HUD Says Realtors Can Now Speak the Truth (about crime rates and school quality)

By Alex Tabarrok. 

"HUD: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to real estate professionals clarifying they are not violating the Fair Housing Act when they share information with prospective homebuyers about neighborhood crime rates and school quality data.

“Buying a home is one on the most significant decisions a family will ever make,” said Secretary Scott Turner. “Americans should not be left in the dark about vital facts like neighborhood safety or school quality. HUD is making clear that real estate professionals can openly and lawfully provide this information in an equal and consistent manner to American families.”

The background is that The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and via later amendments) familial status, and disability. Discrimination included “steering” buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on protected characteristics. The Biden administration ramped this up with a directive and Executive Order that essentially said the Fair Housing Act must be interpreted not just to prohibit discrimination but to redress and undo past discrimination:

This is not only a mandate to refrain from discrimination but a mandate to take actions that undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of discrimination and that afford access to long-denied opportunities.

…the [HUD] Secretary shall take any necessary steps,…to implement the Fair Housing Act’s requirements that HUD administer its programs in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing and HUD’s overall duty to administer the Act (42 U.S.C. 3608(a)) including by preventing practices with an unjustified discriminatory effect.

The “discriminatory effect” language reinforced that so-called disparate impact, not just intentional discrimination counted as discriminatory—and it contributed to a legal and reputational environment in which platforms and agents had strong incentives to avoid anything that could be characterized as steering. As a result, by the end of the year, Realtor.com had removed its crime map from all search results, as did Trulia, Redfin announced it would not add crime data to its platform and since Zillow already didn’t include such data, by early 2022 all the major portals had dropped crime information. Similarly, the National Association of Realtors published material instructing agents not to directly answer client questions about neighborhood safety. One article in “The Safety Series” was titled “‘Is This a Safe Neighborhood?’ Don’t Answer That” and by “Safety Series” they meant safety for the realtor not the client.

So without explicitly making such information illegal, the government created a legal and reputational climate that chilled its provision. Portals removed crime maps and realtors became reluctant to answer ordinary buyer questions about neighborhood safety and school quality. That is a degradation of service, not a civil-rights victory. The pretext was that crime information might not be accurate but the real fear was that it would accurately suggest neighborhoods with high percentages of black residents had more crime. Withholding information about crime and schools, however, does not change the facts; it just shifts the informational advantage toward buyers who are wealthy, well-connected, or sophisticated enough to find the data themselves. Moreover, it should go without saying that black homebuyers also want information about neighborhood crime rates–don’t these buyers count? Suppressing truthful information is rarely a good way to improve outcomes. As with Ban the Box, blocking direct access to relevant information encourages worse proxy-based decision-making.

Trump’s HUD is correct: fair housing law should prohibit discrimination, not prevent realtors from telling the truth."

What the Meta–Google Verdict Gets Wrong

Is a product defective if it gives you too much of what you want? And are social-scroll algorithms regulated products — or protected speech?

By Logan Tantibanchachai of AIER. 

"A few weeks ago, social media skeptics received their best news in years.

In KGM v. Meta, a jury found Meta and Google negligent for their role in fueling a youth mental health crisis. Now, six million dollars in damages is basically meaningless to companies that gross hundreds of billions in revenue annually. But the reason this case has gotten so much media attention is for what it might represent. Some have compared the case to the beginning of litigation against Big Tobacco last century, which culminated in a $206 billion master settlement with more than 40 states.

In this case, however, the jury got it wrong. It concluded three things:

• Instagram and YouTube were designed in ways that encouraged uncontrollable use and addictive behaviors.
• The companies failed to adequately warn users, especially minors, about the risks.
• The design of their platforms was a considerable factor in causing the plaintiff’s mental health problems.

All three of these things could be true, but neither Meta nor Google should be held liable for any of them. Unlike prior cases involving social media, KGM treated YouTube and Instagram as fundamentally defective products. The central question wasn’t whether malicious users could misuse these platforms, but whether the platforms themselves posed inherent risks. In general, online companies aren’t legally accountable for what users post due to Section 230 protections — Meta, for instance, wouldn’t be held liable for someone using its products to incite violence. In this case, though, Judge Carolyn Kuhl ruled that platform design elements — like algorithm-driven feeds, autoplaying videos, and push notifications — could be challenged. 

In other words, Instagram and YouTube should be held liable because they’re addictive, and too effective at providing content users want.

In a motion denying summary judgment, Judge Kuhl wrote: “The fact that a design feature like ‘infinite scroll’ impelled a user to continue to consume content that proved harmful does not mean that there can be no liability for harm arising from the design feature itself.” In other words, Meta and Google can be held responsible for designing a product that fulfills a consumer desire. Such an argument is dubious. Product innovation exists precisely to meet the demands of consumers — and that’s a good thing.

If such a conclusion holds, where could it not apply? Oreos are delicious — should Mondelez International be forced to make their product less appealing because a “design feature” of Oreos causes repeated consumption of Oreos, with negative health outcomes? Should TV shows that end on a cliffhanger be banned because such a “design feature” creates an addictive cycle, causing the viewer to continue watching? In excess, many other products besides social media can become addictive, but it’s not the government’s job to single out certain products or consumer desires as addictive. 

And then there’s the First Amendment problem. Even assuming that social media is addictive in a way analogous to tobacco, the two differ in a key respect. Social media companies are being held liable for their speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. As Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, put it:

The plaintiffs in these lawsuits argued that companies design algorithms that are tailored to individual users to keep them hooked. But algorithms are themselves speech, and there is no reason to treat this speech differently from the code that encourages people to keep playing video games. 

Or, as the Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in Moody v. NetChoice, “the First Amendment … does not go on leave when social media [is] involved.” And while social media is almost certainly a drain on society — decreasing attention spans, increasing depression, and spreading misinformation — neither restricting First Amendment-protected speech nor regulating the free market is the answer.

Forcing social media companies to restrict access to social media won’t necessarily lead to meaningfully lower social media usage by teenagers. For one, even the most extreme option — simply banning social media usage by teenagers — is easily circumvented by most teenagers. Teenagers have cleared visual age checks. As one Australian teenager put it, “I scrunched my face up to get more wrinkles, so I looked older, and it worked!” Perhaps not a high-tech workaround, but it nevertheless worked, and many other techniques do, too.

And even if the current mainstream social media companies — Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. — were forced to make their products less addictive, that would just open the door for competitors to replace them. And then what? Regulate those products until they’re less addictive, too? At some point, the government will just be playing First Amendment Whac-A-Mole. 

Ultimately, this is not a problem for the courts — nor even legislatures — but rather for civil society. Regulating trillion-dollar companies out of existence won’t fix the underlying problem. If social media were intrinsically detrimental, in the way that cigarettes cause a chemical addiction and subsequent health problems, then almost every teenager who uses social media would struggle with addiction and see some demonstrable negative impact on their life. But that’s not the case. About one in five teens say social media has hurt their mental health. Another study found that social media usage beyond three hours a day increased internalizing problems (like anxiety/depression) by about 60 to 80 percent. Neither of these numbers are great. But they also reveal that a significant percentage of teenagers who use social media are perfectly fine. 

So what explains how one teen could use social media and neither become addicted nor have their mental health suffer, and another teen could experience the opposite? Very likely having access to a robust civil society — family, activities, community organizations, religious groups, and other social supports. Social media accounts for about one percent of the variation in life satisfaction. By contrast, family situations explain about a third of life satisfaction for young adults. Running to government for legislation to fix our minor woes allows these important community bonds to atrophy. An important aspect of the liberal political order is the recognition that voluntary, robust civil society can play a much more effective role in addressing these societal problems than can even well-intentioned meddling by the government. Social media is no exception."

Earth Day’s Bad Bet Against Humanity

The Malthusian mind does not see the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt

By Marian L. Tupy of Cato. Excerpts:

"Malthus had already lost his main argument before his essay even appeared in print. Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England rose from 5.2 million to 8.44 million, an increase of 62.3 percent. Over the same period, nominal GDP per person rose from 12.37 British pounds to 23.97 pounds, an increase of 93.8 percent. The nominal price of a four-pound loaf of bread, a staple that fed much of the poor, rose from 5.2 pence to 7.4 pence, or 42.3 percent. Because incomes rose much faster than the price of bread, the latter became 36.2 percent more abundant, not less."

"Human beings are not trapped in the same ecological logic as bacteria in a dish or buffalo on a plain. We exchange with one another. We build institutions. We create tools. We improve production methods. We substitute one material for another. We grow more from the same soil—sometimes much more. In other words, we create new knowledge."

"Higher prices signal a problem. Those higher prices then encourage knowledge creation, and new knowledge leads to greater abundance."

"The Simon Abundance Index, which Dr. Gale L. Pooley and I publish every year on Earth Day, is named after Julian Simon. It is a deliberate continuation of the quantitative analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance that Simon’s bet with Ehrlich began. Unlike Simon and Ehrlich, who measured the abundance of resources in inflation-adjusted dollars, we look at “time prices.” Money prices are distorted by inflation and disputed deflators. Time prices solve that problem by dividing a good’s money price by hourly income, showing how long a person must work to buy it. They capture both falling prices and rising wages, require no inflation adjustment, and allow comparisons across countries and centuries. Time is universal, cannot be printed, and reflects the real cost people pay: hours of life. Time prices provide a clearer, simpler, and more meaningful measure of resource abundance than money prices for ordinary people."

 

"By this measure, the last 45 years have been a rout for the pessimists. The 2026 report says that the Simon Abundance Index stood at 636.4 in 2025, up from a base of 100 in 1980. That means Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980. All 50 commodities, including fuels, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, food, such as chicken, beef, and lamb, and metals, such as aluminum, copper, and gold (yes, even gold!), in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent, doubling about every 17 years. In the 42 countries tracked by the report—accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population—none saw lower resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980. That is not what a species trapped in Malthus’ arithmetic is supposed to produce.

The mechanics of that gain matter. Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. What required an hour of work in 1980 required about 18 minutes in 2025. The same hour of work that bought one unit of a typical commodity in 1980 bought 3.44 units in 2025. That is a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. At the same time, the world population grew by 85 percent, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion. Put those two changes together and you get the index’s central finding: For every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent. Resources growing at a faster pace than the population is what Pooley and I call superabundance. It is the opposite of Malthus’ conjecture that each additional person leaves less for everyone else.

The critics sometimes retreat to complaining about the short-term noise, as though any temporary spike in prices confirms the Malthusian creed. Our report addresses that, too. In 2025, 27 commodities became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The abundance of oranges rose the most, by 65.6 percent, while coconut oil’s abundance fell the most, by 36.3 percent. But commodity markets always swing because weather changes, disease hits crops, wars disrupt transport, and investment arrives late or early. Simon never argued that every price falls every year in a straight line. He argued that scarcity signals provoke adjustment. A temporary setback is not a vindication of Malthus. It is often the first stage of a correction. That is why the long trend matters more than the annual changes.

Our findings do not show that pollution is imaginary or that every environmental question has been solved. It has not. But environmental problems should be addressed as side effects of human flourishing, not as evidence that human flourishing itself is a mistake. The Earth Day mentality blurred that distinction. It converted planetary stewardship into misanthropy. It taught millions to look at a growing population and see only a burden, never a contribution. It treated the human animal as uniquely destructive when, in fact, people are the only animals who can recognize ecological damage and fix it. It is new knowledge—human knowledge—that gives societies the capacity to clean rivers, regulate toxins, build sewage systems, improve fuel efficiency, and move from dirtier technologies to cleaner ones. A poor society burns what it can find and dumps what it cannot manage. A rich society can afford scrubbers, pipelines, wastewater treatment, research labs, and better rules.

The green extremists often speak as though abundance is the disease, when in fact abundance is usually what makes environmental improvement possible. And so, despite half a century of doomsaying, the Earth is not collapsing under the weight of humanity. It is supporting far more people who can command far more resources with far less labor than their predecessors could. That is not the picture of a planet in terminal decline. It is the picture of a planet made more habitable by the one species clever enough to improve it. The Earth is not a museum piece. It is a working planet inhabited by learning beings who desire and are entitled to flourish." 

Quantitative easing and the Fed’s free lunch problem

By Steve Swedberg of CEI. Excerpt:

"QE operates primarily through asset price channels, which means that it compresses risk premia and increases market responsiveness to central bank communication. This can create artificially elevated asset prices, encourage greater risk-taking during periods of accommodation, and also increase financial system exposure.

Over time, this weakens the informational role of prices. Capital allocation becomes increasingly shaped by policy-driven conditions instead of market-based signals. That shift can reduce the efficiency of investment, thereby directing resources less consistently to their most productive uses.

Because productivity is the primary driver of long-run growth, wages, and economic resilience, even incremental distortions in capital allocation can weigh on the economy’s underlying performance over time. What begins as a stabilization tool can, if sustained, alter the structure of financial decision-making.

Setting the stage for the hard part

Against this backdrop, balance sheet reduction is a means of re-establishing clearer price discovery and restoring policy space for future downturns. It is a step toward rebalancing the role of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in monetary policy. QE has altered financial markets in ways that persist well beyond the crisis it was meant to address. Sustained intervention weakens the role of market signals and makes financial conditions more reliant on policy-driven forces. As these effects become embedded in market behavior, stepping back from QE becomes more difficult. The central challenge is whether the balance sheet can be reduced without severe consequences."

Yale Takes Itself to Reform School

A faculty study agrees with many of academia’s critics, believe it or not

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the critique: rising tuition that prices out the middle class; an explosion in bureaucracy that steals resources from instruction; runaway grade inflation; an opaque admissions process that prizes race, gender and identity over achievement; disdain for America’s founding and its abiding principles; and a largely left-wing monoculture that discourages honest (or any) debate, among other sins."

"Yale’s report by an internal Committee on Trust in Higher Education treats those criticisms with respect and in many cases agrees with them."

"Trump. They essentially agree with the criticism about rising costs, admissions that lack transparency, and the failure to support free speech on campus and genuine academic freedom." 

Police Chiefs Allegedly Faked Robberies in $5,000-a-Pop Visa Fraud Scheme

For nearly a decade, four Louisiana lawmen and a Subway shop owner manufactured phony crime reports to help foreign nationals stay in the U.S., prosecutors say

By Joe Barrett of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"In a case still winding through court, federal officials allege the men spent nearly 10 years manufacturing false crime reports as part of a visa-fraud scheme. The operation netted the officers $5,000 per “victim” and helped hundreds of foreign nationals secure U visas—a status that allows certain crime victims to remain in the U.S., Van Hook said."

"The center of the scheme, authorities said, was Chandrakant “Lala” Patel, the friendly owner of a Subway and other small businesses. Patel, himself a U visa recipient, would allegedly connect with crime “victims” looking to stay in the U.S."

"He would then turn to one of the law-enforcement officials to draw up paperwork for crimes that never happened"

"The officers would generate false reports and swear in writing that the people named were legitimate crime victims"

"For years, it worked, authorities said. Investigators with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spurred the multiagency probe in July 2024 after uncovering a pattern of inconsistencies in U-visa applications."

"Hundreds reportedly obtained U visas through the scheme, and Louisiana isn’t alone."

"Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Boston indicted 10 Indian nationals for allegedly staging convenience-store holdups in Massachusetts and elsewhere to secure U visas. A bogus robber and getaway driver would appear to rob the clerk or owner at gunpoint, then flee, authorities said. Minutes later, the clerk would call police and present security-camera footage as evidence."

Also see Five Things to Know About the Visa Fraud Case Shaking Small-Town Lousiana: Prosecutors say the little-known U visa is at the heart of an alleged scheme. 

A Minnesota Mining Liberation Act

The GOP overturns a Biden rule that banned resource development

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"a Biden public land order that withdrew some 225,500 acres of land in the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota from mining and other resource development."

"Expanding domestic critical mineral development ought to be a bipartisan cause as China seeks to weaponize its control of the supply chain. The Duluth Complex beneath Minnesota’s Superior National Forest boasts nearly eight billion tons of critical minerals" 

‘Feed the People!’ Review: In Praise of the Supermarket

Eating locally grown meat and vegetables is a nice aspiration, but it’s no way to get a satisfying meal in the winter.

By Daniel Akst. He reviews the book Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Excerpts:

"There is no shortage of access to Brussels sprouts; people simply prefer to eat the wrong things. Local is fine, but not if you live in Chicago and want good produce in winter. Oh, and if you’re on a tight budget, Walmart is your best bet for healthy victuals."

"nostalgia for the food culture of our grandparents overlooks the prevalence of rickets, pellagra and food-poisoning in those days, to say nothing of hunger. Nor do the authors believe processed food is inherently evil. They disdain raw milk as dangerous and ask instead that we appreciate the role of pasteurization and fortified bread"

"urban community gardens, those itty-bitty lots where neighbors grow snap peas and the like, don’t amount to a hill of beans. “Qualitatively invaluable, quantitatively valueless,” they write."

"nobody should call our food system “broken”"

"the claim “offers no real vision of a better future and only vague gestures at systemic change.”"

"a vast modern society can only be fed safely and affordably by means of an efficient, industrial-scale food-production apparatus"

"pleasure deserves to be considered"

See this related post: Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love Industrial Food. 

Here is the beginning:

See We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents by Dr. Dutkiewicz and Dr. Rosenberg are the authors of the forthcoming book “Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better.” From The NY Times.

America Loses Its Will to Work

From the War on Poverty to ‘quiet quitting,’ we’ve stopped appreciating the value of honest labor

By Barton Swaim. Excerpts:

"Did the “war” bring victory? On the one hand, today’s poor live vastly more prosperous lives by any material measure than the poor of the 1960s. Talk of citizens living over or under a “poverty line” is meaningless, Mr. Eberstadt shows (Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute), the de facto line having risen so dramatically upward—a fact that has little to do with government transfer payments and almost everything to do with rapid economic growth in the postwar period."

"Three decades after the War on Poverty began, congressional Republicans passed, and a Democratic president signed, the most sweeping reform yet made to America’s welfare state. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 conditioned the most important forms of direct welfare payments on employment or the search for employment. Opponents predicted disaster. New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, formerly a critic of America’s welfare state, predicted that his colleagues who voted for the bill would “take this disgrace to their graves.” In fact, the reform succeeded. It moved millions off welfare rolls and into the labor market."

"The law mainly reformed Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which it renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. But expansions and liberalizations of other safety-net programs in succeeding years have negated the gains made by the 1996 law."

"We’ve known for years about the slow flight of working-age men from gainful employment. Mr. Eberstadt’s “Men Without Work” (2016) documents in painful detail the moral and psychological costs of men leaving the labor force since the mid-1960s. New and frightening is the phenomenon of “disconnection” among the young, both male and female. About 1 in 7 Americans 18 to 24, according to a recent Rand study, are neither working nor looking for work. Many young people support a “universal basic income”—a government payment to every American, regardless of income or employment status." 

Water, Water Everywhere—Except in California’s Reservoirs

A winter respite from drought was all too brief. Dredging would solve the problem in the long term

By Edward Ring. He is director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center. Excerpts:

"In the final week of 2025, more than 1.3 million acre-feet poured into the bay (San Francisco)—enough water to supply all the state’s water consumption other than farms for nearly two months. But California water officials captured less than 7% of the incoming flow because of onerous environmental restrictions. The rest flowed out to sea."

"There’s a solution that would safely permit Californians to harvest far more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta"

"This could make millions of additional acre-feet of water available for all Californians."

"Beginning in the late 19th century, California farmers regularly used their own equipment to dredge the delta channels."

"those farmers deepened the delta channels and spread over their surrounding farmland the rich silt they excavated or used it to reinforce the levees."

"environmentalists essentially ended the practice in the 1970s." 

"One of the central claims is that dredging kills protected native salmon. Precisely the opposite is true: The bigger threat to the state’s salmon population is the presence of striped and largemouth bass"

"In the old days, thanks to dredging, salmon still had access to deep channels with the cooler waters that they prefer and bass avoid."

"Without dredging, the delta’s waters are shallower and warmer. When environmentalists countered with expensive government salmon hatcheries, the bass adapted, hiding in the shallows surrounding the hatcheries, where they are treated to an endless buffet of salmon fingerlings."

"Without dredging, water officials who see storms coming quickly drain their reservoirs to make room for water. Dredging allows more water to flow through the delta without flooding, so water officials can keep reservoirs full"

"Channels deepened through regular dredging would greatly increase the overall volume of fresh water in the delta." 

Tariffs Have Long Been a Corruption Magnet

Transparency is a hallmark of good tax policy; opacity is its enemy

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Paul Rahe’s justifications for tariffs fail under scrutiny (“There’s a Case for Tariffs,” op-ed, April 16).

Mr. Rahe assumes tariffs boost resiliency, but recent history shows the opposite. National security might justify narrow trade restrictions, but tariffs have not insulated Americans from economic disruptions and have frequently made things worse. The baby-formula crisis of 2022 and automakers’ recent struggles to obtain aluminum, each triggered by the sudden closure of a tariff-protected U.S. factory, show that localized supply chains are vulnerable to local shocks—and tariffs block alternatives. Research from the pandemic finds that globalized supply chains performed better and adjusted faster than nationalized ones.

Mr. Rahe also errs on tariffs’ ability to promote manufacturing. Decades of protection failed to create thriving U.S. steel, shipbuilding, textile and footwear industries. More recent duties on solar panels did the same. With around half of imports being manufacturing inputs, tariffs raise American producers’ costs and undermine competitiveness. Combined with uncertainty surrounding executive branch tariffs, this explains why surveys consistently reveal manufacturers opposed to new protectionism.

Mr. Rahe is correct about the intrusiveness of income taxes, but tariffs can’t replace them because import volumes are far too small. Their invisibility, meanwhile, isn’t the benefit Mr. Rahe thinks. Since the 19th century, tariffs have been a breeding ground for rent-seeking and corruption and have persisted after decades of failure, precisely because their costs are hidden and diffuse. Transparency is a hallmark of good tax policy; opacity is its enemy.

Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and Scott Lincicome

Washington

Mr. Carrillo Obregon is a trade policy analyst and Mr. Lincicome is vice president for economics and trade at the Cato Institute" 

Understanding Tariffs and Their Trade-Offs

Although the economy was severely damaged during the pandemic, the culprits were price controls and lockdowns

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Flaws mar Paul Rahe’s op-ed arguing that, in a world subject to war and other disruptions, tariffs can protect an economy’s resilience (“There’s a Case for Tariffs,” April 16). It’s untrue that the pandemic showed that, with free trade and global disruptions, “supply chains collapse.”

Although America’s economy was severely damaged during the pandemic, the culprits were price controls and lockdowns. Yet despite these obstructions, as Scott Lincicome explains, “a December 2020 U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) report found that U.S. manufacturers and global supply chains responded quickly to boost supplies or make new drugs, medical devices, PPE, cleaning supplies, and other goods, and that the pharmaceutical, medical device, N95 mask, and cleaning products (including hand sanitizer) industries were particularly ‘resilient’ (in the ITC’s own words).”

Economically, tariffs can’t increase the domestic capacity to produce particular goods without decreasing the domestic capacity to produce other goods. Because private businesses themselves have strong incentives to assess accurately the risks of global disruptions and optimally diversify their sources of supply to minimize supply-chain troubles, tariffs likely create excess capacity in protected, politically powerful industries as they drain resources away from other, politically weaker industries. This political determination of which industries are essential and which aren’t weakens the economy’s ability to respond effectively to global shocks.

Prof. Donald J. Boudreaux

George Mason University" 

America Is in the Middle of a Stealth Manufacturing Boom

Factory jobs are down, but factory output has risen briskly. Credit goes not to tariffs, but to the most basic economic force of all: demand

By Greg Ip. Excerpts:

"Since January 2025, manufacturing jobs have indeed fallen by about 100,000 workers, or roughly 0.6%. In the same period, though, manufacturing production rose 2.3%, and manufacturing shipments, unadjusted for inflation, climbed 4.2%."

"several sectors that where domestic production was strong, so were imports. Where production was down, so were imports."

"domestic production of computer and electronic products last year was up 7.7%. (All its figures are from the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier.) But imports in this sector were up even more, by 40.5%."

"Behind this: an artificial intelligence revolution"

"Aerospace and transportation equipment (which excludes trucks and cars) also boomed last year, with domestic output up 28%."

"Now consider motor vehicles and parts, around which Trump erected steep tariff barriers. Imports duly fell 14%. But domestic output also dropped 3%. In furniture and related products, imports were down 22% while domestic output fell 3%. Relatively high interest rates last year were likely a factor."

"Production of primary metals, including steel and aluminum, did benefit from tariffs which are now as high as 50%. Production rose, and imports fell. With prices well above global levels, capacity utilization, profits and investment should all rise. But Trump’s first-term tariffs didn’t yield sustained prosperity. Even now, primary metals production is more or less back to 2023 levels"

"Food and beverages contribute the largest share of domestic manufacturing output at 18%."

"Foreign competition isn’t that consequential. And production last year was basically flat."

"production can rise simply because existing factories are ramping up capacity. But durable improvement requires investment in new capacity, which is visible in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and aerospace. If tariffs have led to new investment, the effect on production might not show up for a while." 

$170 per tonne industrial carbon tax by 2030—currently Ottawa’s plan—will cost Canadian workers $1,160 in reduced income and result in 50,000 fewer jobs

By Ross McKitrick, Elmira Aliakbari, Joel Emes and Milagros Palacios of The Fraser Institute.

Estimated Impacts of a $170 Industrial Carbon Price in Alberta and Canada

• This study, using a computable general equilibrium model of the Canadian economy, examines the economic implications of increasing Alberta’s and Canada’s industrial carbon price to $170 per tonne by 2030, in line with the current federal mandate.
• This policy would impose substantial costs. In Alberta, real GDP could decline by 2.0%, relative to a scenario in which the industrial carbon price does not increase after 2025. This corresponds to about $1,730 per employed person and a decline of more than 10,000 jobs.
• At the national level, the economy would shrink by 1.3%, equivalent to about $1,160 per employed person, with a loss of over 50,000 jobs.
• The impacts are not evenly distributed across the economy. Energy and energy-intensive sectors in Alberta—including electricity, refined fuels, transportation, and utilities—are projected to experience relatively large declines in output.
• Capital earnings decline much more than labour earnings indicating that, despite the loss in real GDP per worker, households are actually shielded in the short run from the worst economic impacts. The large drop in returns to capital, however, can be expected to result in reduced or cancelled investment plans, which will translate into further long-run declines in Canadian living standards.
• Policy makers should understand the full range of potential economic impacts of further increases in carbon prices, especially in a context in which major trading partners like the United States and China are not engaging in similarly aggressive GHG control policies.

The New Muckrakers Find Who’s Gouging California’s Drivers

By Craig Eyermann of The Independent Institute.

"Over ninety years ago, muckraking author Upton Sinclair ran a failed campaign to become California’s governor in 1934. He later recounted the experience in his very forgettable book, except for one quote, “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.”

The one quote that stands out in Sinclair’s account of his campaign stumping is this one:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

There is perhaps no better quote to understand California’s politicians. Today, there is perhaps no better example of this insight at work than California Governor Gavin Newsom’s ongoing efforts to find evidence of oil companies gouging California consumers. Writing in the Sacramento Bee in March 2025, Nicole Nixon recounts Newsom’s quixotic quest:

Two years after California’s Democratic leaders declared victory over big oil with a law aiming to crack down on industry profits, the state has been unable to prove companies engage in price gouging when the cost of gasoline spikes in California.

Since late 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom has accused the oil industry of ripping off California drivers, pointing to an extreme price spike in the state compared to the rest of the country – while companies reported record profits.

“Open your books and prove that you’re not price gouging. Otherwise, you – big oil – will pay the price, not consumers,” then-Sen. Nancy Skinner said after Newsom signed the bill she authored that created an industry watchdog division and gave the California Energy Commission authority to cap oil company profits and return funds to taxpayers.

But the state hasn’t leveled any penalties on oil refining companies since the law passed and has even stopped posting the data it required.

California’s politicians and the bureaucrats at the state’s Energy Commission are a perfect example of people whose salaries depend on their not understanding things. They could never find evidence of “Big Oil” gouging California consumers because there never was any to find. It was all a scheme aimed at low-information California voters to keep them from getting angry enough to vote out the state’s ruling politicians.

This recent history is front and center today because the price of a gallon of gasoline in California has once again spiked above that in every other state.

Only now, a new generation of muckraking journalists dug into the story of why California’s fuel prices are so much higher than in every other state and found the real culprit. Here is a bullet point summary of what CBS News California discovered after just six months of investigating:

• Why California gas costs more: Higher taxes, labor and business costs, combined with environmental programs, regulations, and the state’s unique fuel blend, drive up baseline prices.
• The political narrative is shifting: After failing to prove price gouging — and grappling with the impact of two shuttered refineries — state leaders are now publicly acknowledging the need to incentivize oil companies to stay.
• Why refineries are leaving: Rising costs, increasing regulations, long-term policy uncertainty, and shrinking returns
• Why global conflict matters: California’s growing reliance on overseas refining is increasing volatility — and validating long-standing industry warnings that outsourcing refining increases the risk of price spikes.

It turns out that 55% of the price of a gallon of gasoline in California is due to factors specific to California, especially those imposed by the state government. Amazingly, the state reports that it collects more in taxes per gallon than oil companies make in profit.

California’s politicians are the ones gouging California’s consumers. But don’t expect them to do anything about it because their salaries depend on their not understanding it."

Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution

Between 1750 and 1789, areas in France with heavier tax burdens experienced significantly more riots

By Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau, and Marco Tabellini. 

"The French Revolution dismantled the ancien régime and redefined state power and institutions. It transformed society by abolishing feudalism and establishing modern bureaucratic and legal frameworks, and its influence extended beyond France, shaping institutions worldwide. While the Revolution’s causes were complex, historical accounts have long emphasized the role of fiscal institutions, particularly the extractive nature of taxation under the ancien régime. However, systematic evidence on the role taxation played in shaping the Revolution remains limited.

Our research examines how taxation shaped the emergence and escalation of unrest and its influence on political behavior during the Revolution’s early years. Using data on local per capita tax burdens around 1780, we found that bailliages (administrative districts) with heavier tax burdens experienced significantly more riots between 1750 and 1789. Specifically, a shift from a bailliage in the bottom quarter of the tax-burden distribution to one in the top quarter—a difference of roughly 8 percent of per capita income at the time—more than doubled the number of riots during that period. High-tax bailliages were also more likely to be swept into the Great Fear of 1789, when rumors of aristocratic conspiracies spread rapidly across rural France, triggering attacks on manor houses and the destruction of feudal records and ultimately leading the National Assembly to abolish feudalism.

This relationship holds even after accounting for several factors commonly associated with revolutionary unrest, including the spread of Enlightenment ideas, increases in wheat prices, the local presence of aristocrats and clergy, and the size of tax police brigades. It also holds when we narrow the analysis to municipalities on either side of a tax border. One interpretation of these findings is that taxation depressed local economic development, impoverishing communities and thus leading them to revolt for material reasons.

The relationship between taxation and unrest stemmed primarily from taxes on goods rather than on income or profits. This aligns with historical accounts emphasizing popular hostility toward these taxes, viewed as especially regressive, enforced through intrusive state controls, and emblematic of the ancien régime’s fiscal inequities. Our research focuses on the salt tax and the traites, a system of internal customs duties. Together, these taxes accounted for over 20 percent of royal revenue by 1780, were deeply resented, and were among the first abolished in 1790.

Our findings provide evidence of widespread opposition to taxation. To examine this idea further, we analyzed the lists of grievances compiled and submitted to Versailles ahead of the Estates General in the spring of 1789. Areas with heavier tax burdens submitted more complaints against taxation, even after accounting for the total number of complaints submitted. This relationship holds only for the Third Estate and not for the nobility, consistent with the fact that commoners bore the brunt of taxation while the nobility was largely exempt. Our research also finds that inequality exacerbated opposition to taxation for reasons beyond its direct economic burden. Many complaints cited the unequal imposition of taxes across social groups and territories, as well as coercive extraction without corresponding public benefits.

The Enlightenment emphasized equality before the law and challenged inherited privilege and arbitrary power. Our findings show that riots were more common in areas with greater exposure to Enlightenment ideas, as measured by local book sales and subscriptions to the Encyclopédie. Local literacy rates do not seem to have played a significant role, indicating that the diffusion of ideas mattered more than access to reading per se.

Tax-related riots peaked in the 1780s, but the reason for this timing is unclear. Taxes on goods had existed for centuries, and the overall burden rose sharply between 1690 and 1760 but changed little thereafter. Instead, historians point to droughts that devastated harvests and drove up wheat prices in the 1780s. Our research uses historical data on temperature and precipitation and finds that hotter-than-average summers led to a larger increase in riots in high-tax municipalities than in their low-tax neighbors. Together with our evidence on tax disparities and Enlightenment exposure, these findings suggest that taxation created the structural foundations for unrest, while material hardship and ideological forces catalyzed long-standing grievances about fiscal inequality into open revolt.

While fiscal grievances fueled the Revolution from below, the decisions of representatives also drove the movement from above. We analyzed more than 60,000 legislative speeches delivered between May 1789, when the Estates General convened, and January 1793, when Louis XVI was executed. Our findings reveal that legislators from high-tax constituencies were about 70 percent more likely to discuss taxation, 60 percent more likely to criticize the ancien régime, and roughly 73 percent more likely to defend the Revolution in tax-related speeches than legislators from low-tax constituencies. These legislators were also more inclined to frame taxation as oppressive and call for fiscal reform.

Beyond fiscal debates, legislators from high-tax constituencies were more likely to demand institutional change, call for the abolition of feudal privileges, and criticize the monarchy in their speeches following the Great Fear of 1789. During the Legislative Assembly (1791–1792), legislators from heavily taxed constituencies were more likely to support abolishing the monarchy and to vote for the king’s execution during the National Convention in January 1793.

Note
This research brief is based on Tommaso Giommoni et al., “Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 34816, February 2026."

Note to Bessent and Congressional Republicans: Greedflation Is Still Bad Economics

By Ryan Bourne and Nathan Miller of Cato.

"Republicans spent the better part of four years mocking the political left’s greedflation narrative—and rightly so. But lately they’re using similar arguments to deflect blame for high gas prices pushing up measured inflation. 

The war in Iran has predictably spiked oil prices. The price of the US crude oil benchmark rose over 40 percent in March, and gasoline prices now average above $4 per gallon. As a result, the energy consumer price index was up 10.9 percent in the second-largest single-month increase in the series’ 60-year history. Buoyed by those rising energy prices, overall CPI was also up—0.9 percent in the same month. 

Overwhelmingly, that’s the result of markets pricing in the likelihood of protracted war in Iran and supply chain disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Already, the war has caused $50 billion worth of oil lost—nearly a month of total US oil demand. 

For economists, the price change is an unremarkable consequence. This is what happens when the supply of a good falls, especially one for which the short-term demand is relatively inelastic given oil’s downstream importance. Indeed, with oil being a critical input to so many other industries, sharply rising oil prices are one of the few supply shocks with the power to make the overall price level spike—producing a so-called transitory inflation.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the war in Ukraine disrupted global energy and food supply chains in a similar way. But this occurred at the same time the Federal Reserve had just allowed a huge monetary expansion, and Congress was borrowing like crazy. The result was soaring economy-wide spending, as people shed money balances and bought assets, goods, and services. This effect was ultimately hugely more consequential in driving the uplift in the price level we saw over time.

Democratic politicians, as members of the incumbent party, faced massive pressure to do something about the cost of living, and predictably they reached for an explanation that didn’t implicate their own support for “running the economy hot” through monetary and fiscal stimulus. Some, including Biden, blamed Putin’s war in Ukraine. But many, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D‑MA) and later the president again, also advocated the greedflation or “profit-led” theory of inflation. 

Senator Warren argued that price increases were primarily driven not by excess consumer spending (from the inflated supply of money) or supply disruptions, but by corporations tacitly squeezing excess profits from consumers given the shrouding effect of the supply-shock cost rises. The best evidence supporters of that theory could muster was unconvincing: Nonsense reports conflated the producer price index with input costs, politicians made slipshod comparisons between corporate profits and the inflation rate, and researchers listened in on earnings calls for evidence that firms were using inflation as pretext.

Warren herself seems sincere in believing that this short-term exploitation can arise from periods of cost shocks; she also condemned companies she said were price gouging following Trump’s summer 2025 tariff chaos and last month pressed the Federal Trade Commission to investigate companies raising prices after war in Iran broke out—especially in gasoline, fertilizer, and airlines. But her misguided arguments are now finding convenient use by Republicans too. 

In a House Appropriations Committee hearing last week, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins blamed rising fertilizer prices on “a handful of companies that have basically taken over the market.” 

A day before that, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned retail gas stations to lower prices soon. As crude oil prices fall, Bessent said he’d be looking “to keep the retail gas stations honest,” adding, “I’m sure the president will call out anyone who’s a bad actor.” That comes at the same time CNN reported Republicans were actively searching for a midterm strategy post–Iran war: “The White House has also sought new ideas for taking on rising prices, such as accusing gas station operators of seizing on the war to gouge consumers at the pump.” Of course, we saw similar browbeating against companies after the Liberation Day tariffs.

But corporate greed or price gouging has never been a plausible theory of price changes, let alone inflation. Corporations with substantive market power don’t need pretext. They can always extract high prices by artificially limiting supply. And firms without market power that try to pocket a windfall invite undercutting by rivals; that’s especially true of hypercompetitive retail gas stations. When prices rise simultaneously across an entire industry—nay, across the entire world—the far simpler explanation is either a demand shock or a common cost shock—precisely the sort a war-driven supply shock produces. Consumers have to be willing and able to pay the higher prices, after all.

A lot of politicians around the world seem to get upset if prices for retail gas spike on inventory that was acquired at lower cost. They regard that as unfair “gouging.” Few of them, I suspect, insist on selling their homes for the price they paid for them. But fundamentally, this misunderstands the role of market prices, which reflect the relevant scarcity of the products in each new context. The opportunity cost for firms of selling oil below what the market will bear today is the price that could be obtained elsewhere in the world. Firms also need to replace inventory at the new market price. So, yes, they might make a short-term accounting profit on some inventory, but this is quite transitory.

More important, prices must rise to allocate scarce goods toward those with the highest willingness to pay and to prevent shortages. The profit received is an incentive to ramp up production and end a shortage. Companies who don’t raise prices don’t miraculously have more gasoline to give—we’re still $50 billion worth of oil short. And because charging below market prices would be crystallized into a shortage, consumers aren’t left better off in aggregate. The times when a consumer benefits by finding gas at below-market prices are inevitably offset by the times they find no gas at all—either because earlier customers tapped the supply or because the time cost of waiting in line for gas isn’t worth it.

The increasing frequency with which politicians reach for the greedflation myth is troubling. It reveals that lawmakers aren’t interested in reckoning with the consequences of their policies. When voters swallow the greedflation myth, they give cover to the bad policies that actually caused price hikes and absolve the lawmakers who pushed for them. With Warren and the Democrats, it was strong support for overly stimulatory monetary and fiscal policy. With the Trump administration, it’s explaining away the impact of tariffs and a conflict they started. 

Voters and consumers shouldn’t let this happen. Supply shocks raise prices, and wars are supply shocks. Loose monetary policy devalues the dollar. At a minimum, governments that go to war or government institutions that enable excess monetary creation bear responsibility for the inflationary consequences, not the people and companies that have to respond to those consequences." 

Is each American generation doing better?

From Tyler Cowen. 

"We construct a posttax, posttransfer income measure from 1963 to 2023 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement that allows us to consistently compare the economic well-being of five generations of Americans at ages 36–40. We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women. Progress for Millennials younger than 30 has also remained robust, though largely due to greater reliance on their parents. Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.

That is from Kevin Corrinth and Jeff Larrimore in Demography.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis."

From Fatal Conceit to the Friendly Skies: How Deregulation Made Flight Affordable

By Jeffery L. Degner AIER. Excerpt:

"With FDR’s creation of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in 1938, its designers claimed that it would centrally administer, “safety-related rulemaking, accident investigation, and economic regulation of commercial airlines.” Eventually, it would go far beyond such broad claims and do far more than that, engaging in price-fixing and the prevention of new entrants, just to name a few. Ultimately, the hubris of social engineers led them to declare what “fair” prices were across the airline industry.

In a 1975 report, no less than liberal senator Edward Kennedy admitted that “the Board’s experience suggests it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to develop a cost-based ratemaking system that uses fair procedures and keeps fares in such an industry low.” In a more damning admission, “This is not to say that inherent defects are the only cause of the CAB’s failings. These may, for example, also reflect the human tendency to listen more closely to representatives, such as those for the industry, who are powerful, well-informed, and can reward regulators with future jobs or contracts.”

The ultimate effect of this centralized planning was to “control prices, restrict entry, and confer antitrust immunity.” In brief, the CAB was used to create a government-backed cartel in the interest of existing large carriers. In what amounted to a public confession of crony-capitalism, the CAB’s days were numbered. 

In the wake of the report, American Airlines was allowed to discount its fares up to 45 percent in an attempt to see whether airline travel could be “made available at a price all can afford.” Once this mild form of price competition was allowed, rivalrous competition showed suspicious legislators and regulators that allowing competition did indeed create greater value for consumers. Eventually, Senator Howard Cannon along with bipartisan supporters including Ted Stevens and Wendell Ford helped pass the Airline Deregulation Act in February of 1978. 

Since industrial leaders at the time, like Delta Airlines, had grown accustomed to the many protections they received under the CAB, they lobbied against the deregulatory move. They made claims that “free entry” and “free exit” were “untested concepts” that would result in the concentration of the industry into the “hands of only a few carriers…causing service deterioration at smaller cities and in smaller markets.” Delta’s doom-mongering didn’t materialize in either the short or long run. 

In the nearly 50 years since the abolition of the Civil Aeronautics Board, routes and flexibility have proliferated, and prices have declined continually. In fact, the last three decades have seen inflation-adjusted domestic airfares fall from $614 in 1995 to $397 in 2025. Further, the industry continues to grow, nearly doubling the number of employees since 1990. Prior to deregulation, air travel was undoubtedly a luxury good. Now, it has become so affordable that 80 percent of Americans with annual household income below $50,000 have taken flight at some point in their lives." 

 

 

 

BART's new fare gates have led to a 1,000-hour decline in clean up time; 41% drop in crime; and $10 million increase in projected revenue

Tweet from NX Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic.

 

The Human Progress Index (HPI) shows an even more dramatic improvement in human well-being since 1990 than either the UN’s HDI or the Augmented HDI

Tweet from Chelsea Olivia Follett. 

 

The WTO Isn’t Dead, but America Is Breaking It

Reform can’t happen if the U.S. keeps pretending it didn’t help cripple the institution it’s now eulogizing

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Jamieson Greer’s frustration with the World Trade Organization is understandable, but his op-ed ignores how the U.S. unwisely accelerated the organization’s decline (“Another Fish Story From the WTO,” April 8).

The American middle class has prospered in the era of open trade, and U.S. manufacturing job declines—driven mainly by productivity gains—long predate China’s WTO accession. The U.S. was the WTO’s chief architect and reaped significant economic and geopolitical value from the system. Its retreat, which began before the administration, ignored these realities and instead prioritized U.S. farm subsidies and trade remedies, often resisting the disciplines Washington demanded of others.

Fealty to these and other insular political issues stymied multilateral negotiations and motivated four separate U.S. administrations to neuter the WTO dispute settlement by blocking Appellate Body appointments. Washington’s participation in disputes has also ground to a halt. You can’t complain about the rules of the game after you stop playing and strangle the referee.

Worst of all, the U.S. has been a bad-faith abuser of the rules it helped write, blowing through tariff bindings and invoking narrow WTO exceptions for national security and balance-of-payments crises to maintain President Trump’s global tariff wall.

Mr. Greer is right to decry the WTO’s consensus problem and the abuse of certain rules by other WTO members. The institution does need reform. But members’ continued participation shows the institution isn’t dead. And reform can’t happen if the U.S. keeps pretending it didn’t help cripple the institution it’s now eulogizing.

Clark Packard and Scott Lincicome

Washington

Mr. Packard is a trade policy fellow and Mr. Lincicome is Vice President for Economics and Trade at the Cato Institute."

Dr. Makary and Mr. Hyde at the FDA

The agency kills a therapy for melanoma despite the evidence of progress against deadly tumors

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Patients with metastatic melanoma who stop responding to other immunotherapies typically die in less than a year. In Replimune’s trial, tumors shrank in nearly all patients and vanished in one of six. About a third went into remission. FDA staff were so impressed by the results that the agency designated RP1 a “breakthrough therapy” in November 2024 to expedite its review."

"As we’ve reported, Dr. Prasad last summer overruled career staff to reject RP1. The agency’s main criticism was that its trial lacked a control arm, though this would be unethical in late-stage patients who failed to improve on other therapies."

"Start with the claim that the tumor-shrinking effects of RP1 could not be disentangled from that of another immunotherapy that patients were taking concurrently. But all patients had previously relapsed or failed to respond to other immunotherapies. RP1 is intended to help these refractory patients by boosting their response to other therapies."

"cancer in responding patients advanced after a median 30.6 months when they also got RP1, versus 4.4 months of being treated with other immunotherapies."

"The FDA implicitly concedes that the RP1 results are impressive by contriving ridiculous reasons to argue they could be exaggerated." 

Virginia Is for Higher Taxes—and Gerrymanders

Gov. Spanberger’s popularity takes a hit as she abandons the center

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Unlike in private industry, collective bargaining in government isn’t adversarial. Public unions sit on both sides of the table since they fund the campaigns of the politicians with whom they “negotiate.” The incentive is to give away the store to union allies"

"Wisconsin Republicans in 2011 ended this cycle by limiting government collective bargaining, which has saved taxpayers some $35.6 billion, according to the MacIver Institute. Studies have also found that the law improved student test scores, in part by allowing schools to pay teachers more for performance."  

Los Angeles Schools Can’t Do Math

Teachers get a rich new union contract despite awful student results

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

The contract "increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave and expanded student support services that will invariably require more hiring. Pay for new teachers will jump nearly 12% to $77,000."

"state per-pupil spending has soared in recent years to $27,418"

They will "have a workforce that is larger than when the district had 40% more students than we have today"

"the district and state are required to make payments equal to 30% of teacher salaries for their pensions. Teachers can retire at age 63 with a pension worth 85% of their final pay, plus free health benefits for life."

"Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide." 

The Truth About the Cuban Blackouts

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady. Excerpts:

"Blaming the U.S. embargo for Cuba’s economic disaster has lost its political firepower because the law has been watered down. Today Cuba can buy, with cash, all the food, medicine and construction materials it wants from the U.S. It can get lots of other stuff from the rest of the world."

"Cuba’s economic crisis is caused by a hard-currency shortage. Output from once-vibrant export industries like sugar, tobacco, coffee and fruit can’t even supply the domestic market. Barren agricultural fields are covered in weeds. Manufacturing is gone. Even tourism, which the regime has tried to hype since the 1990s, is in bad shape. Handouts from the Soviet Union, bilateral lenders and Venezuela, which kept the country afloat for decades, are no more."

"Even before January, . . . the monthly Cuban ration book supplied food for less than two weeks." 

"If not for remittances, families would suffer even greater privation." 

"he cause of the power failures is the antiquated grid which, . . . requires an investment of $8 billion to $10 billion over three to five years."

"new power plants have to be built because the existing ones sit on polluted land." 

Around 14% of Enrollees in ACA Plans Failed to Make Payments, Data Shows

Decline in January payments is driven by loss of federal Affordable Care Act subsidies

By Anna Wilde Mathews of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Normally, the rate of falloff in ACA plan membership early in the year is in the midsingle-digit range.

ACA enrollment was already declining."

"Many ACA policyholders saw their insurance bills mushroom after expanded federal subsidies that started during the pandemic lapsed at the start of January, when insurers were already implementing major rate hikes largely because of rising health costs."

"When health-insurance prices rise, younger, healthier people are more likely to drop coverage, leaving a greater proportion of sicker people who are costlier for insurers.

Among people who signed up with the same ACA insurers in 2026 that they had last year, Wakely data showed that those who made their initial premium payments were about 10% less healthy, based on an estimate of their expected healthcare costs, than those who didn’t pay their January bills.

When healthier people leave a market, insurers project higher average healthcare costs per enrollee and raise their premiums to cover them. That happened this year, when insurers made steep rate increases, but it couldn’t yet be determined if they correctly gauged the pattern—or if they will raise premiums again next year partly as a result of the ever-costlier pool of enrollees."

"some of the HealthCare.gov states saw rapid growth of low-income enrollees after the introduction of enhanced subsidies in 2021, with many on plans that didn’t require any premium payments. That expansion might now be melting away." 

The Growing State Tax and Jobs Divide

On April 15, see how job growth has changed in high- and low-tax states

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"progressive states . . . tax their rich and middle classes more. 

"small businesses . . .typically pay tax at their state’s individual rate."

"Eight states—Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming—have no income tax. On the other end of the spectrum are New York (top state and local individual rate 14.8%), Oregon (13.9%), California (13.3%), Hawaii (11%), Minnesota (10.85%), New Jersey (10.75%), Massachusetts (9%), Washington (9%) and Vermont (8.75%)."

"Private job growth outside of social assistance and healthcare—which rely heavily on government funds—has been paltry in these states since January 2020: Hawaii (-3.8%), Oregon (-3%), Vermont (-1.7%), Massachusetts (-1.4%), New York (-1.3%), California (-1.2%) and Minnesota (-1%)."

"stronger job growth in lower-tax states: Texas (10%), Florida (8.5%), North Carolina (7.9%), Arizona (7.3%), Tennessee (5.7%), Alabama (4.3%) and New Hampshire (1.6%)." 

America’s industrial capacity has continued to grow during a time of free trade agreements and trade deficits

See “As Compared to What?” – Exhibit #3,4593e17 by Don Boudreaux. Excerpt:

"Oren [Cass] laments “our failure to attend to industrialization.” What failure? When Pres. Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 America’s industrial capacity had been on the rise since the pandemic and that month reached an all-time high. This capacity has continued to grow. Today, America’s industrial capacity is 13 percent larger than when China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001, 66 percent larger than when NAFTA took effect in January 1994, and 148 percent larger than in 1975, the last year the U.S. ran an annual trade surplus.

Oren might respond that the precise kind of capacity that we now have prevents us from producing the most-important stuff. Using the example featured in the piece you sent, Oren would likely point out that because we import many transformers of the sort used in data centers, our reliance on foreign producers for transformers is slowing our completion of data centers and, hence, hampering our development of AI. Perhaps. (Never mind that domestic politics is now the highest obstacle to data-center construction, and also threatens to thwart AI directly.) Oren’s solution is to produce more transformers domestically.

How simple! This conclusion appears to be a no-brainer. But appearances here deceive. Like all protectionists, Oren never asks: What outputs will America therefore produce less of? He supposes that the capital and resources that tariffs or subsidies draw into transformer production will be drawn away only from domestic industries producing goods or services that are less important (according to criteria preferred by Oren) than are transformers. But Oren can’t possibly know just what other domestic industries will shrink as a result of transformer tariffs or subsidies, or by how much they’ll shrink.

We might all agree that an engineered increase in the production of transformers would be worthwhile if the only consequence were reduced American production of deodorant and dog biscuits. But what if increased production of transformers reduces American production of semiconductors or jet engines or software for running AI?

Of course, I have no idea what we Americans would produce less of if the government uses tariffs or subsidies to increase American transformer production. But nor does Oren have any idea. He naively points to something – transformers – that would be good to have more of were that something costless, and then he leaps to the unwarranted conclusion that free trade has failed because we currently don’t have more of that something.

To overcome, for any product, the strong presumption in favor of a policy of free trade – a policy with a proven record not only of raising living standards but also of enhancing national defense – requires compelling argument and solid evidence. But all that Oren gives here, as in his other writings, are half-told tales detached from the important considerations that serious economists habitually take note of."

FAR too restrictive: Time to repeal floor area ratio limits

By Steve Swedberg of CEI.

"In cities across the world, fights over housing affordability come down to a simple question: how much can be built on a single lot? In Chandigarh, India, officials are debating whether to double that limit, while Sydney, Australia has seen public clashes over proposals for increased housing density.

Back in the United States, lawsuits in Virginia suburbs, protests in San Francisco, and contentious hearings in cities such as Baltimore and Austin show that zoning has become a central flashpoint in local politics. One zoning law that has played a role in these disputes either directly or indirectly is the floor area ratio (FAR).

FAR limits how much total building space can be constructed on a lot, and it applies to both residential and commercial structures depending on the zoning district. It is calculated by dividing the total building floor area by the total lot area. For example, a 5,000-square-foot lot with a FAR of 2.0 allows 10,000 square feet of building space. That could take the form of a single large home, several smaller units, or some combination. In all cases, total floor area cannot exceed the FAR limit.

FAR may seem like a technical, math-heavy zoning rule disconnected from everyday life. In practice, it sets a limit on building size that strongly influences what housing gets built and who can afford to live in which neighborhood.

The faulty logic behind the limit

FARs in the US can be traced back to early 20^th-century New York City. The city initially used height limits to prevent skyscrapers from obstructing air and light to the streets. In the mid-20^th century, planners concluded that height restrictions were inadequate and began supplementing them with FAR regulations to control overall building bulk.

For housing, FAR rules effectively acted as a proxy for height limits by setting a maximum total building volume relative to lot size rather than a fixed vertical cap. Other cities followed suit by adopting similar approaches. Decades of development under FAR rules suggest that the logic behind the limit is flawed. FAR sets a maximum on total building volume relative to lot size, but it does not control how that space is used.

A building can fully comply with FAR yet still cast long shadows, crowd neighboring properties, or occupy most of the lot. Two buildings with the same FAR can look entirely different: one tall and slender, another short and bulky, covering most of the lot. Because FAR regulates size instead of form or placement, its impact on sunlight, airflow, and open space is inconsistent at best.

The other rationales do not fare better, especially that of “maintaining neighborhood character.” While often invoked to reflect residents’ preferences about scale and appearance, the concept of “neighborhood character” largely refers to a subjective sense of visual appearance or feel, not a clearly defined metric of public harm. The term is used to express general opposition, as opposed to something that is easily quantified or tied to a specific land-use concern.

Another justification is infrastructure capacity. By limiting building volume, planners aim to prevent overloading streets, utilities, and schools. However, infrastructure demand depends more on the number of units and occupancy patterns than on floor area alone. A large single-family home may place fewer demands on infrastructure than a smaller multi-unit building with the same square footage.

Many cities can address these challenges more directly through market-based alternatives such as user fees, impact fees, or private investment, which allow growth while ensuring that those who consume or benefit from infrastructure help cover its costs without resorting to distortive zoning regulations.

Fewer buildings, pricier homes

Beyond faulty rationales, FARs produce unintended consequences. To quote the Cato Institute, FARs “restrict the number of developable square feet of residential space for a given lot size, and thereby limit the density of co-living buildings.” By capping total buildable volume, FARs force developers to make trade-offs about how much to build and how to allocate space among units. This reduces the number of housing units, discourages mid-sized projects, and contributes to higher prices.

Direct studies of FARs are limited because they are usually bundled with other zoning rules, which makes their independent effects hard to isolate. Nevertheless, there are some FAR-specific case studies.

Zurich pursued a policy of upzoning, which is a change in zoning rules that allows more building space on a lot. By increasing the allowable FAR, Zurich boosted the number of housing units by 9 percent over a decade. A 17 percent increase of allowable FAR in Mumbai, India, resulted in a 58 percent increase in housing supply, as well as a 24 percent decrease in housing prices in affected areas.

Broader research on density limits reinforces these findings. Allowing more building space increases housing supply and takes pressure off of housing prices, while restrictive land-use regulations limit housing construction and drive up housing prices. An estimate from a Cato Institute policy paper attributes about 20 percent of housing growth variation to density regulations, including FARs.

Scrap the cap

FARs act as an invisible barrier to housing. They do not reliably protect sunlight, air, neighborhood character, or infrastructure capacity. Meanwhile, FARs constrain how many units can be built and raise costs for renters and buyers alike. Moreover, the decision about how much floor space to build and how to distribute it should be determined by those with the most at stake: the property owners, the lenders, and the residents.

While some cities might consider partially relaxing FAR limits as a short-term measure, the most effective solution is full repeal. Repeal would free developers to respond to demand, allow more housing units to be built where people want to live, and make housing more affordable without relying on burdensome regulations like FARs. It is time to stop letting this flawed formula dictate who can live where."