Month: October 2025

Zohran Mamdani has put forth many bold—and expensive—proposals in his New York City mayoral bid, including childcare for all, government-run grocery stores, and free buses. He’s planning to pay for these proposals with various tax hikes, including a large jump in the city’s corporate tax rate from 7.5 percent to 11.5 percent. He claims this will bring in $5 billion, and says New York City’s economy can “afford to support a stronger public sector.”

Unfortunately, raising the corporate tax rate could also hinder the job market, cause corporations to relocate, and decrease long-term government revenue, potentially damaging New York’s status as the financial capital of the world.

Corporations hit with higher tax rates would seek ways to cut costs, possibly harming workers through either layoffs or lower wages. Particularly in New York City, where corporations employ hundreds of thousands of workers, even modest cost cutting measures are bound to negatively impact the nearly 5 million local workers. In the United Kingdom, for example, around one in six British companies cut hiring in the fourth quarter of 2024 in anticipation of tax hikes that took place in April 2025. If New York employees aren’t directly laid off, they could face lower wages in the long run. Approximately 28 percent of the cost of higher corporate taxes is taken on by workers in the form of lower wages, further exemplifying the harsh effect that corporate tax hikes have on workers. Corporate tax hikes are generally never a good idea—even more so in a weak labor market where the national unemployment rate is the highest since the pandemic and job growth has consistently underperformed in the past few months.

Some corporations will also deem the tax hikes as too imposing to pay altogether, forcing them into relocation to another city, state, or even country where they can operate with lower costs. Already, the exodus of banks from Wall Street to corporate tax havens, such as Elliot Management’s relocation to Florida, has cost the city millions in managed assets. New York City simply cannot afford to watch other businesses follow. Already, New York has an estimated budget gap of $4.22 billion in 2026, and a massive $8.83 billion gap is projected for 2027.

Consider the possible damages. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently estimated the economic effects of a mere one percentage point increase in the federal corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 22 percent. That increase would cost New York’s 10th congressional district, home to the Financial District and southwest Brooklyn, approximately $1.3 billion over 10 years. The rest of the city would be harmed too, of course—yet Mamdani proposes an even more drastic increase of four percentage points. “Businesses have only three options to pay for higher taxes: raise prices; reduce costs; or lower returns to investors,” as the authors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce report wrote. “In reality, they do all three.” The fourth option, one even more feasible if a tax hike only hits New York City, is that businesses will flee.

New York City’s economy cannot afford higher corporate taxes. All of America benefits from the city’s status as the financial center of the world. Mamdani’s proposed tax policies would threaten that reign.

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Price Johnson isn’t a fan of games of chance.

Unfortunately, his gaming business is now caught in a high-stakes contest where the outcome feels entirely out of his hands.

Cephalofair Games, where Johnson works as COO, prides itself on making games that limit randomness and reward players for making strategic decisions and planning ahead. The company’s most successful game, the award-winning Gloomhaven, is a dungeon-crawling adventure that, unlike most, doesn’t rely on dice to determine outcomes.

“We’ve eliminated a lot of the luck elements that exist in games like Dungeons and Dragons and in other role-playing games,” he says. “In our games, strategy is everything.”

Now, it won’t be tumbling dice, but the nine justices at the U.S. Supreme Court who will determine the fate of Cephalofair Games—and many other American businesses—when they hear a case next week challenging the legality of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. That’s not exactly like risking it all on one roll, but you can forgive Johnson for feeling like it is. The outcome of the case will set the conditions for the future of U.S. trade policy: stability or chaos.

“If the Supreme Court decides one person, the president, is allowed to flip the switch on tariffs overnight, every day, any day they want, that is going to create such a volatile and unstable and untrustworthy market,” Johnson predicts. “We can’t build a business around that. We can’t plan for that.”

Board game makers have been hit particularly hard by Trump’s tariffs, which have raised the cost of importing just about everything. Cephalofair is based in California, but like many other businesses in the industry, Johnson’s company relies on contractors in China and Vietnam to make the tokens, pawns, cards, and other physical elements of its games.

Manufacturing all those parts in the U.S. is not possible if game companies want their products to be competitively priced. With high tariffs in place, the costs compound quickly. Nathan McNair, the co-owner of Pandasaurus Games, broke down the math in a post on his company’s website. The added cost of the tariffs makes every step more complicated, from design to sales, and can even change what games a company chooses to make in the first place. “This has not just squeezed our margin; this has substantially increased our risk,” he concluded.

Trump’s tariffs have already stung Cephalofair in several ways. The company has paid more than $144,000 in tariff-related costs this year, Johnson says, and has had to furlough some employees. The staff that remain, including him, have taken pay cuts. Given the uncertainty in their supply chains, Cephalofair has paused the development of some new games, which means less work for dozens of contractors—artists, designers, writers, testers, and so on. For games that were already in production when the tariffs hit, Cephalofair asked buyers to pay a fee to help cover the new import taxes. Other production runs have been delayed as Johnson and his colleagues roll the dice on the hope that the tariffs will be struck down or otherwise lowered.

“The U.S. is our least trustworthy trading partner right now—and I say that as an American,” Johnson told Reason. “I can’t trust what the policy is going to be tomorrow, let alone next week.”

Case in point: When I spoke to Johnson on Wednesday afternoon, he was worried about a tariff increase that was supposed to hit this weekend, just days before Trump’s tariff authority goes before the Supreme Court. Earlier this month, Trump threatened to raise the baseline tariff on imports from China to 130 percent, from 30 percent, starting on November 1.

If that tariff rate becomes reality, “that is effectively an absolute embargo,” Johnson said. “We are not going to pay more to bring our product in than it costs to make it.”

On Thursday night, as he returned from a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, Trump told reporters that the U.S. would now be lowering tariffs on imports from China. The details remain vague—Trump said he agreed to reduce some existing tariffs by 10 percentage points—and it would appear the 130 percent tariff threat is now off the table. China, in return, agreed not to suspend exports of rare earth minerals.

From Trump’s perspective, surely, the threat of 130 percent tariffs was simply a negotiating position staked out in advance of his meeting with Xi and never meant as a serious policy. But that approach, which the president has deployed repeatedly this year, is causing huge headaches and material losses for businesses like Johnson’s, which can’t afford to risk the possibility of being hit with a massive tariff bill just because a shipment arrives at the wrong time.

Instead, those businesses will do what Johnson has done: Delay orders, slow production, and hope more stability emerges.

As a legal matter, the Supreme Court is being asked to determine the extent of the emergency executive powers that Trump has seized to impose tariffs. But the practical implications of this case spill out across all parts of the economy. In reality, the justices are being asked to decide whether the president should be allowed to disrupt supply chains for thousands of American businesses at a whim—even for reasons as silly as television advertisements that he dislikes.

That’s really a policy question, one that’s better left to Congress. Even though Congress has been unwilling to stand up to Trump’s tariffs so far, there are small indications that could be changing. This week, the Senate passed resolutions terminating Trump’s tariffs on imports from Canada and Brazil, and another that would end his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on many other imports.

Johnson is hoping the Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s tariff authority, but he also knows this mess won’t really be resolved until the legislative branch reasserts its proper authority over trade.

“There’s clearly no plan with this administration,” he says. “And that’s why I believe that power over tariffs and power over taxation, that’s supposed to be with our local elected representatives. We should have someone that we could go to and appeal to, whether they listen to us or not, we can say, ‘hey, I’m down the street. This is my business. Please represent us.'”

The post Trump's Tariff Chaos Crushes Board Game Makers: 'The U.S. Is Our Least Trustworthy Trading Partner' appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II, by David Nasaw, Penguin Random House, 496 pages, $35

“There wasn’t any band there; there wasn’t anybody greeting me except the girl that I had [written] to while I was overseas. That was my homecoming.” That poignant moment recounted by World War II veteran Clinton Riddle is one of the many vignettes that populate David Nasaw’s new book, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II.

Nasaw, an emeritus professor of history at the City University of New York, marshals such experiences to argue that, beyond the ticker-tape parades, millions of men like Riddle filtered home to little fanfare. After returning to America, many struggled with alcohol addiction, marital problems, unemployment, crowded housing, and psychological issues that medical authorities didn’t fully understand. Nasaw’s book is a corrective to the simplistic narrative of stoicism, unity, and triumph that dominates conventional narratives of “the greatest generation.” It isn’t a work of revisionism so much as an act of recovery, one that elevates voices of pain and disquiet that were understood in the years after the war but faded from popular memory in the decades thereafter.

While the book bills itself as a history of veterans’ lives after the conflict, Nasaw adroitly begins his narrative in the thick of the fighting, tying the experiences of returning veterans to their experiences abroad. Beyond the scarring practice of combat, Nasaw illustrates a military culture awash in alcohol abuse and philandering, not to mention soldiers’ nagging concerns about spousal infidelity back home. He continues his narrative through the immediate postwar period, with two final chapters covering the individual and institutional legacies of the war.

Nasaw’s goal is to incorporate the toll on returning veterans and those who they left behind into our understanding today of the Second World War. His book joins a body of work on war and memory that corrects the one-dimensional narrative of the “good war” and restores the complexity and humanity of the Americans who fought it. As he skillfully shows, victory came at a steep cost for those who managed to survive the fighting. The romantic image of the war was largely a post hoc construction, championed not by those who did the fighting but by later generations well-removed from the burdens of the conflict.

* * *

Nasaw challenges some romantic images of postwar policy too, though not from a particularly libertarian direction. He is critical, for example, of the G.I. Bill, the federal entitlement program that afforded tuition and other forms of financial support to send returning veterans to school. Its “democratization of higher education,” he argues, was “revolutionary in establishing a new social welfare state for veterans”—but also “conservative in protecting class, gender, and racial status quos.” As a concession to Southern Democrats, the system was implemented by state and local authorities; as a result, he argues, it left female, gay, and black vets behind.

The broader suite of veterans’ readjustment programs—not just the G.I. Bill but home buying assistance and other efforts—were, the author argues, a missed opportunity for more comprehensive social welfare. Nasaw notes that during the late stages of the war, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a “second Bill of Rights” that would have extended government assistance to the full progressive shopping list of employment, housing, food, medical care, old age pensions, and so on. Social programs for veterans, he suggests, became a proxy fight over the New Deal, with a conservative coalition of Midwestern Republicans and Southern Democrats who wanted to put FDR’s domestic agenda on ice.

In Nasaw’s retelling, that coalition served as an effective roadblock, thereby undermining Roosevelt’s “aspirational” and “transformative” vision that “would have leveled the playing fields providing rich and poor, Black and White, veteran and citizen with new economic rights.” Libertarian-minded readers will shake their heads in disagreement at the idea that what the country needed was more government redistribution. But you’ll note that even here, Nasaw is challenging the liberal narrative in which the war was an unalloyed progressive force for American society.

* * *

The book shines brightest in its handling of the individual burdens shouldered by veterans and their families: heavy smoking, heavy drinking, infidelity, and, of course, the experience of combat. Behind the images of relief and the euphoria of victory, individual vets struggled to readjust, to find housing, and to reconnect with their loved ones, helping fuel a postwar divorce boom. Nasaw argues that vices and the social dynamics around them—compounded by psychological maladies, which we would now call PTSD—haunted and hamstrung veterans returning to civilian life.

On the specific matter of post-traumatic stress disorder, Nasaw offers many gripping accounts of individuals who struggled to leave the war behind them. Beyond those anecdotes, he illustrates the evolving medical comprehension of the phenomenon previously known as “battle fatigue” or “shell shock.” Psychiatrists, informed by the Freudian thinking of the day, diagnosed lingering war trauma as stemming from internal unresolved childhood suffering and not the obvious external experience of grisly combat.

Relatedly, military and veterans’ affairs doctors misunderstood and therefore misdiagnosed combat ailments now known as “traumatic brain injury.” Soldiers who endured concussive blasts from friendly and enemy fire, and who complained for years of related conditions, were diagnosed with “emotional unrest” that would resolve with the passage of time. Finding little official support, veterans often turned inward and self-medicated with alcohol and overwork.

It is in this area where Nasaw makes his most significant scholarly contributions—and offers his most gripping material on veterans’ personal struggles. His final chapter, “Aftermaths,” argues that the passage of time did not necessarily improve veterans’ mental health but often in fact made it worse. Major, jarring life events, such as retirement or the death of a spouse, could cause lingering traumas to return. Studies from the late 1970s and early ’80s found that alcoholism remained a consistent problem for WWII veterans, leading to a “mortality [that] was significantly higher.”

When greater medical recognition of veterans’ issues came along, it arrived, ironically, at the same time as a widespread desire to sweep them under the rug. Drawing on the earlier work of writers such as Studs Terkel and John Bodnar, Nasaw argues that the romanticized narrative of the “good war” fought by the “greatest generation” demanded that said generation’s lingering traumas be “disremembered.” That “good war” narrative, he shows, gained traction as the nation was “hungry for heroes after the Vietnam debacle and primed to celebrate victory after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Modern demands for an uplifting World War II narrative mean the real, painful experiences of its veterans are often overlooked. Nasaw cites Marine veteran Eugene Sledge: “Over fifty years later, I look back on the war as though it were some giant killing machine into which we were thrown to endure fear to the brink of insanity.” By restoring these stories to the center, Nasaw shows that veterans were far more than “stick-figure avatars of progress” and that their wartime service was not merely a “character-building, maturing experience.”

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, approximately 45,000 of the original 16 million World War II veterans are still with us today. As the last of those survivors fade away, The Wounded Generation reminds us that the horrors of war linger long after the shooting stops—it loiters in the minds, marriages, and memories of those who fought them. If even the “greatest generation” struggled after the guns fell silent, their long road home ought to give us pause before we send future generations abroad to fight wars, “good” or not.

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