Policy

The empathy for and interest in protecting the powerless and a ruthless pursuit of opportunity for all, no matter of high or low birth, that once defined a righteous and productive political movement has been set aside in favor of a performative politics—whose most zealous adherents are often more interested in signaling membership in a caste—that

Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

…the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

The anecdote helped explain the change

Starting with the “Great Society” splurge in the 1960s, which created many social programs but failed to provide any way to pay for them, America has become accustomed to living beyond its means, essentially by borrowing huge amounts of money and passing the debt along to future generations. (An admirable exception was the Clinton presidency, which

By keeping long-term interest rates deliberately low, the Fed in effect subsidized government deficit spending by keeping the cost of borrowing artificially low. Only now as the Fed has had to raise interest rates to counter inflation have the costs to the federal fisc become more apparent.

Loose monetary policy created asset-price inflation, but ordinary people mostly just felt the effects of rising prices. Unlike the wealthy, they didn’t benefit much from the rising asset prices in their portfolios.

Ms. Reeves in October unveiled a budget aiming to achieve the highest revenue as a proportion of GDP since World War II.

This exodus has removed those former taxpayers’ capital gains from the tax base, while the higher capital-gains rate probably is discouraging other taxpayers from realizing gains.

News flash: Once a wealthy taxpayer has left the j

We have seen that it is not fluctuations in the money supply growth rate as such that set in motion boom-bust cycles but rather fluctuations in the growth rate of the supply of money created by central and commercial banks out of “thin air”.

America cannot redistribute its way to prosperity. Aggressively raising taxes on the wealthy by 1.5% of GDP ($5 trillion over the decade) and redistributing those funds equally to every American would provide just $1,500 per person annually. Certainly helpful, but no substitute for the rising incomes produced by strong economic growth.

Thus, revenue

Since then [2017], the federal regulatory army has continued to expand, with an annual budget now exceeding $80 billion. Over the past eight years, federal agencies have imposed some 550 major new rules—each carrying an estimated economic cost of more than $100 million per year.

Moreover, without the crush of new federal regulations, businesses cou