2) renewing full investment expensing, (3) returning the interest limitation to its less restrictive definition, and (4) allowing full research spending deductions.

The PTC and ITC are projected to continue to expand past 2034. In 2050, the two credits will cost as much as $180 billion annually.

Other pro-growth reforms, such as neutral cost recovery, have increasing static fiscal costs outside the budget window. Although neutral cost recovery is not included in our estimates, the escalating open-ended cost of the PTC, ITC, and other IRA provisions, such as the advanced manufacturing credit sub-provisions for critical minerals, would more than pay for neutral cost recovery even in the years beyond the budget window.

The IRA’s unlimited tax credits are a fiscal time bomb, costing between $2.04 trillion and $4.67 trillion by 2050. They represent an unchecked expansion of government spending with no clear end date. Policymakers have a rare opportunity to repeal these costly provisions and use the savings to fund permanent, pro-growth tax reform that benefits the entire economy—not just politically favored industries. Getting the scoring right is critical."