The Word "Latinx" Backfired with Latino Voters (And It Should Be No Surprise)

Although I am glad it is almost Election Day, I also think about election dynamics and how voting patterns change over time. The Latino population in particular comes to mind because of how much the Latino population has grown in recent years. As the Pew Research data indicate, the Hispanic population grew from 9.7 million in 1970 to 62.1 million in 2020. With a U.S. total population of 331.4 million in 2020, that would make the Hispanic population 18.7 percent of the U.S. population, a percentage that is anticipated to grow. 

While U.S. Latinos have a history of disproportionately voting Democrat (a lot of that having to do with immigration), those trends have shifted more Republican in the 21st century, as the data from Cornell University's Roper Center show. Why are Hispanic voters leaning more Republican? According to a new research paper from professors at Harvard and Georgetown Universities (d'Urso and Roman, 2024), one such explanation on why Latinos are more likely to vote Republican has to do with the term "Latinx."

For those who are unaware, "Latinx" is a gender-neutral alternative to the words "Latino" and "Latina" that was invented by activists in 2004 to describe those of Latin American descent. While it has existed since 2004, it started to gain traction among the political Left, celebrities, and activists in the mid-2010s. So-called "progressives" thought "Latinx" was to be this wonderful, inclusive term. It turns out that the term had the opposite effect on the vast majority of the Latino community, as the aforementioned study found.

Why was "Latinx" such a turn-off for Latinos that it made them more likely to vote Republican? The authors of the study believe it is "Identity-Expansion-Backlash Theory." The authors created the term to describe a theory in which Latinos are against the term "Latinx" because it is conservative and/or religious Latinos driving the trend. In other words, they believe that anti-LGBT bigotry in the Latino community is responsible for the backlash. More on that in a moment, but I want to ask something first.

Is every Latino on the planet going to embrace LGBT individuals with open, loving arms? Of course not! There is still machismo that is prevalent in Latino culture and homophobia is very much a real phenomenon in Latin America. But if it were truly that bad, there would not be multiple Latin American countries that have legalized same-sex marriage, including Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and parts of Mexico. I am not here to say that views of LGBT individuals in Latin America are ideal. Latin American countries have not quite made the progress of the Western world, but it is miles ahead of Muslim-majority countries. Remember that a) there is not a Muslim-majority country that has legalized same-sex marriage, and b) there are multiple Muslim-majority countries that legally punish gay and lesbian individuals with jail time and/or execution. 

But I digress. Let us get back to why so many Latinos take issue with the term "Latinx." I first wrote on this topic in 2019 and again in 2022. Let me tell you there are multiple reasons to dislike the word "Latinx" that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anti-LGBT bigotry:

• The use of the letter "x" to denote a gender is foreign to the Spanish language.
• The suffix "-x" does not grammatically or orally correspond with the Spanish language. 
• This inoperability in the Spanish language excludes millions of Spanish speakers, not only working-class and everyday Spanish speakers, but also the nonbinary and gender-neutral Hispanics the term was purportedly meant to help. 
• Not only is it inoperable in Spanish, but it is clunky in English. Language is meant to be clear when communicated. "Latinx" fails at that endeavor spectacularly.
• "Latinx" is a term mainly used by Left-leaning, college educated individuals, Hispanic or otherwise. Not only does it come off as elitist and virtue-signaling, but it is not reflective or inclusive of the vast majority of the community it is supposed to represent. 
• It is condescending to have a group of people (predominantly white "progressives") to complain about colonialists having imposed cultural norms in the past all the while trying to come in and tell Hispanics, many of whom are working-class, how to speak Spanish and impose an Anglophone norm of "-x" in the process.  
• If proponents of "Latinx" had any cultural comprehension or awareness, they would know that there are such pan-ethnic terms as Hispanic and Latino, not to mention the fact that it is quite common for Latinos to self-identity by the country of origin rather than a pan-ethnic term. 

I wish that the authors of the paper, who both have PhDs, could be better with critical thinking and come up with a list of all possibilities for a given phenomenon instead of the one that supposedly confirmes their preconceived notions. But on the Far Left, everything is due to racism and bigotry. There cannot be any other possibility than bigotry. This explanation by the authors is both ideologically driven and unfalsifiable, not to mention a false and simplified view of a world that has complexity. I do not have a PhD, and yet I was able to come up with a solid list of reasons why "Latinx" is such a turnoff to the Spanish-speaking community in the United States without having to resort to the argument of bigotry.

“Latinx” has been around for two decades and it should be no mystery as to why most Latinos are not using it and why many dislike it. It is foreign to the Spanish language. It is downright weird to many Spanish-speakers to use a word like "Latinx" in the Spanish-speaking world, as polling from Pew Research in September indicates. It is the beginning of linguistic imperialism to impose such an Anglophone change on Spanish speakers, a classical instance of the pot calling the kettle black coming from the woke Far Left. 

Aside from my strong objections with the term "Latinx," I find it compelling that the word is reprehensible to a statistically significant number of Hispanics in the United States where they change their voting patterns in response to it. I can see why they would change their votes. "Latinx" is not about inclusion. It is telling Latinos that their culture, norms, language, and values are wrong, as the tone of the authors in this study convey. "Latinx" is not about one word. It is an attack on a way of life and a way of speaking an entire language. 

I am not saying that "Latinx" is the single most important issue in U.S. politics. Looking at Gallup polling, there are issues such as the economy (inflation in particular), immigration, crime, the federal budget, poverty, and housing affordability that make that list. What the findings with politicians' usage of the term "Latinx" does show is how disconnected the political Left is with the Latino community. It is emblematic of how the Far Left has taken a grip of the mainstream Left, particularly when it comes to language. If the mainstream Left does not want to be off-putting to Latino voters, it should abandon this linguistic locura to not come off as so extreme and instead find a way to speak to what is important to the vast majority of Latino citizens. 

Raising the Retirement Age Can Help Social Security, But It Is Not Enough to Save It

As we come to the climax of this presidential election, I think about Social Security and how neither presidential candidate intends to cut Social Security benefits. As I brought up last year, Social Security is not sustainable. The Social Security Trustees' Report calculates that the Social Security trust fund is to be depleted in 2035. Afterwards, there will be a statutory reduction in Social Security benefits. 

One commonly recommended policy alternative to help save Social Security has been to raise the retirement age to 69. It was a topic I explored back in 2013 and one you can explore further with this Congressional Research Service primer. While I was in favor (and still am) of raising the retirement, there was a concern of mine: cutting the retirement age would not be enough. Over a decade later, it looks like my concern was justified. An analysis from the American Action Forum brought my attention to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) letter published last month. Two main findings were 1) raising the retirement age would reduce benefits (which the Left-leaning Center for American Progress pointed out in July), and 2) it would not be enough on its own to extend the life of the trust funds. 

Per the CBO letter, Social Security spending would be 0.5 percent of GDP less than under current law, which is not bad considering that CBO predicts that Social Security spending will be 5.4 percent of GDP in 2054. But 0.5/5.4 is still less than a reduction of 10 percent. That simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows how it barely scratches the surface. Even with variations of options about changing Social Security retirement age, as is presented by a September 2024 analysis from the Brookings Institution (see below), it still has a ways to go. 

Do not mistaken my analysis or any of these cited analyses as saying that we should abandon tinkering with early retirement ages for Social Security. As a pointed out with my analysis of the France case study last year, there are too many retirees pulling funds with too few workers contributing to public pension funds. When you have more money going out than going in for an extended period of time, a financial system cannot remain solvent. That is what has happened with Social Security in the United States. Plus, raising the retirement age is shown to improve economic growth by the fact that workers stay in the labor market longer and make more money in the process. 

Social Security is out of whack enough where it is going to take multiple policy alternatives in addition to altering full retirement age (e.g., lowering benefits, altering the formula) to make a difference with Social Security. Hopefully, it can add up to either making Social Security solvent once more. Or even better, the American people realize that privatizing retirement accounts brings them a better return on investment (ROI) and therefore is better for their retirement. 

Trump's Mass Deportation Idea Is As Massively Lousy As When He First Proposed It, If Not More So

There has been no shortage of terrible policy ideas to criticize and scrutinize during this presidential election cycle. Vice President Harris wants to implement such inane ideas as taxing unrealized capital gains and price controls on groceries. Trump has cranked out multiple absurd ideas, including, but not limited to, absurdly high tariffs and a temporary credit card interest rate cap. Today, I would like to cover one of Trump's longest-standing policy proposals: mass deportation. It is long-standing enough where I criticized the idea back in 2015. I did not like the idea back then and I certainly do not like it now. Here is why I think it is a terrible idea. 

Mass deportation is costly. There is the matter of how much this would cost. Think about what would go into enforcement. The government would need to identify, locate, detain, and legally process, and then remove 11 million unauthorized workers. Then there is the matter of creating and expanding upon detention facilities, courtrooms, and other infrastructure, not to mention hiring additional personnel. According to the American Immigration Council's October 2024 study on Trump's deportation plan, that would cost an estimated $967.9 billion over the next decade. 

Mass deportation would harm the U.S. economy. Immigrants are a net gain for the economy, and yes, that includes low-skill immigrants. Aside from the labor they provide, undocumented immigrants pay about $100 billion in taxes annually. Also, as this policy analysis from the Brookings Institution points out, unauthorized immigrants typically take different jobs from low-skilled U.S.-born labor (e.g., housekeeping, construction, caregivers), not to mention contribute to the long-term fiscal health of the U.S. 

As such, removing these laborers that are positively contributing to the economy would harm the economy, a concept I explored earlier this month with the housing construction market. The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) found that deporting 8.3 million unauthorized workers would be 7.4 percent below the baseline by 2028. The Wharton School of Business, which is the premiere business school in the U.S., similarly estimated a negative trend regarding GDP: a reduction of GDP per capita by one percent between now and 2050. 

PIIE also found that deportation would decrease the number of employee hours worked by 6.7 percent. That makes sense, especially since deportation has been shown to lower the employment and hourly wages of U.S.-born citizens because of an increase in labor costs and reduction of local consumption (East et al., 2023).

Mass deportation would not solve crime-related issues. During the Vice Presidential debates, J.D. Vance said that a Trump 47 administration would start by deporting the undocumented immigrants who are criminals. Trump also said he wants to target migrant criminal networks. The idea is that by deporting migrant criminals, it would lower the crime rates because there are fewer criminals. Forget for a moment that immigrants are 60 percent less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens (Abramitzky et al., 2023).

Theory gets in trouble with practice here because the U.S. government has already tried this before. Secure Communities was a program through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that targeted unauthorized immigrants with the cooperation of law enforcement. A study from the Institute of Labor Economics found that the SC program did not reduce property or violent crime (Hines and Peri, 2019). Why would that be the case? Enforcing deportation is a labor-intensive endeavor. It does not make police more efficient in solving cases and it ties up resources that could be used to solve cases. 

Not only does deportation do nothing to lower crime rates, but it also exacerbates the victimization of Hispanics. Why? They are less likely to report crimes because there is lack of trust in law enforcement to do their job when the possibility of deportation is looming over their heads (Gonçalves et al., 2024). 

Mass deportation would violate a lot of civil rights, as well as destroy lives and erode civil society. This would destroy the lives of migrants and have migrants that have yet to be detained live in a climate of fear. As for the Constitution, it does not take much to see how much abuse of Fourth Amendment and Sixth Amendment constitutional rights would take place if Trump were given the green light to deport immigrants. 

Worksites, immigrant neighborhoods, and Catholic churches would be raided. The amount of surveillance to carry this out would be staggering. Police officers knocking on doors at the middle of the night would be reminiscent of the Stalinist regime. In the meantime, detaining Latino migrants would come with human rights abuses that FDR committed against Japanese-Americans during World War II. I would be worried about the detainees in detention camps. As a September 2024 report from the Office of Inspector General already lays out, ICE already has issues being able to "maintain a safe and secure environment for staff and detainees."  

If you look at history and such examples as Argentina in the 1970s, the Pinochet regime in Chile, or Stalinist Russia, detaining and deporting people is not the hallmark of a free society, but of an authoritarian one. 

What is the likelihood this would actually happen? On the one hand, Trump talked a big game about deportation for his first term but did not carry it out. 

On the other hand, Trump is better poised to implement mass deportation should he be elected. For one, he appointed 245 judges during his first term, thereby being fewer legal obstacles. Two, this idea is more popular than I thought. According to a U.S. Today/Suffolk University poll conducted earlier this month, 45 percent of American support the idea of mass deportation. 

On the other other hand, our immigration system is already dealing with considerable backlog. Going door-to-door to detain people is labor-intensive and. It is not something our current immigration system can handle and would require cooperation from state and local police, which is not a given. Plus, it would require cooperation from the migrants' native countries, which is tenuous at best. 

Postscript. From a political lens, it makes sense why this is popular. People are getting fed up with what is taking place on the U.S.-Mexico border, not to mention how endemic and normalized crime has become. From a policy lens, deportation makes zero sense. Deportation is a costly endeavor that will harm the economy (including U.S.-born workers) while doing nothing to lower crime. Meanwhile, the U.S. government would have to trample constitutional rights and ruin millions of lives in the process. It is not only anti-immigrant, but anti-American.

It would take a lot of violence, force, and taxpayer dollars to make this a reality. Why should we deport largely peaceful, non-violent, hard-working people who are contributing to the economy and paying taxes? Why create a culture of distrust, paranoia, and division? Why pay so much money and derive no benefit? I agree that this country could use considerable immigration reform, but mass deportation is not the answer. For all of our sakes, I hope that this policy proposal is nothing more than a campaign gimmick and not a reality in which this country becomes more despotic and tyrannical, a prospect that would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves. 

Harris' Plan to Expand Medicare to In-Home Long-Term Care Is Nothing to Write Home About

The actress and comedienne Betty Davis once said "Old age ain't no place for sissies." She wasn't kidding. One in five adults over 65 cannot manage such basic activities as eating, bathing, or cooking without assistance. That figure goes up to half for the 85-plus crowd (Heimbuch et al., 2023). Acquiring long-term services and supports (LTSS) is costly. According to the life insurance company Genworth, the median assisted living facility costs $5,350 a month, whereas the median semi-private room for a nursing facility costs $8,669 a month. Given that the median retirement savings is $462,410 for the 75-plus crowd, it is no joke. 

Costly elderly care is the problem that Vice President Kamala Harris would like to address with her proposal to cover long-term home care. Her idea, which was proposed earlier this month, is to fund Medicaid to subsidize in-home long-term care to provide the LTSS that older citizens need to function and live without requiring assisted living. That is because Medicare currently does not cover home care, not to mention that only 4 percent of seniors have private long-term care insurance. 

Harris' cost of estimate comes from a study from the Left-leaning Brookings Institution, and even they specify that the $40 billion estimate is for a "very-conservatively designed universal program." I very much doubt that such a program would be conservatively designed. I have two cost estimates that show how rosy her estimate is. 

1) A study commissioned by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) found that Medicaid spent $115 billion on home-based care in 2021, or $15,407 per person (Wysocki et al., 2024). Assuming the per capita cost holds constant and that 14.7 million individuals would be eligible (per Kaiser Family Foundation estimates), that would be a back of the envelope estimate of $226 billion. That $226 billion might be low considering that the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a home health aid working 40 hours a week costs $68,640 a year, which is over $30,000 more than the median income of a Medicare beneficiary. 

2) In 2020, the Left-leaning Urban Institute proposed a similar program in which there would be a $150 per diem cap on in-home expenses. Urban Institute estimated that it would cost anywhere between $250 billion and $394 billion annually. To think that the cost of home aides has increased by a third since that study. 

On top of those cost estimates, research shows that including home care in health insurance will create the moral hazard to boost demand (Konetzka et al., 2019). Especially without a corresponding increase in home health aides, what this means is that home care will become more expensive as a result. In other words, what we will see is that Harris' policy could easily cost over half a trillion dollars annually. 

What makes the proposal even more ridiculous is that she claims that she can fund the $40 billion by cutting $40 billion in Medicare drug spending without denying benefits to anyone. I am skeptical that she would succeed. For one, the Medicare drug-price controls used in the Inflation Reduction Act managed to increase premiums by 20 percent in 2024 while limiting consumer choice and raising out-of-pocket costs (Council for Affordable Health Care). No surprise there since I predicted in 2022 that the IRA would have such negative effects on drug pricing. Second, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in its report on reducing prescription prices that CMS would only be able to make a cut somewhere between $0 and $4 billion, which is nowhere near enough to cover the conservative estimate of $40 billion. 

Source: CAHC

Even if Harris could magically cut $40 billion from Medicare without affecting benefits, think of what that implicitly means. As Cato Institute scholar Michael Cannon pointed out in his analysis on the proposal, Harris is tacitly admitting that there is at least $40 billion of waste in Medicare. And that is not too far off the mark considering that CMS admitted that there was over $31 billion of improper payments in 2023. 

It is not only the waste that bothers me about Medicare, but the quality of healthcare that Medicare provides. The nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission concluded that "the [Medicare] payment system is largely neutral or negative towards quality," a conclusion that is also in Cato Institute research on the topic. This begs the question of why we should trust the government to expand Medicare and not expect the same inefficiencies and low quality.

The Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust is already projected to be insolvent by 2036. Why should we add more promises that we cannot fund? Medicare is one of the three largest budgetary drivers of the federal budget and the out-of-control spending. The United States is going to reach a $1.9 trillion deficit this year, has already reached a 99 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, and have that ratio increase 122 percent in the next decade. 

Plus, as the Right-leaning Heritage Foundation points out, the Biden administration increased the deficit well beyond what the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected. The debt increased from $27.8 trillion at the start of Biden's term to $35.8 trillion, or an increase of $8 trillion in debt. If Harris had brilliant ideas to keep costs down, don't you think she would have at least presented some of those ideas to the President in the past four years?

We have seen that Medicare or price controls will do nothing to help save costs here. What Harris' plan would do is increase healthcare costs considerably, do nothing to address Medicare waste, and all the while provide the elderly with subpar in-home care. This is not compassionate or fiscally responsible. It is nothing more than a feeble attempt to buy the votes of Medicare enrollees in the hopes that she can beat Trump come November. Money does not grow on trees; you cannot solve a problem simply by throwing money at it. I wish more people would see that Harris' plan is one proposal out of many that does not exist to help people, but rather buy votes in the hopes of winning come Election Day.

"Islamophobia" Is Far From Being the "New Anti-Semitism": Stop Minimizing Anti-Semitism by Equating the Two (Pt. II)

Since Hamas carried out the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, I have been appalled as to how kidnappers, rapists, murders, and génocidaires could possibly get the sympathy of the world. I had to question how the Far Left became so anti-Semitic (read here, here, and here). I also wrote about how the entity known as Palestine needs to put the victim card back in the deck but probably will not (see here, here, and here). It is not only the Palestinians playing the victim card. It is Muslims throughout the Western world. I find the victimhood audacious enough where I started writing about how "Islamophobia" is nowhere near the bigotry that anti-Semitism is. You can read Part I here.

The first inconvenient truth I pointed out is that anti-Semitism has existed for three thousand years, whereas the concept of "Islamophobia" has only existed since 1997. This lead to my second inconvenient truth, which is that "Islamophobia" is so new because Muslims spent much of their history oppressing, persecuting, and colonizing. Now I continue more inconvenient truths, including continued oppression, a lack of attempts to systematically wipe out all Muslims on the planet, and that Jews are significantly more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than Muslims. 

Muslim-majority nations continue to oppress. The non-profit Freedom House provides detailed analysis on political freedoms and civil liberties by country. The vast majority of Muslim-majority countries are ranked as "Not Free," whereas none of them are considered "Free." In the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2024 annual report, you will see multiple Muslim-majority countries detailed as being problematic for religious freedom, including Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkey. If Islam were really a religion of peace, you would think at least one Muslim-majority country would be tolerant of non-Muslims, yet such a nation-state does not exist. On the other hand, there is only one Jewish-majority state, Israel. Guess what? Israel allows Muslims, Christians, and Druze to live peacefully and practice their respective religion within Israel's borders. 

People have not tried to systematically wipe out Muslims. The closest that there has been to systematic extermination is the Chinese government's persecution of the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority of about 11 million living in Western China. While a reprehensible violation of human rights, this repression of the Uyghurs has not been determined to be an act of genocide. As I pointed out when refuting the pro-Hamas' accusation of Israel being genocidal, genocide has a specific legal definition. To quote Spiked Online:

Muslims are not facing the intimidation that Jews now face daily on the streets. There are no demonstrations calling for the destruction on any Islamic nation or protests demonizing Palestinians as 'child murderers' or 'genociders.' Nor are there influential initiatives calling for a boycott of Arab institutions or individuals. 

There has not been a nut job like Hitler that wants to systematically exterminate all 1.9 billion Muslims with a "Final Solution" for all believers of Islam or has succeeded. Unfortunately, Jews have not been spared that fate. Hitler managed to wipe out a third of the world's Jewish population with his Final Solution. If only that genocide were a thing of the past for the Jews. It is 2024 and it is difficult to talk about a two-state solution when the government representing the Palestinian people is pushing for a Final Solution against its Jewish neighbors in Israel.

Furthermore, you do not see thousands of protestors across the globe calling for the extermination of Muslim people. It is thousands of people in the so-called "civilized world" denying the atrocities of October 7, cheering on raping, murdering, genocidal terrorists, all the while chanting for the extinction of Jewish people in the name of anti-Zionism and "freeing Palestine." Too bad these bigots cannot call for freeing Palestine from Hamas or denounce the atrocities of October 7.  

Jews are more likely to endure a hate crime than a Muslim. Harassing, threatening, or committing violence against Muslims is unacceptable because no one should undergo that sort of treatment. At the same time, there is a disparity between the dangers a Muslim faces versus what a Jew faces. 

In the United States, we can see those rates with the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics. According to the FBI Crime Data Explorer, there have been 821 anti-Muslim hate crimes while there have been 5,424 anti-Jewish hate crimes between 2019 and 2023. There are 4.45 million Muslims in the United States in contrast to 7.5 million Jews. When adjusting for population, a Jew in the United States is 3.9 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim. 

Outside of Israel and the United States, the countries with the largest Jewish populations are France, Canada, and the United Kingdom. I will start these non-U.S. countries with the United Kingdom. 

In London, anti-Semitic hate crimes have overtaken the number of anti-Muslim crimes since October 7, 2023. This does not even factor in that there are 1.32 million Muslims versus 145,466 Jews in London, or there are about 9 Muslims in London for every Jew. Merely by eyeballing the graph below (Telegraph), you can see that multiplying the blue bars by 9 to get a sense of the rates show that a Jew in London is much more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim, especially since October 7, 2023. In 2022-23, the likelihood is about five times as likely.  In 2023-24, that is about 12 times more likely. 

Canada does not fare better. B'nai Brith Canada has shown a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada from 2022 to 2023 in its annual report. Looking at hate crime figures from Statistics Canada, there were 1,496 police-reported hate crimes against Jews versus 576 against Muslims between 2018 and 2021. There are about 1.8 million Muslims in Canada versus the 393 thousand Jews, or about 4.6 Muslims for every Jew. When adjusting for population to understand rates, a Jew in Canada is 12 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim. To think that these figures were before October 7, 2023! 

And finally, there is France. First, I will show the number of anti-Muslim crimes recorded by the Central Territorial Intelligence Service [Service Central du Renseignement Territorial; SCRT] (per here and here).

Then there are the anti-Semitic crimes reported (see here and here). You can read the most recent report here from the French government's SCRT (in French). What we see with historical data is that there are more anti-Semitic hate crimes than anti-Muslim crimes. That is before October 7 when anti-Semitism nearly quadrupled in France. That is also not factoring in the fact there are 550,000 Jews versus 5.7 million Muslims in France, or more than 10 Muslims for every Jew in France. In 2022, that would mean that a Jew in France was 22 times more likely than a Muslim in France to be a victim of a hate crime. 

Moral of the story: what we see with government data from the countries with the largest Jewish populations (excluding Israel) is that Jews are significantly more likely to be harassed, terrorized, and victimized than Muslims are. The fact that there are more hate crimes against Jews than Muslims in these countries signals that anti-Semitism is a bigger scourge than "Islamophobia." 

Postscript. I hope to address one additional aspect of this debate in a future blog entry, mainly that "Islamophobia" is a cudgel to silence legitimate dissent against Islam or Islamists. In the meantime, I will say this. Treating "Islamophobia" and anti-Semitism as equals and lumping together is insulting to Jews because it diminishes what the Jewish people have endured not only since October 7, 2023, but over the centuries. It also ignores the fact that Muslims have oppressed and persecuted others for centuries and that those who run Muslim-majority countries still oppress to this day. 

Denunciations of anti-Semitism are diluted when lumped together with other forms of bigotry. When George Floyd was murdered, people did not denounce "racism, homophobia, transphobia" or scream "All Lives Matter;" the chant was "Black Lives Matter." Equating "Islamophobia" with anti-Semitism is giving Jews the "All Lives Matter" treatment, which apparently is an unacceptable mantra for the Woke Left except for when it used against Jews. "Islamophobia" is nowhere near the problem that anti-Semitism is. Anyone who does not treat anti-Semitism as a separate, legitimate form of bigotry is part of the problem. After all, anti-Semitism has been the canary in the coal mine far too many times in history. Let us hope that the Western world can learn that important lesson before it slips into decadence.  

Trump's Tariff Plan Would Harm Small Businesses and the Voters He Claims to Want to Help

Like any other presidential candidate, Donald Trump is trying to pander to as many people as he can so he can win the presidential election. He wants to appear pro-business by lowering the corporate tax rate. It is certainly better than Kamala Harris' proposal to hike the corporate tax rate. He is also trying to appease the working class with a tax exemption for tips and a tax break for overtime work, neither of which are good ideas. There is one policy idea where Trump thinks he is protecting domestic industries while simultaneously helping out everyday Americans by keeping their jobs here: high tariffs. Specifically, he wants to impose a 10 percent tariff on all goods and a 60 percent tariff on goods from China. You can read my critiques of the universal tariff and the Chinese-specific tariff for yourself, but I will be repeating some of those arguments here today. 

As an analysis published last week from the Brookings Institution illustrates, there are multiple costs to firms. Any firm that sells imported goods will be scrambling to receive an exemption from the government. Unfortunately for small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is the largest enterprises that are best poised to receive the exemptions. Not only that, it is the larger firms that can better absorb the costs of tariffs. Because as much as I hate to burst Trump's bubble, it is not the other country that pays the tariff, but it is the domestic country (in this case, the United States) that pays. It is the consumer of those goods that pay. That can be an everyday worker, but it can also be a business that uses imported goods as an input of their business. On top of the administrative costs, Trump is going to cause greater strain on supply chains. 

Because tariffs increase the price of doing business, it means that production is depressed and employment drops, especially for imports from countries that decide to retaliate against the United States with tariffs of their own. How bad would the impact to employment be? According to a Tax Foundation analysis of Trump's tax proposals, it would cost 674,000 jobs. The Tax Foundation found that the tariffs would also reduce the GDP by 0.8 percent in the next decade. If Trump increases the universal tariff from 10 percent to 20 percent, that would decrease the GDP by 1.3 percent. 

In addition to jobs, what would it cost the everyday American? Looking at research from the Peterson Institute, the average household would lose $2,600 if Trump implements the tariffs and the permanent tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which, as you can see below, would hit the poorest households the hardest in terms of percent of after-tax income.

I have been critical of Trump's tariff proposal since before he entered the White House. Why? You can read this primer from the Cato Institute on tariffs if you want, but we saw what happened with Trump's tariffs during his first term: a GDP reduction of 0.21 percent, wage reduction of 0.14 percent, a net loss of 166,000 jobs, and costing the average household $831 a year. To think these were the effects of tariffs that were much smaller. The impact of larger tariffs that would affect nearly 10 times the amount of trade would, as already illustrated, be even more harmful. 

If Trump takes his tariff plan seriously and succeeds in implementing it, it will be the worst tariff plan since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act during the Great Depression, which not only reduced the GDP by 3 to 5 percent (Bernstein, 2008), but also caused other countries to retaliate and reduce their imports by an average of 28-33 percent (Mitchener et al., 2021) to the point of spiraling the U.S. economy into the Great Depression.  So there are geopolitical ramifications in addition to the economic ramifications. 

But let us bring it back to the economic aspects. Tariffs cost everyday workers their jobs, decrease  their personal income, lower the GDP, and have the cost of the tariff ultimately passed to the consumers by making goods and expensive more for all. Through his "America First" shtick, he will make this country poorer by making it more expensive to do business and burden the everyday consumer. You would think we would have learned are lesson from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act or even when Trump implemented his tariffs. I truly hope that lesson sinks in for whoever is in the White House in 2025 because if not, it will be the American people that pay the price. 

How Dwelling in a Sukkah During Sukkot Can Help in Living More Modestly and Humbly

Having completed Yom Kippur, I pivot from the fasting and chest-thumping of Yom Kippur towards celebrating the time of joy that is Sukkot. Traditionally a harvest festival (Exodus 23:16; Deuteronomy 16:13, 15), the Jewish holiday of Sukkot has two main mitzvot (commandments), one of them being sitting in an dwelling in a sukkah (Leviticus 23:42-43). A sukkah is a temporary booth or hut covered with vegetation that commemorates the time the Israelites spent in the wilderness after the Exodus. You can read more about the particular legalistic requirements of what constitutes as a sukkah here. I do not want to get into the details today because I want to ask a more fundamental question of why Jews dwell in a sukkah in the first place. 

The great rabbi Moshe ben Maimón, also known as Maimonides, gives us an answer. In his text The Guide for the Perplexed (3:43), Maimonides states that Passover teaches us about the miracles which G-d wrought in Egypt, whereas Sukkot teaches about the miracles wrought in the wilderness. The moral lesson is "to remember his evil days in his days of prosperity. He will thereby be induced to thank G-d repeatedly, to lead a modest and humble life." Maimonides then goes on to say that Jews "leave our houses in order to dwell in tabernacles (a sukkah), as inhabitants in the dessert do that are in want of comfort." 

To recap, Maimonides opines that the end-goal of dwelling in a sukkah is to teach us to live modestly and humbly. The two ways we go about that is to remember the past miracles along with leaving our own homes for a temporary dwelling that is less comfortable than our current homes. So how does dwelling in a temporary hut lead us to be more modest or humble? 

In the Mussar text Duties of the Heart, Rabbi Bachya ibn Pakuda teaches that "All virtue and duties are dependent on humility." Another Mussar text, The Ways of the Righteous (ארחות צדיקים), the author teaches that humility is the root of Divine Service. Upon examining various character traits, I found truth in these statements when tying it to the mitzvah of dwelling in the sukkah: 

Gratitude. Having Sukkot be during the harvest time teaches that there are fat years and lean years, much like the story of Joseph teaches. A farmer can control for technique and taking care of crops, but cannot ultimately control for what the yield is or whether there is a drought that year. We are to be humble enough to be grateful for the bounty, regardless of its size. Shifting from pride in our possessions to recognition of the blessings we receive humbles us. To quote Pirkei Avot (4:1), "Who is rich? The one who is satisfied with their lot."

The Jewish philosopher Philo (1 c. CE) takes the gratitude concept further. Maimonides actually got the idea of being in a sukkah to remember the "bad old days" from Philo. Philo says remembering the "bad old days" is a reminder of how far we have come. It can be challenging to appreciate that concept when we are dealing with the worse anti-Semitism since the Holocaust, but recognizing the progress in the overall arc of history and praising G-d for the good in life helps us remain more humble. 

Our relation to material wealth. With regards to being modest, the very nature of a sukkah leads to a more modest mindset. Here you have a semi-flimsy structure that is intentionally exposed to the elements of nature. It is designed as to not be luxurious. Modesty is in contrast to luxury because modesty in part is about avoiding excessiveness or extravagance. 

As Maimonides points out, entering a sukkah means leaving the comforts of home. The sukkah teaches a lesson about not being obsessed with material wealth. The sukkah is a manifestation of minimalism and a lesson on how to be satisfied with less material wealth. After all, Pirkei Avot (2:8) teaches that "the more possessions [you have], the more worry." Sukkot gives us a spiritual time out to de-emphasize the material to focus on what truly matters. This is not to say that we need to forego material comfort of any sort, but rather that we do not need material extravagance or to be materially focused or obsessed to live a good or happy life. Our actions, character, values, and experiences are worth more than our material wealth. 

Impermanence. The Rashbam taught that the sukkah's temporary, fragile structure teaches us about the fragility of our lives, which includes our mortality. Per the previous point, we ultimately are not going to care about how much material wealth we amassed. Most likely, we will care more about the experiences we had and the people with whom we shared those experiences. Realizing how short our lives are is meant to give us pause, as well as a sense of humility. 

We are small in comparison to the vastness of the universe and time itself. The sukkah reminds us that even the most seemingly secure and solid aspects of our lives are ultimately temporary. This realization of permanence does not only give us humility. In 2021, I wrote a blog entry about how meditating on death (memento mori) paradoxically brings us more joy because we are more likely to enjoy life's experiences with intensity and motivation when we are aware of how short life is. 

Adaptability in the face of vulnerability. Death is not the only form of vulnerability we deal with during Sukkot. Dwelling in a sukkah means being exposed to the elements of nature. What does this teach? No matter what we do to prepare or protect ourselves, there are always forces beyond our control. Reminding us of our limitations amidst the vulnerability teaches us to be more humble and accepting of whatever may come our way. Six years ago, I wrote about how we adapt our environment for optimal performance when things go awry. A couple years later, I wrote a blog entry on how nasty weather during Sukkot gives us an opportunity to expand our comfort zone, thereby enhancing our experiences. Both blog entries came with the theme of learning to adapt to conditions that we previously deemed sub-optimal. 

Dealing with ego and arrogance. One beautiful lesson I found from Slovie Jungreis-Wolff from Aish HaTorah is that there is a height limit for a sukkah of 20 amot, which is about 37 feet. Why the height limit? Because when you are so full of yourself, the arrogance does not make room for anyone else in your life, even G-d. She goes on to say that "if you want your life to be filled with love and meaning, discover the gift of humility." Per a quote misattributed to C.S. Lewis, "Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it's thinking of yourself less." The world does not revolve around you. This is not woo-woo spirituality talking. The longitudinal Harvard Study of Adult Development is a good example of showing how social connections and community can be the single most important factor determining happiness and long-term health. 

Another aspect of dealing with ego comes from the Rashbam's commentary on why we sit in the sukkah. For him, it is a matter that one's wealth ultimately comes from G-d (Deuteronomy 8:17-18). Rabbi Yitzhak Haboab went as far as saying that this is to remind us that we ultimately should not put our trust in man, but G-d. 

Even if we want to make the insight less theocentric or make it completely secular, the sukkah can still provide that lesson that we are not capable of providing or creating everything we need. We can never be truly independent or self-sufficient in the strictest of terms, short of going off the grid and living in the wilderness as a hermit. No one is so talented or has the time to be a mechanic, author, welder, doctor, professor, farmer, flight attendant....you get the idea. The beauty of living in a market-based economy is that we can use comparative advantage in a way where we mutually benefit from voluntary exchanges. By recognizing how interdependent the economy is, it helps us come to terms that we cannot do it all on our own, thereby instilling a sense of humility. 

Compassion. A couple of years ago, I argued that one of the spiritual benefits of fasting is that it helps create greater empathy for those who deal with food insecurity. For those who do not experience housing vulnerability year-round, living in a sukkah gives a taste of what an unstable housing situation feels like. That humility can lead to compassion towards those in need (Rabbi David Golinkin).