“The Trump administration signaled a plan Friday to revoke a two-year-old tax rule designed to crack down on an arcane but highly lucrative tax avoidance tactic used by some of the largest and most complicated businesses.
If enacted, the Trump administration’s proposal would mean that large business partnerships no longer need to tell the IRS when they shift assets from one corporate entity to another. Those transactions, called “basis shifting,” have allowed businesses to dodge tens of billions of dollars in taxes, the Treasury Department alleged in the past, by illegally depreciating the same asset over and over again.
…
the IRS workforce has shrunk drastically under Trump. In the first months of his term, more than a quarter of the agency took buyout offers or otherwise left their jobs.”
“Beginning in 2017, the city began enforcing a requirement that new apartments of 20 units or more include “affordable” housing units, which are rented at money-losing, below-market rates to lower-income tenants.
The results were predictable. Developers shrank the size of projects to avoid having to comply with the costly mandates. Overall, permitting fell.
…
It’s certainly true that “funding” inclusionary zoning to offset developers’ losses helps to mitigate the negative impact the policy has on new supply. It would also go a long way toward making inclusionary zoning constitutional. (Critics periodically argue in lawsuits that unfunded inclusionary zoning is an unconstitutional, uncompensated taking.)
Even so, there are still many problems with “funded” inclusionary zoning that make it an inferior policy to simply having no inclusionary zoning at all.
For starters, funded inclusionary zoning does not remove a regressive tax on housing. The tax, in the form of the mandated affordable units, is still in effect. It is just offset by a countervailing subsidy intended to prevent housing production from falling.
Funded inclusionary zoning thus still has a suppressive effect on overall housing supply that must be mitigated with government subsidies/tax breaks.
Instead of spending tax dollars on schools, police, or lowering tax rates, city hall must spend that money just to keep housing production flat. The tradeoff of funded inclusionary zoning then is no new housing and fewer public services (or higher taxes).
…
That YIMBY worldview would therefore seem to suggest that housing subsidy dollars should be spent expanding supply even more, not zeroing out the effects of supply-killing affordable housing mandates.
If a city has a housing shortage, boosting housing production, and not tinkering with the mix of incomes in new buildings, would seem to be the priority.”
“Those old-school airlines might have been luxurious, but those flights were unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans. If you lived back then, you wouldn’t be flying in style. You’d probably not be flying at all.”
“Carr threatens network daytime and late-night shows with reprisal if they don’t offer candidates equal time. But Fox News’ late-night show Gutfeld!, which draws more viewers than any of the networks, can have on any guests it wants, since the content of cable TV generally falls outside the FCC’s purview. The same goes for social media platforms like TikTok, where 1 in 5 Americans regularly gets their news. The idea that ABC, NBC, and CBS control the flow of information is quaint.
…
“Streaming represented 44.8% of TV viewership in May 2025,” Nielsen found in June 2025, “while broadcast (20.1%) and cable (24.1%) combined to represent 44.2% of TV.” In other words, 80 percent of all that we watch on TV is not even subject to the same level of FCC regulation, including the equal-time rule.
…
Carr “sees correcting anti-Trump bias as an important part of his job,” Jacob Sullum wrote in the February/March issue of Reason, in a piece about the FCC’s history of policing speech. “In fact, Carr seems eager to embrace what he once derided as ‘a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the “public interest.”‘”
The equal-time rule is an antiquated regulation that becomes more obsolete with each passing year. It’s no longer the case that broadcast networks are Americans’ only—or even main—source of information. It shouldn’t be up to the FCC to decide if talk shows are the right amount of partisan. If viewers don’t want to watch, it’s easier than ever to just watch something else.”
“The legislation addresses various issues tied to last year’s fatal Washington air disaster, including advanced location-tracking technology on aircraft. But the ROTOR Act has met stiff resistance from the chair of the House Transportation Committee.
…
The Senate passed the bill, S. 2503, from Cruz and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), via unanimous consent in December.
…
Transportation Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) has objected to the bill, saying he wants big changes to it.
In a series of recent interviews, Graves has cited concerns over impacts to general aviation, the small-scale flights that range from recreational trips on single-engine planes to crop dusting.
On Tuesday, the top Democrat on the House transportation panel, Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington, said in an interview he was mulling two options: either adjusting the ROTOR Act or crafting new legislation after the National Transportation Safety Board last week issued 50 recommendations related to the catastrophe, which killed 67 people.
In a separate interview Tuesday, Graves said his committee will have a bipartisan response to the midair collision.
Victims’ families and the chair of the NTSB have backed the ROTOR Act.
One of the NTSB’s recommendations mirrors a key component of the Senate bill: a mandate of an advanced location-receiving technology — called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast In, or ADS-B In — on planes and helicopters flying in busy airspace.
Graves, an avid pilot and longtime general aviation booster, doesn’t support the ROTOR Act’s ADS-B In requirement, as written.”
Korea’s labor laws make firing employees very difficult. These strict laws drew out of the horrible working conditions during Korea’s economic rise under a dictatorship. Making it that hard to fire employees leads to: bad employees lowering companies’ efficiency, companies hiring fewer employees, companies keeping workers as contract employees or independent contractors and the employees therefore not getting basic benefits, brain drain as good employees can more easily move up the ranks and make more money in other countries, and discourages foreign companies from investing in Korea.
“instituting a “duty of care” for AI developers to “prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users” (per Blackburn’s summary of the bill). This duty would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
…
“It’s basically just an invitation for lawyers to sue any time anything bad happens and someone involved in the bad thing that happened somehow used an AI tool at some point.
And then you have to go through a big expensive legal process to explain “no, this thing was not because of AI” or whatever. It’s just a massive invitation to sue everyone, meaning that in the end you have just a few giant companies providing AI because they’ll be the only ones who can afford the lawsuits.”
…
Section 11 of Blackburn’s bill is promoted as combating “the consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Big Tech and AI systems.” But, in practice, it could require AI systems to have a pro-conservative slant—at least as long as President Donald Trump or other Republicans are in power.
The bill would set up “audits of high-risk AI systems to undergo regular bias evaluations to prevent discrimination based on protected characteristics, including political affiliation.”
…
“Right now, 230 lets platforms get frivolous lawsuits dismissed quickly at the motion to dismiss stage. This change would force every platform to go through lengthy, expensive litigation to prove they weren’t “facilitating” (an incredibly vague term) or “soliciting” third-party content that violates federal criminal law.
That’s gutting the main reason Section 230 exists. Instead of quick dismissals, you get discovery, depositions, and trials, all while someone argues that because your algorithm showed someone a post, you were “facilitating” whatever criminal content they claim to find.””
“Regulation isn’t just an annoyance—it’s a prosperity killer. At the end of 2024, the MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index found that “51% of small businesses say navigating regulatory compliance requirements is negatively impacting their growth” and that “almost as many (47%) say their business spends too much time fulfilling regulatory compliance requirements.”
With the affordability of housing a major concern, the National Association of Home Builders warns that “regulations account for nearly 25% of the cost of a single-family home.”
…
“The real test ahead is whether deregulation will be made durable by Congress or be left to the whims of the executive officeholder,” Crews emphasizes. “Unfortunately for the Trump project, meaningful reform requires more than freezes and ratios. Congress needs to make the ‘Unrules project’ permanent, and to end the laundering of regulation by means other than the conventional rules featured in this roundup.””