At the lower range of the wage scale, businesses have so much leverage over workers that they can suppress wages under competitive market rates. Because of this, an appropriately priced minimum wage doesn’t hurt employment, and actually increases it because more people are willing to work for that higher wage and they are less likely to quit.
The increase in wages results in higher prices and lower profits. The higher prices do not cancel out the wage growth with inflation because only a minority of the cost of all the goods and services people buy are from people who make near the minimum wage.
Trump praised Xi like a sycophant. Xi did not return the words.
Trump has accelerated American decline. Further polarizing the country, getting the US into a so-far unsuccessful war with Iran, weakening relationships with allies, removing quality immigrants along with the bad ones, increasing corruption, weakening the ability of the country to tax its wealthy citizens, broad and unstrategic tariffs that weaken the US economy, etcetera…
Studies don’t add up to supporting that inequality matters outside of the inequality itself. Instead of focusing on inequality, it’s better to focus on helping everyone live a better life than on inequality per se.
“Many conservatives are embracing big government, from police-state immigration tactics to socialist economic policies.”
There were some true believers, but for the most part, don’t tread on me Republicans were just anti-Obama reactionaries who globbed on to whatever justification they could to complain about Obama.
“”State capitalism is a two-way street. Many businesses, by aligning themselves with Trump’s agenda, elicit better treatment—in their ability to sell to China, the tariffs they pay, how they are regulated, and what mergers are allowed,” wrote Greg Ip, The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator, in a recent piece about how CEOs are navigating Trump’s state capitalism. “In other words, state capitalism doesn’t just serve the interests of the state, but of favored capitalists.”
And the Trump administration does not seem likely to place its own limits on this behavior. Asked recently about the logic behind these acquisitions, Trump said, “We should take stakes in companies when people need something.” That’s an answer that lacks any limiting principle.”
“Although President Donald Trump frequently decries the threat that fentanyl poses to Americans, his comments reveal several misconceptions about the drug. He thinks Canada is an important source of illicit fentanyl, which it isn’t. He thinks fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs, which they don’t. He thinks the boats targeted by his deadly military campaign against suspected cocaine couriers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific are carrying fentanyl, which they aren’t. Even if they were, his oft-repeated claim that he saves “25,000 American lives” each time he blows up one of those boats—which implies that he has already prevented nine times more drug-related deaths than were recorded in the United States last year—would be patently preposterous.
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The fentanyl implicated in U.S. drug deaths is not a “weapon.” It is a psychoactive substance that Americans voluntarily consume, either knowingly or because they thought they were buying a different drug. Nor is that fentanyl “designed or intended” to “cause death or serious bodily injury.” It is designed or intended to get people high, and to make drug traffickers rich in the process.
Trump nevertheless claims “illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.” How so? “Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose,” he says. But that observation also applies to licit fentanyl, which medical practitioners routinely and safely use as an analgesic or sedative.
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Contrary to what Trump implies, the danger posed by fentanyl in illicit drug markets is only partly a function of its potency. The core problem is that the introduction of fentanyl—initially as a heroin booster or replacement, later as an adulterant in stimulants or as pills passed off as legally produced pharmaceuticals—made potency, which was already highly variable, even harder to predict. It therefore compounded a perennial problem with black-market drugs: Consumers generally don’t know exactly what they are getting.
That is not true in legal drug markets, whether you are buying booze at a liquor store or taking narcotic pain relievers prescribed by your doctor. The difference was dramatically illustrated by what happened after the government responded to rising opioid-related deaths by discouraging and restricting opioid prescriptions. Although those prescriptions fell dramatically, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated. That result was not surprising, since the crackdown predictably encouraged nonmedical users to replace reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with much iffier black-market products.
The concomitant rise of illicit fentanyl magnified that hazard, and that development likewise was driven by the prohibition policy that Trump is so keen to enforce. Prohibition favors especially potent drugs, which are easier to conceal and smuggle. Stepped-up enforcement of prohibition tends to reinforce that effect. From the perspective of traffickers, fentanyl had additional advantages: As a synthetic drug, it did not require growing and processing crops, making its production less conspicuous and much cheaper.
Traffickers were not responding to a sudden consumer demand for fentanyl. They were responding to the incentives created by the war on drugs.
“In 2022, Seattle became one of the first cities in America to pass a minimum wage law for food delivery drivers. The law went into effect in 2024, and the results were nothing short of calamitous. Food orders plunged to unprecedented lows, delivery costs exploded, and driver earnings appeared to crater.
Now, new research on Seattle’s delivery driver minimum wage ordinance shows that the law had no long-term effect on driver wages. And yet, Seattle’s city council shows no signs of changing course, even with higher consumer costs and zero growth in driver pay.”
“Two of Mamdani’s executive orders directly address that latter goal. One creates a Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) task force dedicated to identifying and removing bureaucratic barriers to new housing construction and leasing.
The second creates the Land Inventory Fast Track (LIFT) task force that will identify city land that can be used for housing construction.
Both are fine ideas. They’re also not exactly novel.
Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, likewise convened task forces to speed up the city’s permitting process and to identify city-owned land that could be used for housing.
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Perhaps a Mamdani administration will be able to squeeze more juice out of new task forces.
But as the Manhattan Institute’s Eric Kober details in a new report, substantially increasing new supply will require more comprehensive legislative changes to city zoning and permitting laws.
The end goal of those reforms, like many of the zoning reforms the City Council passed under the Adams administration, is to induce private developers to add more units to the housing-starved city.
Several of Mamdani’s other initial housing moves may well make them less likely to do that.
On his first day in office, Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver, a tenant activist and one of his campaign advisers, to lead the city’s Office to Protect Tenants.
A few days later, the New York Post reported on Weaver’s long history of hard-left social media commentary. She’s called for seizing private property and derided homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy.”
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In addition to appointing Weaver, Mamdani has directed city agencies to host a series of “rent ripoff” hearings, in which tenants will be given a public forum to complain about conditions in their buildings.
Mamdani, beginning his administration by appointing communists and scheduling housing struggle sessions designed to demonize landlords, might not be the most surprising development. It’s not entirely unprecedented either. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio liked to talk about seizing private property from time to time.
It’s nevertheless worrisome for anyone who does care about private property protections. It’s also maddeningly hypocritical.
Weaver was a primary proponent of New York’s 2019 rent stabilization law that made it much more difficult for landlords to fund maintenance and building improvements through higher rents.
As recent lawsuits and reports have highlighted, the result has been declining housing quality and a growing number of units sitting empty because their owners cannot finance needed, often city-mandated repairs.
Neither Mamdani nor Weaver can expropriate private housing all by themselves. The U.S. Constitution provides some protection against that. They can, however, scapegoat landlords for problems that are caused by overbearing regulation.
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Housing production has plummeted in Montgomery County, Maryland, which borders Washington, D.C., following the implementation of a local rent control ordinance.
In 2023, the county council approved a rent control policy that caps annual rent increases at the lesser of inflation plus 3 percent or 6 percent.
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multifamily housing permits have fallen by some 96 percent since the implementation of rent control. County planning officials report that the multifamily projects that are getting permitted are generally for-sale units.”
In an interview, Trump’s chief of staff described Elon’s brash, illegal, incompetency, and Trump’s lack of basic knowledge about what he’s doing, and the damage that his and Elon’s policies are doing.