“My trepidation boils down to two things. First, for all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington. It feels that it is less about smaller government than it is about political transformation. While the two intersect, this strategy could fall short.
That’s in part—and this is my second point—because for those of us who care about permanently downsizing government and keeping it bound by constitutional rules to prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, DOGE is mixed. While there is a small probability the approach will succeed in reining in spending or the administrative state, it will be at the heavy cost of reinforcing the power of the executive branch and opening the door to the same abuse when the left is in power.
The probability may be higher, however, that they will fail to make a significant difference at all. If that is the case, we will be left with both a presidency on steroids and no meaningful reduction in government.”
“Social Security is the biggest federal expense. The next priciest items are other entitlements including Medicare and Medicaid, and Americans want to spend more on them, too. Defense is next, and while there’s room for cutting there, it’s nowhere near enough to close the deficit and save Social Security.
Some politicians claim that we can grow our economy enough to make up for Social Security’s shortfalls. But that won’t work. “Because Social Security benefits are indexed to wage growth, as wages increase, so do benefits,” explains the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett. “Therefore, while higher wage growth boosts revenues, it simultaneously raises the future benefits owed to retirees.”
Complicating the issue, add Boccia and Lett, is that “improvements in life expectancy and a declining birth rate mean that a shrinking group of workers is supporting an increasing number of retirees even if macroeconomic conditions are sound.”
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Boccia also points out that retirees over the age of 65 have on average triple the net worth of workers between the ages of 35–44. It’s perverse to tax hard-working younger Americans for the benefit of wealthier older ones. She suggests that “Congress should means-test Social Security, returning to the program’s stated purpose of antipoverty protection in old age.”
Some more savings could be found by linking cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security benefits to the chained CPI, which is more accurate than other measures in reflecting how consumers respond to changing prices.”
“A building boom in Austin, Texas has paid off big for renters.
There, residents’ rents have tumbled 22% from their peak in the summer of 2023, Bloomberg reported. The formerly low-cost city took on a new reputation in 2021 as a prohibitively pricey locale, as companies and young workers flocked to the Lone Star State’s capital. Heavy investment in development and ambitious housing policies, however, have flipped the script between renters and landlords.
Nearly all apartments in Austin are doing some sort of special for move-ins, one agent told Bloomberg.”
“The Supreme Court..unanimously agreed that alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have a due process right to challenge President Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to summarily deport them. At the same time, the majority lifted a temporary restraining order (TRO) that blocked those deportations, saying Venezuelans detained under the AEA must file habeas corpus petitions in Texas, where they are being held, rather than seeking relief in the District of Columbia under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
““The impact of human activities on our environment inevitably trickles downstream, impacting our drinking water,” EWG senior science analyst Sydney Evans tells Fortune. She adds that while many of the contaminants have likely been long present in our water and are only being detected now because of improved scientific methods, others appear to be new.
“I would argue that a lot of it has been the way that chemicals and industries are regulated in this country—allowing for a huge number of chemicals to be approved without a whole lot of underlying research to prove that they’re safe,” she says.”