Ninety-one years after Social Security became law, the program faces its largest-ever financing shortfall. Today also marks one year after publishing Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes, with many of the trends we warned about having accelerated, making the case for structural reform even stronger. Since its publication in 2025, Reimagining Social Security has become part of the national conversation on Social Security reform, having been featured in the media, cited by policymakers, and discussed at leading academic conferences. Its core messages include:

• The program has drifted away from its original purpose. Social Security has evolved into an increasingly expensive middle-class income replacement program rather than a focused guarantee against poverty in old age.
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When Hamed Kian was charged in Florida with five counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license—a felony carrying up to five years in prison—he was tried before a six-person jury. Convicted on all counts by this truncated panel, Mr. Kian appealed, arguing that Florida’s six-person jury rule deprived him of his right to a trial by a twelve-person jury as required by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Florida appellate court affirmed his conviction without a written opinion, and Mr. Kian asked the US Supreme Court to review his case.

In trying felony cases before six-person juries, Florida’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s 1970 decision in Williams v. Florida breaks from centuries of tradition. The Framers incorporated the common-law criminal jury into Article III and the Sixth Amendment as a vital structural check against government overreach, overzealous prosecution, and judicial bias. While the Constitution’s text does not explicitly specify a numerical requirement, the Court’s recent originalist jurisprudence—most notably in Ramos v. Louisiana—reaffirms that the Sixth Amendment protects the fundamental attributes the criminal jury possessed at common law. Historically, the requirement that a criminal petit jury consist of precisely twelve members remained undisputed in English and American law for hundreds of years until Williams improperly abandoned that historical scope.

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In a recent letter to the CEOs of artificial intelligence (AI) companies Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, Senator Bernie Sanders (I‑VT) called for a pause on AI development. In the letter, Sanders argues that the recent loss-of-control incidents that occurred while testing OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, and Meta’s models, and the announcement by a Stanford University research team of the synthesis of new viruses with the aid of AI, justify the pause. At first glance, these examples could build a compelling argument for a pause. But a closer look reveals that, in reality, they are hardly a reason to pause AI development and, in some cases, should even be a source of encouragement for rapid AI growth.

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In an essay in The Atlantic titled “In Defense of Flock,” the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman rightly recognizes a foundational principle of criminology: The certainty of apprehension serves as a potent crime deterrent. Yet, in framing automated surveillance as a technological panacea, Lehman ignores the critical trade-off at the heart of a free society. As Benjamin Franklin famously warned: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

To test Lehman’s thesis, one need only apply his logic to his own doorstep. Imagine if the local police department installed a high-resolution pole camera directed squarely at his front door. By his own logic, Lehman should be elated: The camera would deter prospective burglars and, should an intruder ignore it, capture their every movement in crisp detail to ensure swift apprehension.

Every government benefit has a recipient, but it also has a payer. Politics tends to encourage us to focus on the first and forget the second.

Many hardships are visible, immediate, and emotionally compelling. They provide a rationale for Congress to pass a law, for an agency to distribute money, and for elected officials to congratulate themselves on their compassion. But almost no one asks the question that the pioneering American sociologist and political economist William Graham Sumner believed mattered most: Who provided the assistance and at what cost?

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Cleveland police officers Bailey Gannon and Jennifer Kilnapp responded to a 911 report of a disturbed man with a firearm. Entering a boarding house, they were told by the caller that the man was in a bathroom on the second floor. Gannon opened the bathroom door and, upon seeing the man, fled and blindly fired. One of Gannon’s shots tore through Kilnapp’s arm and lodged in her back, causing lasting physical and psychological damage that ended her police career.

Kilnapp sued Gannon, alleging excessive force. The district court denied Gannon’s motion for judgment on the pleadings based on qualified immunity and a Sixth Circuit panel affirmed. However, a later Sixth Circuit panel vacated and remanded the district court’s denial of summary judgment to Gannon based on qualified immunity. The court held that Gannon seized Kilnapp when he “fired his weapon in circumstances that objectively manifested an intent to restrain” the man in the bathroom. However, the court described this holding as only “largely established” by Supreme Court decisions from 1989 and 2007—but not “crystallized” until a 2021 decision issued after Gannon shot Kilnapp. The court thus held that Gannon was entitled to qualified immunity.

Cato filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to review and reverse this decision. A legal principle can always be “crystallized” further—but the law was clearly established that shooting someone other than the target is a seizure. The mere contingency of a later decision recognizing that a plaintiff like Kilnapp could seek relief did not make Gannon’s decision to blindly open fire reasonable.

JD Vance’s book Communion devotes a chapter to arguing that policymakers have spent decades chasing GDP at the expense of his version of the greater good. I wrote earlier this week to show what Vance gets wrong about the country’s economic history—namely, that policymakers have never been the GDP-maximizers he makes them out to be. But even granting that premise, the chapter misfires in a deeper way.

Its greatest mistake isn’t to misunderstand GDP or even to misrepresent what policymakers aim for. It’s to conflate GDP statistics with a motive. Lots of things we do every day grow GDP, yet few of us wake up in the morning with GDP maximization in mind. GDP is a by-product of much human action and decisionmaking—decisions that are for the most part voluntary. Reading the chapter carefully, it becomes clear that Vance’s problem isn’t really with GDP per se but with people who make choices that contribute to higher GDP, but who don’t chime with his own view of what’s best.