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By Paul Ryan and Les Ford Aug. 20, 2026 - ...America’s safety net is badly broken. It often punishes families who make progress toward financial stability. Parents who work more hours or increase their salaries can lose more in benefits than they gain in income.... a hypothetical single parent in the District of Columbia gains nothing financially as earnings rise from $11,000 to $65,000. When these “benefit cliffs” punish parents for earning more or getting married, they weaken the foundations of self-sufficiency and help transmit poverty from one generation to the next....UBI doesn’t solve any of this and creates another...
By Niall Ferguson Feb. 21, 2025 - What I call Ferguson’s Law states that any great power that spends more on debt service than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power. The insight is not mine but originates with the Scottish political theorist Adam Ferguson, whose “Essay on the History of Civil Society” (1767) brilliantly identified the perils of excessive public debt. Read More
By Phil Gramm and Michael Solon Nov. 2, 2025 - Amid all the pessimism and calls for government protection, it’s important to remember that our only window into the future is the past. From the colossal changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution of the last quarter-century, improvements in technology have created an array of jobs that far exceeded—in quantity and quality—the ones eliminated, elevating standards of living. History offers cautionary tales of how special interests and public fear can spawn government policies that delay progress and raise the cost of the transition. Read More
By Marian L. Tupy July 20, 2026 - But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man....But there is another culprit. The power of the federal government, which commands the fate of every major enterprise in America. A tariff waiver can mean billions for one company and bankruptcy for its rival. An antitrust filing can erase a decade of shareholder value in an afternoon. A procurement decision can build a company, and a regulatory finding can bury one. When the government holds that much influence, officials need not even demand tribute. Tribute arrives on...
By Justice Clarence Thomas- Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—...—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident....But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx and their followers. Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is...
By Robert L. Woodson Sr. Jan. 15, 2026 - Here is the truth we must confront: Poverty doesn’t produce moral decay. Deprivation doesn’t produce depravity. It never has. We once endured conditions far worse than today without losing our moral compass. During Jim Crow—when racism was written into law—black neighborhoods were safer than today. Elders were respected. Children could walk the streets without fear. Families were intact, churches were full, and black marriage rates during the Great Depression were higher than for any other group in America. We had less money but more order. Less power, but more integrity. Read...
By Phil Gramm and John Early - Dec. 17, 2025 - Yet even as our economy has experienced broad-based growth, real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. Were that money simply doled out evenly to the 19.8 million families the government defines as poor, each household would receive more than $70,000 a year. The source of this dramatic mismatch is a fraud built into how various programs determine welfare eligibility: The government doesn’t count any refundable tax credits or benefits that aren’t paid in...
By Eric Cohen - Sept. 23, 2025 - Attacks on Jewish college students provoked a larger national debate about the radicalization of the humanities and anti-American animus that have corrupted so many universities. The confrontation between Israel and its enemies has forced the democratic nations of the world to reckon with—or self-righteously deny—the true costs of defending civilization against barbarism. ...The Jews are a thermometer for the moral condition of the Western world and the health of our civic institutions. Read More
By Mike Pence & Ed Feulner - Summer 2025 - An existential identity crisis now grips the American right. A political movement once united by a commitment to limited government, moral order, and a robust defense of American ideals now appears fractured, its purpose clouded by populist grievances and ideological drift. The urgency of this moment demands a return to first principles, along with a reexamination of what conservatism means and what it seeks to achieve in an age marked by cultural upheaval and political polarization. Read More
By Paola Sapienza – 10 27 2025 - We can continue leveraging America’s exorbitant privilege in the global talent market, or we can retreat into protectionism that hands our competitive advantages to countries eager to welcome the talent we reject. If the United States wants to remain the world’s innovation leader, it must continue to welcome those willing to take the leap, cross oceans, and devote their lives to discovery. Our edge is selection from a larger global pool. Closing the door shrinks our innovative future. The choice is openness or stagnation. ...In a globally competitive economy, the countries that...
By Phil Gramm and John Early - Spending on Medicaid, Internal Revenue Service cash welfare payments (refundable tax credits) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) has grown in inflation-adjusted dollars by 671%, 1,463% and 289% respectively since 1990. By contrast, total real Medicare, Social Security and defense expenditures have grown by 383%, 186% and 38% respectively. Medicaid absorbs seven times as much general revenue as Social Security—more than Social Security and Medicare combined. Read More
By Phil Gramm and John Early - The Census Bureau fails to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments to households in the income numbers it uses to calculate not only poverty levels but also income inequality and income growth. In addition to not counting refundable tax credits, which are paid by checks from the U.S. Treasury, the official Census Bureau measure doesn’t count food stamps, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, rent subsidies, energy subsidies and health-insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. In total, benefits provided in more than 100 other federal, state and local transfer payments aren’t...
By Joseph C. Sternberg - The truth is much more complex, and politically challenging: While some other economies suppress domestic consumption and subsidize export production, Americans choose to do almost exactly the opposite. Through political choices such as suppressing energy production and distribution, or permitting red tape and the like, or any number of other policy foibles, we make it much harder than it otherwise would be to produce things in the U.S. Meanwhile, you can’t take a step in America without tripping over a consumption subsidy. Most glaring, though, are our entitlements. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to...
By Phil Gramm and Jodey Arrington - Means-tested social-welfare spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2023. Welfare spending now absorbs an astonishing 72.6% of unobligated general revenue (total revenue net of Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes and premiums and mandatory interest on the public debt) and is larger than the claims against unobligated general revenue by Social Security (4.1%), Medicare (23.5%) and defense (37.2%) combined. Read More
By Gary Saul Morson - How was such evil possible? ... but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains ...had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.” Read More
By Irving Kristol - WSJ - A great mind exposes ideological illusions, while thinking through better alternatives. The following are excerpts from essays that appeared in The Wall Street Journal by Irving Kristol, who died yesterday at age 89. An editorial on his legacy appears nearby. Read More
By Phil Gramm and John Early - Real government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of household earners surged by 269% between 1967 and 2017, while middle-income households saw their real earnings after taxes rise by only 154% during the same period. That has largely equalized the income of the bottom 60% of Americans. This government-created equality has caused the labor-force participation rate to collapse among working-age people in low-income households and unleashed a populist realignment that is unraveling the coalition that has dominated American politics since the 1930s. Read More
By John Ellis - Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education...
By Carl Benedikt Frey July 31, 2026 - How does a country with such casual regard for the rule of law produce so much dynamism?...The answer is that the rule of law, in China ...is not one thing. It has a liberal side—secure property rights, courts that constrain the state... It also has a regulatory side that can wall off competition... America used to be alive to this distinction. It is no longer.......CHINA’S DYNAMISM does not come from the absence of law. It comes from the sequence in which laws are enacted. The Communist Party allows firms to scale in regulatory...