“The answers are a bit complicated because Project 2025 encompasses a lot of different things (and there are some claims about what’s in it that are simply false). I think of its agenda as falling into three buckets:
1) Concentrating power in the presidency: The idea here is to give Trump and his appointees more power over the executive branch relative to permanent nonpartisan civil service professionals (who he disparages as the so-called “deep state”). Critics fear this will lead to the abuse of power and political hackery. Trump supports these ideas and we have every reason to believe he’d implement them.
2) Achieving longtime conservative priorities: This is stuff like slashing regulations, reducing federal spending on the poor, ditching efforts to fight climate change, ramping up military spending, and so on. Many progressives think these ideas are terrible, but they aren’t exactly new. Trump supports basically all of these. (Project 2025 mostly avoids taking firm positions on issues where Trump breaks from the conservative consensus, such as trade.)
3) Taking a hardline religious-right agenda: The project lays out quite aggressive proposals to use federal power to prevent abortions and restrict certain contraceptive coverage. It even says that pornography should be “outlawed” and its creators and distributors should be “imprisoned.””
“”Many developed countries have repealed their net wealth taxes in recent years,” Cristina Enache wrote for the Tax Foundation in a June report on such levies around the world. “They raise little revenue, create high administrative costs, and induce an outflow of wealthy individuals and their money. Many policymakers have also recognized that high taxes on capital and wealth damage economic growth.”
Depending on how high the tax is set, Enache cautioned, it can erase any gains people might make on their investments. “For safe investments like bonds or bank deposits, a wealth tax of 2 or 3 percent may confiscate all interest earnings, leaving no increase in savings over time.”
Worse, wealth taxes depend on government officials’ ability to accurately assess the value of fluctuating holdings in stocks, property, businesses, and the like. That’s a big ask even if you pretend that tax officials are likely to be honest in such efforts.
“The Amsterdam stock market fell by around 13pc in 2022 as inflation soared – but the tax office assumed investors generated returns of 5.5pc, and taxed them accordingly,” Charlotte Gifford wrote for The Telegraph about the administration of the Dutch wealth tax.
The Supreme Court in the Netherlands ruled that the wealth tax hits people excessively hard relative to actual earnings and that it’s unacceptably discriminatory while also violating rights to property ownership. Just weeks ago, the Dutch court revisited its ruling and found legislative efforts to fix the wealth tax inadequate. Hundreds of thousands of people are now owed refunds.
Enache examines several arguments for wealth taxes, including claims that they encourage more productive use of assets or their transfer to entrepreneurs who are better at producing value. But wealth taxes can also encourage consumption among those who fear they might as well enjoy assets now rather than have them confiscated later. They also incentivize businesses to pay large dividends while discouraging growth.”
“One strange thing about the American unemployment insurance (UI) system — which provides weekly payments to jobless people who meet certain criteria — is that it’s not insurance against being unemployed. More accurately, it’s insurance against losing a job “through no fault of your own,” which makes UI more like “getting laid off insurance.”
Aside from a few exceptions in some states for things like escaping domestic violence or hostile workplaces, voluntarily leaving your job disqualifies you from receiving unemployment benefits. Allowing people who quit to receive those payments would be “contrary to one of the fundamental tenets of the UI program. The idea is that we want to incentivize people to work,” said Doug Holmes, president of Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers’ Compensation (UWC), an association that has represented the interests of businesses in matters of UI reform since 1933.
So the point of the American UI system is not to make it easier to quit a job. But a few economists are now beginning to ask: Should it be?”
…
“Boosting UI generosity doesn’t affect overall employment rates one way or the other. Instead of loafing around in subsidized unemployment, more generous benefits can support people to quit their jobs in search of better ones, which benefits workers through higher wages and better job satisfaction, and the economy through enhanced productivity as people find better uses for their skills.
Put simply, more quitting can be good for the economy. If UI made it easier for more workers to quit their jobs, people would still look for work and the economy could be better off overall. The real losers would be lousy jobs, which would struggle to retain workers with a greater cushion to quit and go looking elsewhere.”
…
“In theory, working a job and buying that carton of eggs are both voluntary transactions. If you don’t like your job, you’re as free to find another as you are to choose a different, cheaper carton of eggs. In practice, especially for lower-wage workers who face relentless economic pressure and lots of debt, adding a job search on top of full-time work just isn’t feasible.
As a result, people trapped in jobs aren’t able to send signals to the labor market that their work sucks and leaves them too drained to find something better. Let this kind of labor market evolve over the course of decades or centuries and you can wind up with an economy full of jobs that make too many people miserable. Without enough freedom to quit, the core logic aligning labor markets with people’s preferences is flying partially blind.”
“Former President Donald Trump helped negotiate the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending America’s longest foreign war. But now he believes that the United States should have kept its largest base in Afghanistan to help in a future conflict against China.
During this week’s Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker has tried to transform “America First” from a slogan against overseas entanglements into a cry for more aggressive military force. And the gambit seems to have succeeded. A day after Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), condemned the war in Afghanistan as a failure, Trump himself called for using Afghanistan as a springboard to future conflicts.”
“A multiyear experiment in this working-class city on Lake Erie’s banks holds clues to how America could get a handle on its overdose crisis — if politicians embrace the lessons.
Fatal drug overdoses in the U.S., driven by the synthetic opioid fentanyl, increased by more than half during the pandemic and remain near record levels. But in Lucas County, where Toledo is, they plummeted 20 percent between 2020 and 2022.
Researchers credit the county’s effort to bring together health department workers, treatment providers, clergy and law enforcement to look at where overdoses and deaths were happening, so they could target resources to where they were most needed. The community support, in turn, made it easier to overcome bureaucratic obstacles to getting drug users into treatment.”