Author: Norman Leahy

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address generated its share of headlines and memes. What this and other such addresses rarely do is generate serious policy debate. This one certainly won’t. Instead, it showed the political class at its worst, with attention seekers getting what they craved and the president himself showing he’s as unserious about entitlement reform as the GOP. There is a solution to some of this ridiculousness: end the televised speech. There would still be a State of the Union message. But it would be a written report delivered to Congress without fanfare and most certainly…

Republicans are on record as saying they are not against putting defense spending cuts on the negotiating table. That’s a big change for the GOP, which traditionally has viewed defense spending as a sacred cow. But what sort of cuts do the GOP worthies have in mind? That’s where things fall apart rather quickly: …House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and others in his caucus have pointed to programs including efforts to diversify the military, identify alternative fuels and other environmental initiatives. “We’re going to cut money that’s being spent on wokeism, we’re going to cut legacy programs, we’re going to…

The great Chinese spy balloon incident ended with a U.S. fighter jet shooting it down off the South Carolina coast. Was this the grave national threat, insult to our sovereign airspace, whatever that the political class made it out to be? Not really. There have been other such balloons in recent years. As those incidents didn’t generate nearly the same amount of preening and braying, it’s safe to assume the most recent event was little more than theater. Bad theater. On the level of a slow-motion police chase. And let’s be honest about surveillance and spying, both foreign and domestic.…

Inflation has cooled since last summer – a welcome relief for consumers nationwide. But that doesn’t mean your dollars are going father today than they did in June or July.  According to new government data, wages and benefits – the Employment Cost Index – wage earners are still losing ground to inflation: Nationwide, wages and salaries rose 5.1% in the 12 months through December, according to the BLS. The year-end inflation rate was 6.5%. As The Wall Street Journal notes, this marks two consecutive years that inflation has outpaced wages and benefits. But there’s a possibility the losses could end…

Neither Republicans nor Democrats appear willing to even consider the most modest of changes to the federal government’s programs – Social Security and Medicare. These most sacred of political cows are off limits because neither party wants to be tagged as the guys who cut grandma’s benefits. While this is a case study of why we’re in a massive fiscal mess, it’s also an instance where a small amount of courage could do major fiscal good. Consider this Wall Street Journal piece from the American Enterprise Institute’s Andrew Biggs. Biggs proposes that placing an inflation-indexed cap on the maximum annual…

Industrial policy is all the rage in official policy circles, with the U.S. leading the way owing to the comically ill-named “Inflation Reduction Act.” It’s a good time to be a statist and an even better time to be a private company looking for a hefty dose of corporate welfare. But as with all welfare/protectionist schemes, the IRA has caused a ruckus with the past masters of state-sponsored capitalism, the European Union. The EU’s bureaucrats are deeply worried that the lure of American taxpayer dollars will prove too great for European conglomerates to resist. The EUcrats complain that our government’s…

Things are not going well for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Casualties are high, morale is low and Ukraine is showing more resilience, and getting more Western help, than Vlad ever imagined possible. What’s a troubled autocrat with a penchant for historical allusions to do? Take a bloodstained page from Joseph Stalin’s playbook and bring back the gulags. As Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov write for the Center for European Policy Analysis, “gulag economics” is back on the Russian policy menu: The tradition of using prison labor to satisfy the  state’s needs originated in Stalin’s times,…

While government officials in Washington continue to do nothing about Uncle Sam’s voracious, and constitutionally suspect, data harvesting practices, there is some hope at the state level that such wanton privacy abuses might be curbed. Via the Tenth Amendment Center, we learn that the North Dakota Senate has approved a proposed amendment that would add search and seizure protections to “electronic data and communications.” This is a positive development – for common sense and for personal privacy, if only on the state level. As Mike Maharrey writes: [The] inclusion of electronic communications and data in the state’s constitutional prohibition on…

Newly minted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has pledged to use the debt ceiling fight as a means to spur a serious effort to curb runaway federal spending. That would be fine and good…except in an appearance on “Face the Nation,” McCarthy said both Social Security and Medicare are “off the table.” According to the 2022 annual report from the trustees of the two programs: Social Security and Medicare both face long-term financing shortfalls under currently scheduled benefits and financing. Costs of both programs will grow faster than gross domestic product (GDP) through the mid-2030s primarily due to the rapid aging…

Taking a much-needed break from politics and markets for a moment or two…there’s a rare show underway in the night sky right now – so rare that the last time it occurred was 50,000 years ago. The star of this story: a comet with the unglamorous name of Comet ZTF. The best viewing times of this icy ball are now until the first week of February. It’s not very bright, so you may need binoculars or a telescope to see it. Where is it right now? Sky and Telescope has a map showing the comet’s path through the northern sky…