“It was a no-name market in one of the city’s low-income districts — not much to look at from the outside. But inside were shelves packed with bread, lentils, cheese, oil and even basic household appliances. Most of the items were cheaper brands sourced from small manufacturers that I had never heard of — companies happy to donate goods to the city stores because they could write them off their taxes. The non-profit stores run by the municipality were only available to households whose low-income status had been verified by the city. Prices were low, and families received pre-loaded monthly loyalty cards that worked exclusively at these municipal markets. The balance wasn’t tied to wages or a bank account — it was direct public support, and it was very popular with residents of the neighborhood.
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the markets created both a safety net for the poor and a distribution channel for small producers who rarely made it into high-end supermarkets in wealthier neighborhoods.
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Across Europe, Latin America and Asia, local governments have long used targeted subsidies to ease the burden of urban living.
In Europe, subsidized housing and free health care are pretty much the norm. Berlin, London and Vienna have spent decades building and maintaining public housing that keeps rents within reach for working-class residents and young families. In Mexico City, programs like Leche Liconsa provide subsidized milk and other food staples to low-income households. Bogotá runs transit subsidies that lower fares for the poor. Seoul has built youth dormitories to help students cope with sky-high housing costs. Barcelona has experimented with rent caps and municipal housing support.
These programs aren’t revolutions. They don’t come with Karl Marx Boulevards or Rosa Luxemburg libraries. They’re pragmatic, relatively low-cost subsidies with outsized political impact — and a familiar part of modern urban governance around the world. And while Mamdani’s critics seem to suggest that such ideas are un-American, the truth is that the U.S. has its own history of subsidies and income support, from the New Deal to food stamps to Medicare and Medicaid — programs now recognized even by Republicans as critical components of public welfare.
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Mamdani’s municipal populism may or may not work in New York. But the idea behind it is hardly fringe.
Pragmatic, relatively modest redistribution that people can see and feel won’t be the end of capitalism — or America.”
The guy who killed Kirk was less a hardened leftist and more a young guy with psychological problems who was radicalized by memes wafting in his direction. The guys who tried to kill Trump were nutcases. People with psychological problems are motivated by stupid shit to do something crazy. Toning down the rhetoric may help, but that’s hard when the president is abusing his power and breaking the Constitution left and right. Accurately describing what the president is doing sounds like heated rhetoric when it is not.
““I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump insisted in July 2024. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Trump’s campaign chiefs were equally critical.
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Trump has since gone on to stock his second administration with its authors, including Vought, “border czar” Tom Homan, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller and Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission and now chairs the panel.
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Since his swearing in, Trump has been pursuing plans laid out in Project 2025 to dramatically expand presidential power and reduce the size of the federal workforce. They include efforts like the Department of Government Efficiency and budget rescission packages, which have led to billions of dollars being stalled, scrapped or withheld by the administration so far this year.
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In a post on his Truth Social site Thursday morning, Donald Trump announced he would be meeting with his budget chief, “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”
The comments represented a dramatic about-face for Trump”
“the Energy Department announced that it will offer $625 million in funding to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry.” The funding includes $350 million to modernize outdated coal power plants or recommission closed ones, and up to $175 million for coal power projects in rural communities. This announcement was coupled with an Interior Department directive to open 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal mining at lower royalty rates. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, announced on Monday it would roll back several Joe Biden-era regulations on coal plants
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In May, the Energy Department issued an order to prevent a Michigan coal plant from closing in order to prevent blackouts. The order failed to keep the lights on and cost the utility $29 million over five weeks, which is expected to be, at least in part, paid for by ratepayers
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These cost hikes are likely to escalate if the federal government continues to force power plants to stay open. An August report from Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm, estimates that ratepayers could pay more than $3 billion per year through 2028 if the Energy Department “mandates that the large fossil power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028 remain open.” This figure could soar to $6 billion per year through 2028 if additional power plants move up their retirement dates to secure government subsidies.
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the federal government has opened up millions of dollars in funding for coal projects and passed several measures to benefit coal, including subsidizing coal production overseas. The cost of those actions won’t necessarily show up in monthly utility bills—but it will force the federal government to borrow more heavily in the future, at a time when the national debt is already unsustainably large
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Ben King, director of the Rhodium Group’s energy program, told Semafor “the price of coal would need to fall by at least half,” to “change the calculus” and make coal more attractive to investors than natural gas or renewables. Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity modeling at the think tank Energy Innovation, told the outlet, “this funding is essentially cash for clunkers, but without trading in the clunkers.”
Trump’s latest coal maneuver will benefit utilities and coal companies, but it will come at the expense of taxpayers, who will be forced to finance yet another wasteful government spending account, and ratepayers who will likely see their utility bills continue to climb.”
China has been trying to attract top intellectual talent for years. Trump is discouraging such talent from working in the U.S. and China is encouraging them to live in China. This is hugely dumb policy that could make China the clear leader in world technology.
“Economists have long known that tax expenditures make our taxes unnecessarily complicated, distort pragmatic economic decision making, and mostly benefit hand-selected political constituencies. My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon and I have spent time demonstrating that most tax expenditures don’t offer broad-based relief but rather narrow carveouts that erode critical tax revenue while tilting the scales toward the special interests that sell whatever we’re nudged into buying.
Tax expenditures stand in sharp contrast to a neutral tax system—one that taxes income and consumption consistently and only once, trusts individuals to make buying decisions without manipulation, and leaves resource allocation to markets. Special-interest tax credits should ultimately be terminated.
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Deducting the interest on mortgage payments has virtually no effect on whether someone buys a house. It mostly leads to larger mortgages and bigger homes for wealthier households. That’s a subsidy for the upper middle class.
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The exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) payments is the single largest individual tax break, costing in excess of $3 trillion over the next decade. Most employees would take the insurance their employers offer with or without this incentive. It ends up inflating the size and cost of plans, driving up health spending, making it more necessary to insure through one’s employer, and entrenching workers in their current jobs.
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The implications are clear: Tax credits and deductions are generally not harmless ways to help taxpayers. They are costly, distortionary privileges captured by industries and interest groups. They complicate the tax code, mask the true size of government, and fail to deliver the promised bang for the buck.”
“Hungary was once wealthier than Poland—it had a per capita GDP of $21,400 in 1990, when it also emerged from under the thumb of the Soviet Union—but it now lags considerably and seems to be falling farther behind. A share of the blame goes to Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who embarked on an economic and ideological project during the 2010s that caught the attention of conservatives and nationalists across the globe, particularly in the United States. Along with a crackdown on immigration, Orbán is a ferocious economic interventionist. In 2021, for example, he responded with aggressive price controls on food, fuel, and other essentials to combat inflation.
That shift toward statism brought predictable shortages and, as Balcerowicz warned, stagnation. Hungary’s economy sank into a recession after posting negative growth in the last two quarters of 2024.
Hungary’s brash strongman is skilled at drawing attention to himself. But Poland’s stability and growth ought to show the way forward—not just for central Europe, but for any place that throws off the shackles of authoritarian ideology and the central planning that comes with it.”
“When you look at the sectors of the economy that were supposed to benefit from Trump’s economic policies, however, the news gets significantly worse. The manufacturing sector lost 12,000 jobs during the month of August and 78,000 over the past year, according to the data released Thursday by the Department of Labor.
Over the past three months, during which Trump’s tariffs have been in full swing, the manufacturing sector is down 31,000 jobs. Other blue-collar sectors like construction and mining are down over that same period.
All three sectors figure to have been negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs, which (contrary to the administration’s claims) have hit American businesses with huge new taxes on parts, raw materials, equipment, and more. Like with any big tax increase, one way businesses can offset those costs is by hiring fewer people or postponing new investments and expansion. That’s exactly what manufacturing firms say they have been doing.”