As I point out in my book, The Affordable Housing Crisis: Causes and Cures, for more than one hundred years housing policy has been dominated by the same flawed framework. Each “new” housing policy simply repeats policies that have previously failed. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an example. He ran on a promise…
Reducing property taxes for homeowners has become popular in red states. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is backing a plan to phase out non-school property taxes. As a part of his re-election campaign, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is proposing a constitutional amendment to eliminate school district property taxes for homeowners along with four other measures to…
Kristi Noem frequently likes to tell the media that ICE is apprehending “the worst of the worst.” The website for the Department of Homeland Security states, “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, DHS removed more than 670,000 illegal aliens including murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists from American communities and another…
Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has implicitly announced a revival of the Fairness Doctrine. Introduced in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to present different viewpoints on controversial subjects. When the doctrine was repealed in 1987, radio stations could air programs by conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh without being forced to…
In Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt contends good economics requires us to look beyond the immediate benefits of a policy. While the beneficiaries of a policy are easy to see, those bearing the costs are often unseen. Good economic policy decisions require us to look at the seen and the unseen. Both New York…
Last week, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was spotted on an airplane. Normally, this wouldn’t attract attention from the media, social or otherwise. However, Cruz was leaving Texas just days before a winter storm was about to do nasty things to the state. And this didn’t sit well with some on social media. One user wrote,…
Last week, Texas officials announced that the state spent more than $1 billion on health care for “illegal immigrants” in fiscal year 2025. This article on FoxNews.com provides us with a slew of statistics to show the financial burden immigrants are imposing on Texas taxpayers. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but it…
Last week, I wrote about the government’s use of carrots and sticks to manipulate the behavior of home buyers. Now, in response to Trump’s new health care plan, a physician is calling for more sticks and fewer carrots regarding health care insurance. Trump has proposed sending money directly to Americans rather than to insurance companies….
In my book, The Affordable Housing Crisis: Causes and Cures, I examine the framework that has dominated government housing policies for the past one hundred years. No matter which party is in power, government housing policies have consistently used a combination of carrots and sticks. Carrots are used to incentivize actions desired by the government,…
It is fashionable for Trump’s critics to label him as a fascist. While that label is correct, few realize that many of his critics and political opponents also embrace fascism. Indeed, over the past one hundred years, nearly every President has supported policies consistent with fascism. Contrary to conventional wisdom, fascism is not a right-wing…
Israeli businessman Shlomo Kramer recently called upon governments to take control of all social media platforms. Such a measure is needed, he claimed, to stop “polarization” and prevent the spread of lies. “We need to stack,” he explained, “rank the authenticity of every person that expresses themselves online and take control over what they are saying,…
Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently condemned the welfare fraud in Minnesota, stating, “The Democrats have skin in the game of keeping this fraud—this is the largest fraud ever recorded, over $9 billion stolen from the taxpayers and sent to Somalians.” While conservatives like Cruz are trying to blame Democrats for the rampant fraud, they are…