Tag: in-the-news

What affordability discourse gets wrong: “Nearly half of U.S. families couldn’t afford basic necessities in 2024, report finds,” reads an NPR headline from last week. “Half of Americans can’t afford to dine out or vacation in a cost of living crisis,” reads a Fortune headline from a few months ago. Meanwhile, Axios reports that “sewer socialism” is catching on across the country, describing it as an approach that “focuses on expanding government programs for the public good, like affordable housing, child care and public transportation.”

Technically, “sewer socialism” is a very old term that’s just being co-opted now to refer more vaguely to an almost New Deal sensibility: a “universal everything,” as opposed to means-tested social safety net preference. (“Sewer socialism” has historically referred to the good governance of the nitty-gritty unsexy things that cities provide: sanitation (thus the name), public housing, utilities, and streets.) But it’s true that something is afoot, related to both cost of living and quality of life—especially in urban areas—and that the policy discourse muddies a few issues by jumbling them together. Call it what you want.

“It’s like, yeah, good job reading the polls that tell you that affordability is the number one issue. Do you understand why that is the case? It’s because people can’t f–king afford to eat, so of course that’s their main issue,” Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich told Axios. This argument crops up over and over again—that a substantial portion of Americans can’t afford essentials—and is increasingly used to justify all manner of state intervention. But is it at all true?

“A real but small share of Americans are in genuinely miserable financial situations. They have more bills than they can pay. They are one missed paycheck from eviction. They frequently have literally zero money. The unemployable woman with the worthless degree from the fraudulent for-profit college is in this category. So is the 58-year-old who got laid off from a manufacturing job, exhausted his savings, can’t get hired anywhere, and watches his wife work double shifts at Walmart,” write Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Clifford Asness for The Dispatch. “These people need money. The institutions that make their lives worse—the for-profits that produce unemployable graduates, and the medical billing systems designed to confuse people into paying twice—need to be regulated or eliminated. Both of those statements are true, and neither is in serious political dispute.” They continue:

“The second problem is the squeezed-talent class, and it’s harder to explain because the people involved look fine on paper. Picture a 32-year-old physician married to a 32-year-old software engineer. Combined household income, $400,000. They cannot buy a house in San Francisco or Boston or New York within a sane commute of their jobs. They cannot afford to have three kids, pay for childcare, and put them in decent schools. They are doing every single thing the meritocratic American dream told them to do, and the dream is not being delivered. Their parents, at the same age, with worse credentials and lower real incomes, owned a house and had three kids on one salary. Something is broken here, and it isn’t their fault, and it isn’t fixed by transfers. Giving this couple a $5,000 childcare credit doesn’t move the needle on $4 million houses—and worse, by raising effective demand for childcare without doing anything about the supply, the credit makes childcare more expensive for the people behind them in line. The right tends to dismiss this couple as coastal-elite complainers. The left tends to dismiss them because they’re already in the top 5 percent of incomes. Both are wrong. This is a talent-allocation problem of the first order, and a country pays a real price when its most productive young people can’t form families or live near their work. These two problems require completely different policy responses.”

Note that the squeezed-talent class is also distinct (though sometimes overlapping) from the “why-should-I-live-within-my-means” types: The people who came of age as millennial lifestyle subsidies were expiring, who never really learned how to budget or sacrifice, who believed upward mobility would be available to them too, but became rather accustomed to a high standard-of-living in childhood and weren’t able to build on it much in adulthood (or even meet it at all).

“A lot of people set their goal as how can I have the same experience as ordering out, only at home? and the answer is you can’t!” comments The Washington Post‘s Megan McArdle. “The current generation is earning more at their age than previous generations did at their age; when you combine the fact that they have more income, and more opportunities to spend that income on food, and that all of us really love something delicious at the end of a hard day of work, food is one of the easiest things to indulge yourself with. And, on an individual, per-indulgence basis, it’s one of the cheapest.”

“The problem is people are sufficiently rich to eat a lot of takeout, but they aren’t necessarily sufficiently rich to be financially healthy (or physically healthy) if they do so,” adds McArdle. It’s partly a problem of high costs, and partly a problem of high expectations (to the extent that it’s a problem at all). And it’s also partly a problem of real gains in quality of life being obscured and taken for granted.

Each set of needs requires different public policy solutions. And I’d argue that last group doesn’t need a public policy solution at all—just a remedial home economics class (or, in their eyes, a socialist to save them).

Memorandum signed at Versailles: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other,” reads a draft of the memo, reported by Bloomberg. President Donald Trump signed the memorandum in Versailles, France, yesterday. “The agreement lifts the U.S.-imposed naval blockade of Iranian ports and, most crucially, grants Iran waivers to begin exporting its oil even before the negotiation of a final agreement on its nuclear program,” reports The New York Times. 

The more complicated issues will get hammered out over the coming weeks, starting tomorrow, when American delegates meet with their Iranian counterparts in Switzerland. “This time, the Iranians will come to the table armed with valuable knowledge: They can survive the worst the Americans can throw at them,” speculates Yaroslav Trofimov over at The Wall Street Journal. “President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that their fierce campaign of airstrikes, launched on Feb. 28 and lasting 40 days, would overthrow Iran’s theocratic regime, or at the very least force it to make major concessions. None of that happened, despite the killing of much of Iran’s senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the decimation of the country’s navy, air force and other military assets.”

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Scenes from New York: Yesterday, an 18-year-old Indian tourist died after falling from a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park when the horse bolted. Some are advocating for carriage-horses to be regulated away, following the accident.

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QUICK HITS

• “The Trump administration’s budget office has redirected $352 million that was intended in part for Secret Service training and recruitment to what it described as security measures at the White House, a government database shows,” reports The Washington Post.
• “It’s been quaint this week to see the G7—that talking shop for downwardly mobile world powers, plus the US—follow the White House’s Anthropic bombshell by issuing a draft communique pledging to ‘discuss’ the opportunities and risks of AI for the financial sector,” writes Lionel Laurent at Bloomberg.
• New, must-listen Ross Douthat episode: “JD Vance on the Morality of the Trump Administration.” His description: “I asked the vice president what is Christian about this White House.”
• “Los Angeles County saw the largest decline of any county in the United States in 2025, according to new census data published on March 26,” reports KTLA. “Nearly 54,000 people moved out of L.A. County between July 1, 2024 and July 1, 2025, U.S. Census data shows.”
• Who says romance is dead?

Trump on Egyptian President el-Sisi: "He was in a hotel and I met him. We fell in love, deeply in love … we didn't know each other before that." pic.twitter.com/oN1kjKfb6o

— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) June 17, 2026

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The new Global Justice Report by the World Inequality Lab in France—which calls for caps on economic growth in rich countries, top income-tax rates of 90 percent, and a World Sovereign Fund to redistribute wealth to the Global South—has reignited one of the oldest debates in economics: How do we actually lift people out of poverty?

The data have never left much question. The answer is economic growth. Nonetheless, many development economists have spent decades arguing that growth isn’t enough or as important as development aid. The French report is simply a radical expression of a popular view. So, it’s worth reviewing the evidence again.

Stated plainly, every country that has gotten richer overall has also reduced poverty. More importantly, no poor country has ever achieved decent living standards without first getting genuinely richer. Obviously, wealth and basic human well-being move together, but the relationship is so reliable that it’s more like a physical law than a social-science finding.

People in poverty have little access to food, clean water, decent shelter, basic medical care, and schooling. Adequate amounts do not exist in nature; they must be produced. As an economy grows, it produces more of these things. This enables more growth which, in turn, lifts the masses out of poverty.

Two centuries ago, roughly three-quarters of the world could not afford more than tiny living spaces, enough food to avoid malnutrition, and some minimum heating capacity. Since then, the share of people in this type of poverty has fallen dramatically. The reason is an explosion in production that began with the Industrial Revolution and has yet to stop.

Unfortunately, the belief that economic growth in poor countries benefits richer residents and bypasses the needy remains commonplace. A large body of economic literature shows that this is nonsense. For instance, the work of World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay and others find that when average incomes rise, the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of a population rise at essentially the same rate. In other words, growth is not systematically biased against the poor.

Further, even in the worst cases where growth skews toward elites, the impact on well-being in poor countries is too powerful to ignore. In a recent Substack post, development economist Lant Pritchett showed that elite-skewed growth in Ethiopia does four times more to improve basic human well-being—clean water, child survival, schooling—than uniform growth in Denmark. Denmark has already achieved those basics. Ethiopia has not.

As such, the most important question for poor countries is not who gains most from growth. It is whether growth happens at all. The countries that are home to most of the world’s remaining extreme poor—places like Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mozambique, Malawi, and Burundi—have not grown for decades. Our World in Data’s Max Roser points out that Madagascar’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita today is roughly the same as it was in 1950.

The reason isn’t a lack of development aid. These are among the world’s most aid-dependent economies. The DRC has received tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid over decades and $1.3 billion in 2024 from the U.S. alone. In past years, Mozambique received as much as half of its government budget from foreign aid. These countries have been the focus of development programs, nongovernmental organization activity, World Bank projects, bilateral donor attention, and charitable intervention for generations.

Countries don’t get stuck in extreme poverty because the world has ignored them. They get stuck because they do not produce. And they do not produce because the institutional conditions that make production possible—secure property rights, the rule of law, open markets, protection from predatory government—are largely absent. Countries ranking at or near the bottom of economic freedom indexes are also the poorest. Those that liberalize experience across-the-board income increases.

Economist Vincent Geloso’s research finds that economic freedom is one of the strongest predictors of who escapes persistent poverty and who stays trapped. Colin Doran and Thomas Stratmann have found much the same. The mechanism is straightforward: Property rights give people an incentive to produce. Lower regulatory barriers let businesses form and labor move toward opportunity. Freedom from predatory government encourages long-term investment. Remove these conditions and countries stagnate, no matter how much aid they get.

Growth is both necessary and sufficient. No country has escaped poverty without it. Every country that has achieved higher GDP per capita has also achieved high levels of basic human well-being. Targeted aid can be useful at the margin, but it’s no substitute. Although many supposed poverty fighters are blind to this reality, serious policy makers shouldn’t be.

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From yesterday’s Complaint in Spatz v. Stewart & TheaterMania (S.D.N.Y.):

This is an action for libel per se, and false statements causing special damages. Defendant Zachary Stewart, a theater critic writing for Defendant TheaterMania, authored and published a review of a theatrical production written and presented by Plaintiff. The production was a serious, historically grounded drama confronting the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the tragedy of a miscarriage, and the racially motivated execution of a Black man for loving a white woman. Yet it was deliberately, falsely, and maliciously described that production as a “buddy comedy.” …

Plaintiff believes and therefore alleges that Defendant Stewart’s false and injurious characterization was not an act of good-faith criticism, but rather an act of ideological sabotage, motivated by Stewart’s known and documented hostility toward the State of Israel and the Jewish people, and his sympathies with the Palestinian and Gaza cause….

The Play is, in all respects, a serious drama. It does not contain comedic plot lines, comedic characters, physical comedy, comic timing, comic volley, or any other element associated with the buddy comedy genre or any comedy genre.

Rather, the Play examines, with gravity, emotional depth, and historical fidelity, the following subjects:
(a) The Holocaust—the systematic genocide of six million Jewish people—and its shattering impact on Jewish identity, memory, and historical consciousness as addressed by one of the characters and the death of his wife and two children in Auschwitz;
(b) President Harry Truman’s role in the founding of the modern State of Israel and the political, moral, and historical forces that gave rise to it;
(c) The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, including its causes, conduct, and consequences;
(d) The racially motivated execution of a Black man, Mr. Willie McGee, whose appeal was handled by Bella Abzug in real life. He was put to death for engaging in a loving, consensual interracial relationship with a white woman—an actual historical injustice representing the brutal reality of American racial violence;
(e) A devastating miscarriage suffered by Bella Abzug (one of the referenced “buddies” and Truman’s attorney in the Play) suffered just after the McGee hearing, presented with honesty and emotional weight;
(f) The dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, three days apart; …

The review is reproduced at pp. 15-17 of the Complaint, and the title is “Review: Truman vs. Israel, the Harry Truman-Bella Abzug Buddy Comedy Nobody Asked For.” I’m pretty skeptical about the case, since in context “buddy comedy” appears to be an opinionated characterization, which can’t be proved true or false. You can read the rest of the review there and see for yourself.

Also, the allegedly false allegation focuses on the qualities of the play, not the qualities of the playwright, so the proper claim would presumably be trade libel, not ordinary defamation. (I oversimplify the inquiry slightly here.) And the headline is a “fair index” of the contents of the article, which is part of the test for libel-by-headline under New York law.

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Last week I recorded a FedSoc forum with Professor Jesse Merriam at Patrick Henry College. The topic was “No Enemies to the Right? Antisemitism and the Big Tent.” Usually, when I do one of these events, I am talking about something newsworthy. But this forum was a bit more personal, as I was the newsworthy event. I discuss my resignation from Heritage, and provide some updates of what has happened since.

This video is worth watching.

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The U.S. Supreme Court just added a new case to its upcoming 2026–27 docket that should interest fans of early American history.

At issue in Kian v. Florida is whether the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury requires 12-person juries in all criminal cases. Florida law says it does not. According to that state’s statute books, “twelve persons shall constitute a jury to try all capital cases, and six persons shall constitute a jury to try all other criminal cases.” Hamed Kian, who was tried by a six-person Florida jury and sentenced to prison for practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license, wants the Supreme Court to overturn his conviction and restore the 12-person jury in the Sunshine State and the handful of other states that currently lack it.

To win, Kian will have to persuade a majority of the justices to overrule the Supreme Court’s 1970 precedent in Williams v. Florida, which allowed the use of six-person juries. “Williams was incorrectly decided,” Kian argues, “and is contrary to the understanding of the Sixth Amendment at the time of the Founding.”

At least one member of the Supreme Court seems more than ready to reach that same conclusion and rule in Kian’s favor. In 2022, the Supreme Court declined to hear a similar case about the constitutionality of an eight-person jury called Khorrami v Arizona. Dissenting from that denial of certiorari, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that “a mountain of evidence suggests that, both at the time of the [Sixth] Amendment’s adoption and for most of our Nation’s history, the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.”

Two years later, the Court declined to take up a six-person jury case called Cunningham v. Florida (2024). And once again, Gorsuch filed a sharp dissent. “Florida does what the Constitution forbids because of us,” he declared. “In Williams v. Florida, this Court in 1970 issued a revolutionary decision approving for the first time the use of 6-member panels in criminal cases.” And “in doing so,” Gorsuch continued, “the Court turned its back on the original meaning of the Constitution, centuries of historical practice, and a ‘battery of this Court’s precedents.'”

Gorsuch’s historical argument is convincing. The Sixth Amendment’s right to trial by jury was rooted in the British common law. And that British common law right, as William Blackstone explained in 1769 in his widely read Commentaries on the Laws of England, rested on the existence of 12-person juries. “The founders of the English law,” Blackstone observed, “have, with excellent forecast, contrived, that…the truth of every accusation, whether preferred in the shape of indictment, information, or appeal, should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbours, indifferently chosen, and superior to all suspicion.”

To say that the right to trial by jury was of paramount importance to America’s founding generation would be putting it mildly. Among the “repeated Injuries and Usurpations” charged against King George III in the Declaration of Independence, for example, is the fact that the crown “depriv[ed] us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury.”

Likewise, when the Anti-Federalists complained in the late 1780s about the lack of a Bill of Rights in the new U.S. Constitution, they frequently lamented the lack of additional jury trial safeguards. “How does your trial by jury stand?” Patrick Henry demanded of the Virginia Ratification Convention on June 5, 1788. “In civil cases gone—not sufficiently secured in criminal—this best privilege is gone.” The Sixth Amendment was ultimately added to the Constitution to assuage such Anti-Federalist concerns.

Kian v. Florida thus presents the Supreme Court with the opportunity to both correct one of its past mistakes and vindicate a venerable constitutional right the founding generation clearly held dear.

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6/18/1787: Alexander Hamilton introduces his plan to the Constitutional Convention.

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This is part of 1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason’s favorite American Founders. Read more here.

I do not know my favorite Founder’s name. I just know that in 1788 a Baltimore newspaper published a series of pseudonymous essays where he warned against standing armies, called for a bill of rights, and declared, paraphrasing Jonathan Swift, that “laws are cobwebs, catching only the flies and letting the wasps escape.” See-sawing between fears of an aristocratic legislature and a tyrannical executive, he argued that we’d be best off with the highly decentralized democracy found in certain Swiss cantons. “If I am told that the people are incapable of governing themselves” like the Swiss, he wrote, “I shall answer that [it has] never been tried in America, except among the native Indians, who are free and happy, and who prove that self-government is the growth of our soil.” He signed these articles “A Farmer.”

The essayist was an Anti-Federalist, part of that band of skeptics who thought the proposed Constitution granted too much power to the federal government. I do not share some of his opinions—he liked sumptuary laws, for example, and would have limited the vote to property holders. And yes, his idealized vision of rural Swiss life missed the ways that even that system restricted liberty. Well, no one’s perfect. He still wrote one of the era’s most spirited attacks on concentrated authority.

His series’ high point was its third installment, which rejected the idea that a national regime would ensure domestic peace. The “sword of government,” A Farmer argued, was more likely to inflict one group’s preferences on another, bringing “that series of desolation, which France, Spain, and the other great kingdoms of the world have suffered, in order to bring so many separate States into uniformity.” Better, he wrote, to let Americans “separate and divide as interest or inclination prompted.”

Nor did A Farmer accept the idea that a national government would better protect us from foreign subversion or invasion. “The only foreign, or at least evil foreign influence, must be obtained through corruption,” he argued—and the “facility of corruption is increased in proportion as power tends…to a concentration in the hands of a few.”

After offering reasons to doubt a confederation would be more attractive to invaders, his essay warned of the opposite danger—that America itself would become an empire. “It was the extensive territory of the Roman republic that produced a Sylla, a Marius, a Caligula, a Nero, and an Elagabalus,” he wrote. Decentralism magnified not just the power of voice but also the power of exit: “In small independent States contiguous to each other, the people run away and leave despotism to reek its vengeance on itself.”

It’s a fiery anti-authoritarian jeremiad, and part of me wants to learn more about the man who wrote it. Did he fight in the Revolution? Was he politically active in other ways? Was he actually a farmer, or was that just a convenient mask?

But another part of me prefers not to know how much this man’s life matched his rhetoric. Some historians have guessed that A Farmer was future Maryland Gov. John Francis Mercer, a planter who owned slaves and eventually joined the centralizing Federalist Party. The evidence for Mercer’s authorship is pretty thin, though, basically coming down to the fact that he offered some overlapping arguments elsewhere. So I’ll take these essays on their own. If their author enslaved people, joined the Hamiltonian coalition, or otherwise departed from the ideals in these editorials, the uncertainties of history have severed such unhappy facts from the words on the page.

Of all those words, my favorite passage comes in that third essay, when our farmer-writer addressed those who think a national government is better suited for “cutting a figure in history.” They are correct, he conceded. But “the silence of historians is the surest record of the happiness of a people. The Swiss have been four hundred years the envy of mankind, and there is yet scarcely an history of their nation. What is history, but a disgusting and painful detail of the butcheries of conquerors, and the woeful calamities of the conquered?”

1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason‘s favorite American Founders:

• Benjamin Franklin
• Samuel Adams
• Thomas Jefferson
• George Mason
• A Farmer
• George Washington
• Patrick Henry

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When Maryam Rahimi opened SoLIT Café in downtown Montreal five years ago, she says she never imagined she would spend so much time dealing with the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), Quebec’s language watchdog that enforces Quebec laws requiring services are provided in French. Rahimi says years of complaints and inspections have forced her to change menus, signs, and receipts, and she claims inspectors even wanted her to find a French word for nachos, a request she found absurd. She says the repeated investigations feel like harassment and have cost her thousands of dollars, while the OQLF says it is responding to complaints and enforcing Quebec’s language laws.

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So argues Prof. Jack Goldsmith (Harvard) in his Executive Functions post. An excerpt:

The United States in the MOU pledges “immediately” to “issue waivers for export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.” (Emphasis added here and throughout.) These waivers presumably include waivers of U.S. statutory sanctions against Iran.

I don’t think the president has the authority under domestic law to issue these waivers. The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015 applies here and temporarily bars a president from waiving sanctions against Iran. The executive branch has counterarguments, to be sure. And it’s doubtful that any institution will make the president comply with INARA in any event….

Read the post for much more.

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