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.