A Passover Lesson from Song of Songs: The Courage to Keep Going Without Certainty

On the Shabbat of Passover, many Jewish communities have the practice of reading the Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim; שיר השירים) during services. Unlike the Book of Esther for Purim or the Book of Lamentations for Tisha B'Av, this pairing with Passover is not self-explanatory. Passover is a national story about the Jewish people going from slavery to freedom. Song of Songs is a poetic love story celebrating love and intimacy. 

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a class in which we analyzed verses from Song of Songs and compared them to midrashic texts to analyze it further. One of the questions that lingered for me after this class was how these passages about longing and searching have to do with the Passover story. 

In chapter 5 of Song of Songs, the woman is sleeping when she hears a knock at the door. It is her male lover knocking (5:2). She hesitates for but a moment (5:3). When she arrives at the door, he is already gone (5:6). Rather than going back to bed, she goes out in the middle of the night to look for her lover (ibid). 

She does not know where he can be or whether he can be found. She does not know whether her search will yield any results, but she carries on. Upon her search, she was physically assaulted by watchmen (5:7). Even when met with harm and misunderstanding, the search does not collapse. 

Rather, she continues the search. But why? One answer is that she has a reference point: the lover. Not even assault deterred her from finding him. She is already in motion. When people are often in a state of grief, loss, spiritual yearning, or love, people persist and take that momentum, even with the pain. She does not stop to ask if it is worth continuing. She simply presses on. Why?

It is not because the search has been fruitful at this stage. It is because the assault of the watchmen does not resolve the absence of her beloved nor does it change her North Star. Her North Star is not a guarantee of outcome or even a clear sense of direction. It is a relational anchor that persists even when clarity is missing. The beloved is not visible and his location is not know, but he remains meaningful. It is carried forward in spite of the uncertainty.

This echoes a dynamic I explored with Psalm 27, a passage Jews traditionally read during the Jewish month of Elul. Faith is not build because of doubt, but through that doubt. Although the Psalmist's enemies are closing in on him (Psalm 27:3), he has trust even though he does not know the outcome. It is the ability to remain emotionally and spiritually oriented when one is surrounded by uncertainty, instability, and threats. Doubt is not the deterioration of faith. It is often the very thing that makes it stronger.  

Interestingly enough, she continues when she talks with her friends (6:1-3). She does not respond with confusion or despair when her girlfriends ask her where her lover is. She still has no clue where he went or whether he will return. Yet she speaks with confidence and clarity, that he's in the garden looking for lilies and that "I am my beloved, and my beloved is mine" (אני לדודי ודודי לי). In that sense, faith is not the elimination of uncertainty. It is the ability to move forward when that uncertainty remains intact. 

This structure of faith is not confined to the love story in the Song of Songs. It reappears on a far larger scale in the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt. Although they were slaves under Egyptian rule, the Israelites leaving Egypt without knowing the full shape of the journey ahead was scary. That uncertainty was not a minor detail. It was a major underpinning of the emotional and existential difficulty of the journey of the Exodus  It helps explain why the process of leaving Egypt is marked not only by movement forward, but also by such unstable moments as the Golden Calf and multiple episodes of kvetching.

Song of Songs and Passover ultimately reflect the same spiritual movement, although one was intimate and the other collective. In Song of Songs, a woman searches through absence and disruption yet continues forward without certainty of outcome. In the Exodus narrative, an entire people leaves Egypt while still inhabiting uncertainty, fear, and internal resistance along the way. After all, how does a walk that should take a few weeks turn into 40 years? 

Perhaps this is why Song of Songs belongs on Passover. Liberation in the Exodus narrative is not a clean transition from bondage into clarity. It is the beginning of freedom lived inside uncertainty, fear, and unfinished longing. Even after leaving Egypt, the journey is marked by desire for what was left behind and uncertainty about what lies ahead. 

Seen this way, liberation and longing are not opposites are not opposites, but rather intertwined realities within the same act of moving forward. The same people who step into freedom also carry with them hesitation, complaints, memories, and emotional baggage. Becoming free does not give you a clean slate. In this sense, liberation is not the end of longing or searching, but rather its beginning in motion.

Means-Testing Social Security Is a Better Band-Aid, But Still Not a Cure

Social Security was born out of crisis. In the depths of the Great Depression, about half of the elderly in America lacked sufficient income to be self-supporting. The idea was simple: ensure that those less fortunate, the elderly in particular, would not fall into destitution. It was not meant to be elegant. It was simply meant to help people stay afloat during a time of economic crisis. 

Nearly a century later, the program has exceeded its initial scope and is struggling under the weight. Social Security's long-term financing is no longer a concern in the distant future. The Social Security Trust Fund could be depleted as early as 2032. Once that happens, there will be a statutory cut to Social Security benefits up to 24 percent. 

Faced with this fiscal reality, policymakers have proposed increasing taxes, cutting benefits, or some combination of both. Increasingly, politicians have eyed benefits to higher earners, both for political and fiscal reasons. Earlier this week, the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) proposed a Six Figure Limit (SFL). The SFL would cap a couple's normal retirement age (NRA) earnings at $100,000, whereas that cap would be at $50,000 for a single person. For clarification, those caps are for not just Social Security income, but all income, including wages or earnings from work, investment income, pension income, and any other income sources. 

The SFL has a number of benefits. One is that would close at least 20 percent of Social Security's solvency gap. This option would save at least $100 billion over a decade while reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio by at least 2 percentage points. Since debt is a drag on economic growth, this is indeed good news.   

Some might complain that the SFL might weaken the link between benefits and contributions. However, the SFL would bring it back to what Social Security was in its inception: a modest safety net. The fact that Americans receive more in retirement benefits from the government than even the French do is ridiculous (see below). 

A proposal like the SFL that can improve solvency and reduce government debt while scaling back Social Security is definitely an improvement over the status quo. However, I would still contend that the SFL is a second-best option. 

Last year, I criticized Social Security in honor of its 90th anniversary and pointed out how it is structurally problematic. One issue is the pay-as-you-go payment mechanism. This is unsustainable due to demographic shift of fewer workers supporting more retirees, which creates an inevitable shortfall. The second issue is precisely that there is a strong link between contributions and benefits. Higher-income individuals receive disproportionate benefits, which acts more like a redistribution scheme rather than a safety net. 

As much as I can appreciate that the SFL can help mitigate the fiscal woes with Social Security, it does not address or resolve Social Security's structural and systemic issues. The pay-as-you-go mechanism will continue to be untenable, whereas the link between contributions and benefits imposes more costs on those with lower earnings. 

On the other hand, a private social security account would allow individuals to control their own retirement savings while being able to have way more saved for retirement. It is time to stop treating Social Security like a handout and start treating it like an investment. Ditching the Social Security program would put retirement savings where they belong: in the hands of the people, not the government. 

Shock and Oil: The Hidden Economics of War with Iran

About a month ago on February 28, the United States and Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other military bigwigs. Since then, there have been military strikes from both sides. The fallout from this war and how it will end remains to be seen. We have already seen one of the predictable outcomes come to fruition. 

There is about 20 percent of the world's petroleum and liquified natural gas that passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Because of the Strait being all but closed, oil barrels have already increased from $73 a barrel at the eve of the war to around $113 a barrel. What is interesting here is not merely the magnitude of the spike, but its timing. The market did not wait for a sustained disruption in supply. They moved almost immediately after the war started. 

And because energy is a universal input into the economy, the price movement does not stay confined to the oil market. It feeds directly into transportation costs, manufacturing inputs, agricultural production, and electricity-intensive sectors like artificial intelligence and data infrastructure.

But this is more than the immediate shock of the military escalation. It is uncertainty about the future. A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas finds that even when the increase in the probability of a worst-case scenario rises, the prices start to rise and the output starts to drop. As the conflict progresses, the probability does not disappear; it intensifies. 

The risk becomes more realized with higher insurance costs, higher shipping costs, and increased precautionary behavior. The risk premium driven by expectations blends into a price increase driven by reality. As this other study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculates, the longer the conflict persists, the more permanent those price hikes remain and the bigger the impact on the GDP (see below).

The costs go beyond the energy market. As of March 23, there has been nearly $29 billion spent on this war. The Cato Institute points out that this undefined war has no clear exit strategy, which makes it more like the war in Afghanistan. Then there's the fact that when geopolitical risk rises, companies do not invest; they wait. Research from the Federal Reserve shows that heightened uncertainty about wars and conflicts causes business to delay capital spending and hiring, which leads to a sizable drop in investment.  

Taken together, the economic consequences of war extend beyond headline figures. Higher gasoline prices are the most visible cost, but it one of many costs in a long chain of government expenditures, business decisions, and long-term economic growth. As uncertainty rises, investment falls along with economic growth. 

In that sense, war operates like a hidden tax that shows up in the form of higher prices, larger deficits, and a slower-growing economy. It's amazing because it's a tax that no one in the U.S. voted for, that no one in the U.S. can escape, and will get explained away afterwards as if nothing happened. 

When "Flatten the Curve" During COVID Meant Trading One Health Crisis for Another

During the COVID pandemic, "flatten the curve" became quite the mantra. It was the justification used for sweeping lockdowns in order to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The fear was not merely widespread illness, but a collapse of the hospital system. As I explained last month, that nightmare scenario of hospitals overflowing with patients was more faulty modeling and prediction than reality.  

A recent COVID inquiry from the United Kingdom adds on another unpleasant layer. Not only were governments across the world acting in a draconian manner to a threat that by and large did not materialize. They did so in a way that reorganized healthcare to focus on COVID and incentivized everyone else to stay away, especially with the slogan of "Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives" slogan. A few favorites from the inquiry report:

• People were also deterred from accessing healthcare....[because of] the public messaging that was intended to keep them safe ('Stay Home'), the fear of catching COOVID-19 in healthcare settings, a feeling that they did not want to 'overburden' the NHS or because they were worried about attending appointments without a loved one being able to attend with them.
• Some non-COVID-19 patients had their diagnoses and treatments delayed to the point where their conditions became untreatable. 
• There was a decline in attendances at emergency departments and other healthcare settings for non-COVID-19 conditions, even for life-threatening medical emergencies such as heart attacks. 
• This suggests that the public messaging of Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives may have, inadvertently, sent the message that healthcare was closed. 
• Missed and late diagnoses and longer waits for treatment for colorectal cancer...resulted in 1,630 excess deaths from colorectal...cancer. 
• The increased rate of deaths in the community from heart attacks suggested that, during the pandemic, people with heart attacks were less likely to attend hospital and thus did not receive time-dependent heart attack treatments, which led to their death. 

If you read Section 9 of the inquiry, you can read a whole list of how this impacted non-COVID healthcare in the British healthcare system. Upon reading the report, it is tragic that this happened in the first place. It is not as if the cancelled procedures, missed treatments, reduced access, or people trying to avoid care was unpredictable. 

Some might be aghast at these findings, but this lamentably was foreseeable. I noted in May 2020 that the downstream effects of shifting healthcare towards COVID care and away from non-COVID were being severely underweighted. That is why it did not surprise me when it was found that the lockdowns caused excess deaths or evidence in 2022 made it clearer of the costs of delaying preventative care. In 2025, I pointed out how a series of health issues increased in prevalence during the pandemic and had not abated at that time. 

What this UK inquiry does is provide institutional confirmation that people did not seek or receive care when they should have, that diagnoses and treatments were delayed, and that patients in some cases presented too late for effective intervention. It also acknowledges that public messing unintentionally contributed to people avoiding this necessary healthcare. What makes it worse is not only that this occurred, but it persists into 2026. Data from the NHS shows that backlogs are still well above pre-pandemic levels.

There is a tendency to treat this all as unforeseeable, as if no one could see this coming. The sad truth is that it is not. Putting off routine care means that deferred care racks up. That is not wisdom in hindsight; that is basic arithmetic. What makes this outcome so uncomfortable for those who were cheering on the lockdowns is that the governments who were trying to keep their citizens safe latched onto such a narrow definition of safety that they ignored the tradeoffs. 

The result is a familiar and unfortunate pattern: fewer immediate hospital crises followed by years of backlogs, delayed diagnoses, and deterioration of healthcare systems. Once the emergency passed, so did the attention to the disastrous aftermath of the lockdowns, which is another reminder of why something as vital as our health should not be fully placed in the hands of the government, especially during a crisis.

The Trump Administration's Latest Protectionist Trick: Call All Foreign Trade "Unfair"

Modern prosperity relies heavily on international trade. No one single country, even one as resource-rich as the United States, produces everything its citizens want or need. The premise of international trade is that people specialize in what they do well and exchange with others who specialize in something, else, and do so across international borders. It is through international trade that countries prosper. From food and clothing to smartphones and automobiles, international exchange allows producers to reach global markets while consumers gain access to goods that would otherwise be more costly or scarce. 

Yet last week, the Trump's Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) claimed that foreign exports are inherently unfair by saying "U.S. trading partners producing more goods than they can consume domestically...displaces existing U.S. domestic production." By redefining imports as evidence of unfairness, the argument treats the presence of foreign goods as a problem rather than a benefit. This view of economics and trade misunderstands the purpose of trade and risks harming the very Americans it seeks to protect. 

Imports Are Benefits, Not Punishment

A common mistake in the Trump administration's line of thinking is that is treats nations as if they were corporations competing for market share. Under this "logic", every import is portrayed as a concession to foreign producers while exports are celebrated as national triumphs. This narrative might be effective for political optics, but bears little resemblance to how markets actually function. 

This misunderstanding largely stems from the mistaken belief that the economy is a fixed pie in which one country's gain must come at another's expense. In reality, trade expands the pie by allowing individuals and businesses to specialize in what they do best and exchange with others who do the same. Trade allows both sides to become better off because each is exchanging something they value less for something they value more. By expanding opportunities for specialization and exchange, international trade increases overall prosperity rather than simply redistributing a fixed economic pie. 

The Protectionist Redefinition

Calling foreign exports inherently unfair is not an economic argument so much as it is a bastardization of the word "fair." In traditional trade policy debates, unfair trade practices refer to specific policies that distort competition, such as subsidies and state-owned enterprises. As imperfect as it arguably is, it is why a World Trade Organization exists. The Trump administration throws out that entire framework out the window. What is going on is that the administration is asserting that the act of selling goods to Americans is suspect if the seller happens to be located outside of the United States.

It is absurd because this approach eliminates the need for evidence or analysis. The argument uses circular logic in which foreign exports are declared unfair simply for being foreign exports. Such "reasoning" turns market competition into exploitation, success into cheating, and consumer choice into economic wrongdoing. Any successful foreign business can be labeled as "unfair", thereby making the fairness argument meaningless. It is an approach that replaces serious economic analysis with farcical economic nationalism. 

What is more is that this logic mirrors the rhetoric behind "Buy American" or "buy local". If purchasing foreign goods is harmful, then presumably Americans should only buy domestically produced goods. But why stop there? With that same logic, it should be wrong to buy goods and services from another state rather than one's own community or neighborhood. Taken seriously, this reductio ad absurdum "logic" collapses when applied consistently. Economic progress has always depended on the widening the scope of trading partners. Restricting trade based on geography does not create wealth. It merely limits the ways in which prosperity can flourish.

Making America Pay Again

This protectionist mindset is framed as a way to shield American workers and industries from "big, bad foreign competitors." In reality, protectionist measures like tariffs impose broad costs onto the U.S. economy. Tariffs reduce competition and restrict supply, which results in higher consumer prices, fewer jobs, and lower economic growth. What is framed politically as sticking it to foreign countries ends up being a tax on the everyday American. 

Those higher costs ripple throughout the broader economy. Consumers pay more for finished goods, while American businesses pay more for imported components and raw materials that they rely on to produce their own products. In many industries, these inputs are essential to maintaining competitiveness. By raising their costs, protectionist policies ultimately make American firms less productive and less able to compete both at home and abroad. 

Those Who Trade Together Stay Together

Trade does not merely affect prices; it shapes the broader strength of the nation. Declaring foreign exports unfair and erecting trade barriers risks weakening the very economic foundations that sustain U.S. competitiveness and strategic influence. Driving up costs for American firms leaves them less capable to compete in the global economy. A strong economy is a prerequisite for a strong national infrastructure and robust national security, and protectionism undermines both. 

These costs extend beyond domestic production. They also damage alliances and global relations. Tariffs and other protectionist policies often push allies into the arms of rivals, thereby diminishing national security. At the same time, these measures slow domestic production and reduce the efficiency of U.S. firms, which undermines the critical base for U.S. infrastructure and security. In other words, this approach risks making the country less secure, less innovative, and less influential on the global stage. 

Old Trade Fallacies Make a Comeback

Declaring foreign exports "unfair" substitutes political rhetoric for analysis. By assuming that imports are evidence of wrongdoing, the argument ignores the principles that make international trade beneficial: specialization, voluntary exchange, and consumer choice. This is just the latest manifestation of the same idiotic reasoning behind "Buy American' or "buy local" campaigns: restricting trade based on geography or origin does not create prosperity; it limits it. The zero-sum logic of protectionism is fundamentally at odds with how markets work. 

The consequences of these policies extend much beyond economic theory. These protectionist measures raise costs for consumers, increase inefficiencies for businesses, and undermine the strategic and economic advantages of maintaining robust global trade relationships. Far from protecting Americans or making America great again, these measures punish them, reduce prosperity, and weaken the U.S.' ability to adapt in a competitive world. If the U.S. government treats all foreign goods as guilty by default, the ones who will lose bigly will be the American people. 

COVID Lockdowns & School Closures and How the Children Did Not Developmentally Bounce Back

Sometimes it feels like the COVID-19 pandemic was yesterday, but the truth is that yesterday was the six-year anniversary that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. We were told shortly after that the effects of the lockdowns would be short-lived and we could weather it because nothing was worse than COVID-19. We all know how that safetyism turned out!

In the years following the pandemic, researchers have been trying to discern what the tradeoffs of the lockdowns were. The body of research continues to grow and show how the lockdowns were far from being harmless, especially for children. 

Last December, I wrote about research that indicates that lockdowns may have contributed to language and social-cognitive delays in young children. A new study from the University of East Anglia (Johns et al., 2026) shows how the lockdown's effect on children is much worse than previously thought.

The new study did not simply compare outcomes before and after the pandemic. This study tracked the same children over time, allowing researchers to measure how quickly their cognitive skills developed and how entering school during the lockdowns affected that growth. Not only does the study show that the lockdowns caused lower growth in executive-function skills and that the impacts were more greatly felt by children in low-income households. That gap persists years after the lockdown and those students still struggle to catch up.

This study cannot tell us whether the delays from the COVID lockdowns are permanent because only time can tell. Even so, this study shows something fundamental. Lockdowns slowed the rate at which key cognitive skills developed during one of the most formative periods of childhood. 

Executive function, which includes such skills as self-control, attention regulation, and flexible thinking, normally grows rapidly when children first enter school and begin interacting regularly with peers. When those experiences are interrupted, development slowed. Even if some of that is made up, it is not as simple as doubling down efforts to make up for lost time. It simply does not work that way. And this is not a trivial development because it is executive function that plays a major role in academic and social success down the road. 

That is what makes this whole debate even more striking. Much like I brought up last December, lockdowns that disrupted children's lives so profoundly and had such adverse effects were often justified by people who spoke passionately about income inequality in the pre-COVID era. Yet policies that shut down schools and isolate children from an environment where they normally develop those skills was asking for trouble. 

Studies like this show that the costs of lockdowns were not temporary or merely inconvenient. The lockdowns are such a calamity where they still have caused considerable harm years later. Draconian COVID measures were not simply a matter of children missing a few classes. These children have been deprived of an important part of growing up and what it means to be a kid. 

The Billionaire Blunder: Why Bernie Sanders' Wealth Tax Wouldn't Deliver

Every few years, the idea of a wealth tax resurfaces in American politics. The concept is simple enough. Instead of taxing income, the government would impose an annual tax on accumulated wealth, whether that is stocks, bonds, real estate, or other assets. Last week, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) introduced legislation for a 5 percent wealth tax on the billionaires. Sanders claims that this tax could generate $4.4 trillion in tax revenue over the next decade, revenue that Sanders would like to use to pay for Medicaid expansion, affordable housing, and a $3,000 in direct payments to households.

The theme of a wealth tax is hardly a new topic here at Libertarian Jew. I first covered it in 2014 when economist Thomas Pikkety proposed a global wealth tax. I did so again in 2019 when Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a wealth tax. While the details of the proposal can change from one to the next, the evidence consistently shows the problematic nature of the wealth tax. I will use my 2019 argument as the basis for my current argument and update the data as needed. 

Other countries have abandoned the wealth tax. In the 1990s, the number of OECD countries with a wealth tax peaked at 12 countries. Now, the figure is at four countries: Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and Colombia. Much of the remainder of this piece will get into the "why" of this decline.  

The wealth tax is difficult to valuate. As the OECD points out (p. 69), a difficulty with the wealth tax is figuring out assets are worth. Unlike income, which is recorded through transactions, wealth often consists of assets that lack clear market prices, such as family businesses, land, or valuable collections. Determining their value requires subjective appraisals that can be expensive, inconsistent, and easily contested. 

High elasticity. Another question is how sensitive wealthy people are to wealth taxes. This responsiveness to a tax increase or decrease, known in economics as elasticity, gets at how much an individual can tolerate a tax change. In the Spanish case study, tax filers' taxable wealth decreased by 42-51 percent. Similarly in Colombia, a 1 percent decrease in the wealth tax led to an immediate 2 percent increase in wealth for those near the threshold. In Scandinavian countries, a one-percentage point increase in the wealth tax led to a decrease of stocks by wealthy taxpayers by 2 percent. 

It is no mystery: people do not want to pay the wealth tax. People can use the legal system with tax avoidance, whether through moving taxes in tax-exempt accounts, underreporting wealth, inflating liabilities, or claiming deductions strategically. These are the types of responses with lower tax rates. Imagine what it would be like with a 5 percent wealth tax rate!

It is also worth noting that Sanders' rhetoric about "millionaires and billionaires" softened in recent years. He conveniently dropped the "millionaires" around the time he himself became a millionaire. I guess it is easy to champion taxing the rich as long as you get to redraw the definition of "rich" to leave yourself out. 

Rosy estimates and evasion rates. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimated that Sanders' wealth tax would generate $4.4 trillion in the next decade. They were the same economists that calculated the estimate for Elizabeth Warren in 2019. Warren's tax was at 2 percent for wealth between $50 million and $1 billion, and 3 percent for anything above. For Warren's version, the economists assumed a 15 percent tax evasion rate. What I find peculiar is that these economists assume a lower evasion rate with Sanders' version, even though it is a higher tax rate. 

Forget that one of the co-authors, Zucman, co-authored a paper showing that those in the 0.01 percent have a tax evasion rate upwards of 30 percent. Other tax experts are not buying it. As the Tax Foundation points out, if you assume an evasion rate closer to that paper that Zucman co-authored, Sanders' estimate would decline to $3.3 trillion over 10 years. Senior Fellow Kyle Pomerleau at the American Enterprise Institute is even less optimistic. Once factoring in behavioral responses, Pomerleau estimated that it would be $2.3 trillion over the next decade. 

Wealth tax does not generate that much revenue. The issue of unbridled optimism is not confined to these two economists that Sanders hired. Historical experience shows how little revenue wealth taxes truly generate. With Sanders' estimates, his annual average of $440 billion would be the equivalent of 1.4 percent of GDP, given that the most recent GDP figures had it at $31.10 trillion. 

Looking at historical data, it has been quite low. That was a conclusion of that lovely OECD report on wealth taxes (p. 18). The Tax Foundation was kind enough to gather the historical wealth tax data on the few countries that still have a wealth tax to show that with very few exceptions, the wealth tax revenue does not exceed 1 percent of GDP (see below). 

  

Conclusion. All of this adds up to a simple conclusion: wealth taxes are inherently tricky, easy to evade, and historically generate far less revenue than proponents claim. Sanders' proposal may sound ambitious, but experience teaches us that wealth taxes provoke capital flight, creative accounting, and behavioral shifts that shrink the tax base. Let's be real: taxing billionaires at 5 percent is less a sincere fiscal plan and more a social media stunt dressed up as economics.

X Marks the Spot? Why Driver’s Licenses Shouldn’t Be Gender Identity Statements

Last week in Kansas, Senate Bill 244 went into effect. One notable aspect is that this bill mandates that people enter bathrooms in government buildings according to their biological sex. What is interesting is that an individual violating this law can face a civil penalty of $1,000. But that is not the provision I want to cover today. This bill also requires that driver's licenses list biological sex instead of gender identity. 

For transgender individuals, this is not an abstract policy change. It alters a document that they use for multiple activities, which includes driving a vehicle, renting a car, interacting with police, applying for a loan, boarding an airplane, picking up a package, registering at a hospital, checking into a hotel, and signing a lease. Critics of this bill argue that it imposes stigma, creates daily friction, and opens transgender people to harassment and discrimination. 

One criticism of this bill that I will agree with is that there was next to no grace period given for transgender people to acquire a new driver's license. It is true that a retroactive invalidation with no grace period is harmful and an example of poorly drafted legislation. Bureaucracies should do their utmost to not create avoidable chaos, although that might be too big of an ask. 

Yet beneath the procedural misstep is a more fundamental issue, mainly that a driver's license is a form of legal identification, not a canvas for personal self-identification.  As I explained last year, gender identity lacks clear operational boundaries and is not something that the government can consistently or meaningfully verify due to its incoherent and subjective nature. Because gender identity cannot be defined or verified with consistency, it is an unsuitable basis for a legal document and has no practical utility. 

By contrast, biological sex is a stable and verifiable category that reduces ambiguity and keeps administrative processes consistent and secure. While not as crucial as a photo, name, or date of birth, a biological sex indicator on a driver's license still serves functions that gender identity cannot engender (pun intended). 

• Interactions with law enforcement: Driver's licenses are used to confirm identity during traffic stops, match individuals to warrants, and identify suspects from descriptions. Physical descriptions often include biological sex, which correlates with bone structure, facial structure, height and weight distribution patterns, and voice patterns. While an officer may rely most heavily on the photo, name, and date of birth, biological sex remains a verifiable descriptive element that gender identity does not consistently provide. 

• Medical and emergency contexts: Driver's licenses are not designed as medical records, yet biological sex can occasionally aid identification in emergencies and provide context for drug metabolism differences, sex-specific conditions (e.g., ovarian cancer, testicular emergencies), baseline cardiovascular differences, and possible pregnancy. Biological sex has clinical relevance, whereas gender identity does not serve this function.

• Data integrity. Since it acts as an official source for administrative statistics, driver's license data has a downstream effect of feeding into accident statistics, crime reporting, public health research, and transportation safety analysis. Biological sex is empirically measurable and allows accurate sex-based comparisons. Gender identity does not provide such consistency for data analysis.

A driver's license is an administrative document for legal identification. Because the driver's license serves as a foundational identification document in modern civic life, the categories of information it contains should be objective, stable, verifiable, and resistant to self-attestation alone. Since gender identity is a subjective understanding of the self, it has no consistent administrative application. 

In addition to being an objective category, the characteristic should be necessary for identification or administrative purposes. Otherwise, why not add political affiliation, sexual orientation, religion, or Myers-Briggs type on a driver's license? Because legal identification is not meant to capture the fullness of who we are as individuals. 

It serves the narrower purpose of anchoring a person to a stable, administrable record within a broader legal system. The more the state drifts from objective categories toward interior self-conception, the less it identifies and the more it validates someone's self-perception. A driver's license is for identifying people, not a self-affirmation tool. 

When identification becomes affirmation, it stops identifying anything at all. Validating someone's perception of self is not something the government should be in the business of doing because a category that means whatever anyone says it means, especially when it is not grounded in reality, ultimately means nothing. 

Drowning Out Evil: What the Purim Practice of Noisemaking Teaches About Moral Clarity

The news cycle as of late has been filled with reports of Operation Epic Fury, which is the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign targeting the remnants of Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure, as well as various members of Iranian leadership. Regardless of one's political perspective and whether this attack should have been launched, the operation is unmistakably loud. Not only is it loud in the literal sense with explosions and air power, but also in the figurative sense in terms of the Trump administration's foreign policy and how it views its adversaries. 

The idea that evil should not be ignored and should be actively opposed is not a new concept in Jewish history. In synagogues around the world, Jews will gather tonight in a ritualized form of confronting evil: the reading of the Book of Esther, also know as the Megillah. The biblical narrative describes how a Jewish woman, Esther, rises to the queenship of the Persian Empire and thwarts a genocidal plot against the Jewish people. The antagonist of the story is Haman, a royal official who persuades King Ahasuerus to authorize the extermination of the Jews. Through a dramatic reversal, Haman's plan was thwarted and the Jewish people were saved. 

This is where the noise enters the scene. Every time the name of Haman is mentioned in the Megillah reading, synagogues erupt in boos, stomps, hisses, and the rattling clamor of groggers. Although the first documented instance of this practice is in the 13th century, it is derived from the Torah. In the book of Deuteronomy (25:17-19), the Jews are commanded to blot out the memory of Amalek. Haman was the son of Hammedathah the Agagite (Esther 3:1). Agag was the king of the Amalekites (I Samuel 15:8-9), which is why Jewish tradition (Talmud, Megillah 13a).

In an age where moral categories are inverted, Purim is especially relevant. Hamas carried out despicable acts of kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. If an attack that was equivalent to multiple 9/11 attacks happened to any other country, the international community would have sympathized with the attacked. Instead, much of the world sympathized with an anti-Semitic, homophobic, authoritarian terrorist organization. Entire populations now reframe those who call for the extinction of the Jewish state as "oppressed" and "freedom fighters.”

Then there is the new low society has reached in that more and more are of the opinion that disagreeable ideas are the same as actual violence. We see this not simply in rhetorical terms, but in real-world consequences It was that warped logic that got Charlie Kirk murdered and can continue to justify violence as a response to political disagreement.

These are but two examples to contrast the Megillah. Haman is not perceived as "oppressed," "misunderstood," or "dealing with systemic inequity." Haman sought genocide: full stop. There was no "this situation is complicated" or "the relation between Jews and Persians were complex and nuanced at the time." The Purim story insists otherwise. Power can corrupt, tyranny is real, and genocide is evil. The Megillah illustrates the moral categories unambiguously. 

At the same time, the Megillah models a form of pluralism that does not compromise moral clarity. The Jews lived among foreigners under foreign rule and navigated a world of different beliefs and customs. That diversity does not mean that we ignore when clear wrongdoing is taking place. Just like Jews in the Megillah existed in a different world were also able to recognize Haman's evil. We too must insist on certain basic truths in a pluralistic world. Acts like genocide, torture, and kidnapping are unacceptable. Purim teaches that we can live amidst difference without equivocating about what is categorically wrong or drifting into the idea that evil is "just another perspective." 

The uproar at Haman's name is not just about a tradition. It is about not having evil become normalized. It is about making sure we can distinguish between right and wrong, even in a pluralistic, democratic society. Sometimes it takes a loud, jarring noise to make sure we do not succumb to moral atrophy and indifference. 

How Institutional Investors Are Good for the Housing Market

Earlier this week, President Trump gave his first State of the Union address during his second term. I found plenty to disagree with, including immigration, how tariffs are necessary for economic growth, imposing price controls on prescription drugs, and how he wants to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. There was one aspect that stood out: his take on housing costs. President Trump said that the problem with housing is not zoning, his tariffs, or construction costs: it's BlackRock. Trump touted his executive order to ban investment firms from buying up single-family homes. He also asked Congress to make the ban permanent. For reference, institutional investors are large financial organizations that pool money from many investors and buy assets at scale, such as large numbers of homes to operate as rental properties. 

It is not intriguing simply because it has historically been the Democrats arguing against corporations. It is ironic because Trump rose to prominence as a real estate developer by amassing large amounts of capital to buy and develop property. It seems poetic that he is now arguing that assembling capital to buy property is a threat to the American Dream. When examining further, it does not make sense how institutional investors are a threat. 

Institutional investors account for about one percent of single-family rentals (see below) and less than one percent of overall housing stock. Even if Trump were successful in banning all institutional investors from buying up housing stock, it would barely make a dent in housing supply. These firms operate on a scale that is tiny compared to the millions of homes bought and sold each year by individual buyers and families. Moreover, their purchases often target specific markets (e.g., the Sun Belt) or distressed properties. This means that typical first-time homebuyers are largely unaffected by institutional investor activity.  

Not only do institutional investors have a small market size, but they also improve the housing supply. A professor from City University of New York calculated that institutional investors expanded housing supply by 0.5 units for each unit purchased. In part, institutional investors purchase homes and convert them into rentals. Also, institutional buyers measurably have improved local housing markets by reducing vacancy rates and helping to stabilize neighborhoods (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia). This is because investors buy vacant or distressed homes at a faster rate. Because they buy vacant homes quickly, neighborhoods avoid decay. 

This ripple effect even extends to local employment and home values. This investor activity is associated with statistically significant reductions in local unemployment and increases in employment, especially in construction-related industries (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia). Another paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that was released in 2023 shows permanent consumer welfare gains for homeowners. Homes within a quarter-mile of an institutionally purchased home sold at a value 1.4 percent higher than those that were not. That is not a rounding error, but real money is people's wallets. Who knew that Wall Street could be the good guy?

If Trump really wants homes for more people, banning institutional investors is a funny way of going about it. Institutional investors barely make a dent in the market. What's more, institutional investors actually help the housing market, whether through expanding supply, stabilizing neighborhoods, reducing vacancies, or boosting nearby home values. The real problem is not Wall Street. It is that local housing regulations make it harder to build a home than winning on The Apprentice. It turns out that banning institutional investors will not build a single house. On the other hand, cities with onerous land-use regulations, zoning laws, and permitting barriers do a fine job of stifling housing development. All the handwringing on the federal level cannot fix the housing shortage when the real bottlenecks are at City Hall. 

Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump's Tariffs: Why SCOTUS Didn't Add $2.4T to the Debt

Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) announced a much-awaited decision. In a 6-3 ruling, SCOTUS declared that Trump's tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Power Act (IEEPA) are unconstitutional. I took this as a win not only for the separation of powers, but also for the economic wellbeing of the American people. Economic estimates calculated that these tariffs would have cost consumers billions of dollars, reduced GDP growth, and harmed net employment while doing little in the way of measurable benefits. In a previous piece, I also point out that it is not only economic modeling. History has shown these adverse economic effects to materialize as a result of tariffs. As I wrote earlier this month, these tariffs are even affecting U.S. national security. So yes, I am quite happy and relieved to see this SCOTUS ruling. 

Counting Revenue That Does Not Exist

Yet I noticed a couple of estimates that came out in response to the ruling, and they were both budgetary in nature. The first estimate is from the Wharton School of Business, which a leading business school in the U.S. Wharton estimates that unless replaced by another revenue source, future tariff revenues will fall by half. The second estimate is from the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). CRFB writes that "SCOTUS tariff ruling could add $2.4 trillion to the debt [over the next decade]." According to the CRFB, this ruling could raise the debt-to-GDP ratio from the baseline 120 percent to 125 percent. One of the reasons that this SCOTUS ruling matters is because the Trump administration presented the tariffs not only in terms of trade policy, but also as a source of government revenue. 

The Mirage of "Lost Revenue"

Since the administration touted the tariffs as a revenue source, the framing of "the SCOTUS ruling adds debt" is especially misleading. Tariff revenue under the likes of Section 232 or IEEPA are temporary, process-dependent, and potentially disruptive on an international level. Assuming that the tariffs would last indefinitely or that there would not be economic blowback is unrealistic. The SCOTUS ruling does not add to the debt. Pretending that future tariff revenue increases debt ignores the reality that the money has not arrived in the government's coffers. An absence of a tax increase is not the same thing as an increase in the debt. 

Tariffs only shift resources from consumers and businesses to the government temporarily. They do not magically create wealth out of thin air. Calling tariffs "revenue" distracts from the fact that tariffs are a tax. The government does not have first dibs on the gains from private economic activity. Baseline budgeting treats the tax revenue as a permanent fixture once enacted. As I argued last September, the economic and fiscal realities of tariffs made tariffs an unreliable revenue source, especially given the negative economic effects and the risk of retaliation. That disconnect between baseline budgeting and economic reality is why the claim that "SCOTUS ruling causes debt" rings hollow.

The Real Culprit: Congress' Credit Card

The baseline assumption is that Congress does nothing else, that the currently enacted laws are on auto-pilot. This brings us to what really causes debt. U.S. federal debt does not exist because SCOTUS declared Trump's IEEPA tariffs unconstitutional. It is because the government has consistently spent more money than it makes. That is an outcome of basic accounting. As the most recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Budget and Economic Outlook shows, the government is projected to create an average annual deficit of 6.1 percent from 2027 to 2036. Keep in mind that this is higher than the 1976-2025 average of 3.8 percent. The fact that the CBO projected before the tariff ruling that the debt-to-GDP ratio would be at 120 percent, a ratio that is higher than it was after WWII military spending, should make us pause and ask what the real issue is.

The Deficit Solution Congress Refuses to Touch

As I detailed in 2024, tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did not cause the economy to implode. Similarly, the absence of tariffs did not cause the debt "to explode" because of the SCOTUS ruling. It simply exposes how the U.S. economy is becoming increasingly fragile due to Congress' inability to get its spending under control. Tariffs, tax cuts, or emergency powers will not fix that insatiable, profligate spending. If you actually care about government spending (and if you are a U.S. citizen, you certainly should because of how it will directly affect you) and want a smaller deficit, don't go begging for more government revenue. Tell Congress to stop buying things it cannot afford.

Colbert, the FCC, and the Case for Sunsetting the Obsolete Equal Time Rule

Late night television has reached the news cycle once more. Comedian and television host Stephen Colbert was going to broadcast an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. However, the interview did not take place. Colbert claims that CBS barred him from conducting the interview to the point where he could not even mention not having Talarico on the show, although the interview was later streamed on YouTube. CBS claimed that it had to do with the equal time rule. 

You are probably wondering what the equal time rule is. This rule comes from the Communications Act of 1934. This particular rule of the Act, which is in §315(a) of the Act, governs political candidates. The rule requires broadcast stations to provide equal opportunities to all legally qualified candidates for public office if they allow any candidate to use their platform. This rule applies to broadcast stations, which include radio and broadcast television. This means that the rule is generally not applicable to cable, satellite, or internet platforms. 

The argument back then was that there were a limited number of radio stations that could broadcast. Those advocating for the rule went under the assumption that broadcast stations had near-control over political speech at the time. The thing is that radio was a nascent form of media communication for the masses. Newspapers, pamphlets, and community meetings were the primary forms of political communication back in the 1930s. 

The scarcity argument did not make sense, and it makes even less sense now. As I brought up last year in my argument about why PBS and NPR should not receive public funding, there is a much more diverse media landscape than there was last century with cable television, satellite TV, internet platforms, podcasts, and social platforms. This rule is downright irrelevant because the free market provides platforms for political candidates better than a subset of broadcasters can. As such, the equal time rule is an incoherent regulation that distorts a market with an abundance of options. 

Not only that, but regulatory relics like the equal time rule risk creating arbitrary burdens and risks political abuse. Last year, late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel made controversial remarks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC, a move that Carr does not regret to this day. Last month, the FCC released guidance saying that talk shows and late-night shows should not be exempt from the equal time rule. 

As I brought up last year in my criticism of the FCC's handling of the Kimmel situation, presidents dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt have abused federal power to coerce broadcasters, so it is not as if Chairman Carr's coercion is historically unique. At the same time, the equal time rule is what happens when the federal government is given this much leeway to regulate the airwaves. Not only is it ripe for suppressing freedom of speech, but it is a rule built for a media landscape that no longer exists. Scarcity may have been the impetus for the rule, but a rationale from nearly a century ago for a market dynamic that no longer exists does not justify using it a guise for silencing or quashing political speech. Removing this unnecessary and irrelevant rule is long overdue.

Panic Over Data: What a New Study Reveals About the Main Rationale of COVID Lockdowns

In some respects, it feels like the COVID pandemic was a lifetime ago. However, it was only about six years ago that the World Health Organization (WHO) named the disease COVID-19. Aside from countries such as Sweden, humanity collectively freaked out and governments across the world implemented lockdowns in response to COVID-19. The rationale for the lockdowns was not simply that cases were rising, but that if something were not done to flatten the curve, the healthcare systems would be overwhelmed. 

It turns out that needing to implement lockdowns was even more unnecessary than previously thought. A recent study from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society examined COVID policy, including the lockdowns (Wood et al., 2026). One of their main findings was that most countries reached peak COVID infection before the lockdowns were implemented. This led the authors to say that "the results imply that the full lockdowns were largely unnecessary."

"Largely unnecessary." If only someone warned us beforehand. And no, I am not only talking about when I wrote shortly before the lockdowns in the U.S. that we did not need lockdowns. It turns out that shortly before the pandemic, both the WHO and Johns Hopkins released pandemic guidance stating that there was no rationale for the lockdowns. The authors of this paper try to couch it by saying that the lockdowns might have kept those infection rates down. I have to disagree with that notion. Simply because the lockdowns coincided with the decline does not mean they caused it, as the paper already shows. Many people were already altering their behavior before the lockdowns went into effect. Imagine that: people can adapt to risk during a pandemic without being coerced into a lockdown. It is not as if there has never been a pandemic. These findings from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society show that the lockdowns were not necessary because the curve for most countries was already bending before the lockdowns began. 

The major implication of this study is that the lockdowns were empirically unnecessary to reverse COVID waves. In other words, the major justification for the lockdowns was weak. The problem, though, is that the costs of the lockdown were neither weak, hidden, nor unpredictable. In April 2020 and May 2020, I covered many costs, whether that was economic devastation, neglected non-COVID healthcare, and social unrest. Sadly, I was right about the havoc that the lockdowns caused.

Rather than save lives, the lockdowns actually increased excess deaths. Lockdowns decreased the U.S. GDP by 5.4 percent and consumer spending by 7.5 percent, which came with an economic cost of $9.3 trillion to the U.S. economy. Then there is the widening global inequality; stunting the educational advancement of an entire generation of children; declining social-emotional skills; ruder people, greater fear, and more authoritarianism; higher obesity, greater substance abuse, and a backlog of healthcare issues; and increased political polarization, conspiracy thinking, mental illness, and violence. 

There is no shortage of the damage that the lockdowns caused. Lockdowns were necessary for nothing and costly for everything. What makes this lamentable is that it was predictable and unnecessary. Yet no one is being held accountable for this carnage, maybe because so many were complicit or because it is easier to avoid inconvenient truths than it is to ignore deleterious policy. So why do I bring this up six years later? 

Because there will be another pandemic and important decisions will need to be made for pandemic strategy. It is my hope that perhaps next time decision-makers can actually use evidence and basic risk assessment instead of fear, panic, and lockdowns that ruin millions of lives. Because let's be real: a policy that was unnecessary, harmful, and predictable should never have been applauded as "following the science."

2/12/2026 Hodgepodge: Interest on Debt, Who Pays for Trump's Tariffs, and National Guard Costs

This has been quite a busy week for me personally. I wanted to make sure that I got in two entries in this week, so I want to give a grab bag of some of the ongoings within the wonderful world of public policy. I hope to return to providing more in-depth analyses next week. 

Interest on U.S. Debt. Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic Outlook for the next ten years. This report has some eye-popping findings, such as the debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to hit over 120 percent in the next decade. For context, all that wartime spending for World War II only got the debt-to-GDP ratio to 106 percent. This is not the sort of record that the U.S. should want to break. Because of that profligate spending, the U.S. is paying off more interest on debt than ever. According to this report (p. 82), the U.S. government is projected to spend a whopping $16.2 trillion (yes, that is trillion with a "t") on interest between 2027 and and 2036.

Who pays for Trump's tariffs? Trump and Vance were under the belief that other countries were going to pay for Trump's tariffs, that Trump's tariffs are without cost or consequence. It turns out that is false. When I reported on this topic about three weeks ago, I covered a report by the Kiel Institute that says that the U.S. as the importing country pays 96 percent of the costs of the tariffs. What was not clear from this Kiel Institute report is whether the businesses paid or if it was the consumers. 

This is where the Budget and Economic Outlook comes into play. According to the CBO (p. 30), 95 percent of the tariffs were paid by raising consumer prices on U.S. consumers. This means that businesses have by and large passed on the costs to the everyday American. This lines up with a recent Tax Foundation estimate that Trump's tariffs are a tax of $1,000 in 2025 and $1,300 in 2026 for the average household. 

National Guard. In response to the rampant crime in Washington, DC, President Trump deployed troops to reduce crime in DC. Irrespective of the debate about whether this is effective, we now know how much this cost. The CBO recently released a report on how much all Trump's deployment of the National Guard to all cities cost, which was $496 million from August to December 2025. For DC alone, that was an amount of $223 million. Regardless of what you have to say about the crime rates, there has to be a more cost-friendly route to bring crime down without having to resort to using the National Guard. Perhaps another conversation for another time. 

Plastic Surgeons Draw a Line in the Sand on Youth Gender Surgery...with a Scalpel

Over the past several years, the growing number of medical interventions aimed at treating pediatric gender dysphoria has made its way towards the center of public policy debates. The theme of children's welfare has come up in debates on banning video games, subsidizing school lunches, universal preschool, same-sex adoption, and Drag Queen Story Hour. This is hardly the first time that "Think of the children" has been used as a rallying cry to advance a cause. The Supreme Court's decision in Skremetti v. United States last year was a reminder that we do not have to take the word of activists at face value. Last week, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) released a statement saying that youth gender surgery is not evidence-based. This statement exposes another crack in the framework that assumes that youth gender surgery is a safe practice and settled science. 

Why This Statement Is Surprising

At face value, you would not think that ASPS would sign such a statement. If anything, you would assume that ASPS would be in favor of more youth gender surgery because they have a financial interest in performing more elective procedures. They would be the last medical association that you would expect to be against it, and here we are. And maybe that is the significance of this statement. 

Plastic surgeons are sensitive to malpractice exposure. About 1,000 of these youth gender procedures are done annually, which is small considering the revenue they make from breast augmentation, face lifts, or liposuction. The procedure revenue from youth gender surgery is dwarfed by the liability risk. Plastic surgery is already in a delicate place with regard to reputation. Plastic surgery is seen as elective, cosmetic, or sometimes exploitative. Performing irreversible procedures on minors that lack an evidence base is a recipe for legal disaster and would only create reputational risk. 

The Evidence and the Risk

This statement brings another concern to light: the plastic surgeons are the ones who are charged to treat patients who might deal with long-term side effects. In its statement, ASPS highlights the irreversible bodily changes, including loss of fertility and altered sexual function, as well as typical surgical risks like infection and the need for revisions. Then there are the mental health and developmental outcomes that are poorly understood. ASPS highlights the Cass Review or systematic reviews from European countries that have been carrying out these procedures for longer than the U.S. In addition, they add a systematic review by the ASPS and the 2025 HHS report to the evidence base. 

When the people doing the surgery say that "the evidence is not there," it is insight that would be gained from lived clinical experience. Plastic surgeons profit from the surgery, tend to have a strong belief in bodily autonomy, and routinely defend elective procedures. If they are recommending that individuals under 19 do not undergo the procedure, perhaps there is a very good reason for that recommendation. 

Adults versus Adolescents

There are a number of things that I think are not good life decisions, whether that is having children before getting married, entering a polygamous marriage, smoking cigarettes, eating fast food every day, or not exercising. I also believe that as long as they are not harming anyone else, adults should be allowed to make whatever decisions about their lives, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about the decision. This issue is not about adults making a decision to undergo these surgeries with informed consent nor is this about whether transgender individuals should be treated with dignity (for the record, they should, just like everyone else). 

We are talking about adolescents here, and the ASPS statement underscores an obvious point. Adolescents do not have the understanding (mens rea), maturity, or capacity to make such a decision. When a procedure is irreversible, the evidence base is against doing the procedure, and the patient is still in a developmental stage in their lives such as adolescence, this stance is both prudent and necessary. 

The Ideological House of Cards

This ASPS statement is not simply a victory for evidence-based science or maybe a chance that people can trust that the medical field will value evidence and safety over ideology. It is another example of how gender ideology is teetering like a house of cards. The MTF transgender athlete debate exposes contradictions between self-identity and biological reality. Gallup polling shows that more adults are in favor of transgender individuals playing on sports teams that correspond with their biological sex (currently at 69 percent). More adults are uncomfortable with pronoun usage, with discomfort increasing from 48 percent of adults in 2021 to 54 percent of adults in 2025. 

Meanwhile, acceptance of someone undergoing these procedures has declined from 46 percent in 2021 to 40 percent in 2025. Pew Research polling data from 2025 shows that 49 percent of Americans believe transgender individuals should use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex, as well as 47 percent of adults who believe teachers should not teach students about gender identity. Add the medical risks and irreversible consequences for minors highlighted by ASPS, and it's clear as day that when ideology trumps evidence, this house of cards is not merely wobbly; it is poised to collapse. At the rate that it is going, it is simply a matter of when and how hard of a fall it will be. 

Trump's Tariffs Are Helping Push U.S. Allies into China's Arms and Undermining National Security

Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Chinese President Xi Jinping. This is the first time a British PM visited since 2018. The purpose of this visit was to reset Sino-British relations. One of the topics of discussion at this visit was trade. If this were an isolated incident, that would be one thing. But other Western nations are initiating trade talks with China. Last month, Canada struck a new trade deal with China. Finland, Ireland, and Germany are also re-engaging with China. There are multiple reasons for other Western countries to re-engage with China, whether it is economic development, access to a large consumer market, investment flows, or shifting geopolitics. 

Unpredictable U.S. Foreign Policy Adds Fuel

Those shifting geopolitics are particularly notable. In the last month alone, the Trump administration has captured Nicolás Maduro and threatened allies with tariffs in order to chase his dream of annexing Greenland, the latter of which is categorically unwise. Trump's foreign policy unpredictability creates incentives to hedge against an increasingly unreliable ally, which is hardly unsurprising seeing more Western countries gravitate towards China. One major factor that I would like to cover today is Trump's tariff policy and how that is becoming a turnoff for the US' allies. I will caveat by saying tariffs alone do not explain why other countries are re-engaging with China, but it is a major element that is part of the broader drive towards a pivot, as this analysis from the Chatham House details. 

Trade Diversion: Another Form of Tariffs Backfiring

The sad part is that this pivot is wholly predictable. I have talked about trade retaliation before here at Libertarian Jew. There is direct retaliation, which is when a country responds to tariffs by implementing their own tariffs in response. Then there is indirect retaliation, such as trade diversion. Trade diversion is what happens when tariffs or other trade barriers cause countries to shift imports and exports away from the most efficient or preferred trading partner toward alternative countries simply to avoid higher costs. Under trade diversion, the trade does not disappear but rather gets rerouted. 

Historical Evidence of Trade Diversion

Trade diversion has played out in history more than once. During the 1930s with Smoot-Hawley, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper shows how U.S. exports to retaliating countries fell by 28-33 percent, and trade diversion also occurred. Another NBER paper discovered trade diversion as a result of US agricultural tariffs from 1990 to 2014. In Trump's first term, tariffs on China caused China to divert $21 billion of trade flows away from the United States to other countries (see below). In its 2025 paper on responses to Trump's tariffs, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recognizes trade diversion as a response. Additionally, a study from the North American Journal of Economics and Finance shows how the signing of NAFTA and preferential tariff treatment with Mexico and Canada shifted US imports away from Asian sources toward Mexico. 

Trump's Tariff Strategy and Consequences for National Security

Trump's current trade strategy fits within this historical pattern of trade diversion. The problem is that Trump's posture on tariffs will continue to agitate U.S. allies and make it more attractive for some allies to deepen their economic ties with China. What Trump seems to not understand is that national security is not merely about what the U.S. can produce, but also the allies that one can rely on in times of crisis or need. Research shows that economic cooperation lends itself to stronger security cooperation.

Since tariffs make allies economically worse off, they are incentivized to look elsewhere. Having these allies increase trade and investment with China will create increased strategic dependence on China. What is more is that this re-engagement will mean that U.S. allies will invest more in China and Chinese suppliers. This entanglement with the Chinese economy will make U.S. allies less likely to align with U.S. strategic priorities. When allies rely more on China, China gains leverage and the U.S. will have less influence in trade negotiations, diplomacy, and security concerns abroad. This will undermine U.S. influence, which in turn weakens U.S. national security. 

"America First" Becomes "America Alone"

Trump's tariff strategy ultimately defeats its own stated purpose. Trump is not isolating China or strengthening American security. He is weakening the very alliances that give the United States leverage on the global stage. With a tariff-first approach, Trump is treating allies as economic adversaries, which understandably leads allies to diversify their trading partners more, including toward China. As allies partner more with China, the United States loses its global influence. National security is not only about domestic production, but also partners who share risks, supply chains, and strategic goals. By undermining these foundations, Trump is handing China geopolitical leverage. By alienating allies and strengthening a rival, "America first" becomes "America alone" while China has the last laugh. 

Immigrants Aren’t Draining Welfare: The Welfare State Is Draining America

Immigration is one of those peculiar topics in US policy debates that produce durable myths. They sound like plausible claims in theory, but collapse under the slightest bit of empirical evidence. Over the years, immigrants have been accused of spikes in crime, overwhelming public services, and draining this country's finances. These claims are so hard-wired into the political discourse that they harden into "conventional wisdom." Last year, I examined the "migrant crime wave" claim and refuted it by showing how immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes. 

Schrödinger's Immigrant and the Myth about Immigrants and Welfare

The welfare argument is no exception. In policy debates, you see what is jokingly referred to as Schrödinger's immigrant: an immigrant who is too lazy to work but manages to take all the jobs, which is a paradox that plays into an inaccurate, nativist caricature of immigrants. The nativist crowd at the Center for Immigrant Studies argues that immigrants consuming welfare and working can go together, thereby trying to refute the idea of Schrödinger's immigrant. While rhetorically clever, it only focuses on the theoretical possibility of the two co-existing rather than actual welfare consumption patterns. 

This is where research from the Cato Institute that was released last week comes into play. They actually did the work to see how much welfare and means-tested benefits are consumed by immigrants versus native-born US citizens. It turns out that immigrants consume about 24 percent less in welfare benefits than native-born citizens on a per capita basis. This finding lines up with a National Bureau of Economic Research paper from 2020 that looked at welfare use from 1995 to 2018. Guess what? Those researchers found that immigrants consume much less welfare than their native-born counterparts. 

Why Immigrants Consume Less Welfare

Immigrants consuming less welfare makes sense when you think it through. Immigrants are younger, healthier, and are more likely to either be working or actively seeking work. Because they come with a higher labor force participation rate and fewer chronic health conditions, they are less likely to need disability benefits or unemployment insurance. Furthermore, immigrants face legal and administrative barriers to receiving benefits. 

Immigrants as Net Contributors to Society

When you hear this anti-immigrant diatribe of immigrants draining the welfare system, it ignores the other half of the conversation, which is what immigrants contribute to the economy and to society. In 2024, I illustrated how immigrants contribute billions in income, property, and sales taxes every year. When you look at both the costs and the benefits, the picture flips. Immigrants do not merely "pay their own way." It turns out that immigrants are actually a net positive for government budgets. 

The Real Problem: The Welfare State

The evidence is clear. Immigrants are not the ones bankrupting this country. Immigrants use less welfare than native-born citizens and also contribute significantly in taxes. In net, immigrants are a benefit to the economy, not a burden. I have been consistent in critiquing the welfare state, whether it has been Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or TANF. The anti-immigrant crowd rails against immigrants supposedly "draining the system" (which they don't), yet pays far less attention to the programs that drain this country's finances. If anti-immigrant nativists want to get at the real problem, they would go after the real problem of a large welfare state that costs the American people hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Otherwise, that is not fiscal responsibility or concerns about taxpayer dollars. That's just scapegoating dressed up as moral outrage.