What Did Sanders Achieve?

Chris Cillizza writes: I am not sure any of this is true. Start with what the party’s base wants. Any reasonable definition of the Democratic base...

The Fed and Normality

Isolating the Vulnerable Wouldn’t Work

“Can’t we just isolate the old and the vulnerable, while the rest of the country goes about its business?” Megan McArdle notes that people often...

Vermeule’s Latest

In his much-discussed Atlantic essay, Adrian Vermeule notes that originalism has become the dominant method of constitutional interpretation on the...

Medical Ethics in Crisis

The Witherspoon Institute has published a joint statement providing guidance about some of the difficult decisions on the way: In cases where...

Progressives and College

In a weirdly adversarial review of an essay collection on American education that is not especially polemical, Peter Cunningham writes,...

Hobby Lobby, Religious Freedom, and the Coronavirus

The company is defying shelter-in-place orders in various states, and Dahlia Lithwick of Slate says it’s no surprise: The Supreme Court already gave...

The Constitution and the Common Good

The Constitution as originally understood creates a framework in which we can promote the common good. Adrian Vermeule offers no persuasive reason for...

2009 vs. 2020

Why did Republicans just approve spending big money on a “stimulus” bill when they railed against one in 2009? That’s the question Adam Serwer...

Impeachment and the Coronavirus

Don’t Put SALT in a Relief Bill

The Republican tax reform of 2017 imposed a $10,000 limit on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. That new limit raised taxes on high earners in...

A Disgusting Fraud

Philip Klein: “A story that went viral about the Food and Drug Administration approving a two-minute test for coronavirus antibodies looks like a...

Lives vs. Dollars

My latest Bloomberg Opinion column surveys the debate and concludes that it’s not worth having. An excerpt: What makes the debate even more foolish...

Massie’s Mistake

In the normal course of things, of course Congress should hold a roll-call vote on a $2-trillion bill. But this isn’t the normal course of things....

Pandemic Preparedness

Josh Hendrickson: When a pandemic occurs, the demand for medical supplies such as masks and other protective equipment for healthcare workers and...

An Accusation against Joe Biden

Biden, who has said that women who come forward with accusations of sexual assault should be presumed to be telling the truth, has now been accused of...

Quarantines Aren’t Socialism

Writing in the Washington Post, Gary Abernathy complains that overreaction to the coronavirus has made us all socialists. “When the smoke clears,...

A Waste of Metal

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) thinks the government could help the economy by minting two platinum coins, each worth one trillion dollars....

Offshoring and the Coronavirus

Simon Lester: [Y]ou want to make sure that you are not getting all products that are, in some sense of the term, essential from a single country,...

The Buyback Distraction

President Trump, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and others all think we need to restrict buybacks as a condition of aid to businesses. At...

Elizabeth Warren’s Social Security Opportunism

The senator wants to expand Social Security, supposedly in response to the coronavirus. Charles Blahous goes through the reasons it’s a bad idea:...

What the Fed Is, and Isn’t, Doing

Matthew Yglesias has a good run-down of all the things the Fed is doing to support the economy, from creating new lending facilities to expanding the...

Making Larger Unemployment Benefits Work

My AEI colleague Matt Weidinger points out that states have to have the flexibility to implement any increase in benefits the way that best works for...

The Rebate Plan

At Bloomberg Opinion, I elaborate on how Republicans’ instincts on tax policy are leading them astray right now.

The Republican Plan Is Too Backward-Looking

In response to Don’t Send Poor People Smaller Coronavirus Checks I agree with Robert VerBruggen that the plan’s treatment of people with low...

Coronavirus

The Case for Boosting Unemployment Insurance Payments

Andrew Biggs makes it in Forbes. Higher payments would be easy to administer and well-targeted, and under today’s circumstances won’t do much to...

Who Will Biden Pick to Run With?

A rundown.

No, Coronavirus Doesn’t Strengthen the Case for Medicare for All

My new Bloomberg Opinion column.

More on How and Why the Fed Should Act

Scott Sumner: To be sure, the Fed cannot work miracles. It may be impossible to achieve its targets over the next few months, especially if a...

Only One Word

There was considerable confusion Wednesday night and Thursday morning over the scope of the administration’s restrictions on movement from Europe....

What the Fed Should Do Now

The Fed can’t keep us from going into a recession; we may already be in one. And the public-health response is more important than the monetary one....

Looking Back at H1N1

An estimated 12,469 people in the U.S. died in 2009-2010 from H1N1. Justin Fox reviews that epidemic and compares it to coronavirus. The bad news is...

The Character of the Presidential Race

A Trump-Sanders race would have been more policy-oriented and less character-oriented than a Trump-Biden race will be. Sanders’s great...

Do University Closures Make Sense?

If young people are relatively safe from coronavirus but can infect others who are less safe, then doesn’t it make sense to keep them together at...

Back to the Ash Heap

My latest column looks at how the Left spent four years convincing itself that socialism was on the march, only to be defeated by black voters.

‘McConnell’s Majority Is In Danger’

Writes Josh Kraushaar in National Journal. I suspect that whichever party wins the White House will also narrowly win the Senate.

Warren and Sanders Didn’t Deliver on Their Promises

Bill Scher observes that Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren all made implicit promises to their backers that were rationales for their...

A Payroll-Tax Cut Won’t Help Much

Cutting payroll taxes will not deliver well-timed help to the economy. Employees would get a little more with every paycheck. The deficit would rise...

The Left Is Winning the War Inside the Democratic Party

It may not always get the presidential nominees it wants, but it’s moving the party its way on policy. My column uses the Biden campaign to...

How Biden Consolidated

Ross Douthat and Rich Lowry are two of many to take a look at how the movement to stop Sanders seems to have succeeded while the stop-Trump effort in...

An Attack on Originalism

Last weekend the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy attack on originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation, and on its allegedly...

Worth Reading

How the Biden and Sanders families have cashed in on public service.How Social Security affects wealth inequality.What the declining ten-year Treasury...

More on Milken and Stewart

An email in response to my post yesterday:

The State of the Democratic Race

My friend Chuck Blahous writes on Facebook: It’s not news to anyone that the D nomination is a two-person race now. But here are some numbers just...

Michael Milken and James Stewart

I don’t know the ins and outs of the Milken case, but I did read James Stewart’s criticism of the pardon, which Jack Fowler mentions. In his book...

The Fed Was Right to Cut Rates

Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell and his colleagues made the right call in cutting the federal funds rate by 50 basis points. They knew full well...

Nikki Haley’s Bad Advice

The former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador argues that Republicans should set themselves up as pure, unadulterated capitalists with no...

Boot vs. Barr

On Wednesday, Attorney General Barr spoke to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. Max Boot is not a fan of the speech and what he calls its...