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… is from page 84 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s profound, yet unfortunately neglected, (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function [original emphasis]:

A judicial precedent is not law per se, but evidence of it only. The real law is custom.

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Here’s a letter to my long-time “Proud Trump man” correspondent, Nolan McKinney.

Mr. McKinney:

You “laughed out loud” at Phil Gramm’s and my suggestion that Trump’s second-term tariffs helped cause jobs to grow at a much slower pace in 2025 – the first year of his second term, one filled with tariff hikes – than in 2017, the first year of his first term, before tariffs were raised. You credit your amusement to the fact that “the President is aggressive at deporting illegal immigrants which steal American jobs.” The slower job growth in 2025, you insist, “only happened because of the immigration crackdown.”

LOL!

If the jobs once held by deported immigrants were indeed ‘stolen’ from Americans, then the removal of immigrants from those jobs would have caused Americans to fill those same jobs, resulting in no slowdown in employment growth. But there has in fact been a huge slowdown in employment growth, which means – if you’re correct that this slowdown in employment growth was caused by the mass deportation of immigrants – that immigrants were not ‘stealing’ jobs from Americans.

Sincerely,
Don

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal rightly applauds the Environmental Protection Agency:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday at long last repealed Barack Obama’s so-called endangerment finding that declared greenhouse gas emissions a threat to public health and safety. Cue the apocalyptic warnings unhinged from reality. What progressives really fear is that they won’t be able to dictate the energy supplies, cars and appliances that Americans can buy.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal also rightly criticizes the Federal Trade Commission:

Lina Khan may have left to advise Zohran Mamdani in New York, but her ghost still animates the Federal Trade Commission under new Chair Andrew Ferguson. That explains how the agency has now drawn a First Amendment challenge for allegedly targeting a media outfit.

…..

The FTC justifies its action on grounds that NewsGuard is itself engaging in censorship. Mr. Ferguson has said NewsGuard “led collusive ad boycotts—possibly in violation of our antitrust laws—to censor the speech of conservative and independent media in the United States.”

But Mr. Ferguson misreads the law in going after NewsGuard, a private outfit. The First Amendment protects private actors against censorship by the government.

We’re not fans of media rating shops, since they typically have their own mostly leftward biases. PolitiFact is Exhibit A. NewsGuard’s James Warren once sent us an importuning query objecting to something in an op-ed we had published. But we thought it was a matter of opinion and ignored Mr. Warren, a former political columnist.

Alex Tabarrok’s high hopes that a Trump FDA would be more freedom-oriented than under past administrations have been dashed. Here’s his conclusion:

An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.

Arnold Kling nicely sums up a significant reality: “The post-liberal right is smugly ignorant of economics.”

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, argues that ill-consequences will arrive more quickly than in the past from the U.S. government’s failure to seriously rein in entitlement spending.

Speaking of excessive government spending and of the dangers of deficit financing, Dominik Lett reports on the Congressional Budget Office’s recent warning of ballooning budget deficits.

Here’s the abstract from a new paper by Brian Albrecht, Alex Tabarrok, and Mark Whitmeyer:

Price controls kill the incentive for arbitrage. We prove a Chaos Theorem: under a binding price ceiling, suppliers are indifferent across destinations, so arbitrarily small cost differences can determine the entire allocation. The economy tips to corner outcomes in which some markets are fully served while others are starved; small parameter changes flip the identity of the corners, generating discontinuous welfare jumps. These corner allocations create a distinct source of cross-market misallocation, separate from the aggregate quantity loss (the Harberger triangle) and from within-market misallocation emphasized in prior work. They also create an identification problem: welfare depends on demand far from the observed equilibrium. We derive sharp bounds on misallocation that require no parametric assumptions. In an efficient allocation, shadow prices are equalized across markets; combined with the adding-up constraint, this collapses the infinite-dimensional welfare problem to a one-dimensional search over a common shadow price, with extremal losses achieved by piecewise-linear demand schedules. Calibrating the bounds to stationlevel AAA survey data from the 1973–74 U.S. gasoline crisis, misallocation losses range from roughly 1 to 9 times the Harberger triangle.

Jimmy Alfonso Licon explains that “immigration arrest quotas undermine ICE’s mission.” A slice:

The logic is straightforward. Violent criminals, gang leaders, and professional smugglers are difficult to locate and expensive to apprehend, often relying on networks of other people to help them evade detection. Pursuing such criminal organizations requires investigations, coordination across jurisdictions, surveillance, and uncertain outcomes, making it easy for agents to come up empty-handed. By contrast, unauthorized immigrants who are otherwise law-abiding are comparatively easy to find. They have fixed residences, work regular jobs, and their children often attend the local school.cMany are already interacting with the state through legal channels, including standard immigration check-ins.

When arrest quotas rise, then, it’s no surprise that arrests have accelerated disproportionately among those who are easiest to find and arrest rather than those who pose the greatest threat.cRecent data confirm this pattern.cEnforcement activity has surged, but the majority of arrests involve individualswithout prior criminal convictions,ca distribution consistent with quota-driven optimization rather than threat-based prioritization. And given the career and political incentives behind meeting those quotas, it is what we should expect. This behavior is rational given the incentives; it would be surprising if agents behaved otherwise.

George Will is understandably appalled, if not surprised, by the adolescent boorishness of the current vice-president of the executive branch of the United States government. A slice:

When, during the 2024 campaign, rumors about Haitians eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio, were disseminated, with Vance’s help, this was his response when confronted with the fact that no facts supported the rumors: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He has a duty to lie because the media are indolent.

Vance has a knack for late — very late — adolescent naughtiness. It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. Of Europe’s largest war since World War II: “I don’t care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Very edgy.

Performative politics is almost the only politics on offer nowadays. But must it be a coarseness and flippancy competition?

Let it be said on Vance’s behalf that he refuses to present himself as other than what he is. But before celebrating him for his authenticity, attention should be paid to what he authentically is.

John Tamny remembers Ed Crane.

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… is from page 50 of the 2002 first edition of Geoffrey E. Wood’s Fifty Economic Fallacies Exposed [original emphasis]:

If a country is borrowing abroad, it is not necessarily increasing net overseas indebtedness. That may seem surprising – if a person borrows, his or her debts increase. But even in that case, if he or she has assets, they may be increasing in value more rapidly than the new debts.

DBx: Yep.

Even for that portion of a country’s trade deficit that consists of foreigners’ lending money to residents of the home country – that is, for that portion of a country’s trade deficit that is actual debt – there is no implication that that portion of the trade deficit either is evidence of, or a source of, economic troubles in the home country. There are many economically sound reasons for borrowing money, one of which is to enable businesses to acquire funds, at the lowest possible cost, to expand or to otherwise improve their operations. Successful use of such borrowed funds increases the real net worth of the borrowing businesses.

Of course, excessive borrowing – by households or businesses – is possible, and it does sometimes occur. But there are strong natural checks on such borrowing: Not only do households and businesses themselves have strong incentives to avoid excessive borrowing, lenders have strong incentives to avoid lending to individuals and businesses that are over-extended in their financial obligations.

The big exception to the rule that there’s no reason to worry much about excessive borrowing is supplied by governments (especially those with access to their own central banks). Political incentives encourage existing governments to borrow excessively; they do so because the benefits of government spending today are enjoyed by today’s citizens-taxpayers while the burden of paying for this current spending is loaded onto future citizens-taxpayers, many of whom aren’t yet even born.

Yet even in this case, to the extent that the home-country government borrows from foreigners, the problem isn’t the resulting increase in the home-country’s trade deficit (or shrinkage in its trade surplus); the problem is the excessive spending. The cure for this ailment is to rein in spending (perhaps with a strong balanced-budget constraint) rather than to point to the red-herring of the rising trade deficit as if the cause of today’s excessive spending and growing indebtedness is foreigners’ willingness to lend.

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In Phil Gramm’s and my Washington Post essay on Tuesday we reported that “in 2025, nonfarm employment grew by 0.9 percent, which was notably less than the 1.6 percent increase in 2017.” Given the data available until yesterday, our data here are correct.

But yesterday it was announced that the job-growth figures for 2025 have since been revised downward. Were Phil and I to write the piece now, our point against Trump’s tariffs would be even stronger, as we’d write – using the newly announced revised data – that “in 2025, nonfarm employment grew by 0.5 percent, which was notably less than the 1.6 percent increase in 2017.”

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Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward has a wonderful piece in the New York Times, a core point being that Trump’s continuing abuse of executive power will be abused also by the Democrats when they return to power. Although Trump, of course, is not the first U.S. president to abuse executive power, he is unquestionably and inexcusably accelerating that abuse. The precedent is ominous.

As noted a couple of weeks ago by Daily Kos,

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to adopt the Republican interpretation of power. Apparently, she’s not the only one. It also appears Sen Elizabeth Warren wants to be a Republican as well or, perhaps more accurately, another Donald Trump. In a recent piece done by NOTUS , Sen Warren, Rep Ocasio-Cortez, and other leaders (and potential Presidential candidates) in the Democratic party “…expressed a willingness to use the new tools Trump has carved out, saying that if Republicans can do it, Democrats can too.”

Here are two slices from Mangu-Ward’s essay:

On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the past few months. TikTok, Intel, U.S. Steel and their ownership have become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.

These stories are examples of a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.

Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government — abolish unaccountable federal agencies, scale back the administrative state, cut spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best and morally suspect at worst.

The major parties have pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it. Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital — bullied into silence, primaried out or resigning in despair.

Yet it has never been more obvious that the grab-and-grow approach to power is a destructive and self-defeating way to conduct politics.

…..

But the project of growing executive power has been bipartisan. On speech, officials in the Biden administration leaned on social media platforms to take down what they deemed Covid and election misinformation without explicit action from the F.C.C. The Supreme Court disposed of a case, Murthy v. Missouri, challenging this jawboning, as it is called, leaving the possibility of backdoor censorship wide open.

The executive’s discretionary economic powers — subsidies, stakes in corporations and tariffs — have proved irresistible, too. The administration has spent billions of dollars to take ownership stakes in private companies like Intel and U.S. Steel.

And Mr. Trump’s tariffs — leveled and removed at will and without the participation of Congress, where the Constitution places the primary power — have disrupted and destabilized the global economy and undermined America’s role in it.

While libertarians were hardly alone in championing free trade, what we have been hollering for years is that tariffs are and can only ever be taxes on Americans. To treat them as leverage, war by other means or simply a sign of the president’s displeasure is to fundamentally misuse and misunderstand the nature of a tariff.

Yes.

Trump & Co. are hostile to genuine liberalism – and, hence, hostile to the institutions and norms that promote social cooperation, peace, and prosperity. This reality is plain as day to all but the most MAGA-benighted. But also hostile to genuine liberalism and its fruits are people on the progressive left (whose policy preferences are not as different from those of the MAGA right as partisans in either camp suppose them to be).

It’s not uncommon nowadays to encounter people who criticize libertarians and classical liberals for reminding the world that many of the political enemies of Trump are also enemies of liberalism and the open society. But such reminders – as offered by Mangu-Ward – are necessary lest in our urgency to rid the body politic of one malignant tumor we replace that tumor with another malignant tumor.

Exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of Trump and MAGA is an important task. No less important is exposing the many misdeeds and dangers of the progressive left. Even if we could be certain that the latter is the lesser of these two terrible evils – a possibility to which I’m inclined but not at all sure of – it is a strategic and tactical mistake to suppose that the only task worthy of friends of liberalism today is to criticize Trump and MAGA while treating the progressive political enemies of our MAGA enemy as, if not our actual friends, our trustworthy allies. To criticize the progressive left is not to praise MAGA, to prop-up Trump, or to otherwise support the current administration.

Anyone who is so certain that the likes of Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris pose a significantly lesser danger over the long-run to liberalism than does MAGA as to justify muting criticisms of today’s Democrats and their media cheerleaders in order to focus criticism exclusively on MAGA is, I submit, naive.

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Arnold Kling reflects on his first five weeks of teaching at UATX.

David Bahnsen is understandably unimpressed with Oren Cass’s economically uninformed criticisms of the U.S. financial sector.

Also understandably unimpressed with Oren Cass’s naivete about finance is Judge Glock. A slice:

On Friday, the writer Oren Cass published an essay in the New York Times claiming that the “financialization” of the American economy has ruined lives and businesses. His use of the term is at times vague, but he argues that financialization is the process of “making financial markets ends unto themselves,” with no positive impact on the “real economy.”

These arguments parrot those of decades of Marxist theorists, which have gained surprising heft and breadth in recent years. They emerge from a basic confusion about what finance does and how money circulates in an economy. At root, theories about financialization are another way to attack investors and businesses earning money—in other words, capitalism.

Finance has been around since the dawn of history. It just means providing or lending money that one expects to be paid back later, with some extra income for the trouble. Starting in the 1990s, however, Marxists such as Giovanni Arrighi claimed that under modern capitalism, traditional finance had been replaced by more esoteric and less fruitful types of financial engineering. In recent years, writers including David Graeber and Matt Stoller have claimed that the financial industry focuses on practices such as debt refinancing and stock buybacks that create no real wealth.

The economist Thomas Sowell once said that the most important question an economist could ask is, “And then what?” After a debt refinancing, does the money disappear into the ether? No: it goes back into a business that can then reinvest the money into developing new products, typically at better terms and rates. When a company buys back its stock, what happens to the money? It gets deposited in someone’s brokerage account, where it can be invested in other stocks and bonds. And then what? The money gets put into businesses that use it to develop new products. There is no separate “financial” economy that does not ultimately connect back to the so-called real one.

Critics of financialization lament that financial firms like hedge funds lend money to one another instead of to the “real” economy. But again, a thoughtful observer must ask: And then what? Those firms then lend to businesses or to consumers who buy products, as they have done from time immemorial. Banks have always borrowed money to lend money. Since the earliest days of the United States’s economy, they have also borrowed money from other banks. Financial chains involving more than one transaction are not new, and they do not destroy wealth or make it disappear.

Alan Reynolds reports that “Trump’s first-term tariffs crushed US manufacturing.” A slice:

Trump’s first year, 2017, ended on a promising note with a bold reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and a minor trim of the top personal rate to 37%. The prospect of growth-friendly taxation was already anticipated in the last quarter of 2017, with a 4.6% rate of GDP growth. In 2018, unfortunately, Trump’s attention shifted to nasty, unpredictable tariffs, which had a paralyzing effect on business plans and world investors.

US GDP growth gradually slowed to 3.3% in the first quarter of 2018, 2.1% in the second, 2.5% in the third, and 0.6% in the fourth.

The S&P 500 stock index fell from 2789.8 in January 2018 to 2567.3 by December, with most of that loss in the last quarter.

Meanwhile, USTR Lighthizer’s relatively painless recommended tariffs on washing machines and solar panels in late January escalated to a serious trade war by August.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal calls out Trump for his “crony Canadian Bridgegate.” A slice:

With President Trump, anything that isn’t nailed down might be grabbed and used as potential leverage. Amazingly, that includes a badly needed international bridge financed by Canada and almost finished. Threats by Mr. Trump to block traffic are bad for business, shoddy treatment of an ally, and bad politics too.

The Gordie Howe bridge will soon connect Detroit, Mich., with Windsor, Ontario. It’s crucial for commerce and will alleviate congestion at the nearby Ambassador bridge and the Windsor tunnel. Another transit link is a clear improvement, since Detroit-Windsor is a major North American commercial ecosystem, including for auto makers. Canada and Michigan will jointly own the bridge. This was negotiated a decade ago, and everyone accepted it, including Mr. Trump in a 2017 joint statement with Canada.

Yet the President suddenly intervened on Monday in an internet post. Mr. Trump complained that the bridge didn’t use enough U.S. steel and that Ontario reacted to his trade wars by boycotting American alcohol. He suggested China is conspiring to “terminate” Canadian ice hockey and “permanently eliminate” the Stanley Cup. “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated,” Mr. Trump said, demanding that Canada show “the Fairness and Respect that we deserve.”

Then came news that shortly before Mr. Trump’s social post, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had met Matthew Moroun, whose billionaire family runs the privately owned Ambassador bridge. Will it shock readers to learn Mr. Moroun isn’t a fan of the competing Gordie Howe project? The Journal reports, citing an anonymous official, that Mr. Lutnick came away skeptical of the new bridge, and he “made that clear” to Mr. Trump.

The intervention is another illustration of the Administration’s governance by cronyism.

Jeff Jacoby is right that FDR was right about the hazards to the public posed by public-sector labor unions. A slice:

In negotiations with the unions that represent public school teachers or other government employees, who represents the interests of the people paying the bills? The taxpayers who are required to fund public education and municipal services through their dollars don’t get a seat at the bargaining table. Instead, government officials negotiate with powerful and organized unions over how to allocate public funds. That institutional arrangement — one that blurs the line between those claiming public resources and those who are supposed to be their custodian — deserves a lot more scrutiny than it gets.

In the private sector, collective bargaining brings together parties with genuinely opposing interests. Workers seek higher pay and better benefits; management seeks to control costs and keep the enterprise viable. Each side knows it has something to lose by overreaching. If labor demands too much, jobs can vanish. If management refuses to compromise, strikes disrupt operations, customers are lost, and profits suffer. The discipline of the market imposes limits on both sides — and harshly enforces them.

None of that discipline exists when government bargains with public employees. There are no profits to share, no competitors to steal market share, no risk of bankruptcy if costs spiral out of control. There are only taxpayers’ dollars — dollars provided by people who have no voice at the bargaining table and no direct say in how those dollars are allocated. When government managers negotiate wages, benefits, and work rules with unions representing government workers, the state is effectively negotiating with itself over how to spend other people’s money.

That imbalance is compounded by politics. Public-sector unions are not passive participants in the democratic process; they are among its most sophisticated and ruthless players. They mobilize votes, fund campaigns, and make clear which officeholders are friends and which are adversaries. Officials on the government side of the bargaining table know that generosity today can be rewarded at the next election — while resistance can carry steep political costs. The incentives all run in one direction.

GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia makes the case that “to save Social Security, stop subsidizing wealthy retirees.”

Bob Levy remembers the Cato Institute’s co-founder and long-time president, Ed Crane. A slice:

Ed’s stewardship of Cato—as co-founder, visionary, energizer, policy expert, and source of inspiration—was flavored and enriched by his droll wit. No one but Ed could advise our donors to visit the Cato website to “greatly enhance the enjoyment of your otherwise drab lives.” And only Ed could recommend our Twitter feeds for those of our donors who have attention deficit disorder; or describe Wolfgang, the Crane family dog, as “a philosophical anarchist who believes there is no role for government in our dog-eat-dog world.”

On the other hand, when Ed wanted to make a serious point, he wasted no words. I recall a galling article some years ago in the New York Times admonishing Steve Jobs for not giving more of his money to charity. Ed’s caustic response: “Good point, what has Jobs ever done for mankind?” It’s that kind of trenchant commentary—coming from a truly talented writer—that was an Ed Crane trademark.

And yet style and delivery were just lubricants. Ed’s true legacy is his advocacy for a free society—from his days as a Berkeley student to his work on the Goldwater campaign, his efforts to reform Social Security and establish term limits, his voluminous writings and speeches and media appearances, and his prodigious fundraising capabilities, without which the success of the Cato Institute would not have been possible.

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… is from page 186 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s March 5th 2014, syndicated column, “Black People Duped“:

The cultural problems that affect many black people are challenging and not pleasant to talk about, but incorrectly attributing those problems to racism and racial discrimination, a need for more political power, and a need for greater public spending condemns millions of blacks to the degradation and despair of the welfare state.

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Excellent news conveyed in this Wall Street Journal headline: “House Rejects Speaker Johnson’s Effort to Block Tariff Votes.” A slice:

House lawmakers on Tuesday rejected an attempt by Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) to block votes on resolutions disapproving of President Trump’s tariffs—a stinging blow to his leadership that paves the way for lawmakers to potentially rebuke Trump’s signature economic policy.

The procedural step failed with 217 opposed and 214 in favor, with three Republicans joining all 214 Democrats in voting against the measure, enough to sink it in the narrowly divided chamber.

The no votes came from Republicans across the ideological GOP spectrum: centrist Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Kevin Kiley of California, as well as libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.). The vote was kept open for about an hour as leadership looked to flip votes, but none of the defectors budged. Rep. Greg Murphy (R., N.C.) didn’t vote.

The vote means that Democrats will be able to bring resolutions challenging Trump’s tariffs to the House floor, setting up a series of high-profile votes that could begin as soon as Wednesday. Though Trump could veto any measure that reaches his desk, any successful vote would be a public repudiation of his tariff policy and would likely draw a furious reaction from the White House.

“Big step forward for Americans tired of paying more because of Trump’s tariffs,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D., Wash.) after the vote.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post decries Trump’s threat to block the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge – a new bridge connecting Canada to the United States. Two slices:

President Donald Trump is always on offense, and now he’s directed his ire at … a bridge. It’d be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious.

On Monday, Trump threatened to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge as he escalates his trade war against America’s northern neighbor. He vaguely demanded America be “fully compensated for everything we have given them,” but it’s unclear what the president really wants out of this fight.

…..

The bridge is an uncontroversial way to ease congestion, and in 2017, Trump enthusiastically supported the project. But for the president who is always seeking leverage, this no-brainer infrastructure project suddenly seems worth blowing up. He also warned recently that the Chinese will “terminate” ice hockey in Canada and eliminate the Stanley Cup if their trade partnership grows.

Also from the Washington Post‘s Editorial Board is this correct assessment: “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach” on executive-branch ‘regulation’ of greenhouse gasses. A slice:

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Thursday is expected to announce what he describes as the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. It’s about time.

Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963 to regulate local pollution around the country, and regulators did that for decades. Then, in 2009, the EPA decided it would treat greenhouse gases like other pollutants, despite their damage being global rather than local.

That declaration, called the “endangerment finding,” has been used by bureaucrats ever since to dramatically expand the federal government’s power over cars. Now, the EPA will rescind it.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley is correct: “Voters no longer blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy, and Trump’s policies haven’t delivered.” Two slices:

Give us time, the White House pleads. We’ll tackle the elevated costs of food, energy, medicine and other necessities that gobble up middle-income wages. We’ll address those housing prices—up more than 50% since 2019—which have made owning a home so difficult for first-time buyers. Stop all the grousing already. President Trump’s tariff strategy will work its magic any day now. We promise.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been telling anyone who will listen that things are already much better than people realize. “It’s been a great year on the economy,” he said in December, “but the best is yet to come.” Mr. Bessent predicts that 2026 will be a “blockbuster” year for economic growth once tax refunds arrive, more illegal immigrant workers are deported and the bells and whistles of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act kick in. The administration has “set the table,” he insists, and “Main Street is about to prosper.”

Give Mr. Bessent credit for acknowledging the problem, however indirectly. His boss, meanwhile, has been shouting from the mountains of Switzerland to the plains of Iowa that “affordability” is a fake issue invented by Democrats and perpetuated by the press. “This has been the most dramatic one-year turnaround of any country in history in terms of the speed,” Mr. Trump insisted in January. “It’s amazing. And it’s because of tariffs.”

…..

The president’s MAGA base seems to want every single illegal alien banished from the country, no matter the circumstances or impact on U.S. labor markets. But that base isn’t large enough to keep Democrats from taking back Congress in November, and mass deportation could cost Republicans the additional support they’ll need from independents and moderate Democrats.

Were the White House to heed these warnings and pivot to an emphasis on economic growth and affordability, it still isn’t clear that the policies it favors would get the job done. Banning institutional investors from purchasing homes may be politically popular, but it will do little to address a housing shortage that results from, among other things, zoning regulations and environmental mandates that drive up prices. Institutional investors are responding to the problem, not creating it.

Collin Levy isn’t swallowing the fallacies peddled in Texas to justify the suspension of H-1B visas for that state’s agencies. A slice:

Yet the claim that work visas take jobs from American citizens doesn’t hold up. The Texas unemployment rate was 4.3% as of December, and in Austin—where high-tech jobs cluster—it was just over 3%. Foreign workers in the U.S. typically fill gaps in the labor market that aren’t met by American citizens. A 2020 study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that an increase in H-1B visas within a profession was associated with a decrease in the unemployment rate in the profession.

Mr. Abbott’s pause affects state agencies and universities, not private companies. But the change will be felt acutely in research and medicine. The University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and its MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston each employ more than 100 H-1B holders. They are a small percentage of the overall workforce but fill specialized roles.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum reports on a court ruling upholding freedom of speech in the U.S. A slice:

Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was targeted for deportation nearly a year ago because she had co-authored an anti-Israel op-ed piece that appeared in a student newspaper, can remain in the United States thanks to a recent decision by an immigration judge. In that ruling, which came to light this week after Ozturk’s lawyers mentioned it in federal court, Judge Roopal Patel, who works for the Justice Department, concluded that there was no legal basis to deport Ozturk.

National Review‘s Dan McLaughlin warns of “the coming political-process armageddon.” A slice:

While our constitutional system is built to assume that politicians will seek to maximize their power, American politics is constrained in part by rules and in part by norms of behavior. While some rule violations can be policed by the courts, many of our rules and norms are enforced only by a combination of personal honor and decency, fear of voter backlash at overreach, and fear that the gains from breaking taboos will be outweighed by the costs of partisan retaliation in kind. All three of those checks have been systematically eroding, as politicians and voters alike convince themselves not only that the other side started it but, increasingly, that one may as well go first because the other side is about to start it. This is essentially the mindset of the median European general staff circa June 1914.

GMU Econ alum Adam Michel shares a case study “on how the tax code gets more complicated.”

The Cato Institute’s co-founder and long-time president, Ed Crane, has died.