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 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.